------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Nuclear Waste Ship Poised to Leave France for Japan
Antidote for exposure to radiation hard to get
State to mount strong legal resistance to MOX
Peace Called in Temelin Reactor Struggle
Bell tolls for FAS and US freedom of information
The Web Never Forgets
U.S., India begin defense talks
U.S. consortium inks deal with North Korea
North Korea Vows Arms Build - Up to Cope with U.S.
Pentagon: Missile Test a Success
Antimissile Weapon Hits Target in Latest Test, Pentagon Says
What of missile defense?
China Fumes Over U.S. Missile Test
Russia to launch new nuclear sub
Putin Shakes Up Russian Navy After Receiving Report on Sub
EU tries to break deadlock on germ weapons pact
Bin Laden: Gains in nuclear efforts?
U.S. Fears Bin Laden Made Nuclear Strides
Bin Laden May Be Close to Nuclear Weapon
Few ex-Hanford workers filing for compensation plan
Powell aims to rally Central Asian allies
Free Lessons on Corporate Hubris, Courtesy of Enron
National Security Motivates Plan to Expand Employment Incentives

MILITARY
Battle Rages Outside Kandahar
Hundreds Flee Kandahar as Pressure Rises
Religious Quest Led American To Taliban Side
Afghan Says Fighters Are Ready to Attack Cave Complex
Wrong target
Lockheed to Provide Rocket Pods to Egypt
Sarajevo Siege Commander on Trial
Postal Service May End Irradiation
More Anthrax-Tainted Mail Possible
U.S. Says Thousands of Letters Might Be Tinged With Anthrax
NEW TECHNOLOGY COULD SPOT CHEMICAL WEAPONS
N. Ireland Disarmament Talks
Israeli Military Hits Arafat Sites
U.S. Questions Arafat's Leadership
Turkey May Accept New EU Force
Muslim Radio A Workout for 1st Amendment
Arab TV's Strong Signal
Employees sue CIA for 'abuse of power'
Marines Expand Afghan Desert Missions

POLICE / PRISONERS
Bush Puts America on High Alert
New security threats cited
U.S., Canada Sign Border Accord
Senators Question Military Tribunals
Official toll brings terror deaths down

ENERGY AND OTHER
Sharp cautious on solar cells' brisk growth
Spain's Gamesa wins 1,000 MW wind turbine order
Esso says effects of UK protests not yet clear
World's Water Storage Capacity Shrinking as Dams Silt Up
Scientist Sees Rapid Cloning, Stem Cell Advance
Millions of Afghan Youths, and No Ideas About Their Future

ACTIVISTS
Obituary: Peace-activist grandmother dies of cancer
Diana Fund calls for action against cluster bombs
Shot Just Misses Antiwar Demonstrator
Cake-throwing protest considered treason
Violent protesters face EU travel ban



-------- NUCLEAR

Nuclear Waste Ship Poised to Leave France for Japan

December 4, 2001
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/dec2001/2001L-12-04-02.html

CHERBOURG, France, A cargo ship bound for Japan with a shipment of 61 metric tons of nuclear waste will sail from Cherbourg tomorrow night. The reprocessed radioactive waste, stabilized in glass, is being transported to Japan for storage.

The French state owned nuclear reprocessing corporation Cogema announced the shipment date on Monday, but will not reveal the route of the ship, Pacific Sandpiper, or its estimated time of arrival until the ship sets sail.

The radioactive cargo originated as nuclear fuel which powered Japanese power reactors. Sent from Japan to Europe for reprocessing, the residues are being returned to Japan for temporary storage at the Rokkasho-mura nuclear facility in northern Japan.

The spent fuels were reprocessed at Cogema in France and in the United Kingdom at Sellafield. Cogema says processing of spent nuclear fuel makes it possible to recover 97 percent of the remaining energy which can be recycled and reused.

The reprocessed fuel is separated from the three percent that remains - the ultimate residues. These residues are vitrified, a process in which they are incorporated in a matrix of stable glass. The Pacific Sandpiper will carry 152 containers of vitrified nuclear waste.

Reprocessed nuclear fuel is loaded onto a specialized cargo ship that is a sister to the Pacific Sandpiper. (Photo courtesy BNFL)

Greenpeace condemned the nuclear industry of France, Japan and the UK for proceeding with the planned shipment at a time when terrorists might target the vessel.

The environmental organization is not satisfied that the security of the Pacific Sandpiper has been assured. "Despite a major ongoing security alert worldwide around nuclear facilities involving anti-aircraft missile, army personnel and the implementation of no-fly zones the planned Japanese nuclear waste shipment will be transported by an unarmed British flagged cargo ship," Greenpeace said in a statement.

"It is insane and unjustifiable to plan dozens of shipments of weapons usable plutonium around the globe," said Greenpeace International spokeperson Damon Moglen. "In its desperation to continue its business, the plutonium industry is making itself a global threat to the environment, to public health, and to the cause of nuclear non-proliferation."

One possible route the Pacific Sandpiper could take from France is across the Atlantic Ocean, through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific Ocean to Japan. In 1999, heads of government of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) stated "their unwavering opposition and that of their peoples to the blatant and persistent use of the Caribbean Sea for the transhipment of highly toxic nuclear materials."

They called on the governments of France, Japan and the United Kingdom to "respect the economic importance and ecological fragility of the Caribbean Sea and the well-being of the millions of people who depend on this unique resource for their very existence."

Cogema says the processing and recycling and transport of spent nuclear fuels and vitrified waste are in conformity with national and international regulations.

The first return of vitrified nuclear waste to Japan took place in 1995 and was followed by five other shipments in 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2000. British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. (BNFL), which operates the specialized cargo ships, says they have "travelled over four million miles without a single incident involving the release of radioactive material."

One shipment of vitrified nuclear waste has been scheduled per year, on average in the forthcoming years, according to BNFL and Cogema.

----

Antidote for exposure to radiation hard to get

Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2001,
San Jose Mercury News
BY JULIE SEVRENS LYONS Mercury News
http://www0.mercurycenter.com/premium/scitech/docs/iodine04.htm

Experts say potassium iodide, the best immediate option in a nuclear crisis, remains in short supply despite demands for a stockpile after Pennsylvania accident.

The nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island was steadily spewing radiation when emergency crews made the frantic call for potassium iodide.

At the time of the nation's worst nuclear accident near Harrisburg, Pa., in 1979, it was the best immediate treatment for radiation exposure -- and many experts insist that 22 years later, it remains that way. But then, just as now, it wasn't easy to obtain quickly, which has alarmed authorities who worry that terrorists may target nuclear power plants next.

Although the government has recently started stockpiling anti-anthrax antibiotics and smallpox vaccines, potassium iodide -- which prevents radiation-induced thyroid cancer -- has not been made an equal priority. And, many critics fear, if history soon repeats itself, the nation will find itself in the conundrum it did two decades ago, the victim of its own lack of emergency preparedness.

It was in the pre-dawn hours one morning that fateful March that officials handling the Three Mile Island incident realized the scope of the problem facing them. Very few tablets of potassium iodide were available. Potentially hundreds of thousands of people would need them. And the drug manufacturers that they were able to reach said they couldn't make new pills in time.

So the decision was made to mix raw potassium iodide with water, producing a crude solution they poured into bottles that lacked dosage instructions and matching caps. Six days later, when the 237,013 containers were finally sealed and shipped to the accident site, the liquid had already begun to break down.

``It was a terrible fiasco,'' said Alan Morris, a New York resident who attempted to acquire potassium iodide at the time. Health officials decided against dispensing the questionable product. Manufacturers refused to sell any to Morris or his physician. So the businessman later decided to produce it himself. His company, Anbex.com, is only one of a handful nationwide that has government-approved potassium iodide products on the market today.

Creating a stockpile

After the Three Mile Island mishap, however, things were supposed to change. A presidential commission recommended that a substantial supply of potassium iodide, also known as KI, be manufactured and set aside for future nuclear emergencies.

More than two decades later, that still has not occurred, and some watchdogs are furious.

``We've been calling for this for years,'' said Israel Klein, press secretary for U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who introduced a bill last month mandating stockpiling and widespread distribution of the pills.

``It's kind of a no-brainer,'' Klein said. ``They're affordable. They have a pretty long shelf life. They don't hurt you. And they prevent one of the most common types of cancer from occurring after a radioactive leakage.''

But KI remains at the center of a contentious debate anyway, with opponents of the potassium iodide push arguing that the pills aren't everything they're touted to be.

Potassium iodide is an essential element in the diet, used by the body to protect against hypothyroidism and goiter. It can actually be found in small concentrations in kitchens across the country, as the ingredient added to table salt to make it ``iodized.''

And there is evidence that when taken in large enough doses immediately after a nuclear disaster, it can stop one radioactive isotope, iodine-131, from wreaking havoc on the thyroid. That's because the thyroid gland, when saturated with potassium iodide, essentially has no room for any radioactive iodine.

But the substance does not block any of the other materials released during a nuclear accident or attack. Nor does it protect other parts of the body.

``It's tempting for a lot of people to think this is a cure-all for radiation exposure. But we still believe that sheltering and evacuation is the most effective means of surviving a nuclear catastrophe,'' said Breck Henderson, a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The tablets have too many limitations, come with minor side effects and give people a false sense of security, Henderson said.

``And,'' he added, ``I don't think you're going to be able to take a pill that will help you much in the event of a nuclear weapon.''

Still, bowing to public pressure, the commission announced last week that it has set aside $800,000 for KI, enough to buy pills for people living closest to nuclear power plants. None are intended for the San Francisco Bay Area.

Protecting U.S.

Experts insist that many more potassium iodide products will be needed in many more locations if the country is truly serious about protecting its citizens from a nuclear disaster.

Virtually the entire continental United States was affected by nuclear tests conducted in Nevada half a century ago, and children were exposed to 15 to 70 times more radiation than first thought, according to the National Cancer Institute.

That radiation is capable of drifting hundreds of miles away was all the more evident in Soviet Union during the 1980s, when a reactor exploded at the Chernobyl Nuclear Station. The World Health Organization reported that about one-sixth of all thyroid cancers thought to have stemmed from the accident occurred in people living more than 200 miles away.

``The vast majority of America is within 200 miles of a power plant,'' Klein said. For that reason, Markey's bill calls for potassium iodide in all homes within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant, and community-based stockpiles in towns within 200 miles of such sites.

The Bay Area's closest nuclear power source is the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, operated by Pacific Gas & Electric in San Luis Obispo County. Also a potential threat is the Vallecitos Nuclear Center, just south of Pleasanton, which quietly handles a small amount of nuclear waste. Although the center's main reactor was closed in 1977, the site has been involved in dozens of shipments of irradiated nuclear fuel rods, some of which are still housed in an underground storage bunker there, said John Redding, a spokesman for General Electric, which owns the center.

For terrorists, ``there are so many other more likely targets, like operating nuclear plants,'' Redding said. And the exact location of the nuclear deposit on the company's 100-plus-acre site is not well known.

Still, the nuclear industry is conceding that while the nation's more than 100 nuclear power plants have heavy security and thick concrete and steel shields, reactor towers could be vulnerable to attacks from hijacked jetliners.

``We obviously are not in a position to guarantee we are impervious to any kind of attack,'' said Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington, D.C.

Stockpiling potassium iodide is something individual states might want to consider, Kerekes said. ``But there shouldn't be any false illusions in doing so, that potassium iodide is any sort of a whole-body protection. Its focus is specifically on the thyroid gland.''

Contact Julie Sevrens Lyons at jlyons@sjmercury.com or (408) 920-5989.

-------- britain

State to mount strong legal resistance to MOX

By Mark Hennessy, Political Reporter
Tuesday, December 4, 2001
Irish Times
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/ireland/2001/1204/hom500.htm

The Government has pledged to mount a full-scale legal effort next year to oppose the operation of Sellafield's mixed-oxide (MOX) reprocessing plant, following yesterday's ruling by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.

In a preliminary ruling yesterday, the tribunal refused to stop the plant opening on December 20th, because the situation was not sufficiently "urgent".

Crucially, however, it decided that Ireland does have a prima facie case to argue against the plant, which will manufacture new nuclear fuel rods from spent uranium.

The Minister of State for Energy, Mr Joe Jacob, urged the British to delay opening MOX until measures have been agreed to prevent pollution.

The legal battle would continue until "the UK permanently ceases" polluting the Irish Sea, "subjects MOX to proper environmental assessment and co-operates more fully".

A full hearing of the case will go before a five-strong arbitration panel, operating under the UN tribunal, early in the new year, possibly in late February.

The panel's five nominations will have to be agreed between Ireland and Britain, though two will come from each country, with an independent chairman.

The Irish Government will continue with its parallel legal action before the OSPAR Convention, where it claims the British have refused to release sufficient safety information.

Preparations for a European Court of Justice case, which will argue that the MOX plant is economically unviable and therefore illegal under the Euratom Treaty, will be accelerated.

"The Government is determined to buy in all the necessary scientific back-up that is needed to fight this case," said a source close to the Attorney General, Mr Michael McDowell.

Encouraged by yesterday's ruling, the Attorney General said the British had had "to make very important concessions in order to avoid an injunction". Though he would have preferred to stop MOX opening, he said the ruling gave Ireland the right "beyond contradiction" to be involved and consulted about Sellafield issues.

"We have a process whereby they must now engage with us in all of the material matters and must not hold back from us vital information concerning the threat to the Irish Sea," he said.

"For the first time, Ireland has an international ruling that accepts that Ireland has an interest in Irish Sea pollution levels."

The British Energy Minister, Mr Brian Wilson, said he was "pleased to note" that the tribunal had not ordered the British government to halt the MOX plant's commissioning.

"The British government will, of course, comply with the decision of the tribunal regarding co-operation and consultations with the Government of Ireland," he said.

-------- czech republic

Peace Called in Temelin Reactor Struggle

December 4, 2001
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/dec2001/2001L-12-04-04.html

BRUSSELS, Belgium, A long standing dispute between Austria and the Czech Republic over the Czech nuclear power plant at Temelín has been resolved after the Czechs agreed to be legally bound to introduce a series of safety improvements.

In return, Austria said it would drop its threat to oppose the Czech Republic's entry into the European Union on environmental grounds.

Protesters in front of the unfinished Temelin reactor, 1998 (Photo courtesy For Mother Earth)

The Czech Republic is one of more than a dozen eastern European countries that are trying to meet the requirements to join the European Union's current 15 member states.

Based on safety concerns, Austria was prepared to veto European Union (EU) approval of the Czech Republic's energy "chapter" in the EU accession negotiations.

The deal was reached by Austrian chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel and Czech Premier Milos Zeman yesterday, at a meeting in Brussels brokered by EU Enlargment Commissioner Günther Verheugen. Prague appears to have come off better in the accord, with the political threat to commercial operation of the plant removed and the country's accession no longer endangered.

Under the agreement, the Czech government will implement a series of changes recommended by the EU's Atomic Questions Group, which assesses nuclear safety in accession countries using reports from member states' nuclear regulators.

It will also comply with the results of an environmental impact assessment of the site last February.

The agreement will be transformed into a protocol to be attached tothe country's accession treaty with the EU. This means both countries will have recourse to the European Court of Justice if the agreement is broken. To become part of the treaty, the protocol must also be approved by other EU member states.

{Published in cooperation with ENDS Environment Daily, Europe's choice for environmental news. Environmental Data Services Ltd, London. Email: envdaily@ends.co.uk}


-------- depleted uranium

Bell tolls for FAS and US freedom of information on the Afghan war

Tue, 4 Dec 2001
From: "Dai Williams" <eosuk@btinternet.com>

List members may be familiar with the Federation of American Scientists website. Its weapons index and dozens of fact sheets were the prime source for my recent analysis of the new generation of hard target guided weapons (smart bombs and cruise missiles) - all based on advanced penetrators containing dense metal ballast.

Unfortunately all the FAS links used in my analysis appear to have been "pulled" in the last 24 hours. The main site still works at www.fas.org . The guided weapons section and other references to DU disappeared last night.

The following report from the Los Angeles Times explains the pressures on the FAS webmaster. See extract below and at: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-000094419nov27.story

This is our second experience of emergency anti-terrorism measures restricting freedom of information - the first being deletion of the DU list archives. Curiously Yahoo did not re-instate the messages posted while the archives were missing including my analyses from the FAS website in Tip of the Iceberg, UNEP - DU and cruise missiles and DU in the Afghan war.

I understand the need to protect data about potentially vulnerable terrorist targets (made on DU-list). But this was data about weapons systems that are being used in Afghanistan, not potential targets in the USA. So why the need for secrecy? Vague descriptions of the weapons systems that I suspect are based on large DU penetrators (1000, 2000 and 4000+ lbs) are available on manufacturers sites e.g. for Raytheon (raytheon.com) who manufacture several of the new generation systems including AGM-65 Maverick, AGM-154 JSOW, and Tomahawk plus AGM-86 CALCM on the Beoing site. These do not give anything like the detail or development history that the FAS fact sheets gave.

Raytheon do have slightly clearer descriptions of the Paveway guided bomb family (GBU-24, GBU-28 etc). They don't refer to the GBU 37 upgrade (mentioned on the FAS website until yesterday) of the GBU-28 bunker buster. Instead they indicate that the new BLU-113 advanced penetrator (4000+ lbs of dense metal ballast) is now standard in the GBU-28. It follows that all current bunker buster bombs use the AUP.

The vital question for troops and civilians in Afghanistan remains: what is the dense metal (or combination of heavy metals) that is used in all these advanced, hard target penetrators that enable them to double their penetration effect over earlier versions? Since they are the same weight and overall size but double their pentration effect by having half the cross section area (i.e. much thinner) this can only be achieved with metals 2x the mass of the steel used in previous versions. That has to mean DU or Tungsten, or a combination of both.

The deletion of the FAS pages is a smart move by US security agencies. The credibility of my concerns about potential large scale use of DU in Afghanistan (at least 400+ tons of hard target munitions have been used now judging by early CDI bombing reports) is much harder for the media and other DU researchers to verify now. Until yesterday all the data was in the public domain and accessible by FAS links from my reports.

However, by censoring weapons information that was previously public domain for citizens in US and around the world the security authorities increase suspicions that they have something very serious to hide about US and UK bombing operations in Afghanistan. If you still have copies of FAS pages back them up somewhere.

The DU disclosure bill in Congress is even more important now, and even less likely to get full answers. Only yesterday I wrote to another group of the value of the Internet to freedom and democracy in the US and world. The bell is tolling on both now.

I am an independent citizen with no political or campaign group membership. But this censorship disturbs me almost as much as the DU issue itself and the terrorist outrages on September 11th. Which is the greater threat to freedom and democracy now - foreign terrorists or our own governments and their security advisers? This is a grim situation that 99% of the public are likely to be unaware of in UK or Europe. It works powerfully in the interests of the nuclear and defence industries, and politicians that have supported them on DU use since it became contraversial after the Gulf War.

The truth about suspected DU use in guided weapons since 1989 involves billions of dollars of defence equipment and projects set against the probability of a major cancer and birth defects epidemic in another country - Afghanistan - on a similar scale to that in Iraq. A similar epidemic is probably still developing for civilians and troops assigned to heavility bombed areas in the Balkans (especially Italians, Spanish and Portuguese). If DU was used in guided weapons in the Balkans then Nato's quoted use of 9 tons may need revision to 200+, and in locations that have not been assessed for environmental or medical evidence of DU contamination. The hazards are not limited to US or UK military action. Some of these weapons systems have been exported to 20+ countries around the world. If DU has been used in bunker buster bombs there can be no doubt that these will constitute weapons of indiscriminate effect.

These are big stakes. The Internet remains the one way to raise international awareness and government questions about the full extent of DU use - past, present and planned. Please use DU-list to investigate these issues - while we still can.

Dai Williams, UK eosuk@btinternet.com

-------

COLUMN ONE
The Web Never Forgets

By DAVID COLKER, TIMES STAFF WRITER
November 27, 2001
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-000094419nov27.story

Government agencies have tried to remove sensitive information, only to discover that copies have proliferated and they're virtually impossible to eradicate.

Within days of the Sept. 11 attacks, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry rushed to pull a suddenly sensitive report from its Web site titled "Industrial Chemicals and Terrorism." The agency eliminated all traces of the document and its description of sources for home-brew nerve gases and improvised explosives.

But on the World Wide Web, almost nothing truly dies.

Indeed, the thorny report currently lives on at several locations, including the site for the Oklahoma City National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, a UC Santa Cruz graduate student's Web site and the databanks of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit venture that has electronically stored an estimated 10 billion Web pages in an effort to preserve the Web's history. The Toxic Substances and Disease Registry is one of several agencies--public and private--facing this problem. Contrary to concerns about too much censorship in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the reality is that some agencies are having a hard time censoring anything that was once published on the Internet.

"The Internet is not like a faucet you can turn off and on. It's like a leaky faucet that keeps dripping long after it's turned off," said Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, an organization that strives to cut back on government secrecy.

Still scattered across the electronic ether are a host of "erased" documents, including maps of nuclear reactors, pictures of secret spy satellite facilities and a description of a NASA space propulsion project.

In many cases, agencies had no idea that their erased documents are still available for anyone with a Web browser and Internet link. Detailed maps from the Energy Department's International Nuclear Safety Center, for example, are still retrievable through the Internet Archive.

"I have never heard of the archive," said Jeff Binder, director of the center. "Maybe our guys in cyber-security have."

In the electronic battle against terrorism, the Web has become as porous a landscape as the real battlefronts surrounding Kunduz or Kandahar in Afghanistan.

That's largely due to a kind of Xerox effect on the Web, where pages and even entire digital sites can be easily copied with a few mouse clicks.

Copies of supposedly eradicated reports and documents can be found using common search engines and the Internet Archive's whimsically named Wayback Machine. The "Industrial Chemicals and Terrorism" report can be found in a matter of minutes, even by novices.

Until the Sept. 11 attacks, the porousness of the Web was actually a feature celebrated both in and out of government as a way of providing instant global distribution of information.

Anti-Secrecy Group Now Pulling Pages

For Steven Aftergood, director of the project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, the Internet has been a primary tool in the organization's efforts to battle what it considers misuses of government secrecy. It collects and disseminates information on nuclear weapons, the "Star Wars" antiballistic missile initiative and other projects.

Indeed, the Washington-based group was created after World War II by scientists from the super-secretive Manhattan Project worried that the government was concealing the dangers of building a nuclear arsenal.

But since Sept. 11, Aftergood has found himself in the awkward position of following the government's lead in protecting sensitive information. So far, he has removed about 200 pages from the federation's site, mostly concerning intelligence and nuclear weapons facilities.

-------- india / pakistan

U.S., India begin defense talks

World Scene
Washington Times
December 4, 2001
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011204-73785440.htm

NEW DELHI - A senior U.S. defense envoy began talks yesterday with government officials aimed at deepening military cooperation with India, a former Cold War ally of Moscow.

The visit by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith was the latest in a string of high-profile U.S. visitors to the Indian capital wanting to bolster ties with India.

Indo-U.S. relations have improved dramatically over the past few years. Washington has sought closer regional ties as a counterweight to China. India was one of the first nations to support the U.S. war on terrorism.

