------- Index of Articles
NUCLEAR
Real Men Don't Proliferate
Mossad Chief: Iran Developing Nukes
N. Korea Rejects Nuke Inspection
Missile Defensiveness
Navy Missile Defense Plan Is Canceled by the Pentagon
Top Russian Official Warns of Arms Legal Vacuum
U.S. finds suspected chemical, radioactive material
Eastern Alliance commanders believe al Qaeda fleeing
ABM Treaty May Be History, But Deterrence Doctrine Lives
MILITARY
The Sky Has Its Limits
Tora Bora Attack Advances in Tough Fighting
Tora Bora al-Qaida Positions Captured
U.S. returning to a nightmare called Somalia
Orchestrated chaos in Zimbabwe
U.S. Reviews Bans in Central Asia
Capitol Hill Anthrax Matches Army's Stocks
Allied rifts fuels fears on British troops' mission
Chemical Plants Are Feared as Targets
China, in Harsh Crackdown, Executes Muslim Separatists
Dozens Die in Colombia Drug Struggle
Drug Seizures Have Surged at the Borders
EU Leaders Convene to Design 'Global Superpower'
France's military in crisis, says report
Arafat Calls for End to Bombings
Pakistan Faces Increased U.S. Pressure to Curb Militants
U.S. set to pump up 'spin' machine
The feds' psychic spies
Official: CIA uses anthrax, but no link to letters
The Coldest Warrior
U.S. Vetoes Mideast Resolution
POLICE / PRISONERS
Ashcroft creates interagency force on security leaks
Justice channels $5 billion to states' safety
Policy reasons for a military tribunal
500 Officers to Be Issued High-Powered Weapons Used by Elite Unit
Bin Laden videotape was result of a sting
Bin Laden reported in Iran
ACTIVISTS
Greenpeace Storms Aussie Reactor
-------
How the Feds Stole Christmas
By Gary Krist
Sunday, December 16, 2001; Page B05
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46699-2001Dec14.html
"The federal government is the Scrooge of the season."
-- D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton
The American people liked Christmas a lot --
But the Federal Government clearly did NOT!
The feds hated Christmas! They did -- every one!
They hated the chaos, the crowds and the fun.
"It's wartime!" they cried. "We have to be wary.
The prospect of Christmas is simply too scary."
(For they saw in the season's delightful excesses
The makings of untold security messes.)
"Those tourists will come to D.C. on their jaunts
And want to see all of our usual haunts.
They'll fly in from places like Flint or Peru
And expect to see Congress, the Archives, the Zoo.
"But how to distinguish, amid all the revels,
The innocent tourists from terrorist devils?
We've got to be hard-nosed -- too bad if they frown!
We've got to take action to lock up the town!"
So those Grinches did issue an edict to close
All tours of the White House to regular Joes.
"No visits allowed -- not sooner, not later --
For you never know who is part of al Qaeda."
This order, however, was only the latest
Of numerous acts to defeat those who hate us.
For one Grinch named Ashcroft already had taken
Draconian steps that left liberals shaken.
"It's crucial," said he, "to adopt zealous measures
In order to safeguard our national treasures."
So he'd rounded up suspects -- and not just a few:
If your face fit his profile, well, boo-hoo for you.
But that wasn't all; no, these Grinches had more.
For they saw in this issue a wide-open door.
Why, they even made plans, in their fright and their fury,
To try certain people without any jury!
And so, under pretext of just being cautious,
They did things the Founders would surely find nauseous.
"We've done it," they crooned, "We've killed off their spirit.
They once loved their freedom, but now they all fear it!"
"Yes, Christmas is spoiled, and Hanukkah, too.
But with things as they are, who will dare to say boo?
For when people are scared, they seize any solution,
Despite all their laws and their old Constitution."
But we know the rest; sure, we've all read our Seuss.
We know that our people won't brook such abuse.
We know they'll give voice to their freedom of speech
And cry out their demand: equal justice for each.
And the Grinches, of course, will take heed and reform.
Their cold little hearts will grow ample and warm.
For that's how it works in a holiday tale:
The world's finer nature will always prevail.
Ah --
But there we'd be wrong, for in this case, alas,
The heartwarming ending may not come to pass.
The American people, it seems, quite approve!
The polls show support for each Grinch-worthy move.
So the Grinches have triumphed! The '50s are back!
And here's what we've learned from this terror attack:
That life is no kid's book with uplifting plot;
Our freedoms are precious -- except when they're not.
-- Gary Krist is a Washington writer.
His latest novel is "Chaos Theory" (Random House).
-------- NUCLEAR
Real Men Don't Proliferate
By Mary McGrory
Sunday, December 16, 2001; Page B01
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46714-2001Dec14?language=printer
It was a wonderful week for national missile defense. George W. Bush triumphantly announced he was taking a powder from the ABM Treaty that inhibits his progress to Star Wars. It was a terrible week for non-proliferation legislation, which had, in the Senate, another of its near-death experiences.
The goal in both enterprises, of course, is to protect us fromattack, either nuclear or biological. They couldn't be more different in concept -- and cost. The president's beloved NMD, with all the bells and whistles, could bring in a bill in the neighborhood of $130 billion to $150 billion. Full funding of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program would come to $40 billion, according to former senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), who with Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) created the program calculated to bring Russian nuclear storage out of the used-car lot class.
Bush gave lip service to Nunn-Lugar in the campaign, but in the White House has not put his money where his mouth is. The president cut $40 million and later $73 million for bright ideas such as relocating unemployed and hungry Russian scientists to commercial ventures. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) points out that the Russians need our help to manage their enriched uranium supply. "These are materials which could be made into bombs in terrorist hands."
Nunn, who still enjoys an enormous reputation among his erstwhile colleagues, complains that we have never taken seriously enough the warning of a special task force created late in the Clinton administration. It was headed by two impeccably conventional figures, former Senate majority leader Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) and former Clinton White House counsel Lloyd Cutler. Their conclusion: Unsecured Russian weapons, materials and know-how comprise "the most urgent unmet national security threat to the U.S."
The Bush administration seems to regard the unglamorous Nunn-Lugar effort the way it regards conservation -- as something sissy. Real men drill -- they drill for oil in Alaska; they drill holes in Alaska to accommodate the hardware required for the Star Wars system.
Recently Biden mesmerized a Democratic caucus lunch with an account of a Russian biological weapons stockpile that was inspected by Nunn and Lugar. It looked like a chicken coop. Its only security was a padlock, Biden said.
But two days later, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to cut $46 million in Nunn-Lugar funds. Lugar hastily rounded up a high-level protest, recruiting Chairman Biden, Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) to importune the members to remember we are in a war against terrorism, and a cut in funds could send a wrong signal. It worked.
Bush's announcement came at a particularly hectic moment. The movie of the week was a home video of bin Laden gloating over Sept. 11. The president didn't claim that NMD would have stopped our worst domestic tragedy. He only says that if these fiends get hold of missiles, we can handle them. We can, that is, if the contraption works. That's a big if, and an expensive one, but nobody seems to want to contradict George Bush these days.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, Bush's new best friend, for instance, seemed extremely subdued. He said the decision to withdraw was "a mistake," but indicated it was one he could live with. Other Russian notables grumbled some, but not too convincingly, rumbling on about Putin's naivete in thinking that George Bush would make his life easier. Even the Chinese were quite polite in the end. After all, Uncle Sam is a good customer.
Nunn was ever the good soldier, sober and correct and presenting the positive view. The ABM Treaty allows a six-month grace period between notice of withdrawal and an actual departure. He expressed the hope that the interlude might be used by both sides to negotiate an agreement whereby Bush could press on without actually violating the treaty. Fat chance.
The reality check came from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, an unabashed, career-long Star Warrior. "I personally think," he said at his Thursday matinee, "that people ought to be relieved that this is behind us. It has been kind of a sticking point."
Over the past three months, we've had lots of time to think about what might have stopped the tragedy of Sept. 11. Air marshals on flights would have been a deterrent. The only thing we know for certain that could have stopped the carnage were locked cockpits. What we may need more than all the sensors and lasers and other high-tech paraphernalia is a tough and reasonable approach to Russia's starving scientists. We should be fashioning blood-curdling warnings that if they so much as look at terrorists who want to buy their talents, we'll stop at nothing to stop them.
-------- iran
Mossad Chief: Iran Developing Nukes
December 16, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Mossad-Chief.html and
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/ap/20011216/wl/israel_mossad_chief_1.html
JERUSALEM (AP) -- The head of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency said Sunday that Iran is pursuing development of nuclear and other non-conventional weapons but is sending occasional hints that it could someday reconcile with Israel.
``There are Iranians in high-standing positions of influence that are saying that if there is an Israeli-Palestinian agreement ... Iran will not stand in the way of that agreement,'' Ephraim Halevy said in a rare public speech. ``There are even covert messages of the possibility of reconciliation.''
``These are lone chords at the moment, and they are in no way joining to form a melody,'' Halevy added at a Tel Aviv conference on security. he didn't provide additional details.
However, he also stressed that Iran was attempting to develop nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, as well as expanding its long-range missile program.
Iran and Israel have been bitter enemies for years, with Iran providing support for the militant Islamic group Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah fought for years against Israeli troops in south Lebanon.
Israel pulled its forces out of Lebanon last year, but Hezbollah still wages sporadic attacks over a disputed patch of territory along the border.
Halevy also described the U.S.-led campaign against international terrorism as an unprecedented development because of its focus on an organization -- Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network -- rather than a sovereign state.
The campaign eventually could lead some countries, such as Iran and Syria, to end their support of radical groups accused of carrying out terrorism, Halevy said.
Halevy said that after the war in Afghanistan, international pressure could mount on Syrian President Bashar Assad to ``bite the bullet,'' and crack down on radical groups.
The British-born Halevy is only the second Mossad chief to be identified by name. Until recent years, Israel's military censor prohibited publication of the Mossad chief's name or photograph.
Halevy spoke at a security conference last December in what was billed as the first ever public speech by the head of the Israeli intelligence agency.
-------- korea
N. Korea Rejects Nuke Inspection
DECEMBER 16, 03:26 ET
http://wire.ap.org/?FRONTID=ASIA&STORYID=APIS7GE7S2O0
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - North Korea on Sunday rejected U.S. demands for an inspection of its alleged nuclear weapons program and refused to participate in talks on its missile development.
``There is neither condition nor need for the Democratic People's Republic of (North) Korea to accept the 'nuclear inspection,''' said Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the North's ruling Workers' Party.
``The same is the case with the 'missile issue,''' it added.
North Korea has increased anti-U.S. rhetoric since President Bush warned this month that it and Iraq would be ``held accountable'' if they developed weapons of mass destruction to carry out terrorism.
Bush has demanded that the North allow U.N. experts to inspect its nuclear program. The North is believed to have stockpiled enough plutonium to make one or two atomic bombs.
The U.S. president has also expressed frustration over the North's silence to his proposal in June to resume dialogue and discuss the communist country's missile program and conventional arms.
``The U.S. is going to use the dialogue with the DPRK as a lever to pressure and an opportunity to find a pretext for military provocation,'' said Rodong. The report was carried by the North's official news agency, KCNA, which was monitored in Seoul.
The North has accused the United States of preparing to make it the next target after Afghanistan in the U.S.-led anti-terrorism campaign.
North Korea is on a U.S. list of countries sponsoring terrorism. It maintains a 1.1 million-member military, the world's fifth largest.
The United States keeps 37,000 troops in South Korea to deter North Korea, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War. That war ended in a cease-fire, not a peace treaty.
-------- missile defense
Missile Defensiveness
Scuttling the ABM Treaty Won't End This Argument
By Bradley Graham
Sunday, December 16, 2001; Page B04
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46778-2001Dec14?language=printer
By formally moving last week to withdraw the United States from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, President Bush has opened the way to more aggressive testing of assorted technologies for defending the nation against long-range missile attack.
But he has not silenced arguments over whether such systems are feasible, affordable or necessary. Bush's unilateral action is unsettling to critics at home and abroad who do not share his enthusiasm for jumping to a new strategic framework free of Cold War-style arms control accords. Bringing them along will be a challenge. The president and his team will have to come up with the answers to questions about how this new world order is supposed to function, and why other countries should feel reassured by America's new direction.
With the removal of the ABM Treaty freeing the administration to invest billions of dollars -- not to mention a major chunk of presidential political capital -- in fresh experimentation the stakes are higher than ever: Either Bush and his fellow missile defense enthusiasts will win big, or they will fail spectacularly.
That the United States and the world should again be arguing over national missile defense ought to come as no surprise. Missile defense is one of the great phoenixes of U.S. national security policy: It keeps rising from the ashes of Washington debates.
No sooner had the idea started to soar again under Bush this year than it seemed to falterafter the attacks of Sept. 11. Critics argued that the terrorists' reliance on low-tech hijackings rather than high-tech missiles proved Bush had been concentrating on the wrong threat. But Bush last week invoked the September tragedy as all the more reason to proceed with missile defense. In a speech at The Citadel, the military college of South Carolina, Bush urged his audience to consider this: If terrorists could do the horrendous damage they did just by hijacking a few commercial airliners, imagine what might happen if they ever got their hands on long-range, nuclear-tipped missiles.
Such is the nature of the enduring controversy over missile defense. Each side will look at the same event and interpret it to its own ends. It is a dynamic that has been at work since the first major public debate on the issue in the 1960s, long before Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" initiative.
The Bush administration's ambitious testing program includes a provision for realizing at least a rudimentary antimissile system by the next presidential election in 2004. The successful test earlier this month of a prototype land-based interceptor, which hit a mock enemy warhead over the central Pacific, has only reinforced the administration's drive.
But many scientists, arms control advocates and Democratic lawmakers remain either wary of oropposed to the project, questioning whether a national antimissile system can ever work reliably and be built affordably -- and whether enough of a threat exists to warrant such a weapon. Even if Russia and our NATO allies end up grudgingly accepting U.S. abandonment of the ABM Treaty, critics fear other adverse consequences. It will, they warn, spur China to add to plans to build up its offensive weapons. It will undermine U.S. attempts to persuade other nations to abide by their international commitments. And it will undercut the credibility of international nonproliferation policies by appearing to presuppose their failure.
For Bush himself, the idea of an antimissile shield is tied less to the thought of ever needing to useit and more to allowing America to act abroad without fear of subjecting Americans at home to attack. "You can't be an internationalist if you allow yourself to be blackmailed," the president told me in an interview last summer. "If you believe, like I believe, that our values are so good and we can spread those values in a way that hopefully is not arrogant -- in a humble way -- if you believe that's important, which I do, then the corollary is: How do you make sure you're able to do that without somebody saying, 'If you move, if you act, if you decide to get involved, we'll blow you up'?"
What is it about missile defense that has made it so controversial for so long? That question often ran through my mind during a year and a half of researching and writing a book on why an issue -- dismissed by many after the demise of the Soviet Union as a relic of the Cold War -- came surging back in the final years of the Clinton administration andassumed its place as a high-priority objective of the Bush administration.
Part of the answer lies in the gravity of what is at stake -- namely, survival in an age of nuclear weapons. Since the 1960s, the United States has observed a strategic doctrine that relies on a balance of mutual nuclear terror to forestall a first strike. Called "mutual assured destruction," this doctrine is credited with having prevented nuclear war between Washington and Moscow for four decades. So understandably, there is a reluctance among many to tamper with success.
Additionally, there is no scientific certainty as to whether an antimissile system capable of defending the entire United States can be devised. Scientists appear as divided on this questionas politicians. Cost is also a big factorin the controversy. Missile defense promises to be very, very expensive, with rough estimates ranging from $30 billion for a basic land-based system to well over $100 billion for an advanced, multi-layered architecture.
But ultimately, the passions aroused by missile defense cannot be explained simply by differences over deterrence theory, scientific capabilities or budgetary trade-offs. The issue has taken on a transcendent, symbolic significance. It has become a litmus test in the debate between the political left and right over the best approach to keeping America militarily strong and secure -- whether, in broad terms, the defense of the nation is better served by arms advances or arms control, by military buildups or diplomatic building blocks, by unilateral initiatives or compromise accords.
When framed in this way, the argument tends to arouse the fervor of clashes over theology, with religious terms often invoked. Proponents talk of the "morality" of erecting a national defense. Opponents speak of the "sanctity" of the ABM Treaty.
The Sept. 11 tragedy has not only provided new debating points for both sides. It also has changed some basic realities.
On the one hand, the administration has found it easier to get more money for its aggressive research and testing program. Democrats who had moved previously to cut the administration's $8.3 billion request for missile defense and attach conditions to ensure that testing would remain within terms of the ABM Treaty have been inclined to avoid a partisan wrangle and let Bush's initiative proceed, at least for now. Bush's own elevated popularity also has given him more political leeway for moves such as dismantling the ABM Treaty.
On the other hand, missile defense has lost some of its prominence as the administration's dominant military project. It is now forced to share the stage with the new war on terrorism at home and overseas, and the threat of long-range missile attack seems to many people much more remote than the possibility of another hijacked airplane or envelope stuffed with anthrax.
No Third World country can yet threaten the U.S. homeland with an ICBM. Even those given the greatest chance of doing so soonest -- North Korea, Iran, Iraq and Libya -- are relying on facilities and technologies that are primitive by U.S. standards. And the leading threat case, North Korea, has shown a willingness to drop its whole effort in return for financial assistance from the United States. Nevertheless, the trend is worrisome. Even if North Korea could be taken out of the picture, other emerging Third World missile states still may prove determined to acquire substantial capabilities, if only because of the political leverage accompanying possession of such weapons.
One question often asked is whether a hostile Third World state, even if it came to possess an ICBM, would actually fire it at the United States, given the likelihood of subsequent annihilation by U.S. missiles. But it may not have to shoot to have an effect. Simply the ability to launch a long-range missile may well influence how future U.S. administrations respond to that country or to regional crises that might bring the United States into conflict with it.
Bush is not putting forward a definite architecture or exact timetable for development. Rather, he has embarked on a set of experiments to see which of several alternatives -- land-, sea-, air- or space-based systems aimed at midcourse or boost-phase intercept -- will prove most workable. Additionally, Bush team members have indicated that even if something does not ensure 100 percent effectiveness, they may be willing to put it in the field, believing some weapon is better than none and that improvements will come over time.
This approach offers some promise of finding an optimum design. But the cost of all this experimenting is sure to be substantial, jeopardizing other military projects more popular with senior military commanders. When I asked Bush what his own criteria will be for deciding what kind of antimissile system to build, he replied, "Here are the criteria: Does it work? Is it cost effective? And how does it fit into the priorities of the United States?"
All good questions: In fact, just the ones that critics and proponents have been arguing about for more than 40 years. Now that Bush is doing away with the ABM Treaty, he will have to provide answers. He and other missile defense enthusiasts will no longer be able to blame treaty constraints for foiling development. They will have to demonstrate that their new strategic framework will indeed increase global security. They will have to provide reassurance that their real aim is indeed limited to guarding against Third World missile attack, not gaining strategic advantage over Russia and China. They will have to keep the Europeans from feeling estranged, and prove that a U.S. antimissile system will not undermine other international efforts at countering proliferation.
In short, they will have to show that missile de- fense can work not only technically and financially, but politically.
Bradley Graham covers military affairs for The Post. He is the author of "Hit to Kill: The New Battle over Shielding America from Missile Attack" (Public Affairs).
--------
Navy Missile Defense Plan Is Canceled by the Pentagon
New York Times
December 16, 2001
By JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/16/politics/16NAVY.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - The Pentagon has canceled a Navy program intended to shoot down short- range ballistic missiles, a decision that military officials said today was the first in a series of changes that the Bush administration is likely to make in its missile defense programs.
The Navy program, which would have put interceptors on ships at sea, was killed because it had gone more than 50 percent over budget and had fallen more than two years behind schedule, the officials said. It was known as the Navy Area Missile Defense program.
Under rules set by Congress, to save the program the Pentagon would have had to certify that it was essential to national security, that its costs could be brought under control and that no alternatives existed. Senior military officials decided that they could not make that case.
"It's unfortunate we've reached this point, but certification was impossible," Edward C. Aldridge, the under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, said in a statement.
The program's failure underscores the technological challenges in building a defensive shield capable of protecting the entire nation from long-range missiles, a top military priority of President Bush. Intended to protect ships, ports and amphibious operations from short-range missiles, the Navy program was viewed as one of the less technically difficult anti-missile programs in the Pentagon's missile defense arsenal. "If the easy things are this difficult," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.com, a military policy Web site, "the difficult things are going to be extraordinarily difficult." Mr. Pike has long been a critic of the Pentagon's missile defense programs.
But the cancellation of the program also indicates that the Bush administration's missile defense priorities may be shifting, particularly now that the president has announced his intention to withdraw from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which prohibited the development of ship-based defenses against long-range missiles.
By canceling the Navy Area program, which cost $2.3 billion over the past decade, the Pentagon will be able to spend more money on developing ship-based defenses against long-range missiles, programs that had been severely constricted by the ABM treaty, officials said. Those programs are intended to shoot down long-range missiles either high in the atmosphere or just after launch.
The decision came under attack from missile defense advocates who said that the Pentagon needed to be developing protection against both long- and short-range missiles.
"This is a seriously flawed decision," said Frank Gaffney Jr., president of the Center for Security Policy, a conservative military policy group. "Everybody understands we have to have missile protection for our carrier battle groups and marines and other forward elements. This is not a way to find resources."
The major problem with the Navy program was that ship-based targeting computers were not working well enough with the Aegis radar systems on missile cruisers.
Those radars were designed to track airplanes, which are larger, slower and generally easier to follow than missiles. The Navy was experimenting with computer systems that would have enabled a ship to collate data from many sensors, including satellites, airplanes and other ships.
Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, said that the Pentagon still intended to develop sea-based defenses against short- range missiles. But he said the program would first have to be reorganized.
-------- russia
Top Russian Official Warns of Arms Legal Vacuum
December 16, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-arms-russia.html?searchpv=reuters
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A top Russian official said in an interview broadcast on Sunday that Moscow and Washington had to work hard to draft agreements to fill the legal vacuum created by the U.S. intention to withdraw from the ABM treaty.
Igor Sergeyev, President Vladimir Putin's adviser on strategic issues, said world stability depended on both sides coming to an agreement on a new framework for relations setting limits to the anti-missile system Washington wanted to build.
``The most dangerous thing now is the legal vacuum in which we now find ourselves up until what I think will be June 13 under the six months' notice period,'' Sergeyev told RTR state television.
``In this period until the United States withdraws from the treaty, I believe both sides should do their utmost to replace ABM, to lay out matters, to draw up a new framework for relations with the United States and come up with concrete elements to safeguard stability throughout the world...''
Sergeyev, a former defense minister, said agreements would have to establish ``agreed approaches to offensive and defensive systems. I believe limits to anti-missile systems must be set down so that we understand that they are truly set down.''
Russia had long opposed President Bush's contention that ABM was outmoded and had to be abandoned to take account of missile threats from ``rogue states'' like Iran, Iraq and North Korea,
Putin described Bush's announcement last week as a mistake, but said it would not affect Russian security and renewed proposals to cut Moscow's strategic nuclear arms arsenal.
Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov has since described the move as a purely political decision.