-------- korea

U.S. consortium inks deal with North Korea

World Scene
Washington Times
December 4, 2001
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011204-73785440.htm

SEOUL - A U.S.-led international consortium signed an agreement with North Korea yesterday guaranteeing the quality of two nuclear reactors it is building in the reclusive communist country, South Korean officials said.

The construction of the reactors could be critical to the success of U.S.-led efforts to ensure Pyongyang uses its nuclear facilities to produce energy rather than weapons.

The Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization is building the reactors in return for the North's agreement in 1994 to freeze its suspected nuclear weapons program. North Korea has threatened to scrap the 1994 deal unless the consortium compensates it for losses caused by construction delays.

The U.S.-led consortium had rejected the idea of compensation.

--------

North Korea Vows Arms Build - Up to Cope with U.S.

December 4, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-arms-korea-usa.html?searchpv=reuters

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea warned the United States on Tuesday it would build up its military to counter what it said was U.S. ``strong-arm policy'' against the communist state.

``The U.S. escalated policy intended to stifle the DPRK compels the DPRK to increase its military capabilities for self-defense to cope with it,'' the ruling party daily Rodong Sinmun said in a statement.

``The Bush government is still pursuing the hardline policy to contain the DPRK though it calls for the 'resumption of dialogue without any precondition','' said the commentary, carried on North's Korea Central News Agency (KCNA).

DPRK is the acronym for North Korea's official name -- the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

The statement said the United States was using its anti-terrorism campaign as an excuse to boost its forces in South Korea, creating a ``war atmosphere.''

U.S. officials have said that troops and weapons shifted from South Korea to Afghanistan have been replenished. Many of the curfews imposed on the 37,000 U.S. troops in South Korea after the September 11 aerial attacks have been eased.

The latest verbal attack on the Bush administration followed North Korea's angry rejection last week of U.S. calls for inspections to hunt for suspected weapons of mass destruction, including biological and chemical arms.

North Korea frequently uses bluster, threats and bluffs as a diplomatic tool to extract concessions from South Korea or get the attention of the South's ally, the United States, analysts say.

MIXED SIGNALS FROM NORTH

Experts said it was unlikely impoverished North Korea, which spends a quarter of its gross domestic product on its huge forward-deployed military, would further boost military readiness.

South Korean President Kim Dae-jung told British business leaders in London on Monday that ``the security risk that has long been an obstacle to inducing foreign capital has diminished to a minimum'' as a result of his policies of engaging North Korea.

North-South ties are at a standstill, despite an unprecedented series of exchanges in 2000 which raised hopes of reconciliation. The two Koreas remain technically at war because they failed to sign a peace treaty at the end of the 1950-53 Korean conflict.

Despite its penchant for hostile rhetoric against the United States, South Korea and Japan, North Korea has also sent some positive signals to those countries in recent days.

On Monday, the North Korean Foreign Ministry thanked the international community for food aid that has helped it cope with grave food shortages since 1995.

Earlier that day, North Korea signed agreements with the Korean peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), on the quality guarantees of two nuclear reactors which Western countries agreed to build for the communist North.

KEDO is a consortium set up to implement the $4.6 billion reactor project under the 1994 Agreed Framework deal, which froze the North's suspected nuclear weapons program and obliges North Korea to open its atomic facilities to international inspection.

-------- missile defense

Pentagon: Missile Test a Success

By MATT KELLEY
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_package.html?FRONTID=SCIENCE&PACKAGEID=missiledefense&STORYID=APIS7G64NRO0

WASHINGTON (AP) - The U.S. military says it completed its third successful missile defense test, knocking a dummy warhead out of space more than 100 miles over the South Pacific.

Monday night's successful test means the Pentagon can move on to more complex and realistic trials of the missile defense system, which the military says is necessary ``to deter the growing threat of ballistic missiles carrying weapons of mass destruction.''

Critics say the tests are too costly and unrealistic, arguing that long-range missiles are a minor threat. Missile defense backers, including President Bush, say hostile nations could develop and aim long-range missiles at the United States.

An interceptor missile launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands collided with the dummy warhead at about 10:30 p.m. EST, the military said. The test was nearly identical to a successful one in July.

Bad weather had blocked the test launch on Saturday and Sunday and delayed Monday's missile launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., for nearly an hour.

A modified Minuteman II missile took off from Vandenberg at 9:59 p.m. EST, the Pentagon said. Instead of explosives, its warhead carried sensors to track its progress during the test.

The dummy warhead also carried a large balloon to be jettisoned in an attempt to fool the interceptor - a tactic that the interceptor in this test successfully ignored.

After 22 minutes, the interceptor missile was launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific. That missile carried a ``kill vehicle'' that homed in on the dummy warhead to collide at 15,000 mph and destroy it in space.

Critics say the fact that the interceptor, before its launch, got precise location data from the dummy warhead makes the test unrealistic.

The head of the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, said last week the test was designed to test only certain parts of the interceptor system and was not meant to be realistic.

Monday's test is the fifth in the missile defense program. The interceptor knocked down a dummy warhead in two of the four previous tests. Each test costs about $100 million.

Russia has objected to the U.S. missile defense program, saying it will eventually violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. That pact bans missile defense systems so that a nation could not develop a shield behind which it could safely launch a missile attack.

Bush and Russian President Valdimir Putin failed to agree on a plan to change or scrap the treaty during their November summit.

-------

Antimissile Weapon Hits Target in Latest Test, Pentagon Says

New York Times
December 4, 2001
By JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/04/international/04MISS.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 - A prototype antimissile weapon demolished a mock warhead tonight high above the Pacific Ocean in the second consecutive success for the Pentagon's costly missile defense program, military officials said.

Just before 10:30 p.m., the "kill vehicle," launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, smashed into a dummy warhead that had blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California 4,800 miles away. The force of the collision, at 15,000 miles per hour, scattered fragments of the target into the ocean 140 miles below, the officials said.

"Total success," said Cheryl Irwin, a Pentagon spokeswoman. "We achieved intercept."

Coming on the heels of a similar success in July, the $100 million test tonight is expected to pave the way for more complex trials as soon as February. It also heightens the likelihood that Congress will grant the Bush administration's request to increase missile defense spending by $3 billion in the 2002 fiscal year, to $8.3 billion.

The administration has said it wants a rudimentary missile defense against long-range missiles available by 2004 to 2006.

But the politics of missile defense have changed since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in ways that could both hinder and help the administration's ambitions to build a system as quickly as possible, officials said.

On one hand, the terrorist attacks have somewhat dampened opposition in Congress to missile defense. Though many lawmakers remain critical of missile defense, they have been less aggressive about trying to block funding.

On the other hand, the United States' alliance with Russia in fighting terrorism has made it harder for the administration to unilaterally withdraw from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which President Bush contends hampers missile defense testing. Moscow wants the treaty revamped, not scrapped.

The launch tonight was the seventh of 18 tests anticipated by the Pentagon for its ground-based system. Five of those tests have involved attempts to hit a streaking intercontinental ballistic missile with a nonexplosive kill vehicle; three of them have been successful.

Tonight's test, which had twice been postponed because of bad weather, required the 120-pound kill vehicle to separate from its two- stage booster high in the atmosphere, orient itself in space with help from the stars and use an infrared sensor to home in on the target.

It was almost identical in design to one conducted in July 2000, which ended in failure after the $25 million kill vehicle failed to separate from the booster rocket. A test in January 2000 also failed when a cooling system for the infrared sensors malfunctioned, blinding the interceptor in the final seconds of the flight.

Opponents of missile defense have accused the Pentagon of overly simplifying the tests in a rush to make the system work. They contend that the intercept rocket is slower than it should be, that the decoy balloons released alongside the targets do not look like warheads and that the targets carry homing beacons that help the kill vehicles locate them.

The Pentagon says it will make the tests more realistic in the coming months.

"We are testing to learn, we are not testing as pass-fail for some operational reason," Lt. Gen. Ronald T. Kadish, director of the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, said on Friday.

-----

What of missile defense?

Philip Gold
December 4, 2001
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20011204-32021160.htm

In a previous world - that existing prior to September 11 - I might have given this disorganized book a respectful review. After all, ballistic missile defense can be debated rationally, and the authors hold the kind of academic and governmental credentials that urge serious consideration. But today "The Phantom Defense" seems such a mush of pernicious cliches, willful naivete, technological tunnel-vision and just plain meandering goofiness that a stern review might almost be considered a public service. At issue here is not the authors' total opposition to missile defense, at least missile defense as it has been conceived and developed these past four decades. The issue is their failure of mind, a failure that their impressive resumes can neither hide nor excuse.

Or maybe their resumes can excuse it. For these are old men, wedded perhaps to the ways of the bygone era in which they made their careers, in love perhaps with the belief that something cannot be done because for so many years they've been saying it, and that it should not be done because . . . well, because other people might not like it.

The authors - a former Foreign Service officer, a former CIA analyst and a former Pentagon consultant - serve up the usual three objections to missile defense. It's technically impossible. It would destabilize arms-control. It would provoke new arms races. They also indulge in the standard left-wing criticisms (not entirely wrong) of the Military-Industrial Complex and American foreign policy generally. They equate support for missile defense with either greed or ignorance and dismiss supporters as members of the wacko far right. They offer a few over-recycled bromides concerning various forms of American arrogance and conclude that national security is best achieved by treaties, chopping up our own weapons in order to set an example for others and giving lots more money to the Third World.

The authors begin by raising a valid question. Why has $100 billion (current dollars) spent on research and testing not produced a single piece of usable hardware, let alone an effective system? They offer up a scrawny history of anemic efforts counterpointed by extravagant claims, but never seem willing to consider one very plausible answer. Nothing was achieved because nothing was intended. Leave aside the political aspect - whether Ronald Reagan ever intended to deploy anything (I believe he did not) or whether Bill Clinton set his own program up to fail (it's arguable).

For nearly half-a-century, ballistic missile defense has been run mostly as a sinecure, a government works project for scientists and engineers scattered through the universities, the national labs, the contractors and the military. The dominant pattern has been lethargy, sloth and cushy cynicism. I first discovered this some years ago while covering the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI); the problem seems only to have intensified since. Perhaps it's time to get some new skin in the game.

Of course, the authors would answer, the laws of physics are the same for everybody. Indeed, they base their technological opposition less on the engineering difficulties of building a system than on one physical fact: Radar cannot discriminate between real warheads and decoys in space. They claim that no other remote sensor can, either. Well, how about some new sensors?

The authors fret that missile defense would destabilize arms control. What of it? During the Cold War's final years, a new phrase entered the lexicon: mutual unilateral cuts. We and the Russians have been doing it ever since. And by what illogic may it be presumed that a system that will never, ever work is also destabilizing?

As for the authors' belief that North Korea, Iran, Iraq and their brethren will be so inspired by our willingness to forego defenses that they'll abandon their own missile projects - it's hard to believe that three men of such erudition and attainment could never have encountered evil before. Or perhaps they genuinely believe that our benevolent example alone can tame the world's Saddam Husseins and Osama bin Ladens.

So, what of missile defense? The short answer: It's neither sin nor salvation. It's an aspect of national security that deserves to be explored and taken for what it's worth, whatever that might turn out to be. In this endeavor, as in all scientific and engineering ventures, there are only two certainties. People who say that something can't be done are generally not those who do it. And with each passing year, the list of things that couldn't be done, but got done, grows longer.

Philip Gold is a senior fellow of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute.

--------

China Fumes Over U.S. Missile Test

December 4, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-arms-china-usa.html?searchpv=reuters

BEIJING (Reuters) - China said on Tuesday it remained staunchly opposed to plans by Washington to develop a national missile defense system after the United States tested its controversial missile defense shield.

``Our position on missile defense is very clear and consistent: we are opposed to the United States building a missile defense system,'' Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue told a news conference.

``Instead we believe that relevant sides should, through sincere and serious dialogues, seek a solution that does not compromise any side's security interests, nor harm international efforts at arms-control and disarmament,'' she said.

The United States said it took a major step forward in testing its controversial missile defense shield on Monday by shooting down a dummy warhead on an intercontinental ballistic missile over the Pacific Ocean.

Chinese officials have discussed U.S. missile defense plans with their U.S. counterparts but the two sides do not see eye to eye.

Both Russia and China oppose U.S. plans to develop a missile shield, saying it would violate the 1972 Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty and could trigger a new arms race.

The test is part of President Bush's goal of building a limited shield to protect against ballistic missiles from ''rogue'' nations such as North Korea, Iran and Iraq.

U.S. officials say the current missile defense tests do not violate the ABM treaty between the United States and the former Soviet Union. That treaty forbids the United States or Russia from developing a national missile defense.

But Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have vowed to move beyond that pact if Moscow and Washington cannot reach agreement on updating it.

Despite agreeing to new and deep cuts in offensive nuclear missiles by both countries, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Bush failed to agree on the anti-missile program at a summit in Texas last month, but said discussions would continue.

-------- russia

Russia to launch new nuclear sub

World Scene
Washington Times
December 4, 2001
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011204-73785440.htm

MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin said yesterday he would visit a northern shipyard to launch a nuclear submarine - a trip apparently intended to bolster the Russian navy's morale, shaken by the weekend ouster of several admirals.

Mr. Putin said he would go to the Sevmash shipyard in the town of Severodvinsk today to commission the submarine Gepard. The same shipyard launched the Kursk nuclear submarine, which sank in the Barents Sea in August 2000, killing all 118 men aboard.

--------

Putin Shakes Up Russian Navy After Receiving Report on Sub

By MICHAEL WINES
December 4, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/04/international/04RUSS.html?searchpv=nytToday

MOSCOW, Dec. 3 - Russia's navy was said to be reeling today after President Vladimir V. Putin moved over the weekend to fire or punish 14 of its high-ranking officers for "serious shortcomings" in training and daily duties.

Although the navy's top officer, Adm. Vladimir Kuroyedov, denied any direct link, many concluded that Mr. Putin's actions on Saturday were a belated response to the disastrous sinking of the Kursk nuclear- powered submarine in August 2000, which killed the 118 crewmen and civilians on board.

Mr. Putin acted hours after he met with the Russian prosecutor general, Vladimir Ustinov, and senior defense officials in the Kremlin to hear a report about the Kursk disaster. Mr. Ustinov was said to have found major lapses in security by the fleet, but he apparently reached no conclusion as to the cause of the sinking.

Among those demoted were the commander of the northern fleet, Adm. Vyacheslav Popov; the fleet's chief of staff, Vice Adm. Mikhail Motsak; and Vice Adm. Oleg Burtsev, who commanded the fleet's submarines. The three bore ultimate responsibility for the Kursk, which was part of the northern fleet.

Mr. Putin had rejected Admiral Popov's resignation shortly after the disaster, saying it was premature. On Saturday, however, Admiral Kuroyedov, the naval commander, said the demotions were for "serious violations exposed during the investigation of the northern fleet operations."

Other officials suggested that the transgressions extended beyond the circumstances of the Kursk's sinking to the general management of Russia's prize naval fleet.

Like the rest of the Russian armed forces, the northern fleet has suffered in recent years from a critical shortage of money for maintenance and training. Recent audits have sharply criticized naval readiness, saying that even many top officers were unprepared to navigate a modern vessel.

The submarine plunged to the Barents Sea floor after one or more torpedoes exploded, but the reasons for the explosions are unclear. Some senior naval officials have insisted that the Kursk collided with a mine or a Western submarine, but most experts say the evidence points to a malfunction of a new propulsion system in an experimental torpedo.

Mr. Putin, oblique as ever, gave no direct reason for the punishments, leaving other officials free to speculate about his motives.

Admiral Popov's defenders in the navy told Russian newspapers that the northern fleet commander was being made a scapegoat for the navy's financial and management problems. Others said Mr. Putin was showing his displeasure with the pace of reform in the military, which has resisted proposals to cut staffing and abandon cold war missions.

-------- treaties

EU tries to break deadlock on germ weapons pact

by Richard Waddington
Reuters:
4/12/2001
http://www.planetark.org/avantgo/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=13561

GENEVA - The European Union sought yesterday to break a deadlock between the United States and countries such as Iran and China threatening to torpedo moves to bolster an international pact against weapons of germ warfare.

All 143 states to have ratified the 1972 Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention agree on the need at talks in Geneva to reaffirm a commitment to outlawing such weaponry in the wake of anthrax attacks in the United States.

But there is no accord on what further action should be taken to stop such weapons being developed by countries or by violent radical groups such as the al Qaeda organisation of Saudi-born Muslim militant Osama bin Laden, whom Americans blame for September's suicide hijack attacks in the United States.

"This conference could still fail and that would send out a bad message. We really need something that shows we are able to act," said one European diplomat.

As the three-week treaty review conference entered its final week, the EU advanced proposals aimed at bridging a yawning gap between Washington and developing states like China and Iran.

Some developing countries want to pursue sweeping revisions to the existing treaty, including firmer commitments on the transfer of technology to developing countries.

But the United States, displaying once again a deep suspicion of multilateral treaties, seeks a narrower approach.

OUTLAWING ANTHRAX MANUFACTURE

Earlier this year, Washington rejected a planned protocol to the treaty that would have instituted checks to prevent cheating. Instead it wants agreement on piecemeal measures, such as making it a criminal offence to manufacture weapons of germ warfare such as anthrax.

It also wants states to cooperate in the extradition of suspects wanted in another country on germ weapons charges. But its plan stops short of the multilateral treaty obligations for which developing states have been pressing.

The EU plan calls for signatory states to meet once a year rather than every five years for a review conference. The annual gatherings should be preceded by meetings of experts to prepare the groundwork for decision-taking.

The aim is to send out a message something is being done to face the dangers posed by biological weapons, diplomats said.

In a bid to satisfy developing countries, the proposal leaves open the door for the Convention itself to remain the vehicle for further accords - rather than simply adopting the ad hoc approach favoured by the United States.

But the diplomats said it was uncertain the plan would be accepted. President George W. Bush's administration could see it as a stepping stone to the resumption of negotiations on treaty changes that it has already rejected, they said.

In July, the United States spurned the proposed additional protocol to the 30-year-old treaty which would have made it easier to check whether signatory states were obeying the rules.

Unlike other arms treaties, the biological weapons pact contains no verification mechanism.

Washington, which has accused a number of existing members, including Iraq, Iran and North Korea of having or developing biological weapons, said the protocol would have done nothing to prevent violations of the Convention and would simply have exposed U.S. industry and military facilities to spying.

The conference, called before the mysterious anthrax attacks in the United States which have killed five people, was due to end on Friday.

-------- terrorism

Bin Laden: Gains in nuclear efforts?

Washington Times
December 4, 2001
UPI
http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/04122001-014407-5558r.htm

Suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden may have made greater strides than previously thought in developing a crude nuclear weapon, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

The concern is sufficiently deep that some countries have adopted extreme security procedures at their borders, the Post reported.

A diagram of a radiological bomb, also known as a "dirty bomb," has been found in a Taliban or al Qaida installation in Afghanistan in recent weeks, according to a source.

The device is designed to kill or injure by creating a zone of intense radiation that could extend several city blocks. A large, highly radioactive bomb could affect a much larger area.

Other documents about nuclear weapons in general were recovered. But the newspaper quoted a source as saying such documents could be found in public outlets, including the Internet.

The Post said the alert was raised from interrogation of captured al Qaida members and evidence gathered in the last month at al Qaida facilities.

The newspaper also described a meeting attended by bin Laden in the last year in which an associate of the Saudi fugitive produced a canister that allegedly contained radioactive material.

The associate waved the canister in the air as proof of al Qaida's progress in efforts to build a nuclear device.

----

U.S. Fears Bin Laden Made Nuclear Strides
Concern Over 'Dirty Bomb' Affects Security

By Bob Woodward, Robert G. Kaiser and David B. Ottaway
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, December 4, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52369-2001Dec3?language=printer

U.S. intelligence agencies have recently concluded that Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist network may have made greater strides than previously thought toward obtaining plans or materials to make a crude radiological weapon that would use conventional explosives to spread radioactivity over a wide area, according to U.S. and foreign sources.

Some of the conclusions come from interrogations of captured al Qaeda members or associates. Some come from evidence gathered in the last month on the ground in Afghanistan by CIA officers and U.S. Special Forces from former al Qaeda facilities.

In addition, recent U.S. intelligence reports describe a meeting within the last year in which bin Laden was present when one of his associates produced a canister that allegedly contained radioactive material. The associate waved the canister in the air as proof of al Qaeda's progress and seriousness in trying to build a nuclear device.

The U.S. government last month urgently asked a few key allied governments to assist in determining whether the associate, identified only with a common name, may have entered their countries, perhaps with radioactive material. The concern is sufficiently deep that some countries have adopted extreme security procedures at their borders, including the increased use of devices that measure radioactivity, the sources said.

There is no conclusive evidence that bin Laden or his associates have built a radiological bomb or even have the capability to do so, these sources emphasized. But for years bin Laden has said publicly he was working to obtain a nuclear capability.

U.S. officials are very concerned that any nuclear detonation by al Qaeda would be a calamitous psychological setback to the war on terrorism, and a maximum effort has been launched to detect and prevent the possibility, remote as it might be, several sources said. The worry about al Qaeda's efforts to obtain a nuclear capability was a factor in the decision yesterday to issue another national alert about possible terrorist attacks, a senior source said.

On at least one occasion, the White House cited the increased concern that al Qaeda might have a radiological bomb as a key reason that Vice President Cheney was not available for a face-to-face meeting with visiting senior foreign officials. The meeting usually would have allowed for informal personal contact, but took place via secure video conference because Cheney was at a secure location outside Washington.

U.S. intelligence agencies are looking not only for evidence that terrorists could be assembling a radiological bomb but also for any sign that al Qaeda could be trying to make a very crude and small atomic or fission bomb.

A radiological bomb, also known as a "dirty bomb," could be made by taking highly radioactive material, such as spent reactor fuel rods, and wrapping it around readily available conventional high explosives. The device is designed to kill or injure not through its explosive force but by creating a zone of intense radiation that could extend several city blocks. A large, highly radioactive bomb could affect a much larger area.

There is no public record that any country or terrorist group has detonated a radiological bomb.

A diagram of a dirty bomb has been found in a Taliban or al Qaeda installation in Afghanistan in recent weeks, according to a source. In addition, numerous other documents about nuclear weapons in general were recovered. But a well-placed U.S. source said such diagrams and documents could be found in public sources, including the Internet. The source said some designs were so inadequate and primitive that they most likely would not work.

Al Qaeda's longstanding interest in acquiring a nuclear capability is well-documented. In February, a Sudanese man who worked for bin Laden for nine years, Jamal Ahmed Fadl, testified that al Qaeda was trying to acquire nuclear material in the early 1990s. Fadl said that a bin Laden lieutenant ordered him to buy uranium from a former Sudanese army officer, who offered to sell ore from South Africa for $1.5 million.

Though he did not have personal knowledge that the deal was consummated, Fadl testified, he was paid a $10,000 bonus for arranging the deal. Fadl was a government witness at the New York trial of four participants in the al Qaeda bombing of two American embassies in Africa in August 1998.

Last month, bin Laden told a Pakistani journalist that his movement already had chemical and nuclear weapons.

"I wish to declare that if America used chemical or nuclear weapons against us, then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons," bin Laden was quoted as saying. "We have the weapons as a deterrent."

In 1998, bin Laden called it "a religious duty" to acquire weapons of mass destruction, adding: "If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank God for enabling me to do so."

One Taliban official in Afghanistan has denied that al Qaeda has a nuclear capability.

"We do not even have modern weaponry, not to mention weapons of mass destruction," Abdul Salam Zaeef, former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, said recently after widespread reports of bin Laden's deterrent comment.

Pakistan has detained two nuclear scientists, both veterans of the secret program that has given Pakistan about a dozen nuclear warheads, and is interrogating them about their contacts with Taliban and al Qaeda members. The two, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Abdul Majid, worked in Afghanistan in recent years but have said they were only providing charitable assistance to Afghanis.

Mahmood is an expert in plutonium, the highly fissionable material used in the heart of most nuclear weapons. He was given a desk job in 1999 after he publicly said that Pakistan should help other Islamic nations build nuclear weapons. He also spoke publicly in support of the Taliban movement.

Russia and Pakistan are considered the two most likely sources of radioactive material for al Qaeda. Russian officials have reported dozens of attempts to steal enriched uranium or plutonium since 1990. Last month, a Russian general said unidentified terrorists recently had twice tried and failed to penetrate Russian top-secret fortified nuclear storage facilities known as "S-shelters."

Mohamed El Baradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in a Nov. 1 statement that after the Sept. 11 hijackings, the agency had been alerted to the possibility that terrorists might use "radioactive sources to incite panic, contaminate property and even cause injury or death among civilian populations."

On Nov. 9, President Bush said of al Qaeda, "They're seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons."

Bin Laden is a fugitive from Saudi Arabia, which along with the United States is considered a top target for another attack. Border inspection and surveillance have been increased substantially in Saudi Arabia; authorities there are on the lookout not only for radioactive material but also for any related equipment, parts or technology that might be used in a nuclear device.

In Saudi Arabia, a source said, border guards are searching any package or truck that might be used by smugglers. Particular emphasis has been given to the Saudi border with Yemen, which has had an active al Qaeda presence.

Operatives connected to bin Laden in Yemen are believed to be responsible for the attack on the American destroyer USS Cole in October 2000, when a small boat loaded with explosives rammed the ship and killed 17 U.S. sailors in the port of Aden.

Researcher Jeff Himmelman contributed to this report.

--------

Bin Laden May Be Close to Nuclear Weapon

December 4, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-attack-osama-nuclear.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Osama bin Laden, chief suspect in the Sept. 11 suicide plane attacks on the United States, may be closer than first thought to developing a crude nuclear weapon, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday.

Fear that bin Laden's al Qaeda network might be close to developing a ``dirty bomb'' was a factor in the United States' decision on Monday to issue a new warning of possible attacks, the newspaper reported.

``U.S. intelligence agencies have recently concluded that Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist network may have made greater strides than previously thought toward obtaining plans or materials to make a crude radiological weapon that would use conventional explosives to spread radioactivity over a wide area, according to U.S. and foreign sources,'' the Post said.

The newspaper said the alert was raised from interrogation of captured al Qaeda members and evidence gathered in the last month at al Qaeda facilities in Afghanistan by CIA officers and U.S. special forces.

``The concern is sufficiently deep that some countries have adopted extreme security procedures at their borders, including the increased use of devices that measure radioactivity,'' the newspaper reported, citing unidentified sources.

It said the so-called dirty bomb could be made by taking highly radioactive material, such as spent reactor fuel rods, and wrapping it around readily-available conventional explosives.

``The device is designed to kill or injure, not through its explosive force but by creating a zone of intense radiation that could extend several city blocks,'' the newspaper said.

It said a diagram of a ``dirty bomb'' was found in a Taliban or al Qaeda installation in Afghanistan in recent weeks.

The newspaper said recent intelligence reports had also described a meeting within the last year at which the Saudi-born bin Laden was present, when one of his associates produced a canister that allegedly contained radioactive material.

The Washington Post said the United States was sufficiently concerned by the report to ask several key allied nations to help determine whether the man with the canister may have entered their country, perhaps with radioactive material.

``Border inspection and surveillance have been increased substantially in Saudi Arabia; authorities there are on the lookout not only for radioactive material but also for any related equipment, parts or technology that might used in a nuclear device,'' the newspaper said.

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

-------- washington

Few ex-Hanford workers filing for compensation plan

Tue, Dec 4, 2001
By Annette Cary Herald staff writer
http://www.hanfordnews.com/2001/1204.html

Fewer former Hanford workers than expected are applying for a new program that would pay $150,000 to workers or their survivors if those workers suffered cancer caused by on-the-job radiation exposure.

Nationally, the Department of Labor has received 14,500 claims from nuclear workers and some uranium miners in the first four months of the program. But the applicants include just 575 from Benton and Franklin counties.

"We expected Hanford to be the largest single site for claims," said Pete Turcic, director of the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Task Force for the Department of Labor.

Labor officials aren't sure why more former Hanford workers are not filing claims, he said. During a visit here last week to consider the program's slow start, he heard several theories.

One possibility is that some former workers, proud of the job they did at Hanford, consider applying for compensation unpatriotic.

If that's the case, federal officials hope those people will reconsider and get the money they may be due.

"This is an entitlement the government is providing for the patriotic people who worked at these sites for fighting and helping win the Cold War," Turcic said.

Others may doubt the payments will actually be made.

"We (need to) convince people this is not a paperwork exercise and benefits are going to be paid," he said. "We try to make it as easy as possible."

The Energy Compensation Resource Center in Kennewick will complete the initial paperwork for applicants, either in person or by taking information on the phone and mailing it to them for a signature.

However, applicants, some of them in their 80s or 90s, must apply for their medical records themselves. In some cases, doctors who made the initial diagnosis and would have records may be retired or deceased. The government also may want letters of explanation from the doctors.

"The Department of Labor has assured us people need to make a diligent effort, but they realize records may no longer exist," said Eunice Godfrey, resource center manager.

Medical records are used to determine whether there is at least a 50 percent chance that cancer was caused by radiation exposure, which would entitle former workers to compensation. To help make that decision, the government would like to have details such as how long after exposure the cancer was diagnosed and where in the body it first appeared.

Although the Kennewick resource center cannot gather medical records for applicants, it has information on doctors and can suggest ways to get records that might be helpful.

The office also is trying to reach more people who might be eligible.

It has posted information in senior centers, pharmacies and grocery stores, and in a few cases visited the homes of people too frail to come to the resource center. It's also given information to current Hanford workers, knowing that some families have had two or three generations of workers at the site.

The office also sent notices to 5,000 retirees of Fluor, Westinghouse, Rockwell and GE but got fewer than 50 responses.

Most claims for compensation are coming from Oak Ridge, Tenn., another nuclear site, and some smaller sites that, like Oak Ridge, had gaseous diffusion plants. Workers at those plants fall under a looser set of rules for compensation because radiation exposure records there may be poor.

However, because of the large number of employees who have worked at Hanford since 1943, federal officials expected more claims from workers here.

A University of Washington former worker screening program estimates the number of former workers at Hanford at more than 100,000. Department of Energy budget records show most years more than 10,000 people were employed at Hanford, with twice that many during some years.

A large number of them could be expected to have cancer, based on how common cancer is in the overall population. The American Cancer Society says one in two men and one in three women can expect to get cancer in their lifetimes.

"If they worked at Hanford and had or have cancer, we encourage them to apply," Godfrey said. "We don't want to raise unrealistic expectations, but they won't know whether the reconstruction will determine that their cancer was caused by radiation if they don't file."

While 575 claims have been filed from Benton and Franklin counties, many other former Hanford workers would have moved away and filed claims from elsewhere. But that still doesn't account for the apparently low number of claims from the West.

The Western regional office in Seattle has received 2,211 claims, which would include not only Hanford claims, but also claims from the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory and workers exposed to nuclear bomb testing in Nevada and Alaska.

In addition to claims for cancer, workers also can apply for compensation for lung diseases caused by beryllium or silica. Besides the $150,000, workers who are ill now would also get their medical costs paid retroactive to the date they filed a claim.

No cancer claims for Hanford workers have been paid, but Turcic said the first ones could be paid as soon as this summer. Before claims can be considered, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health must finish formulas and procedures for determining if radiation caused cancer in individual cases. Information on the proposed rules is at www.cdc.gov/niosh/ocas/42cfr81.html on the Internet.

Now only spouses of deceased workers and dependents -- such as children who were supported by the worker at the time of death -- may apply for compensation. However, Congress is expected to consider legislation to allow adult children to apply if there is no surviving spouse to claim the benefits.

For more information on applying, call the resource center at 509-783-1500.

-------- us politics

Powell aims to rally Central Asian allies

By Warren P. Strobel
INQUIRER WASHINGTON BUREAU
December 4, 2001
http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2001/12/04/national/POWELL04.htm?template=aprint.htm

WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell left yesterday on an eight-day mission to cement closer ties with the former Soviet states of Central Asia, which have emerged as key players in the U.S. fight against terrorism.

On a journey that also will take him to Eastern Europe, Russia and four key NATO allies, Powell will emphasize the so-called soft side of the battle against terrorism, a senior State Department official said. He will argue that countries that embrace democracy, economic liberalization and tolerance deny terrorists a haven.

These issues are "kind of seen as the touchy-feely side of things," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. But, Powell will argue, ultimately they are "the best antidote to the terrorists."

At Powell's first stop - a meeting in Bucharest, Romania, of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe - the 55-nation group is expected to agree unanimously on a plan to combat terrorism.

Powell faces a more daunting task in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakstan, Central Asian states where democracy is either nonexistent or in its infancy, and energy-based economies are controlled by political leaders and, often, their families.

Uzbekistan, a one-party nation that President Islam Karimov tightly controls, is a crucial player in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. Uzbekistan is hosting U.S. troops and serving as a launch pad for humanitarian relief missions. In return, President Bush has promised Karimov more U.S. aid and a much closer relationship.

But that aid, especially security assistance, should be conditioned on economic and political reforms, said Martha Brill Olcott, a Central Asia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in Washington.

Otherwise, "we're trading current threats for latent security threats down the road," Olcott said. In Uzbekistan, "it's going to be very difficult to convince the president he needs to step up the pace of economic reform, unless we use conditionality," she said.

During a visit to Washington last week by a high-level delegation, Uzbek officials promised to accelerate economic reforms, including making the country's currency, the som, convertible on international markets. In a joint statement, the United States pledged more support. An aid package of $100 million reportedly is under discussion.

"We have an opportunity to have a new relationship in all dimensions, including democracy and economic reform," Powell told the Uzbeks, according to the senior official.

The five Central Asian states that gained independence during the breakup of the Soviet Union a decade ago historically have been leery of angering Moscow. But Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, breaking with tradition, did not oppose a temporary U.S. military presence on Russia's southern rim after the Sept. 11 terrorist hijackings that killed thousands at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in Western Pennsylvania.

After leaving Romania, Powell will head to Turkey, NATO's only predominantly Muslim member, which has offered its troops for a peacekeeping force in Afghanistan.

In meetings Thursday and Friday in Brussels, Belgium, Powell and fellow NATO foreign ministers will discuss ways to upgrade the alliance's ties with Russia, its former adversary.

After traveling to Central Asia, Powell will go to Moscow, where he will try to make progress on a deal that would reduce U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons and allow the United States to expand testing of a ballistic missile-defense system.He plans to stop in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom on his way back to Washington.

Warren P. Strobel's e-mail address is wstrobel@krwashington.com.

----

Free Lessons on Corporate Hubris, Courtesy of Enron

By Allan Sloan
Washington Post
Tuesday, December 4, 2001; Page E03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52748-2001Dec3?language=printer

In the spirit of the season, Enron Corp. has given us an early holiday gift. No, it's not sending goodies to our homes or money to our bank accounts. Rather, it's giving us an amazing tale of corporate downfall and hubris. And it is providing lessons ranging from the mercilessness of markets to the dangers of forcing people to tie their living and retirement to the same company.

Enron, created in 1985 when Houston Natural Gas combined with a gas-pipeline company, swaggered through the 1990s. It claimed it would revolutionize life and commerce by substituting the efficient hand of the market for the clumsy hand of government regulation.

But Enron's leaders proved to be every bit as bungling as any government bureaucrat. Sift through the financial debris, and you see that Enron lost about $7 billion on four dumb investments (details below.) However profitable Enron's other businesses might have been, paying for those turkeys stretched Enron to the breaking point. And it broke. Some $60 billion of stockholder value has been wiped out this year. Shares that opened the year at $83 closed Friday at 26 cents. Bankruptcy looms. You wonder if Enron Field, home of the Houston Astros baseball team, will be renamed Chapter 11 Field. Or maybe House of Cards.

Adding another dimension to the debacle is the intimate relationship between Enron and the White House. Enron, which for years has tried to ride roughshod over state and federal regulators, has ties throughout the Bush administration. For starters, Enron and its chairman, Kenneth Lay, were among George W. Bush's biggest and most important contributors in his Texas and presidential campaigns. And according to public records, Bush intimates ranging from economic adviser Larry Lindsay to political adviser Karl Rove (who owned $100,000 to $250,000 of Enron stock) to Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick had been on Enron's payroll before moving to Washington. Army Secretary Thomas White Jr., a former Enron executive, had stock and options worth between $50 million and $100 million.

In a different environment -- remember Whitewater? -- the combination of big losses and White House ties would have long since produced cries for a special prosecutor to see what (if anything) Enron's buddies have done on behalf of the company. The upcoming hearings in the Republican-controlled House should be fascinating, and there will doubtless be more hearings in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

"We've had no contact with the White House" since Enron's meltdown started, says company spokesman Mark Palmer.

"I'm not aware that there have been any requests [from Enron] for anything," a White House spokesman says....

----

National Security Motivates Plan to Expand Employment Incentives

By Stephen Barr
Tuesday, December 4, 2001; Page B02
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52736-2001Dec3?language=printer

Concerned about a potential brain drain of government scientists, linguists and others whose expertise is critical to national security, a bipartisan group of senators plans to introduce legislation to expand student loan repayment assistance and graduate fellowships.

Senate staff members of the Governmental Affairs Committee sketched out the bill's goals at a meeting yesterday sponsored by the National Academies, which advises the government on scientific and technical matters, and the Brookings Institution, a think tank that studies government programs and policies.

The bill, the Homeland Security Federal Workforce Act, comes after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the government's move to a war footing. But the Senate aides said work on the bill started several months ago, after testimony and studies identified staffing woes at national security and defense agencies.

Key sponsors of the bill are Sens. Daniel K. Akaka (D-Hawaii), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Fred D. Thompson (R-Tenn.), the aides said. Their proposal would build on the government-wide loan repayment program and would be limited to employees in national security jobs.

The legislation would establish a National Security Service Board, made up of the secretaries of defense, state, treasury and energy, the attorney general, the directors of the CIA and FBI and others. The board would assess the government's national security workforce and write a plan on how to address staffing problems.

To help meet staffing goals, the bill would provide for loan repayment assistance and fellowships.

Agencies would be allowed to repay educational debt of up to $10,000 a year per person, up to a total of $80,000, for people in national security jobs, as defined by agency heads and the director of the Office of Personnel Management. In return for the student loan repayments, recipients would agree to serve in the government for at least three years.

Fellowships would have similar rules. Agencies would be permitted to pay tuition and a stipend (up to $21,500 a year) for graduate education. In return, employees would agree to serve for at least three years in the government. The fellowships would be available to federal employees and people outside the government.

The legislation also would create a National Security Service Corps, which would be run by the service board. The corps would rotate members through various assignments in different agencies to promote sharing of knowledge and techniques.

The proposal reflects a growing interest in the health of the civil service and in measures that might help agencies strengthen recruitment and retention strategies. Numerous agencies face the prospect of large-scale retirements over the next five years, but few appear to have clear-cut strategies on how to improve the quality of their workforces.

At yesterday's meeting, the Senate staff members asked participants for ideas and questions to help them prepare for hearings of the Governmental Affairs Committee, tentatively scheduled for early next year.

Participants suggested that the aides look to the appropriations committees for support, because funding will be crucial for agencies that decide to pursue a robust loan repayment and fellowship program for national security jobs.

The participants also recommended that Congress look for ways to encourage agencies to develop management training programs. Some suggested that the government revamp its promotion system, especially if agencies plan to bring in outsiders or mid-career professionals who might be willing to stay in federal service for three to five years.


-------- MILITARY

-------- afghanistan

Battle Rages Outside Kandahar

By Kathy Gannon
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, December 4, 2001; 10:10 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54770-2001Dec4?language=printer

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Taliban fighters and members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida militia were putting up fierce resistance against opposition Afghan forces outside Kandahar on Tuesday as a relentless U.S. bombing campaign continued, tribal leaders said.

Some Kandahar defenders fired missiles at U.S. warplanes, but made no hits, U.S. officials said.

The city, the last bastion of the Taliban, remained in the hands of the Islamic group, but a seesawing battle was raging for its airport, a few miles away. A senior ethnic Pashtun leader made new surrender demands on Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, who has ordered his forces to fight to the death.

Abdul Jabbar, an Afghan tribal representative in Pakistan in contact with commanders at the scene, described the fighting as close combat. "They're face-to-face," he said.

In Germany, four Afghan factions reached a breakthrough early Tuesday and agreed on a framework for a post-Taliban administration. The United States pressured the anti-Taliban northern alliance into dropping demands that threatened to derail talks on Afghanistan's political future.

Tense diplomacy preceded the breakthrough. The United States had accused the fractious alliance of trying to block the accord and a U.S. official directly complained to its leader in Kabul, Burhanuddin Rabbani.

American military attacks would continue in Afghanistan even after the interim administration was set up, said Richard Haas, the U.S. coordinator for policy on Afghanistan.

"I think what we are looking at is a period of coexistence. Military operations will continue with the interim authority," said Haass, the director of policy planning for the U.S. Department of State, during a visit to India.

After days of clashes, Pashtun tribal fighters loyal to former Kandahar governor Gul Agha battled their way into Kandahar airport from the south on Tuesday despite fighting by pro-bin Laden Arab fighters, said one tribal commander, Mohammed Jalal Khan.

He said tribal warriors had captured half of the airport and were fighting for control of the terminal building.

Other troops loyal to former deputy foreign minister Hamid Karzai were advancing on Kandahar from the north.

The Taliban claimed to have repelled an assault by Karzai's troops in heavy fighting that they said left dozens of anti-taliban fighters dead or wounded the Pakistan-based news service, Afghan Islamic Press, reported.

But Abdul Malik, a spokesman for Karzai in Quetta, Pakistan denied there was any fighting, saying Karzai's troops had advanced peacefully to within 18 miles of the city.

He said Karzai had dispatched a new delegation to Kandahar to demand the Taliban's capitulation.

"We don't want any more dead, above all now that it's clear that the Taliban have lost," the Rome daily newspaper, La Repubblica, reported Karzai as saying. "Mullah Omar must understand, and this is the message we are sending him, he must surrender, he must recognize that the battle is over."

Mullah Omar, believed to be holding out in Kandahar, has ordered troops to defend the city to the death and not retreat as they did when other cities were besieged by anti-Taliban forces.

Reports from either side could not be verified as the Taliban have barred western journalists from the region. Karzai is being touted as a possible interim national leader in a proposed broad-based temporary administration for Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, three men who claim to be American citizens and who fought on the side of the Taliban are now being held by U.S. forces or allied opposition forces in northern Afghanistan, senior defense officials said.

Elsewhere, U.S. special forces in Afghanistan's mountainous east were working with local people in the hunt for bin Laden and his top lieutenants.

The Pentagon believes they might be in the Tora Bora area in the White Mountains south of Jalalabad, hiding in vast fortified cave and tunnel networks used by Afghan guerrillas in the war against Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

Provincial security chief Hazrat Ali said he had 1,500 men ready for battle against al-Qaida fighters in the White Mountains.

In Washington, Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, the deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said U.S. personnel were identifying targets for bombing rather than conducting cave-to-cave searches for bin Laden.

Airstrikes have been heavy in the remote and rugged region. However, Stufflebeem denied reports that U.S. bombs had mistakenly pummeled villages and wrongly killed civilians and anti-Taliban fighters near Tora Bora.

"I don't have any reports of any villages being struck," Stufflebeem said. "The only reports I have are that all our weapons have been on target. I find that a little bit suspect, that villages are being flattened."

Journalists who visited the village of Kama Ado saw nine bomb craters. The debris of thatch houses was spread over two hillsides along with children's shoes, dead cows and sheep and the tail fin of a U.S. Mk83 bomb.

Local officials said scores were killed in three bombed villages. Anti-Taliban officials appealed to Americans to improve their targeting intelligence.

The other main focus of U.S. bombing is Kandahar and surrounding countryside, another possible bin Laden hiding place.

Stufflebeem said U.S. pilots had reported seeing portable surface-to-air weapons fired at them from around the city. He said these might have been Stinger anti-aircraft missiles or Russian versions of them.

A contingent of more than 1,000 U.S. Marines at a base about 70 miles southwest of Kandahar has been conducting armed reconnaissance patrols, but has stayed out of the fighting.

Stufflebeem said there are at least four "pockets of resistance" around the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif. In Balkh province, about 2,000 Taliban and al-Qaida fighters are holed up and trying to work out a surrender arrangement, a senior defense official said.

Associated Press correspondents Christopher Torchia in Quetta, Pakistan, and Chris Tomlinson in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, contributed to this report.

---

Hundreds Flee Kandahar as Pressure Rises
Fear of Massacre Haunts Taliban Surrender Talks

By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 4, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52345-2001Dec3?language=printer

CHAMAN, Pakistan, Dec. 3 -- U.N. officials said today that hundreds of Afghan civilians are fleeing Kandahar every day in the face of relentless U.S. bombing and mounting pressure by U.S.-backed Pashtun fighters against the last stronghold of Taliban resistance.

Pashtun leaders complained that their efforts to negotiate a surrender in Kandahar have been frustrated by the fears of Taliban fighters that they will be killed if they give up. These fears, combined with orders for a fight to the finish from the Taliban leader, Mohammad Omar, have increased the danger of a bloody street-to-street struggle for the historic walled city, they said.

Pashtun opposition forces continued to exchange fire with Taliban fighters and their mostly Arab allies, primarily near the airport southeast of the city, but there was little gain of terrain by either side, opposition officials and travelers from Kandahar said. The Pashtun militia groups appeared to be waiting for the U.S. bombing to soften up Taliban defenders while their leaders sought to negotiate a peaceful turnover.

To the north, anti-Taliban leaders in Jalalabad said they plan an attack within two days against a redoubt of fortified caves in a rugged mountain area called Tora Bora, where U.S. officials have said accused terrorist leader Osama bin Laden may be hiding. U.S. aircraft in recent days have been bombing intensely in the Tora Bora hills, southwest of Jalalabad, targeting Taliban and Arab fighters who retreated from the city in mid-November. Local anti-Taliban commanders complained that the bombing has killed several dozen civilians.

Two civilians were also killed Sunday in the bombing raids in and around Kandahar, said Mohammed Sariq, a 45-year-old pomegranate dealer who arrived here today. He said a bomb landed on a house near his, killing an uncle and his nephew.