In his interview, recorded on Saturday, Sergeyev said U.S. planners could not say what form the missile shield would take, but it was safe to assume it would involve the use of space.
That, he said, meant that negotiators would have difficulty ''producing a framework for imposing limits.''
Yevgeny Primakov, former Russian prime minister and foreign minister, told the same television program that the U.S. move was ``a serious error'' which failed to take account of Russia's support for the U.S. anti-terror operation in Afghanistan.
``The events of September 11 created a new situation which should have been put to good use and assessed once again,'' Primakov said. ``This is going along an old path.''
Primakov said Russia would now be fully entitled to revise its commitments to fulfil other international arms pacts, including the START-2 treaty on reducing strategic arsenals.
``I don't think we should be in any hurry to do this,'' he said. ``But in any event, they are pushing us toward retaliatory measures of some sort. And that is not reasonable.
-------- terrorism
U.S. finds suspected chemical, radioactive material in Afghanistan
Drudge Report
12/16/2001 (dpa)
http://www.drudgereport.com/flash3.htm
Islamabad - U.S. troops fighting terrorism in Afghanistan have found suspected radioactive and chemical material near their operation base in southern Kandahar city, the American broadcaster CNN reported Sunday. A CNN correspondent accompanying U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld on his visit to the region reported that the discovery was made about 5.5 kilometres east of Kandahar, the spiritual centre of the vanquished Taliban which gave santuary to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda group.
Meanwhile, American warplanes continued to bomb the Tora Bora area in eastern Afghanistan where al-Qaeda's foreign fighters have been pinned down.
Bin Laden is believed to be among them as his voice had been picked up over radio by U.S. special forces operating on the ground along with their Afghan allies.
---
[Here's the CNN story - et]
Eastern Alliance commanders believe al Qaeda fleeing
December 17, 2001
CNN News
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/central/12/16/ret.afghan.attacks/index.html
... The area surrounding the perimeter of airport is heavily mined. Clearing the mines and unexploded ordnance is a huge problem for the military, which wants to make the airport operational.
Near Camp Rhino, the U.S. military gathered significant intelligence from a suspected al Qaeda biological, chemical and nuclear weapons site, Rumsfeld said. The intelligence material was taken from a site called Tarnak Farms, about 3.5 miles (5.5 km) east of the Marine desert base in southern Afghanistan.
Rumsfeld said a good deal of material documentation and other items were found at the location. The site -- believed to be used for research -- was on a list of 25 or 30 sites that have been systematically reviewed by American forces as they came available in Afghanistan. The material is being examined for chemical, biological and radiation content.
"The take was large and significant, and we might find something interesting," Rumsfeld said.
-------- treaties
ABM Treaty May Be History, But Deterrence Doctrine Lives
By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 16, 2001; Page A37
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49643-2001Dec15?language=printer
At the confirmation hearings for Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John R. Bolton, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) had these words of advice about the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty:
"John, I want you to take that ABM Treaty and dump it in the same place we dumped our ABM Treaty co-signer, the Soviet Union, and that is to say, on the ash heap of history," Helms said with a chuckle.
Less than nine months later, the ABM Treaty is, indeed, destined for the ash heap of history. On Thursday, President Bush formally announced that the United States would withdraw from the landmark agreement to allow ambitious testing of missile defenses.
Yet, many arms control experts say the doctrine of nuclear deterrence, or mutually assured destruction, that the treaty enshrined remains alive and well. It has even been a centerpiece of the Bush administration's efforts to win Russian acceptance of missile defense tests; officials in Washington have repeatedly assured their counterparts in Moscow that U.S. missile defenses will not be able to block a full-scale Russian nuclear strike.
The United States has about 5,950 strategic nuclear warheads capable of striking Russia, and Russia has about 5,800 strategic nuclear warheads capable of hitting the United States. Because military planners on each side fear the other might strike, some of those weapons are always on alert, capable of being fired within minutes -- and that does not appear likely to change anytime soon.
Even though both countries have promised to reduce their arsenals and Bush spoke last week about replacing mutually assured destruction with "mutual cooperation," the militaries on both sides remain under orders to maintain the threat of annihilation.
"Our force is configured to hold Russian nuclear and economic targets at risk," said Joseph Cirincione, director of the nuclear nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Even while we're talking to President [Vladimir] Putin, we're targeting his office. It's a fact of life."
The nuclear balance of terror has been remarkably stable. Even at the height of the Cold War, Russia and America tried to avoid coming to direct blows. Now, as some American critics of the Bush administration's missile defense plan argue that it won't work, some Russian critics of the plan worry that it might.
Russian military planners fear that fewer than 100 of Moscow's warheads would be able to survive an American first strike and that a leap forward in missile defense technology might enable the United States to defend itself against that rump nuclear force, according to Bruce Blair, president of the Center for Defense Information, a Washington think tank.
"So they look to the future and the day when the U.S. might deploy a couple of hundred interceptors or so, and they do worry that their weakened nuclear force would be neutralized by even a thin U.S. system," Blair said.
Moreover, Russia's array of satellites and radars designed to warn of a nuclear attack is aging and losing reliability.
"This probably adds to the almost daily instability," said John Rhinelander, a lawyer who helped negotiate the ABM Treaty under President Richard M. Nixon. "The Russian early warning system is full of holes, and Russia will keep large numbers of ICBMs on hair-trigger alert. And I don't see how we'll improve that situation if we keep throwing sand in their face."
Some arms experts also argue that pulling out of the ABM Treaty could encourage Russian hard-liners who want to renounce parts of the START II agreement. Under that pact, Russia is supposed to eliminate 100 SS-18 missiles, with 10 warheads each, and to reduce the number of warheads on each of its 100 SS-19 missiles from six to one by 2007. Some Russian officials have suggested they might keep the multiple warheads to improve the chances of overwhelming any U.S. defenses.
Putin might have been better off if he had reached a deal with the Clinton administration, something senior Clinton administration officials tried to impress upon him. But the Russian president, believing either that he had a better chance of a deal with Bush or that Bush would kill any deal made with Clinton, held out.
"What did the United States have to do to the ABM Treaty to make sure that we were dealing with new [missile] threats? The answer is: There's a whole lot you can do without breaching the ABM Treaty," said Strobe Talbott, who tried to negotiate modifications in the ABM Treaty while serving as Clinton's deputy secretary of state. "The other question is: Do you think that bilateral negotiated agreements between the United States and Russia with the force of law are still useful or not? The Clinton administration felt they were very useful."
The Bush administration places higher priority on developing a layered missile defense system. Even Colin L. Powell, regarded as the Bush official most reluctant to withdraw unilaterally from the treaty, stood behind Bush in May 2000 when the then-presidential candidate said he would pull out of the ABM Treaty if Russia did not allow missile defense tests.
More generally, the Bush administration tends to view global treaties with suspicion. Perhaps nothing indicated that better than the choice of Bolton to lead negotiations on arms control.
Bolton summarized his philosophy in an article last fall in the University of Chicago Journal of International Law that divided the policy world into "Americanists" and "globalists." He said globalists -- "each tightly clutching a favorite new treaty or multilateralist proposal" -- want to bind the United States in a web of agreements on everything from arms to the environment to human rights, while Americanists seek to preserve U.S. sovereignty and policy flexibility.
"Every time America is forced to bend its knee to international pressure," wrote Bolton, who has traveled to Moscow eight times this year for ABM talks, "it sets a significant, and detrimental, precedent for all of the others."
Far better, he has argued in congressional testimony and speeches, would be an approach that relies on informal agreements, glorified handshakes between leaders like Bush and Putin. He has said that arms control accords became floors, rather than ceilings, on numbers of nuclear weapons.
Yet the Bush administration has bowed to the need for some written agreements. Although the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said new targets for levels of strategic nuclear weapons would be set informally, Powell is now negotiating a formal, written agreement with verification measures.
-------- MILITARY
The Sky Has Its Limits
Why Bombs Defeat Armies More Effectively Than Cities
By Stephen Budiansky
Sunday, December 16, 2001; Page B03
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46692-2001Dec14?language=printer
Last week, when President Bush was in Charleston, S.C., speaking to cadets at The Citadel about the future of our military, he singled out the revolutionary technologies that have proved their worth in Afghanistan. He also drew a link to another great transforming conflict in America's military history -- World War II -- noting that by the end of that war, "no one would ever again doubt the value of strategic air power."
Many commentators have similarly interpreted the stunningly successful use of air power in Afghanistan -- as well as in the Persian Gulf War and in Serbia -- as a technological vindication of traditional theories of strategic bombing. But that is a dangerous misreading of history. Air power has achieved these recent successes not just through a revolution in technology, but through a revolution in thinking that in many ways has stood the original concept of strategic bombing on its head. And a good thing, too. For despite what the president said, strategic bombing during World War II (and again in Korea and Vietnam) manifestly failed to achieve the results its champions claimed it would. The lessons from the Gulf War and Serbia suggest that pursuing these failed theories with modern precision-guided weaponry works no better. Success there came from a change in approach.
Classic strategic bombing theory went through many evolutions and variations, but a constant from World War I right through the nuclear age was the belief that attacking enemy armies in the field from the air was a wasteful diversion of effort -- a "false objective," as air power pioneer Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell boldly asserted in 1930. The real objective, Mitchell said, was the enemy's will to resist, and the way to attack that was to strike not at his troops in the battlefield but at his "vital centers." The notion that an aerial assault could deliver the decisive blow had captured the imaginations of air power enthusiasts even before the Wright Brothers first flew, and it continued to underpin official U.S. Air Force doctrine throughout most of the 20th century.
Air power theorists did not always agree on what constituted a "vital center." Some emphasized attacking civilian "morale," with direct strikes against the populace or by disrupting electric power and transportation; others advocated sowing chaos by cutting communication links and destroying government offices; others urged attacks on key war industries. But all believed that direct assault on enemy centers of power would contribute decisively to victory. The enemy government would swiftly be paralyzed, be forced to surrender by an angry and demoralized populace, or perhaps even be overthrown: Strategic bombing, the theorists maintained, inevitably hastens strategic collapse.
Throughout the last century, much of the debate over the effectiveness of strategic bombing focused not on whether these ideas were fundamentally sound, but on technical arguments over how well they could be implemented. The debate was frequently fueled by exaggerated claims of precision and subsequent evidence that raids had done far less damage than at first believed. (In World War II, it was not uncommon for bombers to miss their target by miles.)
Yet strategic bombing in the end failed not just because of the difficulties of precisely targeting factories and government ministries with enough dumb bombs; it failed because the theories that lay at the heart of strategic bombing were often simply wrong. Civilian populations do not revolt under bombing (witness the citizens of London during World War II); urban infrastructure and transportation systems contain great redundancy and resilience; and totalitarian governments in particular can divert vast sectors of the economy to war purposes to make up for bombing losses. Carrying out a World War II-style strategic bombing plan using 21st-century smart bombs would still probably fail to achieve the collapse of an enemy regime.
The U.S. Air Force has not adjusted easily. In fact, the initial strike plan drawn up by Air Force planners for the Gulf War focused exclusively on classic strategic targets -- government ministries, bridges, communications centers and the like. Air power skeptics who question whether hitting (however precisely) empty buildings in Baghdad or Belgrade had any appreciable effect on the final outcome in either war have a point.
But the Gulf War also saw a new and hugely effective use of air power -- to strike directly at the enemy's military forces. Before that war, U.S. military doctrine included plans for air strikes to support ground fighting and (like artillery) "prepare the battlefield" just in advance of a ground attack. But these plans also predicted horrific loss rates for aircraft, and they never anticipated a large, independent air campaign that would precede or even substitute for the jobs traditionally left to ground forces. A sharp dividing line between tactical and strategic air power persisted in military thought up to the 1980s: Independent air campaigns were strategic, and went after things like factories and power plants and seats of government, while tactical operations directly supported troops engaged in combat.
The Gulf War erased that line. The independent air campaign that preceded the ground war destroyed 40 percent of Iraq's tanks and 47 percent of its artillery and killed probably tens of thousands of Iraqi troops. Air Force Historian Richard P. Hallion quotes one Air Force planner who said this was not "preparing the battlefield," it was "destroying the battlefield." Even more important, according to Air Force Gen. Charles Horner, chief air power planner in the Gulf War, was the withering effect that air strikes had on the morale of the remaining Iraqi troops -- who surrendered in droves the minute they had the chance. (Interestingly, time and again experience has shown that while civilian morale is not easily crushed by aerial bombardment, the morale of troops under bombardment frequently breaks.)
The use of air power in Afghanistan has been focused even more directly on enemy forces. The "strategic" targets that have been hit have largely been air defense sites, a necessary first step to any air operation. Beyond that, the overwhelming weight of American air power has been directed against Taliban armor and troops, and against al Qaeda hideouts. It is no mystery why the Taliban crumbled so swiftly: Its army was pinned down and pulverized. The spectacle of B-52s, the quintessential strategic bomber of yore, being called in to provide direct air support against enemy troop positions is striking testimony to the change in thinking and organization that has taken place.
As Bush suggested last week, new technologies such as precision and stealth have certainly been vital in this revolution, as have been the use of unmanned aircraft to locate targets in real time and special forces on the ground equipped with lasers to direct strikes. They permit aircraft to knock out enemy air defenses swiftly and accurately and to attack battlefield targets -- historically the most dangerous environment for aircraft to operate in -- from a safe distance and with great effect, with a single bomb destroying a tank. The real breakthrough has come in applying these new technologies not to the failed theory of strategic collapse, but to where military conflict is always decided: the battlefield.
Stephen Budiansky, a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, is writing a book about the history of air power.
-------- afghanistan
Tora Bora Attack Advances in Tough Fighting
New York Times
December 16, 2001
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/16/international/asia/16STRA.html
TORA BORA, Afghanistan, Dec. 15 - Even as American forces and their Afghan allies close in on Al Qaeda fighters in the mountains here, the forbidding terrain and the stubbornness of some of the foreign followers of Osama bin Laden are making the struggle for Tora Bora the most complex battle of the war.
Unlike the earlier string of victories, the goal is not to capture a city. It is to capture or kill up to 1,000 hardened fighters in one of the country's most rugged regions. Ultimately, it is also to apprehend or kill one of the most elusive of quarries, Mr. bin Laden and his top Al Qaeda lieutenants.
American forces have heard what they believe was Mr. bin Laden giving orders over short-range radio in the Tora Bora area in the last week, a government official said today in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity. He said the voice on the radio was identified through comparisons with Mr. bin Laden's voice from several videotapes. [Page B2.]
As the United States conducts the endgame of the war, its military, along with the British and Afghan allies, clearly has the initiative as well as the overwhelming advantage in firepower, as is clear from the thunderous explosions that reverberate through the hills as American warplanes pound the ridges here.
The American bombs are falling deeper in the mountains now, a sign that groups of Al Qaeda fighters are retreating from ridge to ridge as local Afghan fighters and the American and British fighting with them move to cut them off.
For the first time, Al Qaeda fighters have been taken prisoner, another indication that the foe's resistance is weakening. Anticipating a victory, United States Marines are even building a jail for up to 300 prisoners from Tora Bora at their base south of Kandahar.
But the United States is chasing an array of foes, including some who seem desperate to fight to the end and others who seem equally anxious to flee. The region it is trying to seal also abuts the border with Pakistan, a frontier that has previously been porous and uncontrolled but that the Pakistanis are now striving to police.
Just how unpredictable this battle could be was illustrated today when reporters were told to be on hand for the surrender of 300 Arab and Chechen fighters, a development that would have marked a major breakthrough.
Hours later, a pickup truck of Kalashnikov-wielding fighters and Khan Muhammad, a local Afghan commander, drove down the hill and was besieged by the press. The Arab fighters, he insisted, were prepared to surrender, but the Chechens were determined to fight on.
"The fighting could last a few days more, or it could last a month," he said. "It all depends on whether they want to surrender."
There were also reports that some Qaeda fighters were trying to slip across the nearby border to Parachinar, Pakistan. According to a report from an Arab prisoner that circulated here today and could not not be independently confirmed, some 50 Arabs were already on the way, riding mules.
The difficulties of the mission ahead seem to have been aptly summed up by Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the head of the United States Central Command, who said on Friday: "Steady progress. Very dangerous work. And we have a lot left to do."
Tora Bora is approached on a jarring three-hour drive up a rocky road from Jalalabad. Local Afghan commanders drive up the road each day from their villages south of the city along with Western men masked in Afghan garb or draped in hooded parkas, a largely unsuccessful effort to disguise American and British commandos from the prying eyes of the international news media.
The region, Afghan and American officials say, is the last redoubt for Mr. bin Laden and the hundreds of foreign fighters who fled with him, though nobody can say for certain that he is still there. There are other pockets of resistance in Afghanistan, but none that seems to have such a concentration of Mr. bin Laden's followers.
Tora Bora is a region of mountains, valleys, ravines and man- made caves and tunnels. In defense, or perhaps to let some compatriots escape, Al Qaeda fighters have taken positions on the steep ridges.
"They are high mountains," observed Hajji Abdul Qadir, the governor of the local Nangarhar Province. "You cannot say this will take two or three days."
But as Al Qaeda fighters occupy the ridges, the American commandos have called in airstrikes to blast Mr. bin Laden's troops off the high ground and back into the valleys where the American-backed Afghans and American and British commandos can engage them. American firepower is being used to neutralize Al Qaeda's use of terrain.
Taking full advantage of their air superiority and the lack of sophisticated air defenses, the Americans are using a wide and deadly repertoire: B-52's, B-1's, Navy jets, Predator drones and AC-130 Special Operations gunships.
Last night, the drone of the AC-130 gunship could be heard over the mountains, sending streams of fire at Al Qaeda die-hards and dispersing flares to trick any heat-seeking missile Mr. bin Laden's fighters might have. Then an airstrike seemed to set the very hills on fire, perhaps by hitting a weapons depot.
The destructive potential of the American airstrikes is evident on a devastated ridge on the way to a hilltop command post, now occupied by the local Afghan fighters allied with Washington.
Al Qaeda and other foreign fighters had occupied the ridge and used it to shell the road below. Now it is a ghostly region where the trees are merely splintered fragments, small bits of clothing are spread about like confetti and the metal remains of cluster bombs litter the ground.
Much of the recent success in pushing Al Qaeda fighters back seems attributable to the growing number of American and British Special Operations forces, who have called in airstrikes and readied small teams of commandos to apprehend Al Qaeda leaders.
In addition to American and British troops, three groups of tribal fighters are maneuvering in the valleys and on the hillsides.
They are led by Hajji Zahir, the son of the governor of the province; Hazarat Ali, who is in charge of the province's security; and Muhammad Zaman, the local defense minister.
The officials are moving their forces to isolate pockets of resistance and to advance on Al Qaeda's caves. They also claim to have closed the escape route to Pakistan, but that is impossible to verify. They acknowledge that they have no contact with the Pakistani forces that are supposedly controlling the routes on the other side of the frontier.
"If you look at a detailed map of this terrain, what you find is that rather than being terribly horizontal, the terrain gets to be rather vertical," General Franks said. "While these forces may be moving only one or two kilometers in a given day, that is a substantial distance, based on how much they're moving up or down."
Afghan commanders have also given conflicting estimates of the number of Al Qaeda fighters. On Thursday night, Hajji Qadir projected the number at 400 to 1,000. The next day, an Afghan commander reported that 120 to 180 Arab fighters were cut off. That estimate left unclear whether the estimate of foreign fighters had been revised downward, whether hundreds had been killed or whether many had already fled.
By all accounts, the Arab and Chechen fighters have put up the stiffest resistance. Sayad Razaq, a local Afghan soldier, said foreign fighters were continuing to hold out in the village of Surfi, on a mountain ridge. The village seemed to be the bull's- eye for many of the airstrikes today.
On Friday afternoon, the news media received an indication of how determined Al Qaeda die-hards can be. Halim Shah Qadiri was excitedly relaying the news of a new surrender negotiation through his field radio. A group of Arab and other foreign fighters had decided to surrender unconditionally, he said.
As chief of communications for one of the Afghan bands fighting Al Qaeda, Mr. Qadiri was trying to get the details from fellow commanders deep inside the mountains when gunfire echoed through the valley. As journalists waited eagerly for the details of the victory, a spray of machine-gun fire zipped by overhead, prompting the Afghan fighters and the reporters to scramble behind a mud and timber shack that passes for a command post.
----
Tora Bora al-Qaida Positions Captured
DECEMBER 16, 2001
AP
http://wire.ap.org/?SLUG=AFGHAN%2dFIGHTING
TORA BORA, Afghanistan - Tribal fighters said they took the last al-Qaida positions here Sunday, killing more than 200 fighters and capturing 25 but finding no sign of Osama bin Laden. In the south, three U.S. Marines were injured in an explosion at Kandahar's airport.
Also Sunday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld landed at Bagram airfield in the first visit by a top U.S. government official to Afghanistan since the U.S.-led campaign began. Rumsfeld was to meet the new interim prime minister of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai.
After weeks of fighting and relentless U.S. bombing in the White Mountains of eastern Afghanistan, commanders declared victory in an all-out assault on the al-Qaida fighters loyal to bin Laden.
``This is the last day of al-Qaida in Afghanistan,'' said Mohammed Zaman, the eastern alliance defense chief. ``There is no more need for American bombing. Our men have the situation under control.''
Smiling eastern alliance forces chanted ``Al-Qaida is finished! Al-Qaida is finished!'' U.S. planes continued to circle the area but had not dropped bombs for two hours.
The Tora Bora region was the last major pocket of al-Qaida resistance in the country. Gen. Tommy Franks, the U.S. commander of the war, said Friday that other holdouts include the Shindand area in western Afghanistan, Helmand province northwest of Kandahar, and the Kandahar vicinity itself.
Zaman said he had no information on the whereabouts of bin Laden, who many in these forested mountains believe was with the fighters. U.S. officials said they picked up his voice last week on short-range radio in the area.
A cave where alliance commanders had thought bin Laden might be hiding was the last al-Qaida holdout.
``There were only six people. One was killed by our forces and the others were captured,'' said another alliance commander, Hazrat Ali. ``A few days before today I had information he was here, but now I don't know where he is.''
Zaman said several hundred routed al-Qaida men might be on the run toward the border with Pakistan, only miles south of the caves and tunnels of Tora Bora. He and Ali said their forces were pursuing the fleeing fighters.
``Anyone who paves the way for al-Qaida forces to live in the White Mountains will be given capital punishment,'' Ali said, adding that his fighters were searching the area ``meter by meter'' and would bury the al-Qaida dead Monday.
Meanwhile, four of 13 armed Arabs holed up in a Kandahar hospital escaped early Sunday, apparently with the blessing of their guards, said the hospital's head nurse, Ghulam Mohammed Afghan.
The guards are loyal to tribal leader Mullah Naqibullah, a fierce rival of Agha, the governor. Afghan predicted a battle if Agha's men tried to seal off the hospital.
U.S. Marines have been setting up a prisoner-of-war camp at their new base at Kandahar airport for captured al-Qaida fighters.
Marine Capt. David Romley said three Marines were wounded Sunday, one seriously, when one stepped on a land mine at the airport, where they have been checking for mines and booby traps.
Across Afghanistan, civilians and fighters alike poured into mosques for Eid al-Fitr, Islam's most festive holiday, and mullahs leading their prayers appealed for peace.
The assault in the White Mountains began at midday Sunday, with tribal fighters marching up two parallel valleys to launch an assault from both sides of the mountain ridge where al-Qaida fighters were hiding.
Al-Qaida's only way out was to retreat through dense forest, but B-52s pounded the woods with incendiary bombs Sunday, and flames leaped from the trees. The bombing appeared to stop as the eastern alliance moved up the mountain.
Many of the al-Qaida fighters had claimed they were ready to surrender, but alliance commanders were skeptical when they failed to emerge from the mountains.
``They refused to surrender, so now we must fight,'' Mohammed Aman Khairi said.
There had been several unconfirmed sightings around Tora Bora of bin Laden, chief suspect in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
A U.S. official said in Washington on Saturday that American forces in the area picked up his voice on short-range radio last week. But Afghan commanders knew nothing of the radio transmission.
``The Pentagon has their way of knowing things. I have no new information on Osama,'' said commander Atiqullah Rachan.
Before the assault, eastern alliance fighters emerged from the mountains in surrounding villages, their hair matted with dust, to stack their Kalashnikov rifles outside mud-walled mosques and celebrate Eid al-Fitr, the feast marking the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.
In Kandahar, the Taliban's former stronghold, celebratory gunfire filled the city and pink flares shot through the sky as residents visited relatives with gifts of new turbans, money, clothing and dried fruit. Even gunmen standing guard outside the compound of Gov. Gul Agha sported spotless new shoes.
One group of unaccompanied women and girls, some holding hands, walked down a road in shiny red, embroidered dresses. Under the Taliban, females could face severe punishment for leaving their homes without a male escort.
Many people gathered to pray at the tile- and marble-inlaid Khalqa Sharif Mosque, which houses the mausoleum of Ahmad Shah Durrani, the 18th century founder of Afghanistan, and 500 more prayed at the Eid Mosque in the capital Kabul.
``People of Afghanistan, you are a great nation, but now we must unite and live like brothers, and rebuild our country,'' the mullah, Abdul Jalil, told the crowd.
``I prayed to God to bring peace to our people,'' said eastern alliance commander Haji Qadir, who attended celebrations at a mosque in Jalalabad.
Rumsfeld said U.S. military forces have taken samples from an abandoned al-Qaida training camp southwest of Kandahar near the Marines' Camp Rhino that are being tested for traces of chemical and biological weapons material. Rumsfeld said the discovery was very interesting, but he did not describe what was found.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Associated Press writers Christopher Torchia in Kandahar, Afghanistan and Laura King in Kabul, Afghanistan contributed to this report.
-------- africa
U.S. returning to a nightmare called Somalia
Simon Reeve,
San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, December 16, 2001
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2001/12/16/MN115486.DTL
During the afternoon of Oct. 3, 1993, as the sun blazed over the dusty streets of the ancient city of Mogadishu, 140 elite Army special operations forces soldiers descended from the sky into the lawless capital of Somalia to hunt for two senior warlords fomenting chaos in the east African state.
The mission was supposed to take less than an hour. But by the next morning,
when the group was finally rescued after a ferocious battle, 18 Army Rangers had been killed and more than 70 wounded. At least 500 Somalis were dead and 1, 000 injured. It was the longest sustained firefight involving U.S. forces since the Vietnam War.
Memories of the mission are about to be rekindled with the Dec. 28 release of the Hollywood movie "Black Hawk Down," journalist Mark Bowden's book documenting the affair. The film transforms a military debacle into an uplifting paean to individual heroism, while virtually ignoring the wider ramifications of the battle.
In reality, the Somalia escapade was a disaster, not only for the lives lost on that day, but also for the impression of an American foreign policy that knew only how to cut and run. Such a perception directly fueled the ambitions of Osama bin Laden and the growth of a terrorist organization that was to wreak even greater havoc on Americans in the years to come.
Thousands of American deaths later, the United States looks set to return to Somalia, in part to settle accounts. Identifying Somalia as a terrorist base for bin Laden's al Qaeda and other extremist organizations, U.S. reconnaissance planes last week reportedly began surveying targets from the sky, while military and CIA agents contacted potential allies both inside Somalia and in neighboring Ethiopia.
U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said the purpose of the visits was to "observe, survey possible escape routes, possible sanctuaries" for members of the al Qaeda terrorist network who may attempt to flee Afghanistan.
In addition, senior U.S. and British officials met last week with Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi amid speculation that Kenya would be used as a staging ground for attacks on Somalia.
"People mention Somalia for obvious reasons. It's a country virtually without a government, a country that has a certain al Qaeda presence already," Wolfowitz told a Pentagon news conference Monday.
Somalia, of course, does not have nearly the importance of Afghanistan as a base of terrorist operations. But the two countries have some telling similarities.
Both were left to rot after the United States was done with them. Victorious in its proxy war with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the United States was humiliated when corpses of American soldiers were dragged through the streets of Somalia.
Wracked by tribal conflict -- just as Afghanistan was before the Taliban took over -- Somalia now rivals Afghanistan for the kind of lawless chaos in which groups like bin Laden's thrive. "Somalia has completely collapsed as a functioning state," according to a British Foreign Office report written after Sept. 11.
And with thousands of people being killed as clans battle for control of the country (just as rival ethnic groups fought over Afghanistan), local Islamic militants exploit a ruined nation's desire for security and unity to grasp power -- just as the Taliban did in Afghanistan.
Osama bin Laden saw the opportunity early on. In the early 1990s, the Saudi exile began sending money and weapons to a Somali group called al-Itihaad al- Islamiya (Unity of Islam), followed by men who trained and fought alongside the Somali militants who aimed to turn the country into a radical Islamic republic.
Even before the Mogadishu fiasco, Somalia was a focus of al Qaeda activities. In December 1992, al Qaeda operatives placed a bomb in a hotel in Yemen, where U.S. troops were staying on their way to Somalia as part of then- President George Bush's Operation Rescue Hope humanitarian mission. The bomb exploded just after the soldiers had left on Dec. 29, blowing two Austrian tourists to pieces.
The bin Laden operatives returning to Somalia from Yemen included Mohammed Atef, @cq a top bin Laden lieutenant who was reportedly killed recently in Afghanistan, and Mohamed Sadeek Odeh, @cq one of four men sentenced to life in prison for the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. According to U.S. investigators, the two provided further "military training and assistance to Somali tribes."
Whether bin Laden was actually involved in the 1993 Mogadishu attack is the subject of much dispute. Bin Laden has bragged that Somalia was his "greatest victory. . . . It is true that my companions fought with (deceased Somali warlord Mohamed) Farah Aidid's @cq forces against the U.S. troops in Somalia. .
. . My associates killed the Americans. We are not ashamed of our jihad."
An FBI document, revealed in an indictment against bin Laden in connection with the East African embassy bombings, suggests that at least some of Aidid's men were "trained by al Qaeda (and by trainers trained by al Qaeda)."
But others, especially local Somalis, dismiss bin Laden's claims of direct involvement, insisting, according to one account, "that they never heard of bin Laden until he began boasting about Somalia years later."
What is clear is that bin Laden and his followers felt greatly emboldened by the rout of Americans in Mogadishu.
"The youth were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat -- dragging their corpses and their shameful defeat," bin Laden said later.
After the U.S. withdrawal, he focused even more of his energies on the world's only purported superpower. The devastating assaults on the East African embassies, the destroyer Cole and the horrific events of Sept. 11 were among the results.
Bin Laden also maintained his interest in Somalia. Foreign intelligence operatives working in the country saw more than a dozen al Qaeda Arab fighters at one temporary camp in the mid-1990s.
Furthermore, say U.S. intelligence officials, members of the al-Itihaad organization worked with al Qaeda operatives in planning the 1998 East Africa bombing attacks, which killed 224 people.
The officials claim that al-Itihaad helped al Qaeda establish a militia training camp on Ras Kamboni Island, near the border with Kenya, and built its own near the port of Bosasso @cq in the northeast.
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, these camps were dismantled and their alumni vanished. U.S. intelligence officials believe hundreds of fighters training at Ras Kamboni @cq sailed out into the open sea heading toward the relative safety of Yemeni tribal areas to the north.
While the current Bush administration has placed al-Itihaad on its list of terrorist organizations, some observers warn that the reality is more complex. Al-Itihaad, they say, is also a genuine social movement and has different factions.
"Al-Itihaad operates differently in different parts of Somalia," Ted Dagne of the Congressional Research Service told a Washington, D.C., symposium on terrorism last month. "We should be navigating this very carefully."
But few doubt that the group's power has grown, politically and financially.
Besides expanding its hold on southern Somalia, U.S. intelligence sources say,
al-Itihaad exerts considerable influence over Al Barakaat, @cq a Somali-based business conglomerate and money transfer organization described by U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill as one of the "financiers of terror."
Treasury agents, after the Bush administration accused Al Barakaat of moving funds for al Qaeda, have moved to shut the organization down, raiding branches in Minneapolis, Seattle, Boston and Ohio, investigating two more Al Barakaat offices in Virginia and preventing the firm from operating outside Somalia.
Administration officials also believe that the owner of Al Barakaat, Ahmed Nur Ali Jimale, has been a friend and supporter of Osama bin Laden since the 1980s, when both fought in Afghanistan against Soviet invaders, and that bin Laden provided seed money that helped found Al Barakaat in 1989.
Jimale vehemently denies the claims. "This is all lies," he has said. "We are people who are hard-working and have nothing to do with terrorists."
As its financial wing prospered, at least prior to Sept. 11, so did al- Itihaad's military forces. The group itself boasts of having about 70,000 armed supporters, a claim some observers believe is exaggerated. Also debatable is the continuing involvement of al Qaeda in the group's affairs, which some intelligence agents believe has declined since the U.S. attacks in Afghanistan.
However, as of last summer, at least eight al Qaeda operatives were reported to be in Somalia training militants, according to intelligence estimates.
One report obtained by British intelligence officials suggests that even after Sept. 11, several thousand Somalis were receiving military training in southwestern Somalia under the command of two senior al Qaeda operatives, an Iraqi and an Afghan.
According to opposition groups in Somalia, more al Qaeda forces have been moving to Somalia in the wake of the U.S. attacks in Afghanistan.
"Al Qaeda terrorists who escaped from Afghanistan are already trickling back into Somalia," Hussein Aideed, co-chairman of the opposition Somali Reconciliation and Restoration Council, told a press conference in Ethiopia last week.
While this, too, might be an exaggerated view from local sources who would very much like the West to help extirpate groups like al-Itihaad, the Bush administration appears to take the links seriously. "We have research and data that would definitely point to a connection," said Walter Kansteiner, assistant secretary of state for African affairs,
Even without al Qaeda, some experts believe Somali groups such as al- Itihaad could follow its example and send "sleeper" agents abroad while initiating attacks on U.S. targets in Africa and further afield.
Said one U.S. intelligence source: "I can see five years down the line we will be having the same problem with Somalia that we're now having with Afghanistan. It's precisely the same type of situation."
Simon Reeve, an investigative journalist in London, is the author of the "The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism."
----
Orchestrated chaos in Zimbabwe
Urs Kreuter
December 16, 2001
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20011216-12235597.htm
Following the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, U.S. policymakers have been paying increasing attention to destabilizing influences around the world. Greater interest is being shown in developments in less prominent countries, such as Zimbabwe, and legislative action is being proposed to counteract destruction by aging and despotic leaders whose actions affect neighboring countries.
The "Zimbabwe Democratic and Economic Recovery Act of 2001" unanimously passed the Senate on Aug. 1 and gained increasing support in the House despite the attempts of a Washington-based lobbying team hired by President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe for $7 million to derail it. The act passed the House in a 396-to-11 vote on Dec. 4 with full support of the Congressional Black Caucus.
The bill reflects growing concern over the collapse of law and order and the blatant transgression of human rights in Zimbabwe. If violence continues and free and fair presidential elections are not held early next year as scheduled, the act would authorize the U.S. government to impose travel restrictions and to freeze the external accounts of those responsible for the breakdown of the rule of law and for politically motivated violence.
Conversely, if the country's ruling party, ZANU-PF, creates conditions for fair elections and it introduces an equitable and transparent land reform program, the act would provide $26 million for land purchases, and it would promote investment and reduce some of Zimbabwe's debt.
Economic and government mismanagement have led the once popular Mr. Mugabe and ZANU-PF increasingly to lose voter support. Seventy-five percent of the population now lives in poverty and the country is on the brink of famine. The economic decay has been driven partly by Zimbabwe's military support for the Congo governments' war against rebel groups. This support is being provided in exchange for vast mineral and timber concessions to Zimbabwe's political and military leaders, and has depleted Zimbabwe's foreign currency reserves and jeopardized critical imports, especially fuel and food.
To retain power, Mr. Mugabe tried to install himself as lifelong president last year but his ambitions were thwarted in a constitutional referendum. Subsequently, the loss of support for the ruling party resulted in the opposition Movement for Democratic Reform (MDC) winning 57 out of 120 seats in parliamentary elections, despite widespread voter intimidation by ZANU-PF. In his continuing efforts to retain power, Mr. Mugabe has obtained economic support and arms from Col. Moammar Gadhafi of Libya in exchange for numerous properties in Zimbabwe, including a 32-room "Operations Headquarters." Following Col. Gadhafi's announcement at the June meeting of the Organization of African Unity that "all 'whites' should be driven off the land in Zimbabwe and South Africa," there has been an influx of Libyans into Zimbabwe.
The extent of the ZANU PF's violent intimidation became clear on Oct. 30 when a U.S. District Court ruled that ZANU-PF is liable for murdering and torturing its political opponents in the runup to elections. The five Zimbabwean plaintiffs in the case had requested a hearing in the U.S. to seek justice for their murdered relatives. ZANU-PF has also been accused of attempting to assassinate the leader of the opposition party and of bombing the MDC offices.
The commercial agricultural sector has come under increasing attack because of ZANU-PF's contention that the predominantly white farming community is financing the opposition. Government-sponsored occupations of farms started ostensibly to provide land for landless black people even though thousands of acres of land purchased under internationally sponsored "resettlement" programs remain unoccupied. Land seizures and harassment of farmers and their employees have continued despite the Abuja (Nigeria) accord in early September in which the Zimbabwe government agreed to stop land occupations. Last week ZANU-PF banned about 25 percent of Zimbabwe's 4,000 commercial farmers from planting crops and ordered them to leave their homes within three months.
Initially, the Zimbabwe Supreme Court ruled these land seizures to be unconstitutional. Mr. Mugabe recently replaced the chief justice of this court, and last week it ruled that the government should continue to "redistribute" white farms to black Zimbabweans. This ruling has serious consequences for the country. Apart from being the bedrock of Zimbabwe's economy, the commercial agricultural sector employs about 320,000 people, who together with their families number almost 2 million. Zimbabwe is on the brink of famine because of ZANU-PF's policy of land seizures and planting restrictions and because of the depletion of foreign currency.
Since Zimbabwe is centrally located in southern Africa, increasing chaos within its borders is affecting the region as a whole. Botswana's President Festus Mogae recently criticized Mr. Mugabe and his government for failing to deal with land resettlement peacefully, and for dragging the entire southern Africa economy down with his violent approach. One effect is the 40 percent drop in value of the South African currency since June.
To promote peace and stability in southern Africa, it is important that the U.S. send a clear message to Mr. Mugabe and ZANU-PF that America will not tolerate violent suppression of the rights of Zimbabweans. The Zimbabwe Democratic and Economic Recovery Act will provide the kind of signal needed.
Urs P. Kreuter is an adjunct fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a professor at Texas A&M University and grew up in Zimbabwe.
-------- asia
U.S. Reviews Bans in Central Asia
Rumsfeld Expects End to Sanctions on Azerbaijan, Armenia
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 16, 2001; Page A26
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49563-2001Dec15?language=printer
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Dec. 15 -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told the presidents of Azerbaijan and Armenia today that he expected the United States to lift sanctions against them next week, paving the way for the resumption of U.S. military ties.
Rumsfeld's comments came during a whirlwind, one-day tour of three former Soviet republics designed to bolster relations with allies in the war against terrorism.
Congress enacted sanctions against Azerbaijan prohibiting military relations between the two countries in 1992, under intense lobbying by Armenian Americans angry about Azerbaijan's embargo against neighboring Armenia. At the time the two countries were engaged in a fierce conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave populated by ethnic Armenians, who are Christians, but located in Azerbaijan, which is predominantly Muslim. Successive U.S. administrations have imposed sanctions on Armenia, as well.
In his first stop today in Baku, the Azerbaijani capital on the Caspian Sea, Rumsfeld told President Heydar Aliyev that he had hoped to announce the sanctions had already been lifted. He said he now expected that to happen next week. He delivered the same message in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, to President Robert Kocharian.
The Bush administration began pushing hard to have the sanctions waived after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when Armenia and Azerbaijan quickly granted overflight rights to U.S. warplanes involved in the fighting in Afghanistan and offered other military assistance.
"Both countries recognize, since Sept. 11, the threat of terrorism, the changed circumstance," Rumsfeld said. "They also believe that closer military ties with the U.S. will allow them to modernize their militaries."
Rumsfeld's day ended in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, where President Eduard Shevardnadze endorsed President Bush's decision to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in six months. Bush informed Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday of his intention to withdraw so that his administration can pursue its ambitious program for testing and deploying new forms of ballistic missile defenses, which the treaty prohibits.
"Six months ago, I publicly expressed my support and my positive attitude toward the missile defense initiative," Shevardnadze said. "Although President Putin expressed his dissatisfaction with the unilateral decision of the United States to withdraw, he then went on and spoke about . . . further improvement of the relationship between the United States and Russia."
Rumsfeld plans to visit U.S. troops in Central Asia on Sunday before flying to Brussels for three days of talks at NATO headquarters. Those talks will include a session with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov about how to begin fashioning a new security relationship without the ABM Treaty as its cornerstone.
Azerbaijan is a country clearly seen by the Bush administration as a potential ally and major new source of oil outside the Middle East. In Baku, Rumsfeld assured Aliyev and Azerbaijani Defense Minister Safar Abiyev that agreement had been reached in Congress to waive the nine-year-old sanctions.
"The sooner . . . you do it, the better it is," President Aliyev told Rumsfeld during a joint news conference. "Everything is in your hands. We are just waiting for you. Hopefully it will be waived very soon."
The sanctions contained in the 1992 Freedom Support Act ban military assistance to Azerbaijan until the president certifies that the country has ceased offensive operations and blockades in Nagorno-Karabakh. While the law applies only to Azerbaijan, the same sanctions have been placed as a matter of policy on Armenia.
The waiver would authorize the president to lift the sanctions if he can certify to Congress that military cooperation with Azerbaijan is needed to fight the war on terrorism and secure borders in the region. The waiver could not continue if U.S. military assistance was used to upset the Nagorno-Karabakh peace process or to attack Armenia. Officials said identical terms would apply to Armenia as a condition of renewed military ties with Washington.
Nagorno-Karabakh, backed by Armenia, waged a 1988-1994 war in which Armenian forces won control of the area and some adjacent regions of Azerbaijan. The conflict has led to the deaths of more than 30,000 people and driven 1 million from their homes. Sporadic killing continues despite a cease-fire.
Azerbaijanis are adamant that the disputed region remain part of their country. Armenians insist that the region is a historic part of Armenia and became part of Azerbaijan when Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin redrew the boundaries in the 1920s.
-------- biological weapons
Capitol Hill Anthrax Matches Army's Stocks
5 Labs Can Trace Spores to Ft. Detrick
By Rick Weiss and Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 16, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49502-2001Dec15.html
Genetic fingerprinting studies indicate that the anthrax spores mailed to Capitol Hill are identical to stocks of the deadly bacteria maintained by the U.S. Army since 1980, according to scientists familiar with the most recent tests.
Although many laboratories possess the Ames strain of anthrax involved in this fall's bioterrorist attacks, only five laboratories so far have been found to have spores with perfect genetic matches to those in the Senate letters, the scientists said. And all those labs can trace back their samples to a single U.S. military source: the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md.
"That means the original source [of the terrorist material] had to have been USAMRIID," said one of the scientists.
Those matching samples are at Fort Detrick; the Dugway Proving Ground military research facility in Utah; a British military lab called Porton Down; and microbial depositories at Louisiana State University (LSU) and Northern Arizona University. Northern Arizona University received its sample from LSU, which received its sample from Porton Down. Dugway and Porton Down got their samples directly from USAMRIID.
In another development yesterday, government health officials said they planned to recommend that about 3,000 people who were exposed to anthrax, including hundreds of Washington postal and Capitol Hill workers, be offered an experimental vaccine as a precaution in case antibiotic treatment alone failed to protect them from getting sick.
The FBI's investigation into the anthrax attacks is increasingly focusing on whether U.S. government bioweapons research programs, including one conducted by the CIA, may have been the source of deadly anthrax powder sent through the mail, according to sources with knowledge of the probe. The results of the genetic tests strengthen that possibility. The FBI is focusing on a contractor that worked with the CIA, one source said.
But it remains unknown which lab may have lost control of the material that apparently ended up in terrorist hands. One of the two scientists familiar with the genetic testing, who has been advising the government on the anthrax scare, said investigators still know little about security at Porton Down, though they have no reason to suppose it has been inadequate. Of the domestic labs, Dugway has attracted the most attention from the FBI, he said.
Dugway is also the only facility known in recent years to have processed anthrax spores into the powdery form that is most easily inhaled.
Scientists have known for some time that bacteria used in the terrorist attacks belong to the Ames strain, a variant of the anthrax bacterium, Bacillus anthracis, that was first isolated from a cow in Iowa and has been under study by military scientists for decades. But the Ames strain comes in various subtypes that can be distinguished from one another by detailed tests on the microbe's genes.
The genetic fingerprinting finding was made by a research team led by geneticist Paul Keim at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, which has been comparing the Ames strain bacteria found in the Senate letters to other Ames strain samples retrieved from nature and from various university and government laboratories.
"That's good detective work in the sense of determining the origins; this will narrow the search for the people who had access to the strain," said Jennie Hunter-Cevera, a microbiologist and president of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute.
Other experts were cautious, noting that it is possible that the exact subtype of the Ames strain could have originated elsewhere -- perhaps even isolated from animals or soil in the wild.
"It's an important finding but it's not one of those things that says, 'Aha!' " said Richard Spertzel, a former director of the U.N. biological weapons team in Iraq.
The scientists are still planning to do genetic testing on anthrax bacteria from the Defense Research Establishment Suffield, a Canadian military research facility, the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, a government contractor doing research on anthrax vaccines. Those are the only other facilities known to have received samples from USAMRIID.
The researchers also plan to test samples obtained from nature, and from other university labs known to have the Ames strain to see if any others match. But of the few such samples that have been tested so far none has matched the spores used by the terrorists. In addition, the researchers want to examine other characteristics of the samples, such as proteins, carbohydrates and other substances in the material.
"If there's also a telltale piece or trace of nutrients or chemicals that show the process, that's even better. You start adding the pieces and go from tentative to confirmative," Hunter-Cevera said.