U.N. officials said they are processing 1,000 new refugees a day here at Chaman, the regional border crossing into Pakistan about 60 miles southeast of Kandahar. Most of them are from Kandahar, the spiritual center of the Taliban movement and the last major city under its control.

Sariq said so many residents have left Kandahar that it no longer looks like a city of 400,000. "Everybody who has money has left," he said. "Most people have gone to villages nearby. Some have become refugees. But inside the city only the little people remain."

"Right now everybody feels that the whole world is against us," said Abdul Helmandi, a 35-year-old day laborer and refugee from Kandahar. "America is bombing us and sending its Marines. What are they going to do next?"

About 55 miles to the southwest of Kandahar, U.S. aircraft brought in more light armored vehicles and all-terrain Humvees to an airstrip taken over by U.S. Marines a week ago. So far, the Marines have not moved on Kandahar. But the presence of more than 1,000 heavily armed U.S. fighters has prompted speculation of an imminent ground attack on Taliban positions around the city, where the Pentagon has said Omar and the Taliban leadership are believed to be.

The fight for Kandahar has followed a pattern repeated throughout the war that began Oct. 7. Heavy U.S. airstrikes have hit Taliban front lines night and day. Taliban fighters have been pulling back under pressure from the bombs, opening the way for a hodgepodge of opposition factions to move forward. Actual ground fighting has been kept to a minimum.

"I've seen reports where the southern opposition groups, for instance, have probed Kandahar to test, I think, defenses and resistance and strength and resolve there," Rear Adm. John D. Stufflebeem told reporters at a Pentagon briefing. "So I do believe that they are probing to determine. . . . I also believe that they are consolidating so that they can amass firepower. But at the same time, I also know that they're negotiating. So I think that they're looking at all their avenues, but I don't have a sense for necessarily when is the final ultimatum going to occur."

But battle for Kandahar has also been different from those waged by the Northern Alliance in the northern part of the country, if only because of the stakes. The city is the birthplace of the Taliban movement and its spiritual homeland. If it falls, gone is the dream of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the formal name of the Taliban government.

In addition, the battle for Kandahar has come after the battle for Kunduz, where thousands of Taliban fighters laid down their weapons after lengthy negotiations. Hundreds of those fighters were then killed in a prison riot several days later in Mazar-e Sharif, many by U.S. air attacks.

Although the riot has been subdued, the United Nations announced it has pulled its international staff from Mazar-e Sharif because of fighting among different groups in the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance. "We have observations of sporadic fighting and shooting in the city," a U.N. spokesman, Khaled Mansour, told reporters in Kabul. "We don't have any information on who is fighting whom. We have heard about factional fighting."

Taliban officials involved in negotiations with Pashtun opposition leaders have told their interlocutors that a main reason they are not interested in surrendering is because they believe the same fate that befell the Kunduz fighters in Mazar-e Sharif awaits them.

"Every time we sit down with them, they raise Kunduz and Mazar," said Akil Shah, who has been negotiating with the Taliban for the handover of Spin Boldak, a town just inside Afghanistan that is the center of a vast smuggling trade along the border. "Whenever we give them a guarantee of safety, they don't believe it."

While the events at Mazar-e Sharif are still unclear, many people here, both Taliban and Pashtun opposition leaders, have expressed belief that it was an intentional massacre of the Pashtuns by the Northern Alliance, backed by the United States. The killings there fed into a broader feeling here that the United States is intent on punishing the Pashtuns -- the Taliban's main ethnic group -- and helping the Northern Alliance, made up mainly of Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras from Afghanistan's north.

"This is how they are thinking," said Sardar Jelani Khan, another Pashtun negotiator who also has participated in talks over Spin Boldak. "They say, 'If we surrender, they will kill us.' Honestly speaking, after Kunduz and Mazar, we can understand them."

Khan termed "unhelpful" a recent statement by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who said Friday that the United States would "strongly oppose" any type of amnesty or safe passage out of Kandahar for Omar. Khan and Shah said Rumsfeld's statement and others like it have helped hard-liners in the Taliban leadership to unite around Omar.

"People still follow him," Khan said. "They are still loyal. And they feel they have no way out."

Khan and Shah said they both oppose a fight to take Kandahar because the loss of life could be horrific. "Up until now the war has gone well for America," Shah said. "But in a way, Kandahar is a big problem because what America wants is not exactly what we want."

Shah said the United States is interested in capturing people and "bringing them to justice."

"We just want them to go back to their countries or return to their villages," he said. "It is different."

---

Religious Quest Led American To Taliban Side

By Rene Sanchez
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 4, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52321-2001Dec3?language=printer

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 3 -- Four years ago, a studious California teenager named John Philip Walker Lindh startled his middle-class Catholic parents by announcing that he was converting to Islam. A few days ago, after a long and still mysterious journey abroad to study the religion, he turned up on an Afghanistan battlefield as a bloodied Taliban fighter who called himself Abdul Hamid.

Bearded and bedraggled, with a gunshot wound to his leg, the 20-year-old told U.S. military officers and journalists that he had fought alongside the Taliban for months, until he and other fighters surrendered to Northern Alliance forces last week.

And he may not be the only American to have joined the Taliban. Two other captured soldiers also claim to be U.S. citizens, a senior U.S. defense official said in Washington.

"I have seen military reporting saying that there are two other Americans in [Northern Alliance] custody -- Americans believed to have been fighting for the Taliban," the official said. "I can't tell you their names or where they are, but I have seen that in military reporting."

Frank Lindh and Marilyn Walker, who are separated and live in the San Francisco suburbs, identified their son after a close family friend taped CNN footage on his capture and showed it to them. The family moved to California about 10 years ago from Silver Spring.

"They couldn't believe it," Bill Jones, the family friend, said today. "He's a good American kid. He had been on a spiritual quest and they were supportive. They broke into tears when they heard him called an 'American Taliban.' He must have got swept away in something, because he was on a mission of mercy."

In a CNN interview shown today, Walker, who was born in the District and uses his mother's last name, said he became acquainted with the Taliban while studying Islam in Pakistan and that his "heart became attached" to some of the group's fundamentalist teachings. He also told Newsweek that he left Pakistan to join the Taliban in Afghanistan about six months ago to help build a "pure Islamic state." Reporters who have spoken with Walker said he plainly looks and sounds like an American.

Jones said that Walker had been overseas for several years and that his parents had last heard from him in the spring, when he sent an e-mail from Pakistan. "They had been trying everything to track him down," Jones said.

Walker was captured with Taliban forces in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif, and he was among a small number of survivors in an uprising by prisoners that took the life of a CIA officer last week. He emerged from the basement of a mud-walled fortress that had been turned into a makeshift prison, giving up only after Northern Alliance troops poured in oil and set it alight, then fired rockets into the underground tunnels and finally flooded them with cold water.

Pentagon officials said today that the Northern Alliance had turned Walker over to U.S. military forces and that he was receiving medical attention for his wounds. But Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would not say whether Walker was considered a prisoner of war.

"The only thing that I can say about this individual is that this is somebody who claims to be an American citizen," Stufflebeem said. "That claim is being respected at the moment."

Tonight Frank Lindh, who once worked as a Justice Department lawyer in Washington, told CNN's "Larry King Live" that until his son disappeared this spring he had no reason to believe that he was doing anything but zealously pursuing religious studies overseas.

He said he was horrified by what had happened to his son, but added that he also wanted to give him a "little kick in the butt for not telling us what he was up to."

Over the weekend, Lindh told Newsweek that Walker -- who was named after the late Beatle John Lennon -- became intrigued with Islam after reading "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" in high school and later dropped out to study the religion full-time. "He was exceptionally devoted to his studies," Lindh said. Marilyn Walker, a home health care worker who is a convert to Buddhism, told the magazine that her son often had spoken about returning to the United States to study medicine so he could help the poor in countries such as Pakistan.

The couple said that when they last heard from their son seven months ago, he did not seem different. He said he was studying the Koran and did not discuss any political issues or express anger with America, though he said he planned to go "somewhere cooler" for the summer. He also asked for money, and his father sent him $1,200.

His mother called him "a sweet, shy kid" and expressed shock that he had been fighting for the Taliban.

"He must have been brainwashed," she told Newsweek. "He was isolated. He didn't know a soul in Pakistan. When you're young and impressionable, it's easy to be led by charismatic people."

Before moving to California, the family lived near University Boulevard in Silver Spring, in a neighborhood of brick homes and tall oaks.

Today, former neighbors remembered the couple and their three children as quite friendly and described Walker as a normal, fun-loving boy who attended Kensington-Parkwood Elementary School in Montgomery County.

"We played together as long as he lived here," said Andrew Cleverdon, 19. "He was a regular kid. Me and him were rambunctious. Our parents were always yelling at us for being loud and obnoxious."

Another neighbor, Christina Reichel, a retired IBM sales executive, described the family as devout Catholics who went to Mass every Sunday. Both Frank Lindh and Marilyn Walker were "very well-educated and intellectual," she said. "I'd describe the whole family as intellectually curious, very thoughtful and very philosophical, always interested in new ideas."

Walker apparently has been overseas for most of the past three years, first studying Arabic in Yemen and later enrolling in a religious school in a Pakistani village.

Lindh told Newsweek that the only hint of his son's changing political attitudes came in an e-mail exchange shortly after terrorists detonated a bomb next to the destroyer USS Cole, an attack that killed 17 American sailors in Yemen in October 2000. He said his son suggested that the bombing may have been justified because the ship was docked in an Islamic country.

In a brief interview with CNN after his capture, Walker said the time he spent at an Islamic school in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province drew him close to the Taliban. People in that region, he said, "in general have a great love for the Taliban, so I started to read some of the literature of the scholars, the history of Kabul. . . . My heart became attached to it."

Jones, the family friend, said such comments suggest that Walker has been profoundly transformed since he left California. "He wasn't following any political agenda back then," Jones said. "It was like he was going off to start his own little Peace Corps."

Staff writers Annie Gowen and Vernon Loeb and researchers Margot Williams and Margaret Smith contributed to this report.

---

THE HUNT
Afghan Says Fighters Are Ready to Attack Cave Complex

December 4, 2001
By TIM WEINER
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/04/international/asia/04AFGH.html?searchpv=nytToday

JALALABAD, Afghanistan, Dec. 3 - An Afghan commander said tonight that 1,500 Pashtun fighters, accompanied by American Special Operations soldiers, were prepared to attack Tora Bora, the mountain cave complex where Osama bin Laden and 2,000 Al Qaeda fighters are believed to be hiding.

Early this morning and on Sunday, helicopters were seen and heard coming into the Jalalabad airport. A guard at the airport named Thezab said they were American helicopters, including a helicopter gunship and two light helicopters. The United States has helicopters, used by Special Forces, based in both Pakistan and Tajikistan.

Aleem Shah, a front-line commander for Hazarat Ali, a minister of the Eastern Shura, the self-proclaimed, pro-American government here, said that the first of the fighters would leave Jalalabad on Tuesday and that some American Special Operations soldiers would be with them.

Hundreds of Afghan fighters also will head for Meleva, a valley southwest of Tora Bora, where Al Qaeda forces have also been seen in recent days, he said.

Pentagon officials said today that they had no information that such an attack was about to take place.

Mr. Ali confirmed that American Special Operations forces had arrived in Jalalabad. He also said he had met today with a delegation of Afghan tribal leaders who said two Afghan elders from the Tora Bora area had received a message from Mr. bin Laden saying he did not want to fight fellow Muslims.

Nonetheless, Mr. Ali said, Tora Bora will be attacked, and soon.

"That is the last and strongest camp of Al Qaeda in this country," he said. "We are ready."

Neither Mr. Ali nor Mr. Shah would say how many American soldiers were in the region.

Afghan village and tribal leaders from the Tora Bora region met here today and ordered Al Qaeda fighters to leave Afghanistan immediately. They also asked the United States to stop the bombing that they say has caused the deaths of 200 Afghan villagers. There was no independent way to confirm those accounts.

The order against Al Qaeda was a go-ahead to Mr. Ali's forces and, under Afghan tradition, just short of a declaration of war.

In a signed declaration addressed to the world, the elders said: "To those foreigners living in the mountains of Afghanistan, we say to you: leave our country. Because of you, our innocent countrymen are suffering.

"Our demand to the United States government and its coalition: stop the bombing in the name of humanity."

Rage over the bombing is commonplace in the Jalalabad bazaar, the hospital where injured women and children have come, and the villages.

"If the killing continues, there is no way to continue our support for the present regime and the United States," said Gul Wathan, 36, a villager from Landa Khel, where an American missile killed eight guards sent by the Eastern Shura to watch over the municipal office on Sunday.

Such anger could cause support to wane for the Americans and bode ill for the Eastern Shura, the new, fragile governing coalition of Pashtun commanders, warlords and politicians here, who want to be represented in the next Afghan government, when and if it takes shape.

One of the elders, Mohammed Hazarat Faqirbad, said, "War is disaster. War is evil. Because war is unholy. There is no holy war."

The villagers of Kama Ado, about 35 miles south of here, said they had identified and buried 155 of their dead. Eastern Shura officials said at least 58 people had died in three other nearby villages. The officials and villagers said that the death toll would climb and that the dead were Afghan civilians, not Al Qaeda fighters.

Because access is limited to the area, it has been impossible to verify these accounts.

The Pentagon has denied that any villages were struck, saying it bombed only Al Qaeda military complexes between Friday night and early this morning. The villages lie within 10 miles of the caves of Tora Bora in southern Nangarhar province.

As American military activity in and around Jalalabad increases, with bombing runs coming hourly tonight, a significant deployment of American ground forces in the region appeared imminent.

The declaration of the village elders was a signal to the military commanders of the Eastern Shura to gather their forces. The village elders support the American campaign, so long as their people are not killed. They have been angered by the presence of Al Qaeda, but also by the bombing. A ground attack on Tora Bora seemed to be the only alternative to them.

Nearly 200 elders of Nangarhar province met today in a loya jirga, a traditional assembly called in times of crisis. They represent 2.5 million people, roughly 12 percent of all Afghans.

Haji Din Mohammed, who led the elders' gathering, said, "I want to say to the foreign guests, all of us gathered here want to say, that we have a saying: Fish and guests stink after three days."

He told the elders, "These people were involved in terrorism in New York and Washington. They are not good Muslims. They are not friends of Islam.

"We don't want to consider America as an invader of Afghanistan," he said. "We want America in this country as a friend, not as an invader."

At the meeting, held at the White Mosque, one of Jalalabad's oldest shrines, Sher Afzal Musli, an elder from Mohmandara, said: "Just because we have beards doesn't mean we are against you. Please make sure that you identify the real terrorists."

Adbul Ali, from the village of Khogyani, said: "All the Eastern Shura is in the coalition with the United States against the terrorists. But if the bombing doesn't stop, the people will turn against us."

-------- africa

Wrong target
Donald Rumsfeld claims that Somalia is harbouring al-Qaida.
But repeated efforts to verify this have failed to turn up any evidence

James Astill
Tuesday December 4, 2001
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,611685,00.html

Washington is fuelling speculation that Somalia, the second most war-torn corner of the Islamic world, will become the next target in the war against terror. "Somalia has been a place that has harboured al-Qaida and, to my knowledge, still is," said the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, last week.

But should we accept Mr Rumsfeld's "knowledge"? The UN, which unlike Mr Rumsfeld has staff based in Somalia, says there are no terrorists there. And what action could he take against a country levelled by a decade of conflict?

America does not have happy memories of Somalia. In late 1992, it landed 2,000 marines in Mogadishu to restore order to a failed state ravaged by warlords and stricken by famine. A year and a half later, it hastily pulled out after 18 of its elite special force members were killed.

Subsequent American policy and public sentiment towards Africa have been shaped by this pointless, Ł2bn exercise. America would not waste its altruism on Africa again - not even in Rwanda, a year later.

A year after America's retreat, the UN mission that replaced it left too. Somalia's subsequent descent into ever more complicated clan feuding continues to this day, little interrupted by a UN-sponsored administration.

Since 1995, America has gathered intelligence about Somalia through its embassies in Nairobi and Addis Ababa. But only military intelligence agencies, unencum bered by state department security rules, could have visited Mogadishu in the past seven years. And before September 11, they had no interest in doing so. It would not have been consistent with what the US undersecretary of state for Africa, Walter Kansteiner, recently described as a policy of "total benign neglect".

Speculation about America's renewed interest in Somalia began within days of the hijack attacks, when a Somali group, al-Itihaad al-Islamiya (Islamic Unity), appeared on the US hitlist of foreign terrorist organisations. Since no embassy staff have visited Somalia or admit to having learned anything about terrorism there since the attacks, Mr Rumsfeld's "knowledge" probably pre-dates them.

Al-Itihaad emerged in 1991 as one of numerous militias wrestling for power. But, unlike the others, it was fighting not for clan interests but to establish an Islamic state. It had some successes before being pushed into the Gedo region of central Somalia. Ethiopia suspected it of plotting to stir up its marginalised, ethnic-Somali citizens and of a series of assassination attempts in Addis Ababa. In 1997 it sent in troops to clear the Islamists out. It captured and killed hundreds, including 26 non-Somalis of "the same groups that make up al-Qaida", Ethiopia's ambassador to the UN recently told the security council. "We have ample evidence" of al-Qaida activities in Somalia, he said.

Ethiopa is actively trying to destabilise its ruined neighbour out of a long-standing, partly justified, fear of the effect a united Somalia would have on its own 3m ethnic Somalis. To strike Somalia on Ethiopia's advice would be like invading Pakistan on a tip-off from India.

Al-Itihaad appeared on America's hit list because of its alleged responsibility for the assassination attempts in Ethiopia's capital. There are no other terrorism allegations against it and, besides those raised by Ethiopia, no substantial allegations of a link to al-Qaida. "We have seen no connections between al-Itihaad and al-Qaida," said Randolph Kent, the UN's resident coordinator for Somalia. "Nor for that matter have we seen any evidence of the terrorist activity which is exciting the rest of the world."

The only separate charge that al-Qaida was engaged in terrorism in Somalia stems from the trial of suspects in the east Africa embassy bombings early this year. According to the testimony of a former Bin Laden employee, al-Qaida was responsible for the 18 special force members' deaths. But the charge was later dropped for lack of evidence.

Somalia's government, the UN, independent analysts and the Islamist organisation itself, all say that after its defeat in Gedo, al-Itihaad substantially disbanded its militia and adopted a policy of winning Somalis over to its fundamentalist agenda by providing schools, courts and basic health services. Rumours have persisted that al-Itihaad has a training camp on Ras Kamboni island, near the Kenyan border. But a UN mission post-September 11 found only an orphanage.

Even if Mr Rumsfeld has no firm evidence of al-Qaida activity in Somalia, no Somali would be surprised if he launched strikes. Before abandoning Somalia, America sent helicopter gunships to kill Mohamed Farah Aideed, the warlord chiefly responsible for the country's chaos. They succeeded in killing at least 70 people, according to the Red Cross, but not Aideed, who wasn't there.

Mr Rumsfeld would be hard pushed to find anything to hit with a missile. The ruination of Somalia - the mounds of rubble that pass for Mogadishu, the derelict shells of its port and airport - is beyond imagining. Targeted killing of al-Itihaad members would be more likely. Likelier still would be some effort to patrol Somalia's vast coastline, preventing Bin Laden's associates from fleeing there.

Mr Rumsfeld's words should be of great concern to everyone on either side of the war on terrorism. Could he be using the world's most broken country - a "soft target", in intelligence terms - to maintain flagging momentum for a wider war on terrorism? Whatever he decides, don't expect to see US marines landing in Mogadishu.

· James Astill is the Guardian's east Africa correspondent
astill@africaonline.co.ke

-------- arms sales

Lockheed to Provide Rocket Pods to Egypt

December 4, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-arms-lockheed-egypt.html?searchpv=reuters

DALLAS (Reuters) - Defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp. (news/quote ) (LMT.N) on Tuesday said it won a $72.2 million contract from the U.S. government to provide extended-range rocket pods to Egypt.

The contract for more than 400 Multiple Launch Rocket System, or MLRS, rocket pods marks the first sale of the missile and rocket artillery system to Egypt, Lockheed said.

Egypt's initial purchase of the rockets will be followed by a contract for MLRS launcher and ancillary training and support equipment, Lockheed said, noting the foreign military sale was approved by the U.S. Congress earlier this year.

Delivery of the rocket pods, which each contain six MLRS rockets, should begin in fall 2002 and be completed by fall 2003.

Lockheed, the nation's largest defense contractor and builder of the F-16 fighter jet, separately said it won an $80.7 million contract to produce 111 Army Tactical Missile Systems (TACMS) Block IA missiles for the Republic of Korea -- marking Korea's second purchase of the Army TACMS system and the first international sale of the more accurate Block IA system.

-------- balkans

Sarajevo Siege Commander on Trial

WORLD In Brief
Associated Press
Tuesday, December 4, 2001; Page A22 (AP)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52722-2001Dec3?language=printer

THE HAGUE -- A Bosnian Serb commander during the siege of Sarajevo went on trial for war crimes yesterday, accused of ordering his snipers and artillerymen to fire on civilians as they bought bread, tended vegetable gardens or attended victims' funerals.

Gen. Stanislav Galic, 58, looked on impassively as prosecutors drew a portrait of fear and suffering in their opening statement at the U.N. war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Galic has pleaded not guilty to seven counts of war crimes he says he never knew took place during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, when prosecutors say thousands of civilians were killed as they went about their everyday lives.

"A 3-year-old child was shot at the door of her home, a 9-year-old as she played in her garden. Civilians were shot in their homes as they watched television, drank coffee or prayed," said lead prosecutor Mark Ierace.

For nearly two years of the siege, Galic was the commander of the Romanija Corps surrounding Sarajevo.

-------- biological weapons

Postal Service May End Irradiation
Agency Reportedly Plans To Focus on Detection

By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 4, 2001; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52180-2001Dec3?language=printer

The U.S. Postal Service is hoping to get out of the mail irradiation business, planning instead to focus on detection of anthrax spores and other biological agents, postal industry and other sources said.

Hard hit by the recession and declining mail volumes, USPS is exploring whether another government agency may be better suited to the costly and time-consuming task of irradiating the mail, industry officials said.

When the anthrax attacks took place in October, shutting down much of Capitol Hill temporarily, the Postal Service scrambled to find a way to ensure mail was free of anthrax spores and turned to irradiation technology.

It signed contracts with firms in Lima, Ohio, and in Bridgewater, N.J., to use their technology to irradiate the mail. USPS also purchased eight machines from Titan Corp. for $40 million, which have not yet been installed.

Since then, postal officials have learned that zapping the mail can damage some contents and significantly slow delivery.

"Postal officials have made abundantly clear that they do not like the option of radiating mail and would like to take whatever steps they can to get out of the mail radiation business," said Gene Del Polito, president of the Association for Postal Commerce, who most recently spoke with high-level postal officials about this issue last week.

Another source familiar with the thinking of top postal officials said they do not see sanitizing the mail as part of their core business. "They are exploring if there's not a better government agency to handle this type of activity," the source said. "Any rational individual would ask themselves that."

Postal officials yesterday called Del Polito's remarks "hearsay." In a statement, they said: "We remain committed to detecting and removing biohazards from the mail. The safety of our employees and the public is paramount."

The statement said: "We may implement other technologies in the future in lieu of irradiation if they prove efficacious, safe, cost-effective and able to be integrated into our mail processing system. . . . The upshot is this: The hearsay statements should not be misconstrued to imply that the Postal Service is abandoning plans to sanitize the mail. We are pursuing irradiation as the means at this time as an available technology. If some other means presents itself that is just as effective and less costly, we would, of course, seriously consider it."

But Del Polito and Robert McLean, executive director of the Mailers' Council, the nation's largest coalition of mailers, said postal officials want to emphasize detection because they believe it is more efficient to detect tainted mail first, then irradiate it.

"They just told us that they think it would be more efficient, would be less expensive and would not delay the mail as much," McLean said.

Postal officials have told Congress they would like $307 million for technology such as a "particle-size and density analyzer," which can determine whether the particles in a predetermined size range, say, one to 10 microns in size, are biological in nature. They are also looking at protective bags that can be installed in collection boxes to provide initial protection for letter carriers, and a tracking system in the boxes for mail.

Part of the agency's desire to get out of the mail irradiation business is born of the likelihood that it will not get a significant bailout from Congress to help with expenses,Del Polito said. USPS has said it would need $1.1 billion in the short term to cover costs.But even that amount will come nowhere close to covering the costs of operating the irradiation machines and additional overhead, and of lost revenue from lost productivity and lost business, experts said.

"Both systems are going to be costly," McLean said. "The question is, is it necessary to irradiate every piece of mail, or is the science behind the detection equipment such that [only] if it is detected you would move into irradiation?"

Del Polito and others say irradiation has bad side effects: Some mail has had burned edges. The color on some plastic is changed, so a Platinum credit card, for example, is no longer platinum. Smart cards have been rendered dumb.

Postal officials have warned customers that irradiation can damage film, pharmaceuticals, biological samples and diagnostic kits used to monitor such things as blood sugar levels.

On Monday, the General Accounting Office will hold a conference on options for dealing with bioterrorism through the mail. The conference was requested by House Government Reform Committee Chairman Dan Burton (R-Ind.) and Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), ranking Democrat,, who are concerned that irradiation may not be the most cost-effective way to safeguard the mail.

They are interested in systems that enhance security by reducing the anonymity of the sender. One option might be to require people to show an identification card when they mail a package so a bar code or other identifier can be placed on it.

----

More Anthrax-Tainted Mail Possible

By LAURAN NEERGAARD
AP Medical Writer
DECEMBER 04, 08:51 ET
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_package.html?FRONTID=NATIONAL&PACKAGEID=anthrax&SLUG=ATTACKS-ANTHRAX

WASHINGTON (AP) - Tens of thousands of letters mailed around the country may have picked up trace amounts of anthrax in a New Jersey postal facility, but the government hasn't decided whether to track down that mail, anthrax investigators said.

It has been almost eight weeks since this mail was possibly tainted in the anthrax bioterror attack. ``With each passing day, the lack of further cases occurring is grounds to diminish the risk from any one of these letters,'' stressed Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Investigators already have tracked 300 letters that passed through the Trenton, N.J., facility within seconds of anthrax-laden letters mailed to Democratic Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. Health officials in every region that received the suspect letters are watching for anthrax symptoms, but so far no infections have turned up, Koplan said.

But the way the mail was processed suggests far more than 300 letters could have picked up small amounts of anthrax in that post office, he said.

``There seems to be the potential for not just hundreds and not just thousands but tens of thousands and maybe more letters to be potentially at risk for some level of cross-contamination,'' Koplan said.

The CDC hasn't yet decided if this mail also needs special tracking and study.

The count comes as investigators struggle to unravel the mystery of how two women - Ottilie Lundgren, 94, of Oxford, Conn., and Kathy Nguyen, 61, of New York - inhaled enough anthrax to kill them. Nguyen died in October; Lundgren, in November.

No traces of the bacteria have been found in either woman's home, mail or usual locales. Yet suspicion that cross-contaminated mail might have killed Lundgren grew Monday because of circumstantial evidence: A trace of anthrax was found at a Connecticut postal center that processed mail for her hometown, as was a letter mailed to a nearby home that contained a single anthrax spore.

Linking Nguyen to cross-contaminated mail is even harder. A letter addressed to a South Bronx business near her home went through the Trenton postal facility at about the same time as the letters to Daschle and Leahy, but that letter hasn't been found.

The public shouldn't conclude that this was the way the women were infected, said Dr. D.A. Henderson, the government's top bioterrorism adviser. ``We have difficulty in accepting that,'' because past studies have suggested trace amounts aren't enough to cause the deadly inhaled form of anthrax.

Still, scientists do not know the minimum safe level of anthrax, and people with weak immune systems could be infected by far lower amounts than it would take to sicken healthier people. So Koplan said such at-risk people might consider having others open their mail, or hold it away from the face, as steps ``prudent for their peace of mind.''

``People have a right to be uncomfortable about this. We don't have all the answers,'' he added.

Meanwhile, investigators hope the Leahy letter will offer important clues to the source of the anthrax and the perpetrator, because it was discovered unopened and full of the bacteria. But they haven't yet determined how to open the letter safely.

All the other known anthrax-attack letters were opened, letting the bacteria escape, before the investigation even began. In Washington, a Senate office building contaminated when the Daschle letter was opened Oct. 15 may not reopen until early next year, cleanup workers said Monday.

--------

THE DISEASE
U.S. Says Thousands of Letters Might Be Tinged With Anthrax

December 4, 2001
By ERIC LIPTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/04/politics/04ANTH.html

Senior officials of the Department of Health and Human Services said yesterday that some tens of thousands of letters processed weeks ago might have been contaminated with trace amounts of anthrax spores merely by coming into contact with intentionally poisoned mail.

Such incidential contamination might have been the source of the bacteria that killed two women in Connecticut and New York, the officials said.

During a telephone news conference late yesterday afternoon, Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, and his top scientific advisers repeatedly said that there was no evidence of a widespread threat to public health. But the officials said that people with compromised immune systems who were uneasy about the risk might feel more comfortable having someone else open their mail, washing their hands after opening letters or taking other protective steps.

"There seems to be the potential for not just hundreds and not just thousands, but tens of thousands and maybe more letters to be potentially at risk for some level of cross-contamination," said Dr. Jeffrey P. Koplan, the director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency is investigating the deaths of five people from inhalation anthrax, including Ottilie W. Lundgren, 94, of Oxford, Conn., and Kathy T. Nguyen, 61, of the Bronx.

Mr. Thompson said that there was still no "definite scientific or medical link between cross-contamination of mail and the death of Mrs. Lundgren." But his top advisers said this was the theory being explored most closely.

Dr. Koplan said the possibility that thousands of letters with a low level of spores may have been widely distributed was "an uncomfortable situation."

Officials cautioned that the risk associated with cross-contaminated mail appeared to be extremely small.

Perhaps most important, they said, is that it has been nearly two months since letters known to have anthrax bacteria passed through the mail system and only Mrs. Lundgren and Ms. Nguyen are thought to have possibly contracted inhalation anthrax in this way.

"The risk to any one individual is very low," Dr. Koplan said, echoing earlier assessments by other top health officials who said there was only a one-in-several-million chance of someone falling ill.

But the disclosure was the latest in a series that suggested how even small amounts of anthrax can be widely dispersed through mechanisms like the mail service. It also reflects the continuing revision of the assessment of the threat caused by anthrax bacteria in the mail.

Initially, federal health officials said that only a person who opened a letter with anthrax spores could get enough of a dose to cause a fatal case of the disease.

Then they said that even people who just handled a sealed letter could be fatally infected. Now it appears that someone who received a letter that came into contact with a poisoned letter might be at risk of getting a fatal dose.

The latest shift in the assessment came over the weekend, after investigators found trace amounts of anthrax spores at a postal distribution center that serves Ms. Lundgren's neighborhood, and a single spore on a letter that was received by a family in Seymour, a mile from Ms. Lundgren's home in Oxford.

They are also raising the possibility that cross-contamination might have caused the death of Ms. Nguyen. The theory is bolstered by the fact that postal authorities have determined that a letter mailed to the Bronx neighborhood where Ms. Nguyen lived - like the letter to the Seymour family - passed through a New Jersey mail sorting center at almost exactly the same time on Oct. 9 as anthrax-laced letters sent from Trenton to two United States senators.

They had earlier confirmed that this kind of transfer of spores from one letter to another had caused a cutaneous anthrax infection in an office worker at an accounting firm in New Jersey. But they did not think cross-contamination could cause inhalation anthrax.

Federal officials said yesterday that anthrax spores had also most likely been dispersed not only by mail-sorting machines, but also by the equipment that stamps letters. In stamping such letters, Dr. Koplan said, there is "a physical ramming of the letter by the stamping device that in itself may cause some dispersion through the envelope in some way."

If one canceling machine was contaminated, he added, spores could also possibly have spread to canceling machines alongside it.

Postal officials have found traces of anthrax bacteria in about 20 sorting centers and post offices in several states. Yesterday, as part of an intensified effort to determine how many letters may have been contaminated and where those letters were ultimately delivered, federal officials said that an epidemiologist was being assigned to the Washington headquarters of the United States Postal Service.

Dr. Neal L. Cohen, New York City's Health Commissioner, said in a separate news conference in New York yesterday that while he agreed that cross-contamination might have been the source of the anthrax bacteria that infected Ms. Nguyen, the risk to the public at large was limited.

"Obviously there's not a zero risk, but the risk is quite, quite small," Dr. Cohen said.

City health officials have visited two Bronx addresses to see if they could find a possibly contaminated letter that passed through a postal distribution center near Trenton at the same time as the letters sent to Senators Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont. But no letter was found, nor was any sign that anyone in the area had fallen ill.

Dr. Koplan said he could not rule out that other people might have been infected with anthrax, but that the cases had not come to light because the disease had not been properly diagnosed.

"We've had very intensive case surveillance going on throughout the country and not turned up other cases," he said. "May we find more? Yes, we might. Could we have missed some? Yes, we might have. But nevertheless, we're getting lots of reports of cases that don't turn out to be anthrax."

Dr. Koplan added that people whose immunity was compromised, like the elderly or those with AIDS, "might be more comfortable" having someone else open their mail, or washing their hands after they have done so, and, in particular, not bringing mail close to their faces.

"We don't have all of the answers and people would like to have some reassurance that we know exactly what's going on and we don't," Dr. Koplan said.

-------- chemical weapons

NEW TECHNOLOGY COULD SPOT CHEMICAL WEAPONS

December 4, 2001
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/dec2001/2001L-12-04-09.html

WASHINGTON, DC, Devices that could detect the earliest signs of exposure to chemical warfare agents are being developed by researchers in Augusta, Georgia; Boston, Massachusetts; and Newark, Delaware.

A team from the Medical College of Georgia and Boston University is working on a portable machine that could detect the muscle twitches that follow exposure to weapons like sarin and soman.

The device could be worn by soldiers and rescue workers who are at risk, the team said. It may also have applications for crop dusters, farmers and others who work around insecticides, which can cause symptoms similar to those associated with chemical weapons.

"Chemical warfare agents kill by disrupting normal communication between nerves and muscles so that muscles can no longer relax," said Dr. Jerry Buccafusco, pharmacologist at the Medical College of Georgia.

At the earliest sign of confused communication between the brain and the nerves and muscles it controls, victims might still be saved, say Buccafusco and Dr. Carlo De Luca, a biomedical engineer at Boston University.

Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Delaware have developed a portable detection platform that could provide real time recognition of chemical and biological weapons using infrared spectroscopy.

A patent is pending on the Planar Array IR (PA-IR) spectrograph developed by John Rabolt, chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and Mei-Wei Tsao, research professor in that department.

The device, which is now about the size of a large shoebox, can detect even small amounts of chemical weapons agents in solid, liquid or vapor phases.

The device also has broad industrial applications. It can be used to make real time measurements of the thickness and chemical composition of various films, coatings and liquids.

"Our PA-IR system will enable companies that run production lines at extremely fast speeds to cut down on waste by keeping better track of imperfections or variations in product quality as it is being manufactured," Rabolt said.

-------- ireland

N. Ireland Disarmament Talks

WORLD In Brief
Reuters
Tuesday, December 4, 2001; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52722-2001Dec3?language=printer

DUBLIN -- Pro-British paramilitary forces in Northern Ireland are engaged in discussions that could lead them to disarm, officials said.

Retired Canadian Gen. John de Chastelain, the head of the independent arms decommissioning body set up under the Good Friday peace deal of 1998, told the British and Irish governments he has had contacts with loyalist paramilitary groups which could result in their following in the footsteps of the Irish Republican Army, officials said.

The IRA last month disposed of what de Chastelain certified at the time was a significant stock of weapons.

-------- israel

Israeli Military Hits Arafat Sites
Airport Wrecked as Sharon Retaliates

By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 4, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52447-2001Dec3?language=printer

JERUSALEM, Dec. 4 (Tuesday) -- Israeli forces pounded the helipad at Yasser Arafat's compound in Gaza City Monday, then destroyed his airport runway in the southern Gaza Strip and pulled up near his West Bank headquarters in Ramallah early today after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared Israel will fight back against what he called a Palestinian "war of terror."

Arafat was in the West Bank at the time of a missile strike by Israeli helicopter gunships on his beachfront compound in Gaza, but the assault destroyed two of the Palestinian leader's helicopters and ignited a massive fuel fire that shrouded the largest Palestinian city with billowing black smoke for more than an hour at dusk. A dozen people were slightly injured in the attack, the Palestinians said.

Israeli officials said the airstrikes, which followed a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings and shootings that killed 26 people in Israel over the weekend, were the beginning of an intensified military campaign against Arafat's Palestinian Authority. They said the goal was to force the Palestinian leader to squash terrorist groups operating from Palestinian-administered territory in Gaza and the West Bank, not to eliminate Arafat or his administration. Following an extraordinary five-hour meeting of Israel's full cabinet, right-wing and religious ministers voted to authorize the armed forces to pursue a "much broader scope" of military activity than they have taken in the 14 months of clashes here. Cabinet ministers also voted to declare the Palestinian Authority "an entity supporting terror," a move that precludes any negotiations, at least for the time being.

Before the vote, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and other moderate Labor Party ministers walked out of the cabinet meeting in protest. In a statement issued later, Peres said that the Labor Party, which accounts for a third of the cabinet ministers, would meet to consider its future in the coalition government. A decision by Labor to quit the coalition would destabilize Sharon's government and eventually could topple it.

Israeli bulldozers flanked by tanks and armored vehicles rumbled into the two-year-old Palestinian airport in Gaza and ripped up its runway shortly after midnight, striking a blow against the premier symbol of what Arafat saw as an emerging Palestinian state. "We're turning the airport into a flourishing greenhouse," said an aide to Sharon.

Israeli troops and armor moved into Palestinian-controlled territory in the city of Ramallah at about the same time, advancing to within easy striking distance of Arafat's headquarters there.

In the northern West Bank city of Jenin, missiles from U.S.-supplied F-16 fighters badly damaged the office of the governor as well as the main police headquarters and jail. There were no casualties in Jenin because the Palestinians, anticipating Israeli reprisals for the suicide bombings, had ordered the buildings evacuated over the weekend.

Separately, a huge explosion in the Palestinian-ruled city of Bethlehem killed a suspected Palestinian militant and severely wounded another man. Some Palestinians blamed Israel but Israeli sources flatly denied any involvement, suggesting the blast was a mishap caused by Palestinians preparing a bomb.

In an address to the nation a few hours after the Israeli attacks, Sharon lashed out at Arafat, blaming him for embracing a "strategy of terrorism" and calling him "the greatest obstacle to peace and stability in the Middle East."

"We have been dragged into a war, a war of terrorism, a war that has taken innocent victims every day," Sharon said. "I'm telling you and everyone else listening in the whole world . . . that he who is sent to kill us, his blood will be shed by us."

Sharon has made similar remarks about Arafat for decades. Sharon's aides dismissed assertions by some Palestinian officials that the speech amounted to a declaration of war.

"We are exercising our right to self-defense," said Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Sharon. "Our moves depend very much on what the Palestinian Authority will do. If they will take action, then that will not necessitate our having to take harsh steps."

Arafat called the destruction of his helicopters a "humiliation for the Palestinian people." In the past, he had used the helicopters to fly between his headquarters in the West Bank and Gaza, although Israel has lately denied him permission to do that.

Later, the Palestinian information minister, Yasser Abed Rabbo, denied Israel's accusation that the Palestinian Authority supported terrorism, the Reuters news agency reported. He said that Israel's occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was "the source of terrorism" and that Israel's actions were making the prospects of peace even more remote. The Israelis, Abed Rabbo said, "are widening the front and they are making the dream of peace go further away."

Under intense U.S. and Israeli pressure, Palestinian security officials said they have arrested more than 100 suspected militants since Sunday, in at least some cases risking confrontations with large crowds of protesters.

"The dilemma is the Israelis claim they want to protect the security of their people, and they claim the Palestinian Authority should arrest all those who violate the agreements," said Zuhair Manasreh, the Palestinian governor of Jenin. "At the same time they keep on hitting this authority, weakening it and making it impossible for us to do the job."

Israel dismissed the arrests, some of which were videotaped by the forces themselves, as a show for international consumption. Officials said few of those jailed were senior operatives whose names Israel has submitted to Palestinian security agencies as well as to the CIA.

"The top guys, and I'm talking about scores of them, have not been touched," said Danny Ayalon, a senior aide to Sharon.

Sharon returned to Israel at midday Monday from a trip to the United States, which was cut short by the suicide bombings in Jerusalem on Saturday and Haifa on Sunday.

Israeli troops have tightened their already formidable hold around Palestinian towns, cities and villages in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, choking off nearly all traffic around the territory. But hard-liners in Sharon's cabinet have threatened to quit unless the government acts to eliminate Arafat, remove him from power or officially declare the Palestinian Authority an "enemy regime."

One hawkish bloc said it would resign unless the government adopted a much tougher line. The bloc's leader, Infrastructure Minister Avigdor Lieberman, called the airstrikes on Arafat's helicopters "a Hollywood facade, fireworks and pyrotechnics."

Aides to Sharon acknowledged that an overt shift in policy to target Arafat or his administration would prompt a walkout by moderates, led by Peres, which Sharon badly wants to avoid. Consequently, analysts said, Sharon has few clear-cut and attractive options.

"To do too little at this stage would clearly be misread as if Israel for some reason remains constrained by the U.S., or by coalition warfare considerations, or by domestic restraints," said Eran Lehrman, a former senior intelligence analyst for the Israeli army and now director of the Jerusalem office of the American Jewish Congress. "On the other hand it's clear the current government doesn't want all-out war. . . . That would run against American interests."

With his Russian-made helicopters destroyed, Arafat is now symbolically grounded, Israeli officials said, stuck for the time being at his West Bank headquarters in Ramallah, north of Jerusalem. But the officials acknowledged that even though the strike in Gaza took place within 200 yards of Arafat's main office and his home, the attack was mainly symbolic.

"They were very, very limited targets," said Capt. Jacob Dallal, an army spokesman. "This isn't a war on the Palestinian Authority by any means. It's part of this effort to signal to Arafat that this is the time to get very serious" about combating terrorism.

The Israeli attack in Gaza was timed to coincide with the evening meal breaking the daylight Ramadan fast, a time when most Palestinians were at home with relatives and friends. Nonetheless, for Palestinians living near Arafat's compound there, the Israeli attacks, carried out by four helicopter gunships firing antitank missiles, were frightening.

"I saw a big light hitting Arafat's compound, it was like lightning and then thunder," said Saud Abu Ramadan, a Palestinian journalist whose apartment balcony looks down on Arafat's headquarters. "I ran into my room because they were also shelling something -- a store for weapons or a fuel depot -- and there were big explosions."

--------

U.S. Questions Arafat's Leadership

New York Times
December 4, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Mideast-Analysis.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Yasser Arafat's failure to stop suicide bombers from killing Israelis is causing the Bush administration to question his credentials as ultimate leader of the Palestinians.

He could be losing his grip, in the view of top American officials, as he approaches what they consider a last chance to crush Hamas and other Palestinian-based terror groups.

It is a tough position for Arafat, and the Bush administration is having its problems, as well.

On the one hand, the United States is acknowledging Israel's right to retaliate for a rash of suicide bombings. On the other, it is cautioning Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to be aware of the repercussions of retaliation.

It is a difficult message, given U.S. positions on Israel and Arafat as well as its own war with terrorism.

Secretary of State Colin Powell said European and Arab nations were increasing the pressure on Arafat to deal severely with Palestinian terrorist groups.

``It's a challenge we believe he must respond to,'' Powell said on his way to a 55-nation meeting on European security in Bucharest, Romania. ``It's a consistent message that we're delivering to him. I believe he is capable of doing a lot more than he has done so far.''

Leaders of both European and Arab nations, as well as the United States, were appealing to Arafat ``to use all of his influence, all of his authority, all of his prestige, to bring these terrorist elements under control,'' he said.

Powell assessed the situation in a meeting Tuesday in Bucharest with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. Powell said he would tell the Israeli minister that U.S. envoy Anthony Zinni will remain in the area despite the new outbreaks of violence.

In Washington, meanwhile, Israeli ambassador David Ivry said Israel's attacks were calculated to limit civilian damage and to leave the door open to a resumption of negotiations. ``We have to give him a chance,'' Ivry said of Arafat.

But the ambassador also suggested Israel was taking a harder line. An offer to talk if there is a week of calm is not ``on the table'' anymore, he said.

``Arafat has the last chance now,'' Ivry said. ``If he is a leader he has to stop all terrorism.''

The U.S.-led campaign involves a number of Arab and Muslim countries that are pressing the United States to force Israel to withdraw on the West Bank and in Gaza. And they oppose any U.S. attack on Iraq or another Arab country.

Edward Walker, who retired this year as assistant secretary of state for the Near East, says Arafat has to make a break with the terrorist groups.

``It's not a question of arresting a few people. It's bigger than that. It's where the Palestinians stand,'' the former U.S. ambassador to Egypt and to Israel said in an interview.

``Do they want a two-state solution or do they want to get a state now and try to get the rest later?'' asked Walker, who heads the Middle East Institute, a private research group.

``These are terrorists. They are attacking our entire effort to bring peace,'' he said.

Sharon's declaration of war against terrorism Monday, and Israel's missile attacks on the West Bank and Gaza, are seen within the U.S. administration as a warning, not the start of all-out war with Arafat's Palestinian Authority.

Similarly, President Bush and his aides are endorsing Israel's right to defend itself, with limited qualification. Targeted assassinations of suspected terrorists, the latest of which occurred Friday, still are considered beyond the pale.

Once the bombers struck in Jerusalem and Haifa over the weekend, the United States abandoned its traditional call for restraint and stopped imploring Israel not to provoke the Palestinians.

What has changed was the depth of the violence committed against Israel and the U.S. commitment to punish terrorists and their supporters after the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington.

The big unanswered question as U.S. policy shifts is what the United States would do if Arafat fails to shut down Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, the two main terror groups in territory controlled by Arafat's Palestinian Authority.

Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said, ``What is lacking from U.S. policy right now is consequences for Arafat's refusal to fight terror.''