The CIA's biowarfare program, which was designed to find ways to defend against bioterrorists, involved the use of small amounts of Ames strain, an agency spokesman said yesterday. The CIA declined to say where its Ames strain material came from. The spokesman said, however, that the CIA's anthrax was not milled into the volatile power form found in the letters and that none of it is missing.
Nevertheless, the FBI has turned its attention to learning more about the CIA's work with anthrax, which investigators were told about by the agency within the past few weeks, government officials said. The CIA has tried to develop defenses against a vaccine-resistant strain of anthrax reportedly developed by the Russians several years ago.
While the CIA has had small amounts of Ames strain anthrax in its labs to "compare and contrast with other strains," a spokesman said, the agency did not "grow, create or produce the Ames strain." The anthrax contained in the letters under investigation "absolutely did not" come from CIA labs, the spokesman said.
He also said that the FBI is fully aware of the CIA's work with anthrax and suggested investigators were satisfied with the information they had been provided. Law enforcement sources, however, said the FBI remains extremely interested in the CIA's work with anthrax, with one official calling it the best lead they have at this point. The sources said FBI investigators do not yet know much about the CIA program.
Both law enforcement and intelligence officials said the CIA is cooperating with the FBI probe.
Investigators are considering a wide range of possible motives for the anthrax attacks, including vengeance of some sort, profiteering by someone involved in the anthrax cleanup business, or perhaps an effort by someone to cast blame on Iraq, which has an extensive bioweapons arsenal. Whoever sent the letters could have a strong scientific background, officials said, but they also believe the material could have been stolen and mailed by someone without such expertise.
A law enforcement source said the FBI did not initially include the CIA on its list of labs working with anthrax because the agency was not among 91 labs registered with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to transfer anthrax specimens. But as investigators interviewed workers at those known labs, they learned of the CIA's work, and in the past few weeks posed questions about it to the agency.
CIA scientists worked with other government agencies and outside contractors in the defensive biowarfare program, the agency spokesman said. The agency said most of its defensive work involves simulants, not active biological agents.
"Everything we have done is appropriate and necessary and consistent with our treaty obligations," he said, adding that congressional oversight committees, along with the National Security Council staff, has been kept abreast of the CIA lab work. "One of our missions is to learn about potential biological warfare threats," he said, adding that research can involve "anthrax and other biological agents."
Staff writer Joby Warrick contributed to this report.
-------- britain
Allied rifts fuels fears on British troops' mission
Gaby Hinsliff, Laeken and Kamal Ahmed
Sunday December 16, 2001
The Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1501,619550,00.html
The military and diplomatic mission to secure Afghanistan and begin planning for the 'wider war' against terrorism looked increasingly precarious last night after America and Britain appeared to be odds over the way forward.
Tony Blair signalled last night that the full deployment of British-led peace-keeping troops in Afghanistan could be delayed as he admitted that the mission would be 'tricky and difficult'. American backing for the force is still being hammered out.
The stabilisation force was expected to be in place by Saturday, when power is formally transferred to the interim government in Kabul, to prevent an upsurge of violence at a potentially explosive time.
But while the UK has troops on 48-hour standby for the mission, with an advance guard of Royal Marines likely to begin moving in early this week, British sources said other nations making up the international force may not be ready by then.
Under the latest scenario the British could now lead a 'symbolic' military presence in Kabul by next weekend, with the rest of up to 4,000 troops offered to the coalition being deployed later this month.
Downing Street has been working frantically to secure guarantees from the Americans of military protection for the peace-keeping troops, who are likely to be natural targets for disaffected Afghan warlords. Officials said that the US attitude was now the main stumbling block.
Senior government sources have also revealed that the next stages of the war, phases two and three, could lead to a significant divergence between Washington and London. America is planning military action against three targets - Somalia, Yemen and Sudan. Although the source said that the British Government was relaxed about the developments, he said there was growing concern over plans to target Iraq during the third phase.
Military action would threaten the international coalition against terrorism, the source said. He also indicated that Bush was taking a more unilateralist position as the war against terrorism progressed.
Blair said yesterday that he was confident that the military question-marks hanging over the mission would be resolved. 'It is very clear we need in this situation to have a unified and strong coalition, we need the mandate of the United Nations, and we need the agreement of people locally in Afghanistan,' Blair said at the close of the European Union summit in Laeken, near Brussels.
'We will achieve all those things, but there are details that need to be bolted down. Before we went into military action in Afghanistan several weeks passed. When you are sending your troops into battle, or into what is on any basis a tricky and difficult peacekeeping operation, it would not be responsible for us to do that without making sure our troops are protected.'
Although the Prime Minister has not spoken personally to George Bush this weekend, officials in Brussels spent much of their time setting up phone calls to Washington. Blair also discussed the peacekeeping mission with Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and France's President Jacques Chirac.
The fact that the Americans sent representatives to yesterday's peace-keeping conference in London is seen as a hopeful sign. Downing Street has made clear that troops will only be committed when their safety is assured.
'We are not going to go in and let people take pot-shots at us,' said one Minister.
'We are working with that date (22 December) in the front of our minds and we will do what we can. Whether they could be deployed in time to meet that deadline we don't know, but there is no question of deploying the whole force at that point,' said one official source. 'It will effectively build up after that.'
Major-General John McColl, general officer commanding the 3rd Division, was sent to Bagram yesterday to hold talks with Afghan warlords whose co-operation will be vital. He is due to return late tonight to brief Downing Street on the degree of resistance, if any, that can be expected.
Troops, including up to 300 Royal Marines, could then begin moving in early next week. Britain is likely to impose a time limit to avoid an open-ended commitment to the region that would put further strain on the overstretched Ministry of Defence.
-------- chemical weapons
Chemical Plants Are Feared as Targets
Views Differ on Ways To Avert Catastrophe
By James V. Grimaldi and Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 16, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47114-2001Dec15.html
The out-of-town pilot who landed at the Copperhill, Tenn., airport called himself "Mo" and asked a lot of questions. He was particularly interested in a chemical plant he had just flown over: What kind of chemicals are in those massive storage tanks?
Danny Whitener, a salvage-car dealer, said he remembers that day in March as clearly as he remembers the pilot's face. Today, he believes -- and has told the FBI -- that the man was Mohamed Atta, the suspected ringleader of the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center.
Whitener, 48, said he told the pilot that the tanks were empty. But Whitener was dead wrong. In fact, as much as 250 tons of sulfur dioxide remained in the tanks of the Intertrade Holdings specialty chemical plant. If those chemicals had been released, as many as 60,000 people who live within reach of the ensuing vapor cloud could have faced death or serious injury, according to the plant's worst-case estimate.
"Lord have mercy, once you drive a plane into it, I don't know anything in the world that could sustain that!" said Jim Hedrick, co-owner of Growth Management Services Inc., which owns and manages the plant.
Whether Atta was actually in eastern Tennessee -- the FBI said it has received two reports that he was but hasn't confirmed them -- may never be known, but the potential for catastrophe remains.
Since Sept. 11, federal officials have quietly warned the chemical industry that terrorist-launched attacks could turn hazardous-materials plants into weapons of mass destruction.
District officials were so concerned about the threat that, six weeks after the September attacks, they quickly substituted a safer chemical for the deadly chlorine gas stored in 90-ton rail cars at the Blue Plains Wastewater Treatment Plant. A rupture of just one rail car could have put 1.7 million people at risk in the Washington area.
At least 123 plants each keep amounts of toxic chemicals that, if released, could form deadly vapor clouds that would put more than 1 million people in danger, according to an Environmental Protection Agency analysis. More than 700 plants could put at least 100,000 people at risk, and more than 3,000 facilities have at least 10,000 people nearby.
Yet there is no federal counterterrorism security standard for chemical plants or refineries. And there is no way to assure citizens that chemical and oil companies are taking adequate precautions. Instead, the EPA is counting on the industry to take the necessary precautions voluntarily, no matter the cost.
"Certainly, the industry has a very powerful incentive to do the right thing," said Bob Bostock, assistant EPA administrator for homeland security. "It ought to be their worst nightmare that their facility would be target of a terrorist act because they did not meet their responsibility to the community."
The American Chemistry Council, an Arlington-based trade group that represents firms such as Dow Chemical Co., E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Co. and ExxonMobil Corp., said its members have increased security and stepped up employee background checks since Sept. 11. "Our industry has gotten the message and is working hard to make sure that our facilities are safer than ever before," said Fred Webber, the council's president.
But labor union officials, citizen groups and conservationists say that the changes are superficial and inconsistent and leave plants vulnerable to attack, particularly thousands of smaller and medium-sized plants.
"The line was that voluntary initiatives were enough," said Paul Orum, coordinator of the Working Group on Community Right-to-Know. "The line I heard was that a worst-case release or explosion was so unlikely that it wasn't worth planning for. After Sept. 11, it's clear that it is."
The Justice Department in 2000 was supposed to have produced a report about the vulnerability of plants and transported chemicals; a watered-down version is more than a year overdue. A Justice Department official blamed the delays on funding disputes.
Still, in assessing the general terrorist risk to plants, the Justice Department determined last year that the threat was "both real and credible" and could be more serious than attacks on nuclear power plants, which undergo regular security assessments by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
"The ubiquitousness of industrial facilities possessing toxic chemicals and their proximity to population centers also make them attractive targets," the Justice Department concluded.
The FBI was so concerned about chemical plants in the aftermath of Sept. 11 that the facilities were among the first to be shown lists of suspected terrorists, government and industry officials said. One senior EPA official said he remains concerned that members of "sleeper" terrorist cells might be working in chemical plants.
A review of selected EPA documents describes dozens of deadly possibilities:
• A suburban California chemical plant routinely loads chlorine into 90-ton railroad cars that, if ruptured, could poison more than 4 million people in Orange and Los Angeles counties, depending on wind speed, direction and the ambient temperature.
• A Philadelphia refinery keeps 400,000 pounds of hydrogen fluoride that could asphyxiate nearly 4 million nearby residents.
• A South Kearny, N.J., chemical company's 180,000 pounds of chlorine or sulfur dioxide could form a cloud that could threaten 12 million people.
• The West Virginia sister plant of the infamous Union Carbide Corp. factory in Bhopal, India, keeps up to 200,000 pounds of methyl isocyanate that could emit a toxic fog over 60,000 people near Charleston.
• The Atofina Chemicals Inc. plant outside Detroit projects that a rupture of one of its 90-ton rail cars of chlorine could endanger 3 million people.
Required by the EPA to report these worst-case scenarios to the government, the companies say current safety practices make a catastrophe unlikely. But while a post-Sept. 11 presentation by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to defense, intelligence, law enforcement and industry officials agreed, it also warned that "terrorists can make the 'unlikely' happen."
The American Chemistry Council said many plants have increased worker identification checks, hired additional guards and fortified perimeter security since Sept. 11. The council recently published voluntary site-security guidelines.
Since the September attacks, the EPA has convened a series of closed-door meetings and seminars with industry leaders, urging them to fortify their plants. But the agency is evaluating whether its enforcement powers cover plant security. The agency said it has made no effort to check whether plants have made the voluntary security improvements that are claimed.
"There is quite a bit of work to do," said Jim Mackris, chief of the EPA's Chemical Emergency Preparedness and Prevention Office. But there are limits on the EPA, he added, and much depends on the companies and their concerns about civil and criminal liability, insurance costs and public relations.
"If you blow up, you probably are going to lose some customers, going to lose some workers and going to lose some reputation," Mackris said.
'The Wake-Up Call'
Evidence of al Qaeda's interest in chemical attacks is well known -- copies of U.S. chemical trade publications were found in an Osama bin Laden hideout last week.
But al Qaeda terrorists are not alone in considering attacks on chemical plants and refineries. Such plots have involved anti-government militia members in the United States and Chechen rebels in Russia.
Two years ago, the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested two alleged militia members over a plot to blow up in Elk Grove, Calif., two 12 million-gallon liquid propane tanks and four 60,000-gallon high-pressure propane tanks, located about one mile from a residential subdivision in suburban Sacramento.
"To me, that should have been the wake-up call to the industry," Assistant U.S. Attorney Jodi Rafkin said.
A 1998 report by the Chemical Manufacturers Association, the American Chemistry Council's predecessor, acknowledged the threat. "Put in the right place, bombs can deliver the equivalent destructive power of a weapon of mass destruction," the study concluded.
A Texas A&M University study released in October documented 16,060 sudden, dangerous chemical releases in 1998 that caused 61 deaths and 4,002 injuries. "From the point of view of the terrorist, any chemical is a target," said Sam Mannan, the study's lead researcher.
In Louisiana, EPA reports from 50 companies documented 32 spills, fires, explosions and toxic gas releases between 1993 and 2000. The state in 1999 averaged 1,831 pounds of released toxic chemicals for each industry employee, nearly five times the national average.
The Louisiana Chemical Association, the chemical plants' trade organization, said in a statement that "security has been heightened" at the sites since Sept. 11, but it did not describe the new measures "for obvious reasons."
'Big Vulnerabilities'
For more than 1 1/2 years, the EPA and other federal agencies have employed a variety of methods to encourage, goad, warn and prod chemical plants to bolster security.
A February 2000 EPA bulletin warned about "today's increased concern about terrorism and sabotage" and urged "all companies, big and small," to have "some measure of site security in place to minimize crime and to protect company assets."
At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, chem/bio national security program manager Ronald Koopman said he has repeatedly warned companies that they were unprepared for terrorist attacks.
"We would say, 'We see these big vulnerabilities and they make us nervous,' " Koopman said. "And they would say back to us, 'What's the real threat?' And we would say, 'We don't know.' The vulnerabilities are much more dangerous now. . . . It has scared me for some time."
A report published in 1999 by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found serious shortcomings at more than two dozen plants in two communities, which they did not name but which sources said were Las Vegas and the Kanawha Valley in West Virginia.
"Security at chemical plants ranged from fair to very poor," the agency found. "Most security gaps were the result of complacency and lack of awareness of the threat."
Plant security officials were "very pessimistic about their ability to deter sabotage by employees, yet none of them had implemented simple background checks for key employees such as chemical process operators," the report said.
Security around loading docks, ship docks, trains and trucks ranged from "poor to non-existent," the report said. Chemical barge terminals along rivers were freely accessible, and rail and truck links "had no security beyond staging areas."
Meanwhile, "railcars containing cyanide compounds, flammable liquid pesticides, liquefied petroleum gases, chlorine, acids and butadiene were parked alongside residential areas," the report said.
The American Chemistry Council criticized the report for discussing only two communities, saying that they were "not representative of the rest of the country or of the entire chemical industry."
Justice Department Inertia
Despite its stated concern for safety, the industry strongly opposes recently introduced legislation requiring plants to assess the risks of attacks and to propose remedies.
"Additional regulations, stronger enforcement -- that isn't going to do the trick," the council's Webber said. "What you need is the industry stepping up on its own, preventing the worst from happening."
With the goal of preventing terrorist attacks, the industry since Sept. 11 has prodded the EPA and other federal agencies to remove from the Internet data on hazardous materials and chemical plant vulnerabilities.
The trade-off between plant security and the public's right to know about risks to neighborhoods first surfaced in 1999, when Congress agreed to restrict the Internet availability of the EPA's "worst-case scenarios" for individual plants.
In return, lawmakers required the Justice Department to prepare a report assessing the plants' vulnerability "to criminal and terrorist activity." An interim report was to be completed in a year.
To date, no report has been produced. The problem is funding. The study was supposed to cost $500,000, to be paid for from existing funds. Last year, however, Justice Department officials said a full report would cost $7 million, requiring a separate appropriation. Congress in late 2000 appropriated $600,000 for a scaled-back study that would merely develop "a methodology" for assessing plant vulnerability. The interim report is promised by Dec. 21.
Community right-to-know advocates say the combination of Justice Department inertia and the new restrictions on public information take the pressure off industry.
"Part of the reason" security improved, said Stuart Greenberg, of the Cleveland-based Environmental Health Watch, "was that they didn't want to be in the newspaper as the 'top ten' this or that."
'Inherent Safety'
Since Sept. 11, plants and refineries have increased ID checks, tightened access, hired more security guards, replaced broken fences and cameras, reduced inventories of hazardous chemicals and enlisted the help of local police departments.
"We started looking at ourselves as a target, probably for the first time," said Jeff Jakonczuk, environmental health and safety manager at General Chemical Corp. in Richmond, Calif. "We realized that even though we had security practices in place, they didn't address terrorism very well."
But "the kinds of security changes that have been made are superficial," said Rick Engler of the New Jersey Work Environment Council, a watchdog group representing more than 50 union locals.
Many critics warn that the recently tightened security fails to address the issue of "inherent safety" -- changing processes or substituting chemicals to minimize the use of dangerous substances.
Proponents of inherent safety say that it is the best way to avert catastrophes.
"The week after September 11th, we had a meeting on plant security," said Greenberg in Cleveland. "We had a big regional wastewater treatment plant, and we said, 'Isn't it great, they don't have to worry because they switched from chlorine to sodium hypochlorite [bleach] to purify their water?" The District's Blue Plains Wastewater Treatment Plant made the same switch.
Northern California's Contra Costa County, with 45 large refineries and chemical plants, has an ordinance requiring chemical companies to research inherent safety processes and to explain to local officials when they decide not to use them. Without an enforcement mechanism in place, however, the ordinance's effect is in dispute. A recent local study documented 25 major accidents in the county in 1999 and 2000, resulting in four worker deaths and 16 injuries.
Proponents also say that inherent safety provides a permanent solution, while beefed-up security can be temporary.
For example, at the East Coast's largest refinery, Phillips Petroleum Co.'s Bayway Refinery in Linden, N.J., the U.S. Coast Guard, after the Sept. 11 attacks, refused to renew the waiver of a safety regulation requiring one supervisor to be on the dock for every ship unloading dangerous chemicals. The reason was "national security," said Coast Guard congressional liaison Cmdr. Karl Schultz in a letter to Rep. Mike Ferguson (R-N.J.), Linden's congressman.
But Coast Guard Rear Adm. Richard Bennis, the port captain of New York and New Jersey, renewed the waiver after several additional security measures were implemented. Bayway Refinery spokesman Mike Karlovich said security has been heightened to protect the refinery and docks, and he blamed the Teamsters union for exaggerating the threats "to try and scare our neighbors" to further "their labor agenda."
Curt E. Greder, president of Teamsters Local No. 877 in Linden, said companies have lost an opportunity. "We're angry, we're nervous, just like every other American," said Greder, a refinery employee. "We work inside a bomb. Right now, it is not the greatest place to work."
Database editor Sarah Cohen and researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.
-------- china
INTERNATIONAL
China, in Harsh Crackdown, Executes Muslim Separatists
New York Times
December 16, 2001
By CRAIG S. SMITH
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/16/international/asia/16CHIN.html?pagewanted=all
HOTAN, China - A crowd gathered in a sports stadium beneath a blue morning sky here in October to watch court officials sentence a man to death, a scene that has been played out hundreds of times across China this year as part of the Communist Party's latest drive against crime.
But this rally was different. The man, Metrozi Mettohti, 34, was given the death penalty for trying to "split the country" and for storing weapons as part of a persistent and occasionally violent separatist movement among China's Uighurs, the Turkic- speaking ethnic group of nine million people, most of them Muslims, concentrated along the country's far western border.
Six other men were given jail terms of up to 12 years that day for separatist activities, said local residents and activists abroad. According to one account, Mr. Mettohti shouted "Long live Eastern Turkestan!" - the name of the country separatists would like to create - before being gagged.
After the rally, local people say, he was put in the back of a truck, driven to a village outside of town and shot in the back of the head. The execution could not be officially verified.
The fragile, fertile strip between China's rugged western mountains and its vast western desert is the only place in the country where people are regularly put to death for political offenses. The country's current anticrime drive, coupled with a renewed focus on Islamic militancy in the wake of the American-led war on terrorism, has only increased the pace of the executions, Uighurs say.
"The government gives very little information about the people who are executed, and news of executions isn't published outside the places where they occur," said a young Uighur man in Hotan, speaking in the privacy of a car in a region where most everyone is jittery when talking to outsiders.
"Have you heard of `hazat?' " he said, using the Uighur word for jihad, or Islamic holy war. But he was startled when he saw the word written in a reporter's notebook and insisted that his cellphone number be torn from the same page.
Then he thought better of discussing politics at all, and with good reason. His brother had been released just days earlier after nearly a decade in jail for publishing separatist tracts. "The secret police are everywhere," the young man said. "You never know who they are."
Most of the Uighurs condemned to death here are charged with murder or with otherwise causing deaths, but some, like Mr. Mettohti, are being executed for lesser transgressions.
The Chinese government says the executions are meant to keep the separatist threat in check, arguing that Beijing is battling Islamic terrorists not unlike those the United States is fighting in Afghanistan, just a few hundred miles away.
But Uighurs say that the number of executions is incommensurate with the threat posed by separatists and that many innocent people have been swept up in the crackdown. Some of those charged with separatism are simply frustrated young men demanding their rights, they say, adding that the war against terrorism war has given Beijing the political cover to pursue policies that are meant to erode their cultural identity.
At least 25 Uighurs have been executed this year and scores more are waiting on death row, say people who track these executions in the local news media. They say the number is probably much higher because the government in August stopped publicizing most of the executions, which Uighurs say are part of a larger effort to suppress legitimate dissent and accelerate the ethnic group's assimilation into the country's larger Han Chinese population.
This sparsely populated area's oases once watered camels and fortified travelers with raisins, mutton and bread while they paused between mountains and desert on the fabled Silk Road. The Uighurs' local economy is still made up of such stuff.
Though called the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region today, its autonomy is largely symbolic because all major policy decisions are made by the Communist Party and almost all of the region's senior party posts are held by ethnic Chinese. Though Uighurs accounted for more than 90 percent of the region's population when the party came to power in 1949, they account for less than half now.
Hopes for an independent homeland increased after the breakup of the Soviet Union, when a cluster of new, independent Turkic countries appeared on China's western border. But a quick Chinese crackdown dashed those hopes. By the late 1990's, the separatist movement had turned increasingly violent, culminating in a series of bombings and clashes with the police in 1996 and 1997.
The Uighurs are at the eastern end of a swath of Turkic-speaking Central Asia that stretches from the Bosporus to the western edge of the Mongolian steppes and includes 120 million people.
For centuries, the area was ruled by various khans until the Qing dynasty took control here in the mid- 18th century. The Qing court consolidated its hold on the region in the mid-19th century with the help of China's legendary General Zuo Zongtang (better known in the West as General Tso, for whom a popular chicken dish is named). He renamed the area Xinjiang, or New Territory.
Today, Xinjiang is China's largest province, accounting for one-sixth of the country's land and much of its valuable natural resources, most notably oil.
Despite centuries of Chinese rule, though, the Uighurs have maintained a vibrant culture, with writers and musicians continuing to produce popular works - some now banned by the government - in the Turkic language.
They re-established contact with the Muslim world in the 1980's as the country opened up again. Some Uighurs were allowed to travel to Mecca for the hajj, Islam's annual pilgrimage, and many young Uighurs who made the trip brought back a renewed sense of their religious and cultural identity.
How many Uighur separatists are operating in Xinjiang today is impossible to estimate. China says several hundred Uighurs have received training from the Afghan Taliban, and several Uighurs are among the Taliban fighters who have been captured in Afghanistan in the last few weeks. But the number of serious separatists inside China is still believed to be small.
"This is mostly social and civil unrest by disorganized, disgruntled, fairly impulsive young men, not a widespread movement," said Dru C. Gladney, a professor of Asian studies at the University of Hawaii who follows developments in Xinjiang.
The unrest of the late 1990's resulted in a surge of executions. Amnesty International reported that at least 190 people, an average of nearly two a week, were put to death in Xinjiang from January 1997 to April 1999.
Several of the executions this year have taken place in Yili, known as Yining in Chinese, where a Uighur demonstration protesting China's restrictive policies erupted into a riot in February 1997. At least nine people died in the melee, scores of Uighurs were arrested and many of them were sentenced to death or long prison terms.
As recently as Oct. 15, two Uighurs were executed in Yili for their roles in the riots, according to local press reports. Three other Uighurs were given the death penalty with a two- year suspension and six more were sentenced to jail terms, two for life.
The repression has deepened Uighur resentment of the Chinese, but has also eroded sympathy for the separatists. In Kashgar, an ancient Silk Road market town, talk of the political tensions are nervously dismissed by most people, many of whom say the desire for independence remains, but the hope for it is gone.
"We just want to make money and live in peace," said a young Uighur businessman in Kashgar. "The separatists have brought pressure on everyone."
The anticrime campaign is not likely to stop the periodic violence.
In September, local Uighurs say, a gun battle on the road from Kashgar to the Pakistan border left one policeman and two Uighurs dead. A third Uighur involved in the incident was caught and is expected to be executed soon.
The government has called for an intensification of the crackdown in Xinjiang.
China's vast state security apparatus monitors tens of thousands of people whose allegiance to the Communist Party is suspect. While the majority of Chinese enjoy a level of freedom today unprecedented in the 52 years since the Communist Party took control, the party is unforgiving and unrelenting in its pursuit of anyone who challenges its rule.
In Uch Turfan, or Wushi, a county seat in a crook of the snowy-peaked Heavenly Mountains, which separate China from Kyrgyzstan, armed guards patrol bridges and children scatter in panic when a strange car stops near them.
The town has been a center of anti- Chinese sentiment since the mid-18th century, when Qing troops were sent here to quell a Uighur uprising.
According to Uighur legend, seven girls retreated to a rocky mount at one end of town and resisted the troops for days until they were killed by cannon fire. Access to their tomb atop the mount is now blocked by a locked gate.
Local residents, most of whom are reluctant to speak to foreigners, say 28 Uighurs were sentenced at a rally outside the town's movie theater on Nov. 11. Among them was a man who had translated the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights into the Uighur language and distributed it to others. He was reportedly given a 20-year jail term.
Most of the others were also charged with political activities and two were executed immediately after the rally. Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman for the East Turkestan Information Center, based in Sweden, said the men were political activists, but an Uch Turfan court official, reached by telephone, insisted that the men had been executed for murders unrelated to politics.
China acknowledges that its prisons hold nearly 2,000 political prisoners, most serving sentences for endangering state security, according to China's Justice Department.
But those numbers do not include people locked up in the country's reform-through-labor camps, to which the Public Security Bureau has the power to sentence people without trial. In the last three years, there has been a marked increase in the imprisonment of religious activists in such camps, including Uighur Muslims.
Nor does the Justice Ministry's count include political activists charged with other criminal offenses. Many of the state's political enemies are convicted of disturbing social order, illegal publishing or even consorting with prostitutes.
Thousands of people are held for days, weeks or even months in Public Security Bureau detention centers and Communist Party guest houses while under investigation for political crimes. The country's Religious Affairs Bureau has even put bishops loyal to the pope into retirement homes where they are neither allowed to leave nor receive visitors.
The political activists in Xinjiang stand out because of the potency of their dissent and the power of the government's reaction.
Many towns in southern Xinjiang are populated almost entirely by Uighurs, and Chinese rule of the territory has long been marked by Uighur uprisings.
In 1933, the short-lived Eastern Turkestan Islamic Republic was declared in Kashgar. A decade later, Uighurs tried to found another republic farther north in Yili and governed a semiautonomous area there under Kuomintang control until the Communists took over in 1949. Uighurs in Hotan staged another failed uprising in 1954 before lapsing into decades of isolation under Mao.
Fearing that Islamic orthodoxy could be used as a cloak or catalyst for political activism, China is quietly trying to stop its spread and suppress its religious practices. Dozens of illegal religious schools and unauthorized mosques have been shut this year, according to people and press reports here. Government employees risk their jobs if they go to mosques, and women working for the government are forbidden to wear veils.
The government denies that it has also stepped up efforts to dissuade Uighurs from observing Ramadan, Islam's holy month of daylight fasting. But Uighurs say that restaurants and food stalls are given tax breaks if they stay open in the daytime and that schoolchildren are prohibited from going home at lunchtime and are encouraged to eat a noon meal at school.
Mainstream Uighurs say the repression and the drumbeat of executions threaten to turn a small ethnic- based movement into a more volatile religious one.
Near the medieval bazaar in this ancient Silk Road town where Mr. Mettohti lived stands a beige-brick mosque, which is closed and uncompleted, leaving local Muslims yet again without their traditional home for the festivals at the end of Ramadan.
Asking why the mosque's main gate remains boarded up, years after construction began, makes residents visibly nervous.
"We wanted to build it taller, but the government would not agree," said a young Uighur man with a thick black mustache.
To isolate orthodox Uighur Muslims, some of whom have been influenced by the extreme Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, Beijing is mounting a political re-education campaign for 8,000 imams in charge of the region's state-sanctioned mosques.
The campaign started in mid- March and will run until the end of December. The Muslim leaders are required to attend seminars on religious and political policies set by the government and on Xinjiang history as written by the Communist Party.
"These lessons are essential to the long-term stability of Xinjiang," said a recent report by the official New China News Agency, "as they will guide our students away from ideological confusion and mistakes."
-------- colombia
Dozens Die in Colombia Drug Struggle
December 16, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Colombia-Clashes.html
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- A five-day battle over cocaine producing plantations in the northern mountains killed up to 44 leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary fighters, a military commander said Sunday.
Troops have regained control over the battle zone in Antioquia state, said Col. Jairo Ovalle of the army's 11th Brigade.
Ovalle said the troops had recovered the bodies of 14 paramilitary fighters near the village of Acacia, about 245 miles northeast of the capital Bogota. Based on radio intercepts, Ovalle estimated as many as 30 guerrillas also died in the fighting, which began on Tuesday and ended Saturday.
Rebels typically take their dead with them or toss them in rivers, making it difficult to arrive at precise guerrilla body counts, he added.
The two main outlaw factions squaring off in the South American country's 37-year-old war -- the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and the rightist-United Self-Defense of Colombia, or AUC -- fund themselves through profits off the drug trade.
Both sides tax peasants who grow coca, the plant used to make cocaine, and demand payoffs from traffickers who ship the finished product to the United States and Europe. They regularly battle for cocaine-producing areas.
Washington is playing a growing role in the intensifying Colombian conflict. The U.S. government is providing hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to help the armed forces battle rebel and paramilitary units involved in the drug trade.
-------- drug war
NATIONAL
Drug Seizures Have Surged at the Borders
New York Times
December 16, 2001
By FOX BUTTERFIELD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/16/national/16DRUG.html
Heightened security after the Sept. 11 attacks has had a major side effect: seizures of illegal drugs along the nation's borders and at its ports of entry increased substantially in October and November over the corresponding period a year ago, law enforcement authorities say.
The greatest increase, 326 percent, was in seizures from commercial traffic along the Canadian border. But the overall figure was also large: the amount of drugs seized from commercial traffic - that is, from trucks, ships and planes - at all borders and ports was up 66 percent, the Customs Service says.
Experts have no clear evidence that the increased seizures have created a shortage of drugs on the street or raised their price there.
And although Afghanistan has been the producer of about 75 percent of the world's heroin, most of it going to Western Europe, it is far too early to determine what effect the war against the Taliban or its outcome will have on drug supply.
But the commissioner of the Customs Service, Robert C. Bonner, said, "There has been a definite unintended consequence of the effort against terror: we are doing a better job of keeping illegal drugs out of the United States."
Seizures initially dropped after Sept. 11 as drug traffickers slowed shipments, apparently to gauge what would happen as customs inspectors went on highest alert. The decline was very short-lived, however. The total amount of drugs seized by the Customs Service at borders and ports, from commercial traffic and noncommercial alike, jumped 30 percent in October from the same month last year.
At the same time, heightened antiterrorism patrols forced the Coast Guard to pull back most of the ships and planes it had been using for antidrug operations in the Caribbean and the Pacific and assign them to areas closer to the coast, a step that brought a drop in its drug seizures. From Sept. 11 to Nov. 30, the Coast Guard seized 10,600 pounds of cocaine, for example, compared with 30,122 pounds in the same period a year ago, and 480 pounds of marijuana, compared with 7,500 pounds, a spokesman said.
"We recognize that there is a challenge for us in doing both homeland security and drug patrols," said the spokesman, Capt. Mike Lapinski, "so we've started to push the borders back out and interdict the seas again in the drug transit areas. We're almost back to pre-9/11."
The Coast Guard has been able to do this by putting its own detachments on Navy ships. In the last few weeks, Captain Lapinski said, these joint patrols have led to the seizure of two sizable shipments of drugs on vessels off the Pacific coast of Central America.
In New York, meanwhile, seizures of narcotics and of drug money are both up, said Bridget G. Brennan, the city's special narcotics prosecutor.
Given tighter security at airports and increased scrutiny of money laundering since Sept. 11, drug traffickers "haven't been able to move money in bulk or do it by wire transfers as easily," Ms. Brennan said.
As a result, she said, "our money seizures in connection with drug trafficking are really up," to $4.2 million for Sept. 11 to Dec. 10, compared with $600,000 in the corresponding three months last year.
As for the drugs themselves, Ms. Brennan said she had initially believed that heightened security would make traffickers reluctant to bring them into New York. But "that hasn't been true," she said. From Sept. 11 to Dec. 10, her office seized 1,679 pounds of cocaine, up from 1,082 pounds in the corresponding period last year; 725 pounds of marijuana, compared with a pound and a half; and 302,000 Ecstasy pills, compared with 1,011.
Law enforcement officials are uncertain whether the increase in seizures means only that they are intercepting a larger proportion of the narcotics being smuggled into the United States, or whether the traffickers are themselves contributing to the trend by increasing the number or size of their shipments as a way of overwhelming the tighter security.
"It could be either, or both," said Joe Keefe, chief of operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration. "It's too early to tell."
Mr. Keefe said he had not yet seen any evidence that major drug producers in Colombia had increased their production since Sept. 11. He also said he had not heard of any significant shortages of drugs on the street, or of major changes in prices. But because drug dealers often maintain large stockpiles, it can take months for a drop in supply from abroad to be reflected in higher street prices.
Two academic experts who study drug dealing and drug use agreed that street prices had not changed. They are Rick Curtis, chairman of the anthropology department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in New York, and Mike Agar, a senior research scientist with Friends Research International, of Baltimore.
Agreement came as well from Gil Kerlikowske, the police chief in Seattle. Chief Kerlikowske said the steady prices in his city, at a time when tighter security along the nearby Canadian border had resulted in increased seizures of drugs, suggested to him that "estimates of what is coming into the country may have been wrong and that far more drugs were coming in than we were aware of."
Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, said there were so many conflicting factors resulting from the Sept. 11 attacks that "I don't think anyone can guess what the long-term effect will be" on drugs.
While the Customs Service has increased its searches at the borders, for example, police officers in many cities have been diverted from antidrug operations to helping the F.B.I.'s push against terrorism.
-------- europe
EU Leaders Convene to Design 'Global Superpower'
Officials Are Unable to Agree On Combined Military Force
By T.R. Reid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December 16, 2001; Page A35
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49319-2001Dec15?language=printer
LAEKEN, Belgium, Dec. 15 -- Moving toward their goal of building a new "global superpower," the leaders of the European Union today launched a constitutional convention to design a federated Europe that could govern more than a half-billion people from Dublin to Dubrovnik before the end of this decade.
Meeting at Belgium's royal palace just two weeks before the arrival of the euro -- the new common currency that symbolizes Europe's financial and political integration -- the 15 heads of government voted to create a body comprising present and aspiring EU members to review every facet of the union's operations.
The leaders also moved closer to creation of a combined military force that would operate separately from NATO and confirmed an expansion plan that should add at least 10 more nations to the federation over the next few years.
If all that happens -- and such matters are always iffy among the fractious European states -- the continent would be more united by, say, 2010 than at any time since the Roman Empire. In terms of population and gross domestic product, this enlarged European Union would be bigger and richer than the United States.
That is largely the point, as the EU's top politicians stated plainly throughout this summit.
Even British Prime Minister Tony Blair -- hardly the most ardent Europhile here -- made that clear as he summed up the Laeken meeting: "This is about the projection of collected power and influence . . . that makes individual nations more powerful, that makes a global superpower.
"You have the United States, plainly the superpower of the world," Blair went on. "But the point here is, countries in the European Union can project real power as well -- if we're prepared to work together."
The notion of a unified Europe that can stand equal with the United States was possibly the only point of agreement this weekend among the prime ministers, secure in their palace just outside Brussels, and the tens of thousands of demonstrators who were kept miles away in the bitterly cold streets. One of the protesters' most common placards was a picture of a fuzzy dollar sign with a large, clear euro sign stamped over it.
As the summit approached, various arms of the EU spent the past week flatly snubbing the United States on several policy issues.
Attorney General John D. Ashcroft toured four European capitals, pleading for the right to bring all the suspects related to the Sept. 11 attacks back to the United States for trial. But the European Parliament didn't even wait for the visitor to go home before it passed a blunt resolution Thursday saying that "no extradition can be allowed to the U.S. from EU states" unless Ashcroft reverses U.S. policy on capital punishment and the use of military tribunals.
As President Bush was siding strongly with Israel in the latest Middle East crisis, the EU issued a statement on Friday expressing support for Yasser Arafat and increasing financial aid to his Palestinian Authority. "If Bush doesn't want the U.S. to be the honest broker in the Mideast anymore, the EU can step right in," a senior European official said.
The European Union includes about 380 million people in 15 countries who share a common president, parliament, court system, central bank, anthem, bill of rights and 80,000 pages of legal code. But it often acts like a "union" in name only, with member states frequently inclined to go their own way.
For example, when the new common currency becomes legal tender on Jan. 1 -- relegating francs, lire, pesetas and the like to museums -- only 12 of the 15 EU members will use it. Britain, Denmark and Sweden are still holding out.
There has also been increasing evidence that the citizens of the EU feel little connection to their Europe-wide government. In much of Western Europe, people love to hate Brussels the way outside-the-Beltway Americans love to hate Washington.
To deal with that disconnection, the EU summit agreed to set up a "convention on the future of Europe," with seats allotted to both the 15 current members and the 12 nations applying to join. Former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing, an outspoken advocate of a stronger and bigger Europe-wide government, was picked to chair the convention. The d'Estaing convention is to finish its work by mid-2003 so that its recommendations can be presented to an intergovernmental conference in 2004.
Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, who presided over this weekend's summit at the end of his country's six-month term in the EU's rotating presidency, said the constitutional convention would review all elements of the union's structure. Among much else, he suggested that the union might want to have a popularly elected "president of Europe" who could help unify the sprawling collection of states and stand beside the U.S. president on the world stage.
Europe's current chief executive -- the president of the European Commission -- is chosen in a closed meeting by the heads of the 15 states. This means the president has a lofty title but no real mandate from the people of Europe.
As evidence of the difficulty the 15 sovereign nations have in working together, the Laeken summit was unable to finish one key item on its agenda: the formal authorization of a new European army known as the Rapid Reaction Force. Despite intense pressure, Greece refused to go along because it was worried about the force's relationship with NATO, which includes Turkey -- Greece's ancient rival and an EU aspirant. The heads of state will address authorization of the military force at their next summit, to be held in Madrid in June.
As is always the case when the EU leaders get together, the session produced a virtual Matterhorn of paper, both in the meeting hall and on the streets.
Every statement, resolution and declaration coming out of the session must be published in at least three languages -- French, German and English. But EU rules say that certain important documents must be printed in all 11 official languages.
The streets of Brussels, meanwhile, were strewn with the residue of the protests that continued through the weekend gathering. But the flood of flags, fliers and newspapers that surrounded the summit meeting had no apparent impact on the formal session, and the national leaders never got anywhere near the police cordons where the demonstrators were contained.
-------- france
France's military in crisis, says report
By Kim Willsher
THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
December 16, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20011216-15065262.htm
PARIS - France's armed forces are in such a state of disarray that the country could barely defend itself if it were attacked, according to a series of alarming reports by defense experts.
A decade of budget cuts, reorganization and mismanagement has, it is claimed, rendered all three branches of the country's military powerless to react rapidly and efficiently at home or abroad.
Despite the billions spent on the latest equipment, much of it cannot be used. Half of France's fleet of helicopters is grounded, and a third of its tanks are out of action, according to a confidential Ministry of Defense report leaked to newspapers.
The conflict in Afghanistan has highlighted the crisis and generated widespread public criticism about the country's lack of involvement in the international war against terror.
Political leaders have attempted to restore national self-respect by dispatching the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle to join U.S. forces in the Arabian Sea.
It is hoped that the 40,000-ton accident-prone vessel, which cost $3 billion to build, should be en route by today and will complete its mission without the accidents that have led its crew to nickname it "le bateau maudit" - the damned ship.
French defense spending, around $27 billion a year, has fallen from 15 percent of the state budget to 11 percent since the end of the Cold War in the 1990s.
The ending of national service and the creation of a professional army, announced by President Jacques Chirac in 1996 and intended to save $300 million a year, has drained the defense budget of at least another $150 million this year.
Lack of money, however, is not the only problem. While enormous sums have been spent on such prestigious and high-profile projects as the carrier Charles de Gaulle, the Leclerc tank and the Rafale fighter plane, the armed forces lack the resources to maintain and repair their equipment.
A confidential report by the general armed forces board, leaked to the economic magazine Capital, concluded that more than a third of Leclerc tanks - which at a cost of $15 million each were intended to be the pride of France's ground forces - are out of use. A shortage of spare parts meant that the army was having to cannibalize part of its fleet to keep the rest in action.
Around half of France's Puma, Cougar and Gazelle helicopters are grounded and are awaiting repairs, and only a fraction of the air force's planes are fit to fly, defense experts say.
"While the air force has 517 fighter planes, only 12 aircraft are ready to take off within two minutes in order to defend our country in the event of an attack," wrote Thierry Fabre, Capital's defense correspondent.
The French Ministry of Defense contended that "reports of a crisis are exaggerated." "Of course only 12 planes are on standby to fly as part of the air defense mission. No country has all its entire air force on red alert 24 hours a day, 365 days a year," a spokesman said.
The navy is faring a little better, with 32 of its 76 ships reported to be in a state of seaworthiness.
The most expensive folly in French military history remains the Charles de Gaulle, commissioned for the French navy in 1986.
The aircraft carrier was intended to be a potent symbol of military might but was so riddled with faults it proved to be more of a humiliating French farce.
When it finally took to the sea last November on its first long-distance trial, part of one propeller broke off somewhere in the western Atlantic and the vessel was forced to limp home. For every year in operation, the ship has to spend four months in dock undergoing maintenance and repairs.
-------- israel
INTERNATIONAL
Arafat Calls for End to Bombings
December 16, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Arafat.html
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, in a televised address Sunday, called for an end to suicide bombings against Israel and said all ``armed activity'' and ``terrorist activities'' by Palestinian militants must cease.
At the same time, Arafat said Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had ``declared war'' on the Palestinian Authority and insisted that the Palestinians must have a state in the West Bank and Gaza with Jerusalem as its capital.
In a speech to mark the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, Arafat blamed Sharon for the surging Mideast violence, and said Palestinian attacks gave Sharon an excuse to escalate military actions.
There was no immediate reaction from Israel, which has dismissed Arafat's efforts against the militants to date, saying he has proven either unwilling or unable to crush the extremists.
Arafat spoke directly to the Israeli people, urging a resumption of peace talks. ``I would like to renew my call to the people of Israel ... to return immediately to the negotiating table,'' he said.
He called on fellow Palestinians to respect his calls for a cease-fire, which have in recently months proven ineffectual: ``We will not accept more than one Authority on this land... When you take a decision must be respected.''
``Today, I am reiterating my call for a comprehensive cessation to all the armed activities... I call for a complete stop to all activities, especially the suicide attacks that we condemn always,'' he said.
He added that Palestinian mortar attacks against Israel should also cease, saying Sharon was using these mortar attacks, most of which have targeted Jewish settlements, as excuses to hit the Palestinians.
Throughout his speech, Arafat said the Israelis were responsible for the current Mideast crisis. He said the Palestinians should observe a cease-fire, but did not explicitly call for an end to the 15-month-old Palestinian uprising.
``We declared the state of emergency and we have implemented a series of arrangements... including declaring illegal all forms which are committing terrorist activities,'' said Arafat, who was declared ``irrelevant'' by the Israeli Cabinet after a deadly Palestinian attack on an Israeli bus near a West Bank settlement last week.
``All have to respect this initiative. The Israelis do not respect it, and they don't want a cease-fire, but we are respecting our commitments,'' he said.
Arafat concluded the half-hour speech by saying, ``See you in Jerusalem.''
-------- pakistan
INTERNATIONAL
Pakistan Faces Increased U.S. Pressure to Curb Militants
New York Times
December 16, 2001
By DOUGLAS FRANTZ with TODD S. PURDUM
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/16/international/asia/16KASH.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Dec. 15 - The United States plans to increase pressure on Pakistan to curb the activities of two militant Islamic groups after a suicide attack on the Indian Parliament that killed seven people, American officials said.
In its efforts to obtain the continued cooperation of Pakistan in the fight against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, the Bush administration had refrained from pushing too hard for it to clamp down on the two organizations, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, which operate openly in Pakistan and advocate violence to drive India out of Kashmir.
But India's accusation that Lashkar-e-Taiba was behind the dramatic shootout Thursday and Jaish-e-Muhammad's claim of responsibility for a similar attack on the Indian Legislative Assembly in Kashmir that killed 40 people in October has forced a tough re-evaluation by Washington.
Pakistan has "told us that they are planning on moving gradually to curb this kind of extremism," a senior State Department official said. "I think what this means is if these groups are indeed carrying out these kinds of attacks, that process will have to be accelerated."
A Western diplomat in Islamabad concurred, saying the Bush administration will push Pakistan to restrain militant groups to try to reduce tensions with India over Kashmir, a predominantly Muslim border region that India considers a state in its union. India has demanded that Pakistan shut down both groups.
Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, condemned the terrorist acts and in a television address today said he wanted to warn "against any precipitous action by the Indian government against Pakistan."
"This would lead to very serious repercussions. It must not be done," General Musharraf said.
The Pakistanis rejected assertions that the suicide attack, which also killed five gunmen, was carried out by a Pakistani group.