In an interview Monday, Satloff said, ``Time and again, administration officials have referred to Arafat's 'moment of truth,' without there being any repercussions for failing to meet the test.''

Satloff said Bush should consider what his father did as president 11 years ago: suspending U.S. relations until Arafat acted against terrorism.

Richard Murphy, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state, said Arafat can do more to curb terrorist groups, although there are significant independent ``wildcatters'' within Islamic Jihad.

Israel has penetrated the groups so well it will know if determination stands behind Arafat's statements demanding a halt to terrorist attacks, said Murphy, now with the private Council on Foreign Relations.

Judith Kipper, Middle East analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said she thinks Arafat could stop the terrorism. ``But,'' she said, ``he cannot do it without constant American help and as part of a peace process.''

EDITOR'S NOTE -- Barry Schweid has covered diplomacy for The Associated Press since 1973.

-------- nato

Turkey May Accept New EU Force

Tuesday, December 4, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52722-2001Dec3?language=printer

ISTANBUL -- Turkey, a NATO member, has signaled it is ready to drop its objection to the creation of a European Union defense force that would use NATO's military facilities. The move precedes a visit today by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who was expected to discuss the new force with Turkish leaders.

The government said in a written statement Sunday that months of talks involving Turkey, NATO and the EU had resulted in "a concrete basis . . . that will allow cooperation between NATO and the EU to move forward in every area."

-------- propaganda wars

Muslim Radio A Workout for 1st Amendment

By Marc Fisher
Tuesday, December 4, 2001; Page B01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52766-2001Dec3?language=printer

The guy tossing verbal grenades at 700 on your AM dial learned early on that life is a battle. The Klan set Mahdi Bray's lawn aflame back in the '60s because of his family's role in registering black voters down South. Decades later, it's Bray who is lighting the fires, but his weapon of choice is a radio transmitter.

Ever since September's attacks, the airwaves of WWTL -- a low-power, high-static, daytime-only station with headquarters in Walkersville in Howard County and a remote studio in downtown Washington -- have bristled with debate and invective as Muslims bare their fears, express their anger and cherish their heritage on talk shows in English and Arabic.

Since the early days of radio, immigrants have used the medium to bond, to ease the passage into a new land. WWTL, which sells its airtime to several providers of Muslim programming, is squarely in that tradition. There are shows on Islamic investing, doctrinal interpretation and how to maintain Muslim values in a non-Muslim society. Worried parents call in seeking ways to keep their language and beliefs alive in children who want to be like the kids next door.

The station provides familiar voices and ideas to homesick immigrants. But Bray, the main talk show host, isn't into calming nerves. Bray, who grew up in Norfolk in the black church, converted to Islam 27 years ago and has become a professional agitator, taking to the streets to press for school prayer in the District, to protest U.S. funding for Israel's defense and to shout against anti-Muslim discrimination.

"I believe in righteous agitation," says Bray, 50. "I like stirring things up. That's what makes this country great. We're different from other countries, including some Muslim countries, in that we can speak boldly, unfettered. I deliberately push the envelope."

Mornings at 10, Bray's "Islamic Perspectives" takes to the air, but his causes continue long after sign off. He is also national political director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council and president of an umbrella group of Muslim organizations. Although relatively new to radio, Bray knows how to play the shock jock, and he's developed a following among non-Muslims who listen for every incendiary remark on WWTL.

Peter Hebert was scanning the AM dial one day when he happened upon WWTL's early-morning program of readings from the Koran. The first thing he says he heard was, "Rabbis are idolaters, slay them." That got his attention. Hebert, a Montgomery County tech executive, is an observant Jew and quickly became a regular listener.

In the following weeks, he says, he heard hosts and guests talk about Jewish control of the media and a Jewish conspiracy to attack the World Trade Center and blame Muslims for the assault. And he's heard Bray defending Hezbollah, which the State Department labels a terrorist organization.

Hebert complained to the station's owner and the Federal Communications Commission, and he believes the station has toned down its act since September. (Last year, WWTL owner Sima Birach, an Orthodox Christian from Yugoslavia, tossed another program off the station because it featured "virulent" commentaries about Jewish control of U.S. institutions and policies. Birach did not return five calls seeking comment.)

I, too, have had some startling moments listening to WWTL, awakening, for example, to hear Koran readings such as this: "As for those who disbelieve, theirs will be a boiling drink and painful death," and, "Those who desire the world . . . their home will be the fire." Now there's a bracing wake-up show.

As for Bray, he has offered Hebert $1,000 if he can produce a tape of any anti-Semitic comment by the talk host. "Some people say I feed hatred toward the Jewish community, and I take deep offense at that," Bray says. He says he never attacks Jews but often criticizes Zionism and Israel: "I've had some tough things to say about Zionism, but I've tried to be fair to the Jewish faith. I grew up in a civil rights movement inundated with people of the Jewish faith who were led to stand and fight with me."

Bray argues vigorously against U.S. military action in Afghanistan. Yet he invites guests who represent a broad spectrum of views. He's as likely to have conservative activist Grover Norquist on his show as he is to share the microphone with a leftist Muslim feminist.

Listen to WWTL, and you'll hear plenty of cause to be both disturbed and encouraged. For two weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bray stayed on the air all day, taking calls, giving out information about blood drives, listening for signs of a backlash against Muslims. He's happy to conclude that "for every act of bigotry, there's been at least 20 acts of generosity and kindness."

I've also heard lengthy discussions about "the influence of capital" and the "how the media are twisted by their particular ownership" -- a leftist critique commonplace on any college campus but one that turns more pointed on Bray's show: "We know who the owners are," one guest said, prompting another to reply, "They answer to the Zionist regime."

A few days later, another guest pronounced Zionism "more than racism" and said "America is dripping with the blood of our people." Bray laughed, responding: "This is the only show with two disclaimers. When I go off the air, they play two disclaimers."

He's right: The show's sponsor, the Islamic Foundation of America, and the station's owner daily disavow any connection to "the views and opinions expressed in this program."

Although Bray's program is sponsored entirely by the Islamic Foundation, which Bray says gets much of its money from the government of Saudi Arabia, he does not shy from criticizing the Saudis. He has called leaders of Muslim countries "despots" who rule with "a shameful lack of democracy."

The Saudis have never told Bray to back off, "just to be balanced," he says. WWTL's owner leaves him alone, too: "They know I'm not a journalist. I have an agenda."

Bray appreciates the freedom his employers provide. But he can't resist a dig: "The dialogue here is a lot freer than it is in the Middle East. The Saudis know that in America, this is what you got to do. But back home, no way!" He says it without flinching, and then he roars at his naughty self.

Join the discussion at www.washingtonpost.com/fishertalk.

----

Arab TV's Strong Signal
The al-Jazeera Network Offers News the Mideast Never Had Before, and Views That Are All Too Common

By Sharon Waxman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 4, 2001; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52446-2001Dec3?language=printer

CAIRO

The correspondent for al-Jazeera, the Arab world's all-news network, is reporting from a fetid tent city somewhere in Taliban-controlled territory in southern Afghanistan. The camera shows the wretched conditions: toddlers staring numbly, a woman having a seizure. The reporter talks to an elderly man crying over the deaths of his son, brother and cousin.

Then, standing in front of the pup tents of some Western journalists who have been doing similar stories, he notes: These correspondents will soon be going back to their comfortable quarters, while the Afghan refugees have no such hope. He concludes: "This is what the world's most powerful country has wrought upon the world's most wretched country."

This is the world according to al-Jazeera, the 24-hour Arabic-language news channel based in the tiny emirate of Qatar. It is hailed by many as a revolutionizing force among Arab media long constrained by limited resources and state controls. At any hour, Arab audiences can see news from the Mideast, European and American capitals gathered by a large staff of Arab reporters, not translated from a Western news service.

Audiences see news live, not recorded and packaged -- a refreshing change in a part of the world where rumor and conspiracy theory thrive. They watch heated talk shows unfold without editing or censorship. CNN has even forged a news-sharing alliance with the network.

But what kind of news is it? Al-Jazeera, for all its innovation, slick graphics and flashy logos, is not an Arab version of CNN. From watching the network for any length of time, it's clear that al-Jazeera takes a consistently hostile stance toward the United States. In al-Jazeera's world, the Taliban is invariably an underdog force, the United States looms as an occupying power, and Egypt and other moderate Arab states have knuckled under to the superpower's pressure. The channel's other central topic is Israel's persecution of Palestinians, a constant litany of suffering and aggression. Otherwise there is little on al-Jazeera except sports.

Any news organization is, in part, a product of its native culture. All American-based news networks, for example, make the unspoken assumption that the state of Israel has a right to exist and that Osama bin Laden is evil. In the Arab world, that looks like bias.

But critics of al-Jazeera, including many Arab journalists, say that even when such cultural disparities are taken into account, its credibility is hampered by slanted coverage and a tendency toward sensationalism. Those critics say al-Jazeera is tailoring its approach to suit the preconceptions of the Arab audience.

Al-Jazeera's talk shows, which mirror the most ideologically driven gabfests on American news channels, provide a constant forum for examining American misdeeds. On such shows the American point of view may be represented, but there are usually two if not three others -- including the host -- criticizing the United States.

On a typical talk show recently the guest was a conservative Egyptian cleric, Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi, and the topic, announced the host, was "Globalization, the new face of occupation." He outlined the economic gap between rich and poor nations, then his guest chastised the West.

"If you want to be the master and the master alone, that's occupation, and that we refuse," he said. "The problem with Western culture represented by the United States government, a unipolar power, is that it calls for immoral ethics based on monetary beliefs and sexual liberation. And that is against our values." The host heartily agreed.

Afghanistan's fundamentalist rulers and their ideology have gotten no such scrutiny on al-Jazeera. In the midst of the collapse of the Taliban in Kabul, the network scored a live interview with the regime's spokesman in Kandahar. The official said the government was intact and unified. He talked about killing Christians and Jews and noted, "We're getting ready to bring Bush to justice." These statements passed without challenge from the al-Jazeera anchor.

The network aired Osama bin Laden's videotaped statements for several hours a day early in the war, provoking criticism from the State Department. While the channel showed frequent images of American bomb damage to civilian targets -- images that U.S. news organizations, for whatever reason, were reluctant to show -- al-Jazeera has barely mentioned the vast caches of documents exploring nuclear and chemical weapons found in al Qaeda houses in Kabul.

Such information might have interested viewers in the Arab world, where there is widespread skepticism about bin Laden's role in perpetrating terror.

The orientation of al-Jazeera has not escaped the notice of other Arab journalists, or of the people they cover. In one of many scoops the network has landed during the war in Afghanistan, anchor Ahmed Mansour recently interviewed a Pashtun leader, Sheik Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf, whose support will be key in any postwar Afghan government.

Sayyaf took al-Jazeera to task for what he called biased coverage. "The general perception here in Afghanistan is that al-Jazeera has crossed the line in their reporting," he said on the air. "They were very protective of the Taliban. I hear your reporter . . . all the time, and he always reports what the Taliban does, but he never tries to come and see the villages and towns burned by the Taliban."

Mansour responded that the network's reporters have tried to get access to these areas, but were denied.

In an interview from Qatar, al-Jazeera's editor-in-chief, Ibrahim Hilal, vigorously denied that the network has a point of view. "I think it's nonsense to accuse us of being anti-America, or anti-Northern Alliance," he protested. "It's our credibility. If we touch our credibility, we lose everything we have."

He said the comment from the reporter in the tent city in Taliban territory was no more editorial than those of Western correspondents when viewing devastation created by U.S. bombs. He said al-Jazeera could not get access to the al Qaeda documents because it had been barred from Kabul by the Northern Alliance.

Hilal agreed that the talk shows are largely anti-American, but said: "Feelings toward America are the most famous thing in the Arab world, in the Muslim world now. Talking about it on talk shows is very justified. . . . Most of the guests are anti-American, but that's not our problem."

If the anchors are anti-American, Hilal added, "they can't show it on the talk shows. They would be punished immediately."

The innovative nature of al-Jazeera, combined with its clear political point of view, creates a strange paradox. The network represents a quantum leap forward for unfettered journalism in the Arab world, yet it takes an approach that by Western standards would be considered lacking in basic fairness and balance.

Still, by media standards in the Middle East -- where rumors about the United States poisoning relief packages in Afghanistan are printed in the paper, where newspapers whipped up a frenzy over the sale of leather belts that supposedly sapped male potency -- al-Jazeera is a model of fact-based reporting.

There is no doubt that the network has helped to create a far more aggressive and competitive environment in the world of state-owned Arab television news, nudging competitors toward live interviews and having more correspondents abroad.

For decades, Arab TV has been notable for drowsy coverage of unremarkable state visits and presidential activities, and for harsh invective against Israel. In the past few years this has been giving way to lively talk shows and a new sense of competition. Egyptian television, for example, now has a correspondent in Jerusalem -- encouraged, perhaps, by al-Jazeera's presence there -- and debates many aspects of domestic politics on the air.

Given its influence in a region of about 250 million Muslims, al-Jazeera's viewership is relatively small. Accurate figures are hard to come by, but it is available only to those with a satellite dish. Even Hilal says he doesn't believe the official claims of 15 million. But it is watched by decision-makers and journalists across the Middle East. Recently the Lebanon-based al-Minar, the network for the Islamic radical group Hezbollah (yes, it has its own network), even paid al-Jazeera to train its news staff.

"Al-Jazeera is as important to the Arab media as the introduction of [the Egyptian daily] Al Ahram was in the 19th century. It has changed the way television is being run in the Mideast," says Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi Arabian journalist. Live shows, political debate, contrasting opinions -- "those all are new in the milieu. Nobody would admit it, but they are doing it because al-Jazeera started doing it."

Nihal Saad, the anchor for the English-language broadcast on Egypt's Nile TV, says she has felt the sting of criticism when al-Jazeera has a particular story that her network has missed.

"Egyptian television doesn't have that network of correspondents around the world," she says. But, she acknowledges, "If they report on corruption, people start getting interested in it as a news story, so I will want to sell that news story as well. If this is something wanted in the market, why not sell it?"

On the other hand, Khashoggi notes, "al-Jazeera has a big problem with objectivity. They must work this out. They are being led by the masses, they don't lead the masses. They know the taste of the Arab street, and the Arab street is anti-American. They are just like the New York Post. This is not very good."

Al-Jazeera was launched in 1996, financed by the government of Qatar in an apparent effort to raise the emirate's profile. Early on it was accused by some here of a pro-Israel bias because the network interviewed Israelis, another innovation in the Arab world. But it has also annoyed Arab governments for what their officials call a lack of balance.

The Egyptian government was furious with al-Jazeera because of critical coverage of the country's elections last year and because of stories about Egypt allegedly bowing to American pressure over the Palestinian issue.

"It's a tabloid, no more than a tabloid. And tabloids, by the way, sell in millions," says Nabil Osman, head of Egypt's State Information Services.

"It was radical, it was not objective," agrees Saad, whose network, like all the news in Egypt, is run by the government. She and Osman both say al-Jazeera was hypocritical for criticizing Egypt but not Qatar, on which it depends for financial support and a home base. "We knew that Qatar had a trade office for Israel. Why not criticize their government for having trade relations with Israel?" she asked.

Says Osman: "I said to them, 'Why don't you put on a five-, 10-minute program telling us in Egypt about the election in Qatar, so we can benefit?' "

Qatar does not hold elections.

Those who watch al-Jazeera say the sensationalist approach is not so much about anti-American politics as it is about getting ratings: that the network is in the business of telling its audience what they want to hear.

"Viewers here like to believe that America does not mean well in its Middle East policies," says Amr Badr, a local leader of People to People, an American-based organization that promotes international cooperation. "Al-Jazeera will always take the side of the underdog, whether with the United States, the Egyptian government, the Saudi government, whatever."

Hilal said this was true in the early years of his network, when it was trying to attract attention, but no longer. "Now it's completely different. We follow the news as it comes," he says.

As to whether that strategy has worked to boost ratings, that is still unclear. Qatar had hoped for al-Jazeera to be financially independent within several years of its launch, but judging by the paucity of advertising, the network is still quite far from achieving financial solvency.

A dramatic drumroll and string music accompany a booming voice: "Innocents die." (Tight shot of a bleeding baby.) "Mothers crying." (Close-up of a woman in tears.) "Siege. Martyrs go to God. All in Palestine." A number pops up on-screen for viewers to call and contribute to the Coalition for One Body.

The next ad has a similar theme, about Muslims suffering in Chechnya. There is an ad for rose water, and then yet another dramatic ad for a Web site seeking charitable donations, and then another, with heart-rending images of children in bandages and wrapped in rags. ("Lift this agony. Call Qatar International Bank.")

The commercial break over, al-Jazeera returns to a heated debate among a moderator, an online journalist from the Arab Voice and a former U.S. ambassador to Syria, Christopher Ross, who is frequently called on to represent the American view because he speaks fluent Arabic. Today's topic is the American media and whether the U.S. government has been muzzling free expression in the name of fighting terrorism.

Both the moderator and the Arab guest say that it is. "Research shows that 155 people control the American media, and they are all in support of the war in Afghanistan," says the online journalist. "Arabs are not adequately represented in the media."

The host agrees. "The Americans, who are supposed to be for freedom of the press, are shutting up people who talk against them," he says, and refers to what he calls the "bombing" of al-Jazeera's office in Kabul by American forces. (The BBC's office suffered damage as well; a Pentagon spokesman says, "The U.S. military does not and will not target media.")

Ross shakes his head at the barrage of criticism. "I hope in the future you criticize the Arab media with the same fire that you criticize our media," he says.

Later comes a series of reports on the war from correspondents in Dubai, Peshawar, Cairo. There is a Q&A with the Arabic-speaking CNN correspondent Ben Wedeman in Kabul and an interview with the head of security for Fatah, the PLO's political wing, in Gaza. Then more public-service announcements featuring suffering, impoverished Muslims. A teaser for an upcoming sports program, a teaser for a story about a plane crash in 1958, and then a teaser for the rebroadcast of the talk show:

"Why was al-Jazeera's office in Afghanistan bombed? Is this the free press the West has always preached about?" a booming voice asks, as the network's whirling, golden logo swivels dramatically between shots of U.S. bombing in Afghanistan and suffering civilians, another spin of the news cycle in the war-torn world of al-Jazeera.

-------- spy agencies

Employees sue CIA for 'abuse of power'

By Rupert Cornwell
04 December 2001
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=108245

A group of CIA officers has brought a class-action suit against the agency, alleging abuse of power against employees - including the cover-up of mistakes leading to the accidental US bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade in 1999, for which several lower-ranking employees were wrongly blamed.

The case, filed by 15 past and present mid-to-upper level CIA employees, claims that the spy agency has used illegal tactics to prevent them pursuing legitimate grievances against the CIA, including altering and destroying documents, and eavesdropping on privileged discussions with their lawyers.

Roy Krieger, a lawyer for the 15, said: "What the agency is trying to hide is not its intelligence sources but its own dirty laundry about internal disputes, kangaroo disciplinary procedures, discrimination and who is to blame for blunders."

Among those blunders was the mistaken bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia during the Kosovo war. One plaintiff alleges that he and other mid- and low-ranking officers were falsely blamed to cover up a mistake made by a senior officer. The former were disciplined, while the senior officer received only a verbal reprimand, followed by a secret, backdated promotion. He now works at the White House, the lawsuit alleges.

-------- us

Marines Expand Afghan Desert Missions

By Doug Mellgren
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, December 4, 2001; 10:18 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54796-2001Dec4?language=printer
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/12/04/troops.htm

SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN -- Special Marine reconnaissance units are probing more aggressively into the southern Afghan desert for potential threats while other "hunter-killer teams" patrol closer to base, military officials said Tuesday.

A raid force from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit seized this secret desert airstrip on Nov. 25, and the Marines have since built up a force they will describe only as more than battalion strength, with aircraft support.

Apart from possibly challenging Taliban forces, a U.S.-led coalition also is seeking suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden and his network, which has been blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.

Capt. David Romley, a spokesman for the Marines' Task Force 58, said force reconnaissance teams were becoming more active with the sandy airstrip and modern base secured.

"These are deep reconnaissance assets looking for threats," he said. "Any threat is going to be a target."

The reconnaissance units travel in fast-moving, open Mercedes-Benz off-road vehicles, supported by military Humvees.

"They travel in packs," Romley said.

He refused to call them elite units because the Marines do not make that distinction. But he said the units generally consist of older and higher-ranking Marines who have passed a tough selection and training program.

"They are now more aggressively patrolling," Romley said, without giving details about their missions. He said along with special weapons training, the force is trained to recover objects or individuals.

At the same time, a Combined Anti-Armor Team, also called a "hunter-killer team," is patrolling closer to the base in Humvees with heavy machine guns and shoulder-fired, infrared-guided Javelin missile systems.

Platoon leader Lt. Aaron J. Schwartz, 24, of Lansdale, Pa., said the patrols have been quiet, and Marines had seen "absolutely nothing" - not even camels or goats.

The expeditionary units are described as "special operations capable." Their arsenal includes potent AH-1W Super Cobra and UH-1N Huey helicopter gunships, CH-46E Sea Knight and CH-53E helicopters, light armored vehicles, heavily armed Humvees and fast-attack vehicles within striking distance of the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.

Troops and equipment from another expeditionary unit, the 26th, also have begun to arrive from ships based in the northern Arabian Sea, more than 400 miles away, for what they said was the farthest inland push ever made by the Marines' amphibious forces.

Romley said there had been no engagements between Marines at the base and hostile forces since a Nov. 26 attack on a suspected hostile convoy by fighter jets based at sea and Cobras based here.

A Cobra pilot, 32-year-old Capt. Matt - his last name could not be reported - of Sonora, Calif., was part of that engagement and said Marines destroyed two vehicles in what was described as a roughly 15-vehicle convoy.

The pilot said he routinely saw camels, goats, tribesmen and small villages during nighttime runs across the desert, but few hostile forces. However, he said pilots and troops remained wary.

"You are always aware that there are people out there who could kill you," he said.

Although conditions are improving at the base, the troops - many dug into fighting holes in sand and dunes - live under austere conditions, with cold nights, wind and blowing sand that forces them to clean their equipment and themselves vigilantly.

The Associated Press was allowed to deploy with the troops on the condition that it did not reveal secret information.

The Marines on Monday banned the use of most troops' last names, saying they feared possible terror attacks on their families in the United States. On Tuesday, that ban was modified, giving troops the choice of whether to have their last names published.


-------- POLICE / PRISONERS

Bush Puts America on High Alert

DECEMBER 04, 08:53 ET
By RON FOURNIER
AP White House Correspondent
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=NATIONAL&STORYID=APIS7G6DAL80

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush put America on high alert Monday for possible terrorist strikes during the holiday season after U.S. intelligence officials reported an increase in credible threats.

Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge, standing in for Bush to announce the third government alert since the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings, said the information does not point to a specific target or type of attack, either in the United States or abroad.

``The convergence of information suggests, ladies and gentlemen of America, you know, we're at war, be on alert,'' Ridge told reporters in the White House briefing room.

``Now is not the time to back off,'' Ridge said, echoing a warning he issued the nation's governors in a conference call Monday.