Pakistan has long identified militant groups fighting against Indian control of Kashmir as freedom fighters and tolerated their activities even in the post-Sept. 11 era.
The government has started to crack down on radical religious schools, which provided training grounds for fighters who joined the Taliban, and has begun to purge its powerful intelligence service of pro- Taliban elements in response to American pressure.
But Kashmiri separatist groups retain strong backing from elements of the military dictatorship and the public, so the government has been reluctant to restrain them and risk internal problems.
The leader of one militant group said in an interview that his organization was told by government officials to move its headquarters to the Pakistan-controlled section of the Kashmir region and lower its profile, but he said nothing was mentioned about stopping its attacks on Indian outposts.
"All they told us to do was move our visible means of operation out of the spotlight," said the leader.
Similarly, Lashkar-e-Taiba recently moved its offices out of Islamabad and took down the signs at its huge training compound near Lahore, but foreign intelligence officials said the organization continues to train guerrilla fighters there.
Lashkar-e-Taiba, or Army of the Pure, is led by a former university professor, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, who has continued to give fiery public speeches denouncing the American-led coalition's war in Afghanistan and warning President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan not to "sell out" Kashmir the way he sold out the Taliban.
The group has taken credit for many attacks on Indian soldiers in Kashmir, but a spokesman said that it was not responsible for the attack on the Indian Parliament, which shook the world's largest democracy.
Jaish-e-Muhammad, which means Army of the Prophet Muhammad, also operates openly despite American requests that Pakistan freeze its bank accounts and curtail its activities after the Oct. 1 suicide attack in Srinagar in Kashmir.
Representatives of the group telephoned reporters after the Srinagar attack and claimed responsibility and its leader, Mullah Masoon Azhar, told a Pakistani newspaper that Jaish-e-Muhammad had carried out the action. But the group later recanted, presumably after pressure from the Pakistan government.
To avoid any American-prompted freeze on its finances, the current issue of the group's magazine instructs loyalists to contribute to two individual bank accounts to keep funding the jihad, or holy war, against the United States and Israel.
"Give your donations to the mujahedeen from the snow-capped mountains of Chechnya to Palestine to Kashmir to Afghanistan," reads the appeal. "True believers offer their lives. You too should offer your lives and wealth in the paths of Allah and join the caravan of mujahedeen."
The group was formed by Mullah Azhar, a cleric and journalist, who was arrested in 1994 in India while raising money for another terrorist organization, Harkat-ul-Mujahedeen.
He was freed in 1999 in response to the demands of five hijackers who seized an Indian Airlines flight and killed a passenger by slitting his throat. The hijackers were allowed to escape after landing at Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Taliban officials were praised for ending the standoff, but evidence discovered in an abandoned house in Kabul earlier this month suggested that the Afghan rulers may have provided a haven for the hijackers.
Since winning his freedom, Mullah Azhar has traveled freely within Pakistan, giving fiery speeches denouncing the United States and India and raising money.
"I think this brings the Indian government literally to the brink of having to do something," said Marshall M. Bouton, president of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and an expert on the region. "By that, of course I mean a retaliatory attack across the line of control, probably on a supply dump or something.
"That said, there will be tremendous counterpressure from us not to complicate the picture."
-------- propaganda wars
U.S. set to pump up 'spin' machine
Some critics say Bush losing propaganda war
Edward Epstein,
San Francisco Chronicle Washington Bureau,
Sunday, December 16, 2001
E-mail Edward Epstein at eepstein@sfchronicle.com.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/12/16/MN182823.DTL
Washington -- The publicity surrounding the Osama bin Laden tape capped a busy week on the propaganda front in the White House's war on terrorism, and the administration says its efforts are about to go into even higher gear.
Whether these efforts are winning hearts and minds at home and overseas, particularly in the Muslim world, is a matter of contention among veterans of political image wars. The experts didn't agree even after a week in which, in addition to the tape, President Bush made an impassioned speech in support of his efforts to transform the military and led a 70-country remembrance on the three-month anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
"I think the spin war is more important than the military war, and I don't think we're fighting it at all," said Bill Press, former chairman of the California Democratic Party.
"In fact, I think we're losing the spin war," said Press, whose new book, "Spin This," probes how political pros shape public opinion.
He said the White House got a late start in its efforts to woo public opinion in the Arab world and didn't understand that it was dealing with a nonstop, 24-hour-a-day media cycle. For instance, it took the administration more than a month to set up Coalition Information Centers staffed by U.S. government spokesmen in Islamabad, Pakistan, London and Washington to provide briefings and spin around the clock.
And only last Thursday, the same day the bin Laden tape made its splashy debut, did the State Department unveil an international ad campaign to seek tips to help nab terrorists.
A prominent Republican image shaper disagreed that Bush has missed some chances in the propaganda war.
"The administration has done a very good job of reminding people about these attacks," said Dan Schnur, who served as California Gov. Pete Wilson's press secretary and then was a strategist for Sen. John McCain's GOP primary challenge last year.
Bush uses the pulpit of the presidency almost daily to remind Americans of the righteousness of the war against terrorists who killed more than 3,000 people.
"There is no question that even for events as horrific as Sept. 11, this society's attention span is so short that it's necessary for the administration to keep reminding Americans why it's so important," Schnur said.
"The most important element of message delivery is message repetition."
But Press said it's a wasted effort.
"The American people don't need any more pep talks. It's the Muslim community around the world that needs to understand that this is a righteous cause, and we're still not doing it," he said.
The two pros can't even agree on how well the administration handled the bin Laden tape. Word of the Arabic-language tape first surfaced last Sunday, and Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz discussed it on the Sunday talk shows.
The public clamor for its release grew, but the White House hesitated, saying it wanted to ensure no intelligence operations would be compromised and that there would be no disputes over translations of bin Laden's words.
"In this case, caution was the best strategy," said Schnur. He said the delay in releasing the tape kept the story alive, built interest and helped convince people around the world of its authenticity.
"If the tape was released on Sunday, there would have been a lot of unanswered questions," Schnur said.
But Press said, "They should not have said anything about it until they had all the facts down and the tape translated. . . . The way they handled it just increased doubts in some quarters about the tape's validity."
Those doubts are most evident in the Muslim world, where bin Laden and the leaders of other terrorist groups draw their support.
Hussein Ibish of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee said the new tape probably confirmed bin Laden's guilt for people with an open mind. But he said that despite U.S. spin efforts, most people in the Mideast remain skeptical about America's wider foreign policy objectives.
"In the Arab world, the spin war hasn't gone well at all, even though no one can doubt Osama bin Laden's guilt," Ibish said.
Part of the problem, he said, is the U.S. alliance with Israel at a time when Israel and the Palestinians seem close to open war, something that for many Muslims trumps Bush's assertions that his fight against terrorists isn't a fight against Islam.
Bush continues to hammer on that message. He has visited Washington's biggest mosque, and on Tuesday, he will host Muslim leaders at the White House to mark the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
That visit will roughly coincide with increased administration efforts in Arab lands. Last Thursday, Undersecretary of State Charlotte Beers, a former advertising executive who worked on campaigns for Uncle Ben's Rice and other products, unveiled ads that will run in newspapers and on TV and radio, movie theater screens and even matchbook covers.
The "Rewards for Justice" ads, which will first run in the United States and then throughout the Middle East, will appeal for information about accused terrorists. With titles such as "You vs. Terrorism" and "Can a Woman Stop Terrorism?" and promises of rewards running into millions of dollars, Beers said she hopes for results.
The State Department has also started doing market research in Arab countries. "We desperately need to do a better job of getting communication beyond the elites and government figures into the mass markets," Beers said.
-------- spy agencies
The feds' psychic spies
FBI, CIA reportedly using 'remote viewers' for intelligence purposes
By Anthony C. LoBaido,
WorldNetDaily.com
SUNDAY DECEMBER 16 2001
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=25699
Prudence Calabrese may not be a soldier in the regular sense of the word, but the FBI and CIA are reportedly hoping her psychic warriors can help prevent future terrorist attacks.
Calabrese's company, TransDimensional Systems [http://www.largeruniverse.com/], employs 14 remote viewers and says the government has contracted with her to bolster the agency's more traditional investigative methods.
Remote viewers claim to be able to visualize events occurring in distant places by using higher or paranormal powers they say are inherent in all humans.
Remote viewing involves a "receiver," who visualizes a particular object anywhere in the world and, with the help of a "monitor," describes that item and its perceived location. That information is said to be useful in then determining the actual location of the item.
The U.S. government has a long history of promoting and funding paranormal operations in such programs as the Stargate Project [http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=19081].
That CIA psychic-spy program headquartered at the Stanford Research Institute in California was shut down in 1995.
According to the London Sunday Times' Nov. 11 report on remote viewers' being recruited by the U.S. government, the FBI and CIA, though admitting to advising their investigators to "think outside of the box," would not confirm publicly that they are actively seeking help from psychics or remote viewers.
Calabrese cited confidentiality requirements in working for the government as preventing her from providing specific information about her work for intelligence agencies.
As for her view of psychic phenomena in general, Calabrese was resolute.
"It's part of who everyone is, whether they realize it or not. It probably contributes more to how society works than many psychologists and sociologists would want to admit. We use our intuition - gut reactions, 'vibes' about people and places - all the time to make important decisions in our personal and professional lives. Leaders of all kinds rely even more than the average person on their intuition and also on their ability to influence people by means of what people often refer to as their 'aura' of leadership," she said.
Asked why Stargate was terminated, Calabrese offered this take: "Stargate was just one name given to the project that the government was involved in. In previous incarnations, it was called, among other things, Grillflame and Scanate. The overall remote viewing program was officially disbanded in 1995. At this time, many of the members of the current unit were reaching retirement age, so there was a danger of this method leaking out, which could be potentially embarrassing for the government. In response to these circumstances, the CIA released a paper called the AIR Report by Edwin C. May, Ph.D., which explained that though there was an observable phenomenon, it was not reliable enough to continue using in intelligence work."
Tal Brooke, president of the Spiritual Counterfeits Project, a Berkeley research organization and think tank, understands the government's attraction to using psychic spies: "It's a no-brainer for the CIA to use them. These psychic spies presumably can go where no spy has gone before and leave no footprints. The CIA are opportunists, so they say, 'If it works, do it.'"
Brooke added, however, that remote viewing is definitely occult.
"The Old Testament says this is anathema. The New Age movement uses new terms for mediumship, [but] this got Saul into trouble in the Old Testament story."
Brooke added, "Remote viewers are not always accurate. For example, Ed Dames [a well-known teacher and practitioner of remote viewing] predicted that by this date, there would be worldwide financial collapse. That turned out to be false. Dames also claimed that we would see cannibalism in Eastern Europe. That also never happened."
"The bottom line," said Calabrese, "is that [the government intelligence agencies] know it is a cheap and effective intelligence tool, and they, at the very least, can back it up with intelligence gained in the field by conventional means. At this moment in history, it is important to use every tool to combat the terror threat. I think that many in law enforcement and investigation are now willing - when they were not before Sept. 11 - to leave no investigative stone unturned."
If you'd like to sound off on this issue, please take part in the WorldNetDaily poll [http://www.worldnetdaily.com/polls].
--
Related story:
Inside the CIA's psychic program
New Age 'remote viewing' a boon to intelligence community
By Anthony C. LoBaido,
WorldNetDaily,
Saturday, June 3, 2000
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=19081
Editor's note: While seated on a train headed for Pusan, South Korea -- sandwiched in between a major in South Korean naval intelligence and a U.S. Army colonel -- WND's roving international correspondent Anthony LoBaido was introduced to the shadowy world of remote viewing -- a psychic information-gathering technique employed for decades by the U.S. Defense Department to bolster its intelligence efforts.
SEOUL, South Korea -- As the train zoomed quietly through the icy winter night, two military men explained to WorldNetDaily the difficulties in gathering effective intelligence on North Korea -- especially in relation to its ongoing nuclear and biochemical weapons programs.
An American colonel lamented that the U.S. military industrial complex had spent too much time and effort spying on South Korea's own missile program as well as gathering economic intelligence on South Korean banks and "Chaebols" (mega-corporations). Speaking of the latter, he said economic intelligence was gathered to position U.S. banks and transnational corporations to benefit from the 1997 Asian economic meltdown.
"Since the Stargate project was discontinued, we've had an even harder time getting intelligence," said the South Korean naval officer, who worked with the Hongul Koonsa Chung-bo Chung Mung-ga, or "military intelligence." The Korean used words like "Qwe-shin," or "ghost," "Chon-jay," meaning "genius" and "Chonsa," meaning "angel" to describe the project.
"North Korea has 14 kinds of biological weapons, and their nuclear program is a great unknown," he said. "The involvement of Russia, China and radical Islamic states in relation to North Korea is also a mystery. We need to protect our nation, our children from any potential threat. Right now, South Korea is beginning its own version of Stargate. We need any edge we can get."
And so began this writer's exposure to the Stargate Project, its parapsychological roots and its applications vis a vis North Korea and other flash points around the world.
Psychic Cold-War battle
The late 1960s and early 1970s were the window in which psychic and occult phenomena moved into the mainstream in American and Western culture. While the Beatles brought the "religion of the East" to Britain, the field of parapsychology began to order itself for more "scientifically-based study."
Parapsychology is divided into several major fields. One is extrasensory perception or ESP, which deals with information obtained by means beyond the five senses. Another is psychokinesis -- the direct mental interaction with inanimate or animate objects. Yet another involves so-called "near-death experiences" or NDEs.
In 1970, during the height of the Cold War and under the growing threat of Soviet world domination, American authors Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder published a startling book called "Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain." They documented how the Soviets had recruited clairvoyants, psychics, psychokinetic wonderkids and telepathic savants to work in the realm of espionage, counter-intelligence and related security applications.
The book got the attention of the U.S. military complex. So much so, that by 1972 the Defense Intelligence Agency had produced a paper called "Controlled Offensive Behavior -- USSR."
The paper read in part, "The major impetus behind the Soviet drive to harness the possible capabilities of telepathic communication, telekinetics and bionics are said to come from the Soviet military and the KGB. Soviet knowledge in this field is superior to that of the West."
Fearing that using "asymmetrical" intelligence-gathering personnel like psychic spies might enable the Russians to take a huge lead in the espionage field, the DIA believed the Soviets might be able to learn the whereabouts of U.S. troops and ships, analyze top secret documents, read the thoughts of top U.S. leaders, perform psychic assassinations and even disable spacecraft and satellites.
It was in this climate that the Pentagon launched its own psychic intelligence-gathering program -- headed up by INSCOM, the U.S. Army's Intelligence and Security Command.
Finding the right person to lead a project for such a new frontier was a difficult task. The man chosen was Hal Puthoff, a respected engineer who had the security clearance, background in hard science and training to handle the project.
Working out of Fort Meade, Maryland, Puthoff began recruiting a team of "remote viewers," composed of military personnel, who would participate in the radical new program. The billions of dollars spent on satellites, the labors of the CIA and other agencies, and the intelligence shared with the U.S. by her allies abroad was suddenly jolted by this new, radical approach to espionage.
Nuts and bolts of remote viewing
Remote viewing involves using a "target-response" model. The remote viewer -- also called a "receiver" -- would sit in a room in a building at Fort Meade. He would be assisted by a "monitor." A target would be selected -- for instance, a chemical weapons facility in Libya. The receiver would be given 15 minutes to visualize the target. Then, with the help of the monitor, the viewer would compose a sketch of the target. Later the drawings and information were submitted to an analyst for further study.
Working in Buildings 2560 and 2561 at Fort Meade from 1978 until 1995, the remote viewers were credited with the following intelligence coups:
The attack on the U.S.S. Stark on May 15, 1987 -- delivered by a French Exocet missile fired in the Persian Gulf by an Iraqi warplane -- was predicted 48 hours before the attack in which 37 Americans were killed.
In the late 1970s, a woman in Ohio located a downed Soviet TU-22 bomber in the jungles of Zaire.
A kidnapped Marine officer was located and rescued in Europe.
A Soviet Typhoon-class submarine under construction was identified for the first time.
A search for stolen nuclear weapons by right-wing Afrikaners in the South African Defense Force was successfully undertaken in Zululand. The weapons were taken during the SADF pullout from Angola. In the mid-1990s, a book on this event was published, entitled "The Mini-Nuke Conspiracy: Mandela's Nuclear Nightmare," by Peter Hounam and Steve McQuillan.
A successful search for both biological and nuclear material and weapons in North Korea was undertaken.
Despite the vast successes of the Stargate Project, the program found itself surrounded by hostility from various departments in both the executive branch and the Pentagon.
For example, Frank Carlucci, who served as secretary of defense and national security advisor during Ronald Reagan's second term, dispatched the inspector general to investigate the Stargate Project at Fort Meade. But Senators Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, William Cohen, R-Maine, Daniel Inouye, D-Hawai, Robert Byrd, D- WV and John Glenn, D-Ohio interceded and saved the program -- keeping it going through the first term of Bill Clinton's presidency.
The remote viewers were eventually kicked out of INSCOM and the DIA by Maj. Gen. Harry Soyster, who at various times headed up both INSCOM and the DIA.
A 20-year analysis
The most definitive work by remote viewers was conducted at SRI International at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
SRI was recruited by both the U.S. Congress and the CIA to spearhead a 30-year study on remote viewing and psychic spying applications.
Jessica Utts, a professor at the University of California - Davis was selected to serve on the panel to analyze the data collected by the Stargate Project. Utts, who later discussed her findings on 20/20, Larry King Live and CNN -- is only one of a tiny group of U.S. academics to study parapsychology. The field is still in its infancy, although the University of Edinburgh in Scotland now offers a doctoral program in parapsychology. Utts served in Edinburgh at the Koestler Chair of Parapsychology
Speaking of the data collected during the life of the Stargate Project, Utts, writing in a report published in "The Journal of Parapsychology," wrote, "The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance." According to Utts, the remote viewers were accurate "around 15 percent of the time."
In an exclusive interview with WorldNetDaily, Professor Utts spoke openly and freely about her involvement with Stargate.
"In 1995, Stargate was supposed to be moved from the Defense Intelligence Agency to the CIA. Some members of Congress and the CIA decided that they wanted to have the program reviewed first. An independent agency called the AIR was hired to put together a review team. Ray Hyman of the University of Oregon and I were asked to review the scientific work. There had also been a classified 'operations' unit, which targeted specific questions of interest to various government agencies," said Utts.
"We were not given access to the data generated by that part of the program and my understanding is that much of it still remains classified. We were given several boxes of reports covering a 20-year period of research sponsored by various government agencies. All of the reports had been declassified at that point. We were also given access to Dr. Edwin May, who had been the project director for the previous 10 years."
Speaking about her interest as an empirical statistics expert and academic, Utts said, "As an academic statistician, part of my research program since the late 1980s has included laboratory parapsychology. I became involved with the research at SRI International at that point. I was on sabbatical leave just down the road at Stanford and decided it was an area to which a statistician could make useful contributions. There are very interesting underlying questions, some of which can be answered with available data and some of which can't.
"The most obvious questions are, 'Why are the results consistently better than would be expected by chance -- what is going on?'"
Concerning the search by the remote viewers for plutonium in North Korea, Utts said that she didn't "know much about this part. I assume that's part of the operational remote viewing work, not the laboratory work."
Addressing the religious, perceived occult or New-Age nature of Stargate, and of the resistance that traditional believers in Christianity, Judaism and Islam who work in the Pentagon might have toward Stargate, Utts was resolute:
"I don't know about the religious perspective. I think any time we humans encounter things we don't understand and can't measure, we tend to put them into religion instead of science. I am trying to look at this work from a scientific perspective and I think that eventually we will understand it from that viewpoint. I've actually become much more skeptical over the years as I see how people can easily be fooled by seeing what they want to see," she said.
"On the other hand, I have also become much more convinced by the data that there is something unusual going on, that doesn't fit our current understanding of science. But I reserve judgment on what that is. I think those who put this into either a religious or New Age framework are making a leap into what they think the mechanism is. For instance, fundamentalists might think it's the "work of the devil" and New-Agers might think it's that we are all somehow interconnected. Either theory could be right but that's a matter of faith, not science."
In regard to the shutting down of the Stargate Project in the mid-1990s, Utts said, "I think the end of the Cold War changed our priorities. I think the scientific work should be funded by the government -- just like any other exploration into interesting scientific questions. We don't understand the mechanism yet, so I think it's difficult to justify continued use of operational remote viewing."
Utts went on to say that all of the remote viewers were government employees. After Stargate was terminated in 1995, Utts said, "Some of them [viewers] are offering training classes in remote viewing. Others are working as consultants. Some have simply retired and left it altogether."
Those working on Stargate, Utts said, "received their usual salaries. At SRI International, for the research, a few SRI employees who were otherwise unrelated to the program were recruited as participants in the experiments. When I was working there for a year as a visiting scientist, we had a 'mass screening' one day in an auditorium and recruited a few participants who showed promise. I have talked informally with some of them. There is an upcoming conference that many of them are either sponsoring or attending."
After months of searching, WorldNetDaily was able to track down a remote viewer who worked on Stargate. Michelle Heaton, a red-headed 45-year-old Connecticut native who now works as a consultant in the intelligence field, agreed to be interviewed by WND recently in the Hamptons, on Long Island.
"Of course, psychics are used by the police all the time but that doesn't create quite the furor of the Stargate Project.," Heaton said. "Every year, top U.S. corporations like NASA and the U.S. Army spend almost $10 billion on New Age-type seminars. So it's a growth field," she added.
"My involvement with Stargate came in the 1980s. Of course, I am a patriotic American. I remember watching the Soviet Army hockey team destroy our NHL All-Stars at Madison Square Garden in 1979. The score was like 15 to 2. They destroyed us. The skating, passing, shooting, defense and teamwork made our guys look like high school kids. This was when the Russians were in Afghanistan and Angola. The American hostages were being held in Iran. It was a time of great fear for myself and my family. When I went to work for the DIA, I was happy to use my God-given abilities to work against the Russians."
Heaton said that she was tasked to engage in remote viewing in the Middle East, Southern Africa, Eastern Europe, China, Russia and North Korea.
Speaking about North Korea, she said, "They are one nation that really scares me. They really are puppets of the Russians and China in many ways. They loathe Japan and God knows what they are capable of."
"I've been approached by the South Koreans, the French and the British to come and work for their special intelligence gathering programs," said Heaton. "So have the Russians and the Chinese. Since Stargate was shut down, I've had to work in the private sector and it's well paid. But I am a loyal and patriotic American. I'm an all-American girl and I just have this gut feeling that within a short time Uncle Sam is going to need remote viewers to once again carry out psychic missions vital to our national security interests."
Retired U.S. Army Gen. Albion Knight, Jr., said, "The Stargate project is an edge around mind control -- about which the Russians and the Chinese are experts."
He added, "Journalists should keep digging into this topic."
----
Official: CIA uses anthrax, but no link to letters
December 16, 2001
From David Ensor
CNN Washington Bureau
http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/12/16/cia.anthrax/index.html
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The CIA uses anthrax in its bio-warfare program but the bacteria did not make it into tainted letters sent to two U.S. senators and several news organizations, an agency officia l said Sunday.
The confirmation that the CIA has anthrax comes less than a week after the U.S. Army admitted it has produced small amounts of the potentially deadly bacteria for years.
But, just as Army officials denied any connection to the anthrax letters, a CIA official said the anthrax detected in letters sent earlier this fall "absolutely did not" come from CIA labs.
The Washington Post reported Sunday that the FBI is focusing its anthrax investigation on a contractor who worked with the CIA. The newspaper said the contractor may be the source of the "Ames strain" of anthrax found in letters sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, NBC News' anchor Tom Brokaw and several other news organizations. But the CIA official, while confirming the agency has small amounts of the Ames strain for testing purposes, told CNN "we did not grow, create or produce" the anthrax in the letters, and "we are not the source of this material."
Meanwhile, experts continued Sunday to fumigate the Hart Senate Office building, closed since aides in Daschle's office opened a letter filled with anthrax spores on October 17.
"This was very serious anthrax, very highly milled and very dangerous," House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt said Sunday. "This certainly has been a tougher decontamination job than anybody expected."
The FBI is looking for someone or some group who began sending anthrax-laced letters through the mail in mid-September. Five people have died in recent months of inhalation anthrax, including three postal or mail-room employees.
[See "--- biological weapons" above for more information.]
----
The Coldest Warrior
By Ted Gup
Sunday, December 16, 2001; Page W09
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A34204-2001Dec12?language=printer
We cannot afford methods less ruthless than those of our opposition.- John Le Carre, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
On a sunny afternoon in 1984, a 66-year-old retired CIA chemist named Sidney Gottlieb prepared for a most unusual visitor. Three decades earlier he had promised a widow named Alice Olson that if ever she wished to see him she need only pick up the phone.
Now, out of the blue, she had called to redeem the pledge, asking if she and her two sons could come to his remote retreat in Rappahannock County, Va. What she wanted was answers-answers to what really happened to her husband.
The fate of Frank Olson, long stamped 'Top Secret,' was a dark and cautionary tale of the Cold War. On November 19, 1953, Olson, a 43-year-old scientist at Fort Detrick, had joined other government researchers at Deep Creek Lodge in Western Maryland. There, an unseen hand had slipped 70 micrograms of LSD into his glass of Cointreau and the glasses of others. The meeting soon degenerated into hours of drug-induced hilarity. But days after, Olson was said to be sullen and withdrawn. A government official had escorted him to New York to 'take care of him'-words his son Eric would later use with grim irony. Shortly after 2:30 on the morning of November 28, 1953, Olson's body was discovered, bloodied and broken, on the pavement of Manhattan's Seventh Avenue, clothed only in underpants and a T-shirt.The government asked the family to believe that he had hurled himself through a closed window on the 10th floor of the Statler Hotel, while a government scientist assigned to keep an eye on him had slept in the next bed.
Soon after Olson's death, Gottlieb, posing as a Pentagon employee, paid his respects to Alice Olson at her home in Frederick. He said if ever there was anything he could do, just give him a call.
That visit unnerved her. Her coffee cup rattled in her hand. Twenty-two years later, on June 11, 1975, she inadvertently discovered from a Washington Post article describing her husband's death-without naming him-that Frank Olson had been an unwitting guinea pig in an experiment in mind control conducted by the CIA. Olson's sons, Eric and Nils, would reach an even darker conclusion-that what happened to their father was no accident. Only the man who headed the CIA's LSD program knew the whole story. That was Sidney Gottlieb.
That sunny Virginia day in 1984, Gottlieb was anxious about the impending visit. So were the Olsons. From the headlines, Gottlieb had emerged as a kind of Dr. Strangelove. He had overseen a vast network of psychological and medical experiments conducted in hospitals, universities, research labs, prisons and safe houses, many of them carried out on unsuspecting subjects-mental patients, prostitutes and their johns, drug addicts, and anyone else who stumbled into the CIA's web. Some had been subjected to electroshock therapy in an effort to alter their behavior. Some endured prolonged sensory deprivation. Some were doped and made to sleep for weeks in an attempt to induce an amnesia-like state. Others suffered a relentless loop of audiotape playing the same message hundreds of thousands of times.
As the CIA's sorcerer, Gottlieb had also attempted to raise assassination to an art form. Out of his labs had come a poisoned handkerchief designed to do in a Libyan colonel, a bacteriological agent for a Congolese leader and debilitating potions intended for Cuba's Fidel Castro. (None of these toxins are known to have found their mark.) Hounded by reporters, congressional investigators and his victims, Gottlieb had virtually vanished from Washington in the mid-1970s. And now, there was a knock at his door.
'Oh my God,' Gottlieb muttered, greeting the Olsons. 'I'm so relieved to see you all don't have a gun.'
The night before, he explained, he dreamed that the family had arrived carrying weapons and shot him dead. The Olsons assured him that was not their intent. Only later did it occur to Eric Olson, who has a PhD in psychology from Harvard, that in relating his dream, Gottlieb had deftly turned the tables on the family, disarming them and putting them in a position in which they were reassuring the very man they held responsible for Frank Olson's death. Says Eric Olson, 'He was not the master of mind control for nothing.'
Seventeen years later, I too found myself on the twisting roads of Rappahannock County, searching for answers of my own. It was less the mystery of Frank Olson's death that drew me here than the enigma of Sidney Gottlieb's life. In the course of researching a book about the CIA, I had become intrigued with him. I wondered what had possessed him to do what he had done, and what had become of him in the quarter-century since he had left Washington.
The name Sidney Gottlieb is but an obscure footnote in the nation's history. Yet for a generation of Americans who came of age in the Cold War, his experiments came to define the CIA as a rogue agency. His nefarious programs remain a reference point for government gone awry and, to this day, shape public perceptions of the CIA both here and abroad. They have been encrypted into the cultural memory of those who have never even heard his name. And, now, as America once again mobilizes to fight a formidable foe, they stand as a grim reminder that in the desire to protect the homeland, zeal can mutate into evil.
Gottlieb himself was condemned to serve as a kind of poster child of Cold War excesses and demonized in the press as a clubfooted scientist who stuttered and thirsted after fresh goat's milk. Some, like Eric Olson, liken him to Nazi researchers whose experiments perverted science and defied conscience. His notoriety earned him a place in Norman Mailer's novel Harlot's Ghost and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible.
I arrived in Rappahannock County two years too late to speak with Gottlieb. He died on March 6, 1999, at the University of Virginia hospital in Charlottesville after a long bout with a bad heart. Still, the answers I sought were not ones that Gottlieb would likely have offered even in life. In some ways my task was eased by the passage of time. What was left to me was the detritus of any life-dusty documents, memories of friends and foes, a scattering of photos and letters, the odd inscription found in a book. His family, battered by adverse press, declined to meet with me.
'You never get it right,' said his widow, Margaret. 'You never can know what he was. I would just as soon it was never talked about again.' Who could blame her? Their four children-two sons and two daughters-grew up with a father stalked by his own past.
I began my quest in Washington, Va., population 192. 'Little Washington,' it's affectionately called to set it apart from the more querulous Washington an hour east. It is an idyllic landscape of hills and meadows and clear brooks. People here dote on history, but not one another's past. For Gottlieb, it was less Elba than Brigadoon. I stayed in an inn a pasture away from the modest brick bungalow on Mount Salem Avenue where Gottlieb passed his final year. I walked across the damp field to his back yard, the air heavy with honeysuckle. A sundial lay on the ground beside an herb garden. A tiny Oriental warrior stood watch. A wooden ramp was put in to make Gottlieb's final comings and goings easier. This was archaeology, sifting through the artifacts of another man's life.
Who was Sid Gottlieb? Early on I discovered that someone else had already spent a lifetime asking that very question. That was Gottlieb himself.
He was born August 3, 1918, in New York City, to Louis and Fanny Gottlieb, Hungarian immigrants and Orthodox Jews. Gottlieb was born with two clubfeet. A cousin, Sylvia Gowell, recalls that when the blanket covering his feet was first removed, his mother screamed. For years he was unable to walk and was carried everywhere by his mother. Three times he underwent surgery. Like his father, Louis, and brother David, Sidney stuttered. Gottlieb studied Hebrew, was bar mitzvahed, and distinguished himself as a student. His father ran a sweatshop, and later worked as a tailor. His father's struggles doubtless helped mold his son's socialist vision of the world.
At the University of Wisconsin, Gottlieb and roommate Stanley Mehr were active in the Young People's Socialist League. In 1940, he graduated magna cum laude with a degree in agriculture. His senior thesis: 'Studies on Ascorbic Acid in Cowpeas, Vigna Sinensis.' Three years later, Gottlieb earned a doctoral degree in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. There he met his wife, Margaret Moore, the daughter of a Presbyterian missionary.
The couple moved to Washington, where Gottlieb went to work for the Department of Agriculture. In the summer of 1944, while Mehr was in Europe in the Army, he received a letter from Gottlieb boasting that his wife had produced eight ounces of milk for their baby. Mehr wondered how Gottlieb had measured the output of milk. He put the question to him in a letter. Replied Gottlieb, he simply weighed the infant before and after nursing. Vintage Gottlieb, ever the scientist.
In 1951, after jobs with the Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and the University of Maryland, Gottlieb joined the CIA. John Gittinger conducted the agency's initial assessment of Gottlieb and recalls, 'He always had a certain amount of 'guilt'-if you want to use that word-about not being able to be in the service during World War II like all his contemporaries because of his clubfoot, so he gave an unusual amount of patriotic service to make up for that.'
Mehr remembers the day Gottlieb told him he had joined the CIA. 'I was shocked,' recalls Mehr. 'How in the hell would they accept someone who was a socialist?' he asked Gottlieb. 'Do they know you are a member of the Young People's Socialist League?'
That, said Gottlieb, was the first thing he told the agency. CIA Director Allen Dulles 'was astute enough to know that no one hated Communists more than socialists,' observes Mehr.
At the time Gottlieb joined the agency, he and his wife owned 14 acres on Beulah Road near Vienna, Va. They lived in a log cabin that had neither running water nor an indoor toilet. Gottlieb rigged up an outdoor shower, using a 50-gallon metal drum filled with icy cold water from a well. Over time, Gottlieb modernized the house. The family sold Christmas trees and goat's milk.
Given his background, Gottlieb was assigned to the CIA's chemical group. He secretly worked out of a brick building catty-corner to the Department of Agriculture on 14th Street. It was years before Mehr, an Agriculture employee, discovered that his friend worked across the street.
Gottlieb was held in high esteem at the agency. 'Sid kept us from doing crazy things when some of our case officers had crazy ideas,' recalls Sam Halpern, former executive assistant to the head of clandestine operations. One scheme Gottlieb is said to have helped nix was a 1960 plan to expose Castro to an aerosol spray of LSD. Gottlieb argued that LSD was too unpredictable, that Castro might take some action inimical to the United States. 'Very resourceful, very intelligent and completely loyal to the activity we were in,' says James Drum, Gottlieb's former boss.
The origins of Gottlieb's research into drugs and mind control date back to the Korean War. American POWs appeared inexplicably compliant in the hands of the enemy. Amid Cold War hysteria, reports circulated of POWs being doped and 'brainwashed.' Intelligence reports suggested the Communists were sinister puppet-masters holding sway over innocent Americans-the 'Manchurian Candidate' syndrome.
'The impetus for going into the LSD project,' Gottlieb would later acknowledge, 'specifically rested in a report, never verified, I must say, but it was there, that the Russians had bought the world supply' of LSD. What kind of threat was this?'Somebody had to bell the cat and find out,' says Halpern. 'That's how we all looked at it. We were all stumbling in the dark.' So the CIA launched its own research. The most notorious project was MK-ULTRA, created in 1953. It was, in Gottlieb's words, intended to explore 'various techniques of behavior control in intelligence operations.' It funded an array of research, including electric-shock treatments, hypnosis and experiments designed to program or deprogram a subject's memory. Sometimes research bordered on the ludicrous. A top magician was retained to help the agency practice sleight of hand, in part so that researchers could slip LSD to the unsuspecting. Another trick: swizzle sticks impregnated with the hallucinogen.
Gottlieb had primary say over the direction and funding of the program. It was Gottlieb who decided to give doses to the unwitting. He even approached agency colleagues asking for permission to dose them without notice. Many, including Halpern, declined. In most instances it was not Gottlieb, but rather a network of researchers on contract to the CIA who actually administered the drugs. Gottlieb would later claim that he could not personally be held accountable for any abuses, that he trusted in the professionalism of the researchers.
By distancing himself from the specifics, he had hoped to immunize himself and the agency. Gottlieb justified giving psychedelics to the unwitting on the grounds that to do otherwise would skew the results. If the subject did not know what was happening, he might well imagine that he was losing his mind and unravel. That might undermine his capacity to resist interrogation.
Gottlieb himself told friends that he personally took LSD more than 200 times. He would lock himself in his office and record his every sensation. It was not always clear where he drew the line between research and recreational drug use. He once described how LSD affected him: 'I happened to experience an out-of-bodyness, a feeling as though I am in a kind of transparent sausage skin that covers my whole body and it is shimmering, and I have a sense of well-being and euphoria for most of the next hour or two hours, and then it gradually subsides.'
Gottlieb was present that night at Deep Creek Lodge when Olson, unsuspecting, sipped his LSD-laced Cointreau-but nobody has ever proved that Gottlieb's own hand mixed the drug with the drink.
Yet there is little doubt that he had approved the experiment.
'He was a wild man,' remembers covert operative Eloise Randolph Page, once chief of the CIA's scientific operations branch. Page remembers John Schwab, the scientific director at Fort Detrick and Olson's superior, telling her he blamed Gottlieb for Olson's death. Shortly afterward, Schwab told her, 'As long as I am head of Fort Detrick, Sid Gottlieb will never be allowed inside the gates.'But despite a formal reprimand, Gottlieb's career continued to evolve. Early in 1957 Gottlieb temporarily moved from technical support to espionage. 'I propositioned him,' recalls William Hood, a veteran operative. 'I said, 'You don't understand much of what goes on in the boonies where the work is being done. If I get a job overseas, why don't you come along and look at it from the inside out?' 'Gottlieb liked the idea. For months he studied the tradecraft of spying. In September 1957, he and his family moved to Munich. For two years, he worked under cover, running foreign agents. One CIA officer recalls his help in the case of a chemist who had escaped from East Germany. For months the CIA had debriefed the chemist in a safe house. He claimed that he had provided technical support to Communist intelligence services, but CIA headquarters was not convinced that he was who he said he was. So Gottlieb was asked to interrogate him. Within a single session, the officer recalls, Gottlieb established that the chemist was telling the truth, and, in so doing, exposed a system of 'secret writing' then in use by 'the other side.'
As chief of base in Munich, Hood was both Gottlieb's superior and his friend. But Hood and Gottlieb had differences when it came to the subject of drugs. 'Sid and I had a long debate about the use of drugs in interrogations,' recalls Hood. 'He thought that-I hope I'm not slandering the poor bastard-that it would be possible with the right drug . . . I don't know what part of the brain screens indiscretions, but that it could be suspended somehow, and that under some euphoria a person might be responsive to whatever questions were asked.'
At the time, Hood's objections were more technical than moral: 'My view was that 'seeing was believing.' He wasn't going to move me unless he came up with a wonder drug of some kind, and I wasn't going to stop him from continuing his research.'When the full extent of Gottlieb's drug research came to light decades later, Hood was stunned. 'I do think he was entirely out of line with some of the stuff they were doing,' says Hood. Still, he defends his friend. 'It's the kind of thing I don't think anyone could understand unless they had been involved in it,' he says. 'Intelligence services should not be confused with the Boy Scouts.'
Ultimately, however, even Gottlieb gave up on LSD. In 1961 or 1962, in what came to be known as the 'Gottlieb Report,' he concluded that as 'an intelligence tool-it was inherently not effective.' Beyond that, he noted, 'there was a large disinclination on the part of the American intelligence officers to use it-they found it distasteful and strange. They had moral objections.'
In the fall of 1960, Gottlieb was secretly dispatched to Leopoldville, the Congo. On September 19, 1960, a message went out from CIA headquarters classified 'Eyes Only.' It was to Lawrence Devlin, the CIA's station chief, advising him that he would be receiving a visitor-'Joe from Paris.' Days later, Gottlieb intercepted Devlin near the U.S. Embassy. Devlin recognized him at once. Gottlieb was familiar to Devlin and other operatives who had come to rely upon him for the exotica of spycraft-recording devices, hidden cameras, bugs, invisible ink, whatever was needed for a 'tech op.' Gottlieb was to Devlin what 'Q' was to James Bond.
The two got into Devlin's Peugeot 403 and drove to a safe house. Devlin turned up the volume on a radio while Gottlieb delivered his instructions. What Gottlieb said left Devlin dumbfounded: Devlin was to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, a charismatic leftist leader. 'Jesus Christ!' Devlin thought. He had long worried about Soviet efforts to gain a foothold in the Congo and had lobbied to get rid of Lumumba. But this was not what he had in mind.
Gottlieb carefully withdrew a small kit containing a deadly toxin-whether it was anthrax, tuberculosis or tularemia, Gottlieb could not later recall. It was con-cealed within a tube of toothpaste. Gottlieb also set out a hypodermic syringe-in case the toothpaste scheme failed-as well as rubber gloves and a gauze mask. 'And just who authorized such a mission?' Devlin asked. 'The president,' said Gottlieb. 'And how do you know that?' pressed Devlin. 'Richard Bissell,' answered Gottlieb, naming the head of covert operations.
Devlin now says Gottlieb showed no reluctance. But Devlin says he had no intention of carrying out the assignment. Late one night, soon after Gottlieb returned to Washington, Devlin tossed the bacteriological agent into the Congo River, where it was carried over the cataracts and disappeared. Four months later, Lumumba was killed, apparently by a rival faction.
Devlin never blamed Gottlieb for the unsavory assignment. 'I thought he [Gottlieb] got a bum rap for things his seniors knew were done,' he says. 'He was acting under instructions from his superiors.' Then he pauses. 'But, as we both know, as indicated by the boys who got hung at Nuremberg, that is no excuse.'Gottlieb would later be held answerable before public tribunals, but the private trials were most painful. His daughter Rachel married Joel Samoff, a noted scholar of African affairs. Samoff feared that Gottlieb's notoriety in Africa would impede his own scholarship and make him a pariah on that continent. That animosity, say Mehr and other Gottlieb friends, strained Gottlieb's relationship with Rachel.'I am not interested in talking about my dad,' says Rachel. 'I don't want to be connected with that history.'
In 1966 Gottlieb was named CIA chief of the technical services division. His oversight was far-ranging. He supervised some of those who secretly opened Americans' mail. He saw to it that a psychological profile of the skipper of the Pueblo, the intelligence vessel captured by North Korea in 1968, was prepared for the president. His staff briefed the president's medical personnel, prior to overseas trips, on the perils of an LSD attack.
In 1973, after two decades in the CIA, 55-year-old Gottlieb retired from the agency. Prior to retirement he had been awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, one of the CIA's highest honors. He and his wife sold their house in Vienna and most of their possessions. In May 1974, with two suitcases, they commenced a two-year worldwide trip across Asia and Africa. For months, Gottlieb volunteered in an Indian hospital. In July 1975 he and his wife began an overland bus tour of the Mideast. A month later, Gottlieb received a letter in Istanbul informing him of impending congressional investigations of CIA covert operations.
That was the beginning of a series of front-page exposes revealing a long list of CIA abuses. Americans were horrified. The war in Vietnam had just ended. It was the era of post-Watergate revelations, a time of revulsion and reform. It was also a time when the Olson family was offered some measure of relief. On July 21, 1975, President Gerald Ford personally apologized to the Olson family. Three days later, CIA Director William Colby handed the family previously classified documents. A year later Congress provided the Olsons a financial settlement of $750,000.Sid Gottlieb had not been forgotten. He would be needed to testify, the Istanbul letter informed him. Two days later Gottlieb returned to the United States. He soon accepted a grant of immunity to testify before a Senate committee. Unlike other witnesses, Gottlieb was allowed to testify in private sessions. He had a weak heart, it was argued, and could not stand the stress of public hearings.
Gottlieb did not allow himself any show of emotion, but inside he seethed. He bristled at the long-ago reprimand he had received from Dulles in the aftermath of the Olson episode. 'You exercised poor judgment in this case,' Dulles had scolded. Gottlieb had reluctantly conceded that LSD may have triggered what he called 'the suicide' but argued that 'it is practically impossible for this drug to have any harmful effects.' Later he asserted, 'Lots of people get depressed.'
But it was not the criticism that had stung most. In a 1983 deposition in a civil suit, Gottlieb would note: 'I remember feeling: 'Why don't these people talk to me?' ' In testimony before a Senate committee, he admitted that 'the specter of the suicide had haunted me many, many times since November 1953.' He had considered quitting the CIA and taking up the study of psychiatry 'to better understand the meaning of this tragic incident.'
But Olson's death didn't end CIA-funded experiments with LSD. Indeed, according to records made public in the mid-'70s, the funding and scope of that research expanded. Many of the details will likely never be known. Gottlieb had destroyed the MK-ULTRA files just before retiring. The records might be 'misunderstood,' he had said.
Among family and friends, Gottlieb blamed the CIA for failing to protect him. In depositions, he revealed that he had urged the agency not to release his name. 'I became aware after a while that the names of essentially everybody but myself were deleted, but mine was left in, and I asked my lawyer to object to that practice,' said Gottlieb. It did no good. Gottlieb felt he had been made a scapegoat.
Margaret Gottlieb viewed the press and Congress with a measure of contempt: Her husband, patriotic to a fault, had been treated no better than a war criminal. As the hearings pressed on, Gottlieb might well have reflected on the very different path taken by his brother David. Both were brilliant researchers with PhDs. Both investigated plants for their medicinal properties. Both were severe stutterers. But while Sidney had turned his talents to searching for deadly toxins and potent hallucinogens with which to do the CIA's bidding, David had become co-discoverer of lifesaving antibiotics. Today, on the campus of the University of Illinois, where David Gottlieb was a professor, a bronze plaque celebrates his achievements.
Outwardly, Sidney Gottlieb appeared unfazed by events. 'He certainly didn't express it, but we don't know what went on inside this guy,' recalls David Gottlieb's widow, Amy Zahl Gottlieb. 'Don't forget he was used to keeping his feelings to himself, away from his family.' But there is little to suggest that Gottlieb was racked by guilt. He had done what the nation had asked of him. He wrote off the criticism as demagoguery and hypocrisy. Some of the schemes for which he and the agency were blasted-for example, assassination scenarios against Castro euphemistically called 'executive action' capabilities-originated in the Oval Office of President John F. Kennedy. A little more than a decade later, brother Ted, the senator, was grilling Gottlieb for those very actions.
'Sid was being crucified,' says Ken Fienup, a close friend. 'He was doing things that at the time were considered necessary and proper by our government.' Fienup draws an analogy to his own career as an engineer who worked on dams, once widely viewed as of great social benefit and now seen by many as an affront to nature. It was as if history were a game of musical chairs, and Gottlieb had been caught standing when the music stopped.
Other friends share that view. 'I don't think Sid was particularly apologetic about things,' says Mehr. 'I don't see why he should have been. I mean this was the Cold War-W-A-R.'