The FBI put 18,000 law enforcement agencies ``on the highest alert'' because of threats culled from intelligence sources across the globe, he said.

Ridge said the convergence of Christmas and Ramadan, the Islamic holy month that ends in mid-December, could be tempting to terrorists who have a history of striking during religious observances.

The Bush administration issued its first alert Oct. 11, followed by a one-week advisory Oct. 29. Ever since, Ridge, the president and Attorney General John Ashcroft have warned Americans to remain vigilant.

In the last several days, intelligence and law enforcement officials reported increased threats. A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the threat comes from people with links to al-Qaida, the terrorist network headed by Osama bin Laden and suspected in the Sept. 11 attacks that killed almost 3,500.

The threat is not tied to the weekend attacks and retaliation in Israel and may not be a direct response to events in Afghanistan, as al-Qaida is known to plan attacks far in advance, the official said.

``The sources are more credible and, let me just say, the decibel level is higher as they talk about potential attacks,'' Ridge said.

White House officials said the level of concern Monday was not any greater than for the two previous alerts.

They said Ridge pushed for the alert because of the new information and out of the apprehension that public, politicians and police were getting complacent.

``The further removed we get from Sept. 11, I think the natural tendency is to let down our guard,'' Ridge said. ``Unfortunately, we cannot do that.''

Americans can help by reporting suspicious activity to police, Ridge said.

The action comes in the middle of the holiday shopping season, an important time for recession-weary retailers.

``A terrorism alert is not a signal to stop life. It is a call to be vigilant, to know that your government is on high alert and to add your eyes and ears to our efforts to find and stop those who want to harm us,'' Ridge said.

He said the alert was intended to ``remind our citizens, no matter where you live - it can be a big state with a dense population, or you can be a smaller state with a lot of rural communities - we have no way of assuring or guaranteeing or pinpointing where the terrorists will attack,'' he said.

Ridge made the announcement because Attorney General John Ashcroft was out of town. Bush has distanced himself from the alerts, which have been criticized for unduly alarming Americans.

Ridge offered little hope of finding the source of anthrax attacks that shook the nation in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings over Washington, New York and Pennsylvania.

Evidence of trace anthrax in a postal center in Wallingford, Conn., bolsters theories that the death of 94-year-old Ottilie Lundgren was a case of cross-contamination from the mail, Ridge said. But he said the theory is contradicted by other evidence.

He said there was no disagreement within the administration over whether to issue the alert. There was great debate before the first alerts.

``Over the last several days, our intelligence and law enforcement agencies have seen an increased volume and level of activity involving threats of terrorist attacks. The information we have does not point to any specific target either in America or abroad, and it does not outline any specific type of attack,'' Ridge said.

``However, the analysts who review this information believe the quantity and level of threats are above the norm and have reached a threshold where we should once again place the public on general alert, just as we have done on two previous occasions since Sept. 11,'' he said.

Ridge said that figuring out whether information is credible enough to merit an alert ``is an art, it's not a science.''

``It would be so much easier, admittedly, if there were a little more specifics we could refer to,'' he said. ``But there are not.''

-------

New security threats cited

December 4, 2001
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011204-26971172.htm

The director of homeland security yesterday warned of new terrorist attacks against U.S. targets, while the FBI advised 18,000 law-enforcement agencies nationwide to remain on the highest state of alert.

"Over the last several days, our intelligence and law-enforcement agencies have seen an increased volume and level of activity involving threats of terrorist attacks," said Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge during a White House press conference.

"The information we have does not point to any specific target either in America or abroad, and it does not outline any specific type of attack," he said, adding, however, that intelligence officials believe the "quantity and level of threats are above the norm and have reached a threshold where we should once again place the public on general alert."

Earlier, Attorney General John Ashcroft said National Guard troops would be assigned along the U.S.-Canada border to augment undermanned U.S. border patrols and strengthen security along the nearly 4,000-mile divide that separates the two countries.

Mr. Ashcroft, in announcing the plan, said the use of troops was not an attempt to fortify the world's longest undefended border, but an effort to give officials time to "staff up" and train U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service inspectors and Border Patrol agents for key locations. U.S. troops have been used at Canadian border crossings in the past.

"Two great friends have united to form a common defense against a common enemy with the recognition that the United States and Canada have a fateful choice to make: Either we will stand together to combat terrorism, or we will fall together to those who hate our freedom and seek to see it extinguished," Mr. Ashcroft said at a meeting with Canadian officials in Detroit.

In the alert, U.S. intelligence officials said the action was prompted by an increase in communications among Islamic radicals around the world indicating that some type of attack was planned for mid-December - to coincide with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

The increase in discussions was similar to exchanges that took place before the September 11 suicide strikes against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which were analyzed after the attacks. The information also is similar to communications detected in late October showing that Islamic terrorists were planning some type of attack, the officials said.

Mr. Ridge said the FBI issued a "terrorist-threat advisory" to 18,000 law-enforcement agencies across the country to stay at the highest alert and to notify the bureau immediately of any unusual or suspicious activity. This was the third general alert issued since the September 11 attacks.

He said the threats were coming from multiple sources and there was "no disagreement" in the intelligence community that "we should remind America we're still at war, we're still at risk, be vigilant, be aware."

Mr. Ridge said that while the threats being detected are "very generic," authorities are concerned that attacks have been planned in the past to coincide with Ramadan and other "important religious observations" this month. In December 1999, the government thwarted plans for a series of attacks related to the new millennium.

Mr. Ridge also said there was nothing in the information linking the warning with attacks in Israel that killed dozens, or to Israel's response.

Mr. Ashcroft's two-phase border program involves personnel, intelligence and air support - including an expansion of U.S.-Canada border-enforcement teams, an increase in the number of Canadian control officers and the sharing of more immigration and criminal information.

He said the Border Patrol has about 500 people guarding a 3,987-mile border between Canada and the continental United States.

He said the U.S.-Mexico border, about 2,000 miles long, is guarded by 9,000 agents.

U.S. law-enforcement officials recently have been concerned about Canada's porous borders as a transit route for terrorists. Canada maintains an open immigration policy, which has made that country a logical entry point for would-be terrorists targeting the United States.

In December 1999, Ahmed Ressam, 34, an Algerian living in Canada, was caught at the Washington state border trying to enter the United States with explosives in the trunk of his car. He was convicted this year of plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport during the millennium celebration.

In a letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Mr. Ashcroft said the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington had "sharply focused national attention on the security of this country's borders."

But, he said, since the attacks, maintaining heightened readiness and security have required extraordinary efforts from limited staff resources. The attorney general said INS is requesting 419 National Guard soldiers to augment inspectors and agents who have been operating at "threat level one" since September 11.

This heightened security, he said, requires additional staffing of ports-of-entry and enhanced procedures at air, land and seaports to ensure all applicants for admission, vehicles, luggage and cargo are thoroughly inspected.

Mr. Ashcroft said the increased security has resulted in delays at some land border ports of entry and a growing burden on the existing staff on the northern border.

The INS already has detailed 120 Border Patrol agents to the northern border to assist with this effort, he said.

Twelve states on or near the Canadian border will receive National Guard soldiers at their 43 ports of entry to assist the INS, he said.

Mr. Ashcroft said a second phase will include aircraft, intelligence and additional personnel. The INS requested aircraft support to establish air capabilities to fulfill the law-enforcement mission of the Border Patrol.

He said military support will provide intelligence analysis, threat assessments and intelligence training, enabling the Border Patrol to focus and deploy its resources in areas to address the threat and achieve the greatest effect.

• Bill Gertz contributed to this article.

----

U.S., Canada Sign Border Accord
Goal Is to Raise Common Barrier to Suspected Terrorists

By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 4, 2001; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52575-2001Dec3?language=printer

TORONTO, Dec. 3 -- Attempting to disrupt the movement of suspected terrorists, Canada and the United States signed an agreement today that would end "asylum shopping" between the two countries by making it more difficult for refugee claimants turned away from one to seek residence in the other.

The agreement also provides for creation of a common list of countries whose citizens must obtain visas before visiting the United States or Canada.

The overall goal is to put up common anti-terrorist barriers around the United States and Canada and address concerns that, among the many people who seek political refuge in the two countries, there are terrorists whose real goal is to set up shop in North America.

The two countries agreed to require would-be refugees to apply for asylum in the first country they enter. The United States and Canada would adopt the same standards for asylum; a person rejected in one would not be able to reapply in the other.

The two countries would also use biometrics technology, such as fingerprint and eye scans, to share information on "high-risk" applicants, with the goal of making it harder for someone to slip into either country under a different name.

More U.S. and Canadian immigration officers would work overseas to "detect those who are ineligible for entry . . . before they reach Canada or the U.S.," Canadian officials said in a statement. Officers would vet flights bound for North America and screen passports.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Canada has tightened its immigration laws in response to criticism in the United States that terrorist cells were operating in Canada. As evidence of laxity, critics point to Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian who claimed refugee status and lived in Montreal before he was arrested by U.S. authorities in 1999 while trying to cross into Washington state from British Columbia with bomb-making materials in the trunk of his rented car.

But some Canadians have objected to creating what they called Fortress North America and contend that the United States wants to dictate how Canada should screen its immigrants. In September, Prime Minister Jean Chretien said in Parliament that Canada's open immigration policies would not yield to outside pressure. "Let there be no doubt," Chretien said. "We will allow no one to force us to sacrifice our values or traditions under the pressure of urgent circumstances."

Today, Canadian officials said the agreement with the United States did not violate Canadian sovereignty. "The events of Sept. 11, 2001, have cast a new importance on our relationship with the United States, particularly with respect to border security and the legitimate flow of people across our shared border," said Elinor Caplan, minister of citizenship and immigration.

In a ceremony announcing the package in Ottawa today, U.S. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft said the agreement was reached between two "sovereign countries." He attempted to quell U.S. concerns that Canada's immigration policies threaten the United States.

"None of the terrorists from the September 11 carnage came to the United States through Canada, to my knowledge," Ashcroft said. In the days after the attacks, some U.S. news organizations, including The Washington Post, reported that investigators believed that some hijackers had entered the country from Canada. Although that theory has been abandoned, many Canadians complain that their country was hastily accused.

The agreement was signed after the United States announced it would send 600 National Guard troops and helicopters to help patrol the 4,000-mile demarcation line, the world's longest non-militarized border. Ashcroft said the move was made to enhance security and ensure the free flow of goods and people between the United States and its biggest trading partner.

He said the National Guard would "not be functioning as troops" to "militarize" the border, but would fill in to assist immigration and customs officers, giving the United States time to hire more of those officers for the border.

"There are 600 National Guard troops to come and relieve the stress," Ashcroft said. "That is less than one additional person per mile. If you think this is fortifying the border, you have a more active imagination than I do."

Still, the news of U.S. troops raised concern among some Canadians. "If there is a mistake and . . . innocent Canadians are hurt by American military gunfire, it would be horrendous to relations between our two countries," said David Bercuson, director of the Center for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary.

On Sunday night, Ashcroft met with Arab American leaders in the Detroit area, home to one of the largest Arab immigrant populations in the United States. He invited them to sit in on controversial interviews underway with foreign visitors of Middle Eastern descent.

Federal prosecutors are overseeing the interviews of more than 5,000 male foreign nationals who entered the United States since the beginning of last year, including 660 people from Dearborn and other Michigan communities. Many Arab American and civil liberties groups have decried the interviews as racial profiling.

Participants said the talk with Ashcroft and other U.S. officials was frank and productive. "His ears were open, his heart was open. . . . He said, 'Give me ideas. What can I do to make it better?' " said Osama Siblani, publisher of the Arab American News in Dearborn, one of five leaders who attended the meeting.

Staff writers Dan Eggen and Allan Lengel in Washington contributed to this report.

----

Senators Question Military Tribunals

December 4, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Tribunals.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- American citizens who fought for the Taliban could not be prosecuted by President Bush's military tribunals as they are now envisioned, the State Department's war crimes expert told a Senate committee Tuesday.

Pierre-Richard Prosper, the State Department's ambassador-at-large for war crimes, told senators that under Bush's order, only non-Americans charged with war crimes relating to international terror can be brought in front of a military tribunal under the order issued by Bush.

An injured man who identified himself as John Walker is receiving medical care from U.S. forces after emerging from a battle-scarred fortress in the northern Afghanistan city Mazar-e-Sharif. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday he has been told that two other Taliban fighters claim to be Americans and that ``people are looking for them,'' but he knows nothing else about them.

Walker, 20, was identified by his parents from video and photographs as John Philip Walker Lindh of Fairfax, Calif. Bush said he doesn't know what would happen with Walker. ``We're trying to figure that out,'' Bush said.

At the hearing, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., asked Prosper: ``If he was charged with a crime, he could not be tried in front of a military tribunal by the president's definition. Is that true?''

``The definition is limited to non-Americans,'' Prosper said.

Some senators have misgivings about bringing American immigrants before military tribunals.

Still, under the president's executive order, which will interpreted and implemented by the Defense Department, non-Americans caught in the United States and accused of working with al-Qaida could face military tribunals, former Deputy Attorney General George Terwilliger III said.

``It's the nature of the act that makes someone subject to that order,'' Terwilliger said. ``It's the what, not the where.''

The Senate Judiciary Committee held the hearing on military tribunals to ``help flesh out some ... issues before we talk to the attorney general,'' said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who chaired the hearing. Attorney General John Ashcroft appears before the committee on Thursday.

Most experts who testified Tuesday told senators that Bush could constitutionally establish military tribunals for war criminals, and military trials probably are better than civilian trials to prosecute terrorists.

``Who would want to sit on a jury trying the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks?'' retired Army Judge Advocate General Michael Nardotti Jr. said. ``The other question is: Could you find a (civilian) jury that is not biased in some way?''

The idea does have problems, including the Constitution's separation of powers, said Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe. He suggested a hypothetical case in which a terrorist would be released because a civilian court had ruled that the president needed congressional authority to conduct the trials.

``Military tribunals need congressional authority, or at least that's an open question,'' Tribe said.

However, most experts said they wouldn't know how legal or fair the military tribunals would be until the Pentagon issues its rules on their functioning. Schumer said Defense representatives were asked to attend the hearing but refused.

Bush has assured the country and the international community that any military tribunal will be fair, said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. ``The president has kept this as his personal responsibility,'' Sessions said. ``He has put his own reputation on the line.''

-------- terrorism

Official toll brings terror deaths down

December 4, 2001,
Washington Times
combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20011204-2121852.htm

NEW YORK - A total of 3,465 persons are dead or missing from the September 11 terror attacks, according to new but still provisional figures issued yesterday.

In New York, 3,232 persons are dead or missing as a result of two fuel-laden jetliners slamming into the World Trade Center's towers, according to a spokesman for the city's emergency services.

Near Washington, 189 persons are dead or missing as a result of a third hijacked plane crashing into the Pentagon.

Another 44 persons were killed when a fourth airliner crashed in a field in Pennsylvania the same day.

The New York figures have gradually dropped as authorities double-check the lists and eliminate names erroneously listed more than once.


-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

Sharp cautious on solar cells' brisk growth

Story by Edmund Klamann
Reuters:
4/12/2001
http://www.planetark.org/avantgo/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=13551

TOKYO - Sharp Corp, the world's largest photovoltaic cell maker, said yesterday it hopes solar cell production will continue growing briskly at 40 to 50 percent a year, although it remains cautious due to reliance on subsidies.

"For the next few years we hope to keep up the current pace of growth," Takashi Tomita, head of Sharp's photovoltaic systems operations, told a briefing for reporters.

The company, also Japan's largest liquid crystal display maker and a major consumer electronics manufacturer, expects photovoltaic sales of 18.4 billion yen ($149.2 million) in the second half of the business year to March, up 35 percent from the first half.

The full-year estimate of 32 billion is up 55 percent from the prior year's result, although it is only a small fraction of the company's total 1.8 trillion yen in consolidated revenues forecast for 2001/02.

The optimism for growth was tempered, however, by uncertainties in the market and the need to cut costs.

"This is an operation that is built on subsidies, so we are cautious and keeping an eye on market conditions," Sharp Executive Director Zenpei Tani said.

He added Sharp's photovoltaic operations were just about breaking even with help from government subsidies launched in the early 1990s.

The company said that, with subsidies, a typical three-kilowatt home solar power system can now be bought for about 800,000 yen, or one-third the cost seven years ago, during the first year of the government subsidy plan for home systems.

In 2001, the government is paying a 120,000 yen subsidy for each kilowatt of power.

SUBSIDY-DEPENDENT

Tani noted that, while photovoltaic power in Japan tended heavily toward roof-mounted cells for home power generation, in Europe the cells were often used by small-scale commercial power suppliers.

Sharp estimated industry-wide solar cell output would continue rising at an annual rate of 40 to 50 percent over the next several years, with Japan accounting for over 50 percent of global production by 2003, or 500 out of 911 megawatts. The company cited estimates that it held a 17.5 percent share of the market last year, producing 50.4 megawatts of photovoltaic cells, followed by Kyocera Corp at 14.6 percent.

This summer Sharp boosted output capacity to 94 megawatts, or nearly one-tenth the generating capacity of a typical nuclear reactor, and with facilities operating above 100 percent capacity it aimed to produce about 94 megawatts of cells in the business year to next March.

"This year (production) is about 10 to 20 percent short of what we need," Tani said.

Rival Sanyo Electric, based like Sharp in the western Japan metropolis of Osaka, has also set ambitious targets for photovoltaic cell production of 120 megawatts by 2005, or seven times the current level.

Sharp's shares ended Monday trade down 1.44 percent at 1,575 yen, outperforming the benchmark Nikkei average's three percent slide.

For the year to date Sharp has gained 14.3 percent, handily outdistancing the Nikkei's 24.8 percent slide and losses across the high-tech sector, as investors smiled on its relatively strong profit performance and popular products such as flat-panel televisions and colour-screen mobile phones.

----

Spain's Gamesa wins 1,000 MW wind turbine order

Reuters:
4/12/2001
http://www.planetark.org/avantgo/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=13552

MADRID - Spanish wind power and aeronautics firm Gamesa said yesterday it has won an order to supply unlisted Guascor with wind turbines producing 1,000 megawatts of power over the 2002-2005 period.

Gamesa did not specify the value of the order.

Guascor, which has a wind power unit within its energy generation and cogeneration business, will install the turbines across Spain at a rate of 250 MW per year, the statement said.

Gamesa said the Guascor contract was the second largest it had signed after an agreement with Spain's EHN Group in 2000.

The announcement came on the same day that Gamesa investor Vestas of Denmark sold its 40 percent stake in Gamesa Eolica, the wind power unit, to Gamesa Group, the holding company, for 287 million euros.

The break with Vestas enables Gamesa to expand in Europe. While partnered with Vestas, it was limited to Spain, Latin America and Northern Africa.

The newly freed Gamesa said separately that its units had won new approvals to connect to the electricity networks of Italy, Portugal and Greece, supplying those countries with 1,016 MW of power.

The company also said it had reached a technology transfer agreement with a subsidiary of Germany's Repower Systems to build a 1.5 MW generator and that is expected to reach further agreements with Repower in the future.

-------- energy

Esso says effects of UK protests not yet clear

Reuters:
4/12/2001
http://www.planetark.org/avantgo/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=13556

LONDON - Esso said yesterday that it was too early to tell whether a UK-wide protest at up to 300 of its UK petrol stations last weekend had dented retail sales.

"It's too early to say on sales...but the vast majority of our sites were unaffected," a company spokesman said. Esso has more than 1,500 forecourt sites in Britain.

But hailing the boycott on Saturday as a success, the StopEsso campaign, a coalition of green groups, political parties and transport activists, said that 3,000 of its supporters picketed Esso garages in protest at the oil giant's stance on global warming.

Industry experts said that the impact on Esso's retail sector was likely to be minuscule but warned that the effect on its brand name could be more damaging.

"Motor fuel sales in the UK as a total activity are a very small part of Exxon's turnover. Less than one percent of total result is actually down to filling station turnover in the UK," said Ray Holloway of the Petrol Retailers Association.

"The protests themselves will have harmed Esso in image terms, because the protesters are getting their message across but in terms of financial affect it will be minimal," he said.

A spokesman for Esso said that the protests were causing the company concern especially when it came down to branding.

"Clearly if anyone attacks your brand then it is something we take very seriously."

Esso's parent company U.S. oil giant Exxon Mobil has come under fire from environmental groups and politicians across the world for opposing the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change.

They allege that intense lobbying by powerful firms like Exxon contributed to the United States pulling out of the deal last year.

Exxon denies it is unconcerned by gobal warming and says that it is tackling the issue on a number of other fronts.

It says that it is working with the car industry to improve fuel efficiency in engines; is researching ways to lower costs and emissions across all its operations, and investing in producing cleaner fuels.

-------- environment

World's Water Storage Capacity Shrinking as Dams Silt Up

December 4, 2001
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/dec2001/2001L-12-04-03.html

BONN, Germany, The reservoirs of the world are losing their capacity to hold water as erosion brings silt down to settle in behind dams, the chief of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) warned today.

Speaking to the Bonn International Conference on Freshwater, UNEP Executive Director Klaus Toepfer said that siltation is reducing the capacity of the world's reservoirs to hold water, a result that is hastened by the clearcutting of forests.

"The issue of dams can arouse strong passions on both sides," Toepfer told the delegates. "Some people are very much in favor of building dams and others are vehemently against. However, what we are talking about here is the state and fate of the existing stock of dams and reservoirs on whose waters billions of people depend for not only irrigation and drinking water, but also for industry and the production of hydroelectricity."

Dam at Long Quig Xia, China (Photo courtesy Traveler's Field Guide)

Toepfer, a former German environment minister, counselled careful management of the world's stocks of fresh, drinkable water. "It would seem prudent and sensible for us to manage the existing stock in the most sustainable way possible. Otherwise we face increasing pressure on natural areas with water, such as wetlands and underground aquifers, with potentially devastating environmental consequences to wildlife and habitats," he said.

In response, UNEP has launched a new Dams and Development Project (DDP), to address siltation and other serious environmental effects of dam development.

Based in South Africa, the Dams and Development Project, known as the DDP Unit, is a follow up to the work of the World Commission on Dams, publisher of an in-depth report on the environmental impact of large dams in November 2000.

The new DDP Unit has secured funding and pledges of over $2.5 million from the governments of Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Sustainable management of reservoirs will take a central role in its work.

None too soon for Rodney White, author of "Evacuation of Sediments from Reservoirs" and a fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers. White is warning the world's leaders to pay more attention to the capacity of the world's dams to hold water.

"The loss of capacity of the world's dams should be of highest concern for governments across the globe, and at the moment I do not believe this issue is commanding the attention it deserves," White said.

Located near several faults capable of generating large magnitude earthquakes, California's Casitas Dam has just been upgraded to higher earthquake resistance standards. (Photo courtesy U.S. Bureau of Reclamation)

"The demand for water is rising, not falling, as the population of the planet climbs from six billion today to an estimated 10 billion by 2050. I am extremely concerned," said White, "that water shortages in some of the poorer parts of the world will intensify unless we act to reduce reservoir sedimentation and conserve storage in existing dams using sound management techniques. Sediment removal should be a fundamental feature in the design of dams and their associated infrastructure."

In view of the "threat of global warming," Toepfer urged the planting of forests across the globe. "We must act to reduce the loss of forests and to re-afforest cleared areas as part of a comprehensive strategy of watershed management of the world's river systems," he said.

"There will always be natural levels of erosion that will contribute to a loss of water storage capability," Toepfer acknowleged, and called on engineers to provide "technical solutions that offer environmentally friendly ways of extending the lives of the world's reservoirs."

Jeremy Bird, interim coordinator of the DDP Unit, said next week, a meeting in Prague, Czech Republic, they would be looking at how to improve the performance of reservoirs and dams across a wide range of functions from agriculture to power generation.

-------- genetics

Scientist Sees Rapid Cloning, Stem Cell Advance

December 4, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-science-clone-congress.html?searchpv=reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The head of the bio-technology firm that reported recent breakthroughs in human cloning said his team was making swift progress toward achieving new human therapies within six months and urged Congress not to interfere.

Michael West, president of the Massachusetts company Advanced Cell Technologies which last month said it had cloned a human embryo, told a Senate panel he would be ``disappointed'' if his team could not make major scientific advances within six months -- creating longer-lived embryos and extracting stem cells and turning them into human tissue such as heart muscle or neurons.

West, who is also a scientist and member of the company's cloning research team, said that if Congress delayed or banned his research, it would be tantamount to depriving 3,000 people a day from potential treatments for degenerative disease.

ACT's earlier announcements on cloning already have stoked an ethical storm over the morality of the research and have also been criticized by many scientists who say the achievements have been overstated because the embryos were only a few cells and lived only a few hours.

Even one of the scientists at his own company, Tanja Diminko, told a scientific conference in Washington this week that it may turn out that it is not possible to clone a human.

``It might be that you just can't make humans this way,'' she said.

ACT has stressed that its goal is not to clone a human baby but to develop these embryos long enough to extract stem cells. These ``master cells'' have the potential to turn into any human cells and hold immense, though still unproven, promise for treating many diseases, including Parkinson's, diabetes and heart disease.

West told the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on health that although ``science moves at an unpredictable rate,'' he would be disappointed if within six months he had not achieved cell line differentiation -- getting the stem cells and turning them into specific kinds of cells.

``You heard it absolutely correctly,'' he told lawmakers who seemed startled by his bold timetable.

Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, said that instead of seeking to slow down research that he called ``exhilarating,'' the Senate should ``promote and support it as much as we can.''

Led by Kansas Republican Sen. Sam Brownback, lawmakers opposed to all cloning have been pushing for at least a six-month moratorium on the research while Congress considers a permanent ban. Many of Brownback's opponents had said such a pause was unnecessary because breakthroughs were not imminent.

Backed by President Bush, the House last August voted to ban all human cloning. But the Senate has put off action because it is divided between those who want to stop all forms of cloning and those who want to prevent cloning of a human baby but do want to permit so-called ``therapeutic cloning'' to further stem cell research.

Other scientists and ethicists testifying before the Senate panel tried to distinguish between a natural human embryo and a version cloned through ACT's nuclear transfer technique, which involves removing the nucleus of an egg and replacing it with that of another cell.

The natural embryo is formed by fertilization and contains genetic material of a father and mother. The cloned one is formed by ``nuclear transfer'' and contains genetic material of only one person.

``They represent an entirely new kind of biological organism never seen before in nature,'' said Ronald Green, a professor of religion and ethics at Dartmouth College who serves on ACT's independent ethics review board.

``It is essential to distinguish a human being from human cells. They are very different beasts,'' said Bert Vogelstein, a cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins University and the chair of a major ethical review of stem cells research.

Brownback and his allies over the past week have made several attempts to get a ban or moratorium through the Senate, but Senate leaders say they don't plan to take up the issue until February or March.

-------- human rights

THE CHILDREN
Millions of Afghan Youths, and No Ideas About Their Future

By C. J. CHIVERS
New York Times
December 4, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/04/international/04CHIL.html

ALCHIN, Afghanistan, Dec. 2 - His face was dirty and his pants, cinched tight with rope, were several inches too wide in the waist. His rubber boots looked twice the size of his feet. He is 8 years old and has never been to school. He reached into his sweater, pulled out a few pages of Arabic script and began to read.

It was not much, merely the alphabet in Dari, but in Afghanistan it is enough to move him well ahead of his peers. He lowered the grubby book and smiled.

"The mullah taught me," said the boy, Qundahakha, who lives in this shepherd's village without plumbing, electricity, a health clinic or a school, and where children have virtually no idea what they will do in the future.

The United Nations estimates that half of the 23 million Afghans are younger than 18, and although demographics are impossible to verify in a land without a census, it is clear that in each mud-walled hamlet or cold city alley the children swarm in bunches and packs. They are a huge mass of people, largely illiterate and mostly unvaccinated - some skilled in the basics of waging war, others without any moral reference point after being raised under the Taliban's brand of law.

They are savvy to the streets and the steppe, yet without the slightest sense of the world. Here one can meet 10-year-old boys who can clean a carburetor, butcher a sheep, point out a land mine, disassemble a Russian rifle or look after a storekeeper's stall.

Only rarely does one meet a boy like Qundahakha, who is learning to read. It is even worse with the girls, whom the Taliban barred from school.

What will become of this enormous group, and how they will be incorporated into whatever sort of society Afghanistan eventually becomes, is one of the pressing questions for a nation trying remake itself after more than two decades of war.

"This is a problem of the center of the Afghan situation," said Olara A. Otunnu, the United Nations special representative for children and armed conflict. "You are talking about two generations of children and youth who have been exposed to war nonstop."

Mr. Otunnu said the problems exist on two related scales. The issues involving human need are obvious and complex. And on a deeper level, if they are not solved, he said, the children will be the seeds for more violence and terrorism. "Unless the children have viable alternatives, Afghanistan will be an incubator that can be exploited or manipulated by almost anyone," he said. "We have already seen that its problems can spread over borders."

The collapse of standards of living for Afghan youth goes beyond the near absence of organized education. Almost all of the children are living in poverty. Some are psychologically scarred. Most have few role models besides soldiers - and their parents struggling in a hand-to-mouth economy. A few are visibly sick.

Dr. Muhammad Nodir, a specialist in internal medicine in the nearby city of Kunduz, said that in the past year he saw two dozen children die of illnesses that in most of the world would be readily curable, including diarrhea or colds that became lung infections that could not be stopped.

"Most of the children have a cough and other problems, you can just look at them and see it," the doctor said. "We need antibiotics."

There are also unsettling signs in children who have been exposed to so much violence and severity that they have little sense of their meaning. Mirwais, a 12-year-old boy in Kunduz, said that earlier this year he stood in a crowd on the city's main soccer field and watched the Taliban lop a hand and a foot from each of two men accused of theft.

He saw nothing odd about it. He thought it strange that someone would ask. "They were criminal people," he said. "That is what criminal people get."

At the moment, the efforts to help children are patchwork and informal.

In Kunduz on Sunday, while dozens of children played in the muddy alleys, 11 others crammed into a 12-by- 6-foot mud-walled room to practice multiplication tables. Class was in session in an underground school, an illegal education center during the Taliban's four-year reign in the city. It has continued to meet in the past week, even after the Taliban surrendered.

"The Afghan people do not have an economy, but we have good brains," said the teacher, Mahboba. "We are very smart, clever people. All we need is a chance."

Then she amended her thought: "We also need tables, we need blackboards, we need books and chalk and the other things to make schools good again."

Like the dozens of others interviewed for this story, the children in her class brightened when they talked about the future. Then they faltered.

They want to have jobs and earn money, but they know so little of a functioning society that they could name only the few professions they have seen first hand: doctor, shepherd, shopkeeper, teacher, mujahedeen.

One said engineer, but only after Mahboba said the word first. Another, in a moment of inspiration, realized she had learned a new line of work.

"Journalist!" she said, and the rest of the class laughed.

In the shadow of one of the city's schools, which was closed and used as a Taliban barracks, even one former senior Taliban commander said the extremist movement had devastated his country. Sitting by a wood stove with his bodyguards, the defector, Gen. Abdullah Gaurd, said he used to command 500 soldiers in the Kunduz region. He knows the extremist movement set Afghanistan, already suffering from Soviet invasion and civil war, even further back.

"It was a big calamity," General Gaurd said. "The children growing up shouldn't be like us. All of the children should be brought up better. They need doctors and school."

Asked if the classrooms and clinics should be open for girls, he said: "Yes. Even girls." But with schools now tending to only a fraction of the population, for many other children childhood is short. Boys who would be elementary school pupils in the West are already working as apprentices in manual trades.

In the city's bazaar, Mansoor, 10, was cleaning the grease from the starter of a Russian jeep. His hands were blackened with oil and dirt. He washed the parts in gasoline. He said he has been at the job three years. "I am going to go to school next year," he said. "I will learn how to read. Right now my father feeds our family as a mechanic, and it is my job to help him."

In Alchin, children are similarly busy helping their parents tending camels, cows and sheep. Poverty was self-evident: a few of the 60 or so children who clustered around visitors walked barefoot on nearly frozen ground. Another bunch wore sandals without socks. Only four said they could read.

One girl, Zanab, 12, said that she had watched the American bombs explode on the hills nearby, and that now that the province was freed of Taliban she wanted to study. "I would like to go to school and learn how to write, and then go meet the faculty of a college," she said.

Asked if she knew where the college was, she was quiet for a moment. "Maybe Kabul?" she asked back. One of the parents nearby interrupted. "I want to send my children to school, but we are poor and there is no school," said the parent, Abdul Aziz. "This is the problem. Only with school can our children improve our situation."

A few hundred yards away, the gate to Qundahakha's home is a piece of metal stripped from the hood of a Russian truck. Light passes through dozens of bullet holes. He is one of the few in the hamlet who is learning to read, having picked up the alphabet from the Taliban mullah who was teaching him the Koran.

He was 4 years old when the Taliban took over the region, and he knows no other life. He has heard his father say that there was sheep rustling in the Taliban days, and already a few sheep have been taken by hungry Northern Alliance troops.

He thinks the Taliban mullah has given him a chance, and he looks forward to more study at the mosque. He said he will take teachers where he can find them. "I like the Taliban," he said. "The Taliban is good."


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Obituary: Peace-activist grandmother dies of cancer

By Carlos Alcalá
Sacramento Bee Staff Writer
December 4, 2001
http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/obituaries/v-print/story/1267046p-1335578c.html

Barbara Wiedner, the Sacramento grandmother who abandoned her domestic sphere to campaign worldwide as founder of Grandmothers for Peace International, died late Sunday after a three-month struggle with pancreatic cancer. She was 72.

"She was an activist who was not afraid to take the risks to uphold the things she believed in," said former Sacramento Mayor Anne Rudin, a friend and colleague in peace activities.

Mrs. Wiedner was certainly not afraid of getting arrested, and often was, particularly when demonstrating against nuclear weapons.

"I don't know how many times she was arrested," said her husband, Bill Wiedner, of Elk Grove.

He related this story: When their son John was in high school, he was once asked why he was not signed up to bring his mother to the annual mother-son dance. "She's going to be in jail," the boy responded.

Mrs. Wiedner told her grandchildren she was doing it so they could grow up in a better world, though at first they were too young to understand.

"I remember it being pretty odd that my grandmother got arrested," said Laurie Baser of El Dorado Hills. "It hit us when the holidays came around, and it was, 'Oh, Grandma's getting arrested again.' "

Eventually they came to understand and appreciate her activities. "She wasn't just ours," Baser said. "She sort of belonged to everybody."

Inadvertently, Baser helped launch her grandmother's new identity.

As an 11-year-old in 1982, she painted a protest sign for her grandmother to hold at one of her first actions -- a protest against nuclear weapons held at the former Mather Air Force Base.

The sign read, "Grandmother for Peace." Reactions to the sign led Mrs. Wiedner to found Grandmothers for Peace International that year.

The group now has nine formal chapters around the country, and many more informal ones.

Bishop Francis Quinn, the former leader of the Sacramento Diocese now living in Arizona, recalled Mrs. Wiedner as a "sort of gentle activist."

"We marched together, calling for nuclear disarmament," Quinn said. "She was always so loving and approachable in her ways. I certainly admired her."

As its leader, Mrs. Wiedner traveled the world, meeting leaders such as Yasser Arafat and Mikhail Gorbachev, who once chided her for leaving out grandfathers.

She also visited with the humble. "She baked bread with Bedouin women in the desert," said her sister, Jan Provost, head of the Grandmothers chapter in Wisconsin.

And, no matter what the country, it seemed she never met a protest she didn't like.

"It used to be she couldn't find her way to Raley's," her husband said, "and all of a sudden she informs me she's going to go to Moscow during the Cold War to influence that government."

In all, she went on 22 foreign trips, he said.

One was to Hiroshima, with Rudin.

"When Barbara came, I knew of her past history of engaging in protests," Rudin said. "I pleaded with her not to get herself arrested when we were in Hiroshima."

She didn't get in trouble, but she couldn't pass up a demonstration when she saw one from the group's bus.

"She'd say, 'I'll see you back at the hotel,' " Rudin recalled. "She would be off."

It wasn't just the adventure that engaged her, however. It was a true feeling for the issue.

When the group arrived at the city's monument to those who died as a result of America's dropping an atomic weapon there on Aug. 6, 1945, she was stunned.

"She just broke into tears," Rudin said. "It was such a moving symbol of everything she stood for."

Mrs. Wiedner was the eldest of three children. She was born Dec. 16, 1928, and raised in a Roman Catholic family in Superior, Wis.

"She was always extremely intelligent and just a wonderful sister," Provost said.

She came to California in the 1950s and married Bill Wiedner in 1967, already having had nine children (December 4, 8:13 a.m. PST) from a previous marriage.

"I wanted nothing more in life than to be a wife, homemaker and mother," Mrs. Wiedner told The Bee in 1989. "I always saw myself as a grandmother in a rocking chair with a cookie jar nearby for the grandkids."

The nuclear weapons at Mather changed that.

"(It) made me realize that if things did not change, my precious grandchildren could be part of the last generation on Earth," she said in an interview in September, shortly after she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.

"The doctors said six to eight months. She only had 3 1/2 months," said Lorraine Krofchok, a friend and designated successor to lead the Grandmothers. "We were all cheated."

In addition to her husband, she is survived by three sons, Daniel and Kevin Corcoran and John Wiedner; five daughters, Kathleen O'Donovan, Mary Jo Corcoran, Colleen Balarsky, Patricia Estlander and Margaret Tilghman; her sister, Jan Provost; 17 grandchildren; and one great-grandson.

Her brother, John White, died in September, less than a week after visiting her following her diagnosis.

Bishop Quinn will preside at the funeral Mass at 11 a.m. Friday at St. Francis Church.

Contributions in Barbara Wiedner's honor may be made to Grandmothers for Peace International, or its Dorothy Vandercook Memorial Peace Scholarship fund, 9444 Medstead Way, Elk Grove 95758.

The Bee's Carlos Alcalá can be reached at (916) 321-1093 or calcala@sacbee.com .

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Diana Fund calls for action against cluster bombs

Ellie Tzortzi
Reuters:
4/12/2001
http://www.planetark.org/avantgo/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=13554

LONDON - Britain should lead the way on new international controls over the use of cluster bombs, weapons which are as dangerous as landmines, the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund said at the launch of a campaign yesterday.

The fund, which helps landmine victims, launched the campaign with other aid groups to coincide with the fourth anniversary of Britain signing the Ottawa Landmine Treaty.

The treaty bans the use of anti-personnel mines and requires clearance of mined land.

"It seems a timely moment to urge the UK government to take a leadership role in rallying international opinion behind international humanitarian law to also apply to cluster bombs," fund Chief Executive Andrew Purkis said.

Richard Lloyd, director of campaign group Landmine Action, cited U.S. military figures showing that 600 cluster bombs had been used in Afghanistan, each containing 202 small bomblets.

He said they were designed to kill within a range of 150 metres, pierce five inches of armour and set fire to material.

"When the container opens up and scatters the bomblets on the ground, they are supposed to detonate on impact...our experience is that a high proportion of them don't," he said.

"The conservative estimate is that 10 percent of these bomblets fail to go off...If there's been 120,000 bomblets used in Afghanistan already, then there's 12,000 of these lying around waiting to explode at the slightest touch," he added.

Lloyd said he was receiving more and more reports of casualties on the ground in Afghanistan, including one of a 10-year-old boy who mistook a bomblet for a food packet.

The bomblets are yellow, like the more than two million food packets dropped by the United States, he said.

POST-CONFLICT PROTECTION

Cluster bombs and anti-vehicle mines kill and maim people returning home to try and rebuild their lives, Lloyd said.

"What we are campaigning for is new international law to require the users of explosive weapons to clear them up afterwards. The aim is to get militaries to protect civilians post-conflict as well as during a conflict," he said.

The Sandy Gall Appeal for Afghanistan, which provides mine victims with artificial limbs, said cluster bombs added to what the United Nations estimates are one and a half million unexploded mines in the country.

Purkis said an upcoming review of the 1980 Inhumane Weapons Convention at a U.N. conference on December 10-21 in Geneva was an opportunity to address the problems of cluster bombs.

"That meeting could order an expert panel to prepare a new protocol that would cover cluster bombs and other explosive remnants, with a view to bringing them within the UN Convention for the first time," he said.

"What is really important is that the state parties gathered in Geneva feel the force of public opinion, feel that this is a moral issue that people mind about. The recent use of cluster bombs in Afghanistan highlights the problem because these bombs are being dropped in our name, now, " Purkis said.

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Shot Just Misses Antiwar Demonstrator

By Maureen O'Hagan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 4, 2001; Page B03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52745-2001Dec3?language=printer

A group holding a weekly peace vigil in Howard County [Maryland] has endured curses, yelling and threats of violence. But on Saturday, police said, someone in a car fired a shot at the group that came within inches of one of the protesters.

Samuel E. Stayton, 66, of Columbia, said he was carrying a sign made of particle board and had it propped up on his belt buckle about 4:30 p.m. Saturday, about halfway through the vigil. "I heard this noise and felt a vibration in my sign," he said. "I looked at the sign and saw a little hole in the lower left corner."

Stayton said the hole went through the sign and missed his midsection by about four inches.

The sign read, "Peace on Earth."

"We believe it was a BB or a pellet of some kind fired by a moving vehicle," said Howard County police spokeswoman Sherry Llewellyn. An officer went to the scene and took a report, but Stayton said he had not seen who fired the shot.

The vigil, which has attracted about 10 to 15 people each week since it began about two months ago, was organized by a local Quaker group in response to U.S. military action in Afghanistan, although not everyone involved is affiliated with the Quakers. The gathering is held Saturdays at Broken Land Parkway and Little Patuxent Parkway, a busy intersection near The Mall in Columbia.

Participants stand silently on the sidewalk carrying signs with slogans such as "Justice, yes. Violence, no" and "War is not the answer."

Saturday's shooting was the first violent incident the group has encountered. The demonstrators have been heckled before, and occasionally someone has flashed an obscene gesture. "Last week, I heard, 'War is good,' " Stayton recalled. "Another one said, 'War is the answer.' "

Organizer Sherry Morgan, of Scaggsville, said: "I recall one particularly disturbing incident [on a previous weekend] where a gentleman was sitting in the left turn lane yelling, 'You should all be killed.' "

Morgan said that on Sunday, the local Quaker meeting discussed the shooting incident and decided to continue the vigils.

Morgan said she came to beliefs about the war in Afghanistan after considerable thought, weighing her pacifist leanings against her feelings about people directly affected by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "Justice can be pursued without dropping bombs on a country," she said.

The demonstrators considered asking for extra police protection in light of the shooting incident, but in the end decided against it.

Stayton said that he will continue to attend. "It did shake me up a little bit," he said. "I wouldn't want to do it alone."

----

Cake-throwing protest considered treason

World Scene
December 4, 2001
Washington Times
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011204-73785440.htm

STOCKHOLM - A Swedish court convicted four teen-age boys of high treason yesterday for throwing a cream cake at King Carl Gustaf.

In a protest against the monarchy, the youngsters had assembled a strawberry cream cake before one of them threw it in the king's face shouting "For King and Fatherland" during a royal visit to a Swedish park in September.

The court fined the boys between 80 and 100 days' income each, which legal sources said would equate to a maximum fine of about $370. They were also convicted of minor assault.

The boys were all between the ages of 16 and 18.

----

Violent protesters face EU travel ban

Alan Travis and Ian Black in Brussels
Tuesday December 4, 2001
The Guardian
From: Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>

A list of violent demonstrators could be used to stop them travelling within Europe under plans being discussed by the European Union council of ministers.

The proposal to bar "potentially dangerous persons" who are "notoriously known by police forces" follows violent clashes between police and anti-globalisation demonstrators at Gothenburg and Genoa earlier this year.

The new dedicated database covering protesters with a record of violence or public disorder is part of a planned extension of the Schengen information system based in Strasbourg which already holds files on 1.3m individuals, mainly for immigration purposes, and can be accessed from 50,000 computer terminals around Europe.

Ministers also plan to extend the Schengen database to include all "foreigners" - third country nationals - such as illegal immigrants and rejected asylum seekers who have failed to leave the EU within "the prescribed time frame".

The anti-protest proposal has been put forward by Belgium, which currently holds the EU presidency. It would allow EU countries to bar an individual from going to a specific event on the grounds that such a ban would reduce the risk of public disorder.

The idea will be discussed by justice and home affairs ministers, including the home secretary, David Blunkett, later this week. They are also expected to agree a wider definition of "terrorism" that includes protests and protesters.

The move extends to violent demonstrators the current powers of EU countries to ban known football hooligans from travelling to a specific match or tournament abroad if there is evidence that they are out to cause trouble again.

The Belgian paper says the list could work by "alerts" being flagged on the Schengen information system on any person who is "notoriously known by the police forces for having committed recognised facts of public order disturbance" when they are moving alone or in a group to a specific event, if there is evidence they are out to "organise, cause, participate in or foment trouble with the aim of threatening public order or security".

The kind of events from which they are to be barred is drawn extremely widely, to include sporting, cultural, political and social occasions.

Statewatch, the European civil liberties monitoring group, said those whose details are put on the Schengen database are not told that their names are on the record until they attempt to travel. It cited the case of two football fans wrongly entered on the list of "suspected" hooligans who found it took years to get their names removed.

A Home Office spokeswoman said the British government generally supported an extension of Schengen to combat organised crime and terrorism and stressed that the proposal would not affect the right to peaceful protest by trade union activists or anti-globalisation demonstrators.

"Lawful protest is fine. We do not want to catch trade union activists or peaceful anti-globalisation protesters," she said.

Finland and Sweden are opposed to the idea, as is non-EU member Norway, which does participate in Schengen. Tony Bunyan, editor of Statewatch, said: "Now we have the frightening prospect that details of suspected terrorists and dissenters will be held by the Schengen information system on one centralised, computerised EU-wide database and all 'foreigners' in the EU held on another - and both are to be the subject of 'targeted action and/or surveillance'."

EU ministers are starting their preparations on the scheme as up to 30,000 anti-globalisation protesters, including many from Britain, are organising to take part in a march for global justice in Brussels in 10 days' time - the first major anti-globalisation protest since September 11.


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