But a congressional committee headed by Sen. Frank Church rejected such arguments. In the epilogue to its report, the committee concluded, 'The United States must not adopt the tactics of the enemy. Means are as important as ends. Crises make it tempting to ignore the wise restraints that make men free. But each time we do so, each time the means we use are wrong, our inner strength, the strength which makes us free, is lessened.'
After the congressional hearings, Gottlieb and his wife moved to California to reassemble their lives. Gottlieb enrolled at San Jose State University and earned a master's degree in education with a focus on speech pathology. In 1980, he moved back east, to Rappahannock County. No longer cast as the malevolent CIA scientist, Gottlieb was free to reinvent himself, to indulge his passions for farming and his socialist's interest in communal living.
He shared that vision with his cousin Sylvia Gowell and her husband, Robert. Together they created a communal home, in which they might help one another through their final years. The Gottliebs and Gowells purchased 50 acres that they christened Blackwater Estate after the stream that snakes through the property. Gottlieb sought a life of simplicity and conservation. The home he designed was passive solar. There were chickens and goats to be tended, vegetables and fruits to be canned. The commune was nearly self-sufficient. The doors were made three feet wide for the day when one or more of the residents would be in wheelchairs. 'My husband called it either a geriatric commune or a kibbutz,' recalls Gowell.
Actually, Blackwater Estate became a kind of spiritual retreat and the focal point of a growing community who found in Gottlieb a charismatic soul mate. In his home, Gottlieb set aside a corner of the living room for morning meditation. He knelt on pillows and lit candles and incense. Nowhere was there reference to the CIA. After meditation, he bicycled two miles down a bumpy country road to fetch the newspaper and mail. He bought a used car, insisting on cloth interior and manual transmission. He rarely shed his Birkenstock sandals. 'He was like an old hippie,' says Butch Zindel, a friend who marveled at Gottlieb's modest needs.
In 1980, Virginia granted Gottlieb a license to practice speech pathology. He set up a clinic and volunteered in a local preschool helping small children with speech impediments. He also helped the elderly. In 1995, a neighbor, William Young, had a disabling stroke that left him unable to speak. It was Sidney Gottlieb, then 77, who taught him to talk again. For many years, Gottlieb volunteered at the Hospice of the Rapidan, spending long hours with the dying, reading to them or just holding hands and listening. Sometimes Gottlieb would pay a patient's overdue electric bill or confer with a lawyer to make sure that a will was in order. In one instance, a terminally ill man, long emotionally isolated from his wife and friends, finally opened up to Gottlieb, unburdening himself of traumas suffered as a soldier in World War II. The man's wife listened at the door, hearing for the first time the demons that had haunted her husband. Kathy Clements, the director of the hospice, remembers Gottlieb as 'calming, quiet, peaceful and humble.'Gottlieb threw himself into community activities, serving on the zoning board and arts council. He took part in local theater. Each year he was the angel in the Christmas play. The first to appear on stage, he wore white robes and carried a wand with a star at the end.
The transformation was complete. It was as if Gottlieb had lost his former self, walking backward, sweeping his trail clean with a branch. In his first life, he had explored how to control the minds of others. In his second, he had gained sway over his own recollections, granting himself immunity and a fresh start.
In the 1983 deposition, he said he could not even remember whether he attended Frank Olson's funeral. (His signature appears neatly penned on the scroll of mourners collected that day.) Most people in Rappahannock County had no idea Gottlieb had ever worked for the CIA. His virtue was unquestioned, his counsel sought after, his company prized.
But in adopting a life of selfless virtue and transparency he had traded one cover story for another. Just when it seemed he had entirely distanced himself from his past it showed up again on his doorstep.
For 31 years the Olson family had sought answers to Frank Olson's death. Now, on that sunny day in 1984, Sid Gottlieb stood before them. 'There was a tautness to him,' recalls Eric Olson. 'He was kind of hyper-alert and extremely intelligent. You could feel that right away. I was dealing with a world-class intelligence-and a world-class shrewdness. You felt like you were playing cat-and-mouse and he was way ahead of you. He had a way of decentering you . . . He had a charm that was extraordinary. You could almost fall in love with the guy.'
Gottlieb gave the Olsons his standard justification: that giving unwitting subjects LSD had been essential to understand what would happen if 'the enemy' should dose captured American scientists. But why Olson? Because, said Gottlieb, the agency enjoyed a liaison relationship with the scientists at Fort Detrick that made them particularly convenient subjects.
To specific questions-the when's and what's-Gottlieb drew a blank. At times he suggested that he and the Olsons shared much in common. Eric Olson remembers, 'He tried to create an identification between himself and my father, saying they were similar guys, both being children of first-generation immigrants.' Gottlieb's wife, Margaret, spoke of her father being a missionary in India. Olson's widow was the daughter of a missionary in China. 'There was a sense that we were meeting a colleague on the one hand and an enemy on the other,' says Eric Olson.
'I felt kind of brainwashed by the guy,' remembers Nils Olson. 'I ended up having paternalistic feelings toward him. That's how flipped upside down we were . . . you end up feeling violated.'
Gottlieb offered up a mix of candor and indignation. 'If you don't believe me,' he told the Olsons, 'you might as well leave.' When Eric hinted that his father's death was no accident, Gottlieb suggested he seek mental counseling. Later Eric reached his own bitter conclusion. 'He was lying the whole time. Virtually everything he said was a lie.'
What was most unsettling to the Olsons was the way Gottlieb distanced himself from his own actions. 'The thrust of what he did in the whole session,' says Eric Olson, 'was to say that 'that guy Gottlieb back there did some things that I'm ashamed of, but I am not him. I moved on. I left the agency, I went to India, and I am teaching children with learning disabilities, and I am consciousness-raising. I am not that guy.''
Ten years later, in 1994, Gottlieb received yet another nettlesome visitor-James Starrs, a law professor and forensic scientist from George Washington University, who was working with Eric Olson to unravel the mystery of Frank Olson's death. Starrs found Gottlieb charming but 'on the brink of explosion' each time he was challenged. Starrs asked why, after Frank Olson became depressed, Gottlieb had taken him to Harold Abramson, an allergist and self-proclaimed expert on LSD who had been a beneficiary of CIA funding (he once studied the effect of LSD on goldfish). With Frank Olson in turmoil, Abramson had given him a bottle of bourbon and Nembutal for insomnia.
The conclusion many drew based on this odd choice of therapists was that Gottlieb was more concerned with CIA secrecy than Olson's health. It was a point Gottlieb always hotly disputed. 'I was very upset that a human being had been killed,' he had once testified. 'I didn't mean for that to happen. It was a total accident.'
But James Starrs was not so sure. At the request of Eric Olson, Starrs had exhumed Frank Olson's body. What he says he found was evidence of a hematoma on the temple, an injury Starrs believed was too small to have been caused by the impact with the pavement. His conclusion was that the injury could only have occurred before Olson's fatal plunge. His findings supported the Olsons' suspicion that Frank Olson had likely been murdered.
Too far-fetched? Eric Olson cites a 1953 CIA manual. It notes, 'The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface.'
But why would the CIA murder one of its own? Eric Olson argues that his father had deep moral misgivings about the research into biological warfare, including work with airborne pathogens that he had been doing for the agency. In fact, he had decided to quit his job. Eric is convinced that the CIA viewed his father as a security risk, one who had to be silenced.
The CIA has never responded to Starrs's findings.
By 1998 Sid Gottlieb's commune was unraveling. Gottlieb, then 80, was too frail to work the land. He had designed a second dream home, with a tower for meditation, but it was never to be built. Reluctantly, he and Margaret purchased the home in Washington, Va. He sensed he did not have long.
Gottlieb had become more withdrawn. In college he had ribbed Stanley Mehr for quoting the Matthew Arnold poem 'Dover Beach,' dismissing it as pessimistic. But in his last years, Gottlieb recited it to Mehr, having committed the spectacularly dark final lines to memory:
. . . for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help from pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Even as his health deteriorated, he faced additional lawsuits from the ghosts of his past. In 1952 Stanley Milton Glickman was an artist living in Paris. Years later, Glickman would remember an American with a clubfoot who had slipped LSD into his drink at a cafe, leaving him with recurrent hallucinations-in essence, driving him mad. In the early '80s, Glickman sued Gottlieb. When Glickman died in 1992, his sister continued the suit.
There was no evidence placing Gottlieb in Paris at the time, nor any other evidence linking him to Glickman. When Gottlieb died, the suit was brought against his estate. In time, even the judge passed away. Finally, in 1999-two months after Gottlieb's death-the suit was dismissed. Gottlieb's estate prevailed.
'I just feel badly with what he had to put up with in the latter part of his life,' recalls Mehr. 'He gradually became depressed, and it's hard to say how much was due to his heart ailment and how much was due to the endless lawsuits. He was not the same man the last few years of his life.'
When he died on March 6, 1999, secrecy descended once more. The Clore English Funeral Home in Culpeper declined to disclose details of final arrangements, not even the disposition of his ashes. The local paper, the Rappahannock News, observed his passing with one terse paragraph. The last line read, 'Services will be private.'
'It was the shortest obituary in history,' remembers editor Barbara Wayland. The family had feared refueling old controversies. Nonetheless, old recriminations resurfaced almost immediately. Major newspapers through the United States and abroad dredged up the lurid details of Gottlieb's CIA past. His obituary in the Times of London began, 'When Churchill spoke of a world 'made darker by the dark lights of perverted science' he was referring to the revolting experiments conducted on human beings by Nazi doctors in the concentration camps. But his remarks might with equal justice have been applied to the activities of the CIA's Sidney Gottlieb.' The Guardian of London headlined its obituary 'The Real Manchurian Candidate.' The Toronto Sun's obituary ran under the headline 'CIA Acid Guru Dies.'
Such accounts found their way back to Rappahannock County. 'People were tearing their hair out and beating their breasts saying he was evil personified, and how could they reconcile that with the man they knew?' recalls Lois Manookian, a close friend of Gottlieb's.
Many rallied to Gottlieb's defense. Bob Scott wrote a letter to the Rappahannock News. 'The big city newspapers were not able to know the Sid Gottlieb we knew so well,' Scott wrote. 'Sid Gottlieb personified the spirit of the selfless servant.' For others, it was more difficult coming to terms with the news. 'What we read about him was not the man we knew,' says Kathy Clements, who ran the hospice.'It was hard for me to square that up with the person I knew,' recalls the Rev. Phillip Bailey. 'It just kind of floored me that he would have been involved in anything that would have endangered people without them knowing it. He was a very gentle, caring person.'
Says attorney Frank Reynolds, 'If he did the things that he did-that they say he did-how do I put this? If he did the things he did, it requires an ability to put research above other things and it sure looked to me like he put human things above other things in the time I knew him.'
Many have reached the same inexorable conclusion, the one articulated by Rose Ann Sharp, who worked in the preschool where Gottlieb volunteered: 'I always thought that a lot of Sid's later life was spent atoning, whether he needed to or not, for how he had been exposed publicly as some sort of evil scientist.'
'I felt that he was on a path of expiation, whether consciously or unconsciously,' agrees Rabbi Carla Theodore. In part she came to that conclusion after the revelations of Gottlieb's CIA past, but there were earlier hints. Theodore remembers him commiserating with a friend who said she had a past that had to be kept hidden.
'I, too, have done things I really regret,' Gottlieb told her. 'But I am learning to keep it to myself.' For a time, Gottlieb told Theodore, his own adult children were not speaking to him. 'There were enough cries of horror from near and far,' says Theodore. 'It was an extremely big fact of his past. Somehow he was living around it. It was there like a pink elephant.
'I once asked him if I could talk to him about it, and he said, 'Yes, not many people asked.' But the thing was, his answers were so defended that I gave up after a few minutes. It was a barrier. I wasn't going to get the truth. He was a delightful person to interact with, but at the same time I feel he grieved and suffered and that that was always there. Maybe in retrospect he was as puzzled by what he had done as we were who heard about it.'
Says Lois Manookian, 'He had given his heart and soul to the CIA, and because he made some mistakes, he suddenly found himself to be a national demon.'But 'he was always the same person,' insists Manookian. 'He did not become a different person 20 years ago. He was a man of great honor and great integrity.'What Manookian saw in Sid Gottlieb was a man of deep faith who sometimes put it in the wrong place. 'He was not a monster but a man,' says Manookian, 'He was, and is, us, and we didn't want to see it.'
In the end, his life, like many, was riddled with contradictions. He rarely spoke of the CIA, and when he did, he sometimes uttered what would have been apostasy to a younger Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb friend Butch Zindel says that Gottlieb told him he had never really believed that communism was the threat it was made out to be. 'We wasted a lot of money and a lot of people fighting it,' he once said.
In 1993 Gottlieb declined an interview with U.S. News & World Report, saying only that he was 'on the side of the angels now.'
Gottlieb's two worlds came together for one brief afternoon in the gym of the old schoolhouse across from Gottlieb's home. There, perhaps 200 gathered for his memorial service, bearing casseroles and covered dishes. Most who spoke were neighbors and friends from his second life, but there were also white-haired men from Langley who did not speak publicly but mingled afterward. The arc of his life had stretched from one Washington to the other. The first had all but branded him a monster. The second all but canonized him.
'Ah-poor Sid Gottlieb,' says Richard Helms, a former director of the CIA. 'He has been heavily persecuted, but to bail him out of the troubles he's in would take a lot more than just a few minutes and I'm not sure I'd be much of a contributor to it. The nation just saw something they didn't like and blasted it, and he took the blame for it.'
Now 88 and editing his own memoirs, Helms has chosen to delete all reference to MK-ULTRA. 'I see no way to handle it in the amount of space I have available,' he says.
Gottlieb's CIA associate John Gittinger maintained his friendship with Gottlieb after retirement, but the two rarely spoke of their travails. Still, Gittinger believes Gottlieb suffered from the investigations and lawsuits. 'His was twice as bad as mine, and mine was terrible,' says Gittinger. 'I have a feeling that Sid was left out on a limb as far as support from the agency was concerned.'Even now, Gottlieb has not fully escaped his past. Eric Olson, who lost his father 48 years ago, is preparing to sue the government, claiming that his earlier settlement was tainted by lies. His father's skeleton, potential evidence, rests under lock and key in the office of forensic pathologist James Starrs. Tissue samples are in labs in Florida and Pennsylvania.
But Gottlieb's life raised a question broader than any that will ever be addressed in court. It was the subtext of every obituary, the unspoken question on the lips of mourners: how to reconcile the two Sid Gottliebs. One is humble and compassionate, an altruist eager to ease the miseries of the weak and sick. The other, a heedless Cold Warrior, is willing to experiment on innocents or unleash anthrax in the name of national security.
It is hard to argue that Sid Gottlieb was not a product of his time. His life reflected the same polarities that defined the Cold War, the virtues and vices of extreme patriotism, the promise and perversion of science. He inhabited another era-a time of smothering conformity, loyalty oaths, witch hunts, segregation, lobotomies, sterilizations and radiation experiments.
As recently as August, many might have found it easy to look back at those excesses as virtually medieval and call them 'unthinkable,' a handy term to distance ourselves from unsavory elements of our own past. But what was unthinkable in summer is no longer so in autumn. This season, we don't need Gottlieb or anyone else to convince us of the hidden threats and potential horrors we face. We can see it in the endless loop of the news.
The revulsion felt at secret American schemes of assassination has given way to the fervent hope of some that our assassins will be more successful this time. A recent national poll revealed that one in three Americans is ready to sanction torture in the interrogation of terrorism suspects. Once again, the good we do and the evil we are capable of glide within the same tight orbit.
Ted Gup is the author of The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives and is a professor of journalism at Case Western Reserve University. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article at 1 p.m. Monday on www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.
-------- un
U.S. Vetoes Mideast Resolution
U.N. Measure Called for Israelis to Leave Palestinian Land
By Colum Lynch
The Washington Post
Sunday, December 16, 2001; Page A37
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49645-2001Dec15.html
UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 15 -- The Bush administration today vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Palestinian-controlled territory and condemning acts of terror against civilians, U.S. officials said.
John D. Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said council action would have complicated U.S. diplomatic efforts to obtain a cease-fire in the Middle East conflict. And he faulted the Arab-sponsored resolution because it failed to directly address a recent string of suicide attacks against Israeli civilians.
"No one is working harder than we are to end the terror, violence and suffering that has afflicted the Israeli and Palestinian people for too long," he told the council before the early morning vote on the resolution. "Unfortunately, the resolution before us fails to address the dynamic at work in the region. Instead, its purpose is to isolate politically one of the parties to the conflict through an attempt to throw the weight of the council behind the other party."
Twelve of the council's 15 members voted in favor of the resolution, while Britain and Norway abstained. The United States cast the lone veto, blocking the Palestinians' latest attempt to enlist the Security Council in their quest to halt Israel's military activities in the West Bank and Gaza.
The Palestinian-backed resolution called for an "immediate cessation of all acts of violence, provocation and destruction" in the Palestinian territories. It also underlined the "essential role" of the Palestinian Authority in the peace process and urged the establishment of an undefined "monitoring mechanism" to observe human rights violations in the region.
Israel has opposed previous Palestinian requests for the deployment of international monitors in the occupied territories. Israeli diplomats today portrayed the Palestinian initiative as especially offensive in light of recent suicide bombings. "It does not even refer to acts of terrorism by the Palestinians," said Aaron Jacob, Israel's deputy U.N. ambassador.
Palestinian U.N. representative Nasser Kidwa said he was forced to turn to the Security Council after Israel severed ties with Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Authority last week because Arafat had failed to halt attacks against civilians. Kidwa faulted the Bush administration for refusing to use its influence to restrain Israel's military.
"We are the little guys," Kidwa said. "We are the people under occupation and it is our right and a duty to come to the body responsible for international peace and security, to the United Nations, to the Security Council and try to help the situation."
It is the second time the United States has vetoed a resolution on the Middle East conflict since violence erupted in September 2000, imperiling the peace process and leaving at least 776 Palestinians and 233 Israelis dead. On March 27, the United States blocked another Palestinian resolution calling for the establishment of an international monitoring force.
The Palestinian resolution lacked some of the more overtly anti-Israeli language that has graced earlier Palestinian texts. But Washington's resistance to Security Council action on the Middle East has hardened since the recent Palestinian militant attacks against Israeli civilians.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS
Ashcroft creates interagency force on security leaks
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 16, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011216-22364294.htm
Attorney General John Ashcroft has created an interagency task force to review current administrative and legal sanctions governing the leak of classified information.
The review, the first in nearly two decades, will look at current tools to stop leaks and will make recommendations for modifications to administrative policies and regulations, and formulate new statutory remedies, if necessary.
"Leaks of classified information do substantial damage to the security interests of the nation. As a government, we must try to find more effective measures to deal with this damaging practice, including measures to prevent it," Mr. Ashcroft said.
The Justice Department, under the Intelligence Authorization Act, will lead the review in direct consultation with the director of the CIA, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the secretary of energy and other federal government agencies that deal with classified information.
The task force will deliver a report to Congress by the deadline established in the legislation, May 1.
Justice Department officials said the task force will examine ways in which protection for classified information can be improved throughout the federal government. The review will include a decision on whether new legislation is needed, whether personnel processes need to be modified or tailored to address specific needs of the intelligence community, and the impact of new technology on the government's ability to control classified information.
The Bush administration has been concerned about the leak of classified information, and has sought ways to make it easier to prosecute government officials for leaking the material.
Some members of Congress have suggested legislation be drafted to make the release of classified information a felony. The proposed legislation, however, has been rejected by some Republicans and Democrats, as well as many in the news media, civil liberties organizations, unions and historians.
Media organizations and government watchdog groups persuaded President Clinton to veto similar legislation last year on the grounds it would have undermined legitimate efforts to keep the government accountable. They argued that the legislation would have had a chilling effect on whistleblowers and others seeking to open the door on questionable government activities.
In September, before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Sen. Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, shelved proposed legislation that would have called for a three-year prison sentence for those who leaked classified information after he was unable to muster widespread political support.
At the time, Mr. Shelby suggested the creation of an interagency government task force to study the impact of leaks of classified information on such agencies as the CIA and the FBI. He said he was "more than willing" to consider any alternative proposed by the task force.
Mr. Shelby had proposed to make the unauthorized release of all "properly" classified information a felony carrying a $10,000 fine and a maximum of three years behind bars. He said a deluge of leaks was damaging intelligence sources and, in some cases, putting agents in danger.
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Justice channels $5 billion to states' safety
December 15, 2001
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The Justice Department has awarded more than $5 billion over the past year to the states, the District of Columbia and the five territories to fight crime, promote public safety, prevent juvenile delinquency, equip and train emergency responders and assist crime victims.
The department's first annual funding report, released yesterday, said the money went to each of the recipients through the Office of Justice Programs and Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.
"The Justice Department is an active partner with state and local governments and nonprofit agencies in making communities safe places to live and work," Attorney General John Ashcroft said. "This $5 billion demonstrates our solid commitment to these significant state and local efforts."
Virginia received $152 million; Maryland got $122 million; and the District of Columbia received $87 million.
Justice Department officials said more than $3.9 billion of the total went to law enforcement, by far the largest funding category, with another $625 million to juvenile justice programs, $464 million to victims' programs, $98 million to substance-abuse programs and nearly $59 million to community-based initiatives.
The funding report includes both large grants awarded by formula to the states and discretionary grants that are most often awarded on a competitive basis to nonprofit or community agencies. Because many of the formula programs use population as a determining factor, heavily populated states - such as California, which received more than $900 million last year - received more funding than less populated states, such as Wyoming, which received just over $14 million.
Department officials said the law-enforcement category includes funding for a range of needs, from hiring police officers to training emergency first responders to purchasing equipment. Juvenile justice funds include money for improving states' juvenile justice systems, promoting delinquency prevention through programs such as mentoring and funding in areas as diverse as preventing child abuse and reducing gang violence.
They said the majority of funding for victims' programs goes directly to the states to provide compensation and assistance for crime victims or to combat domestic violence. Substance-abuse funds are used for prevention and drug-treatment programs, including drug courts, while a large portion of community-based funding is provided through the neighborhood-focused Weed and Seed initiative.
"This report is a useful tool that allows state and local policy makers to see what federal resources are available within their states to promote public safety," Mr. Ashcroft said. "They can then determine additional needs or tap into existing programs."
----
Policy reasons for a military tribunal
[To respond: mailto:letters@washingtontimes.com]
December 16, 2001
Washington Times
Editorial by Victoria Toensing
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20011216-40893136.htm
The carnage of September 11, 2001, was neither a crime nor an act of war. It was an illegal act of war intended to destroy our American society. As such, it is beyond the scope of our criminal laws.
Entering a country by stealth (sans military uniform) to destroy "life or property," states our Supreme Court, is an example of a belligerent who is an offender "against the law of war subject to trial and punishment by military tribunal." Therefore, those who decry military tribunals cannot prevail on Supreme Court precedent. They must argue policy. I supervised the U.S. Justice Department's terrorism unit in the mid-1980s, and faced the problems of investigating and prosecuting terrorism. I know the practical policy reasons that require the president to have the option to try these cases outside our criminal justice system.
The security requirements of a regular trial would overwhelm our federal law enforcement personnel capability and subject government trial participants and buildings to round-the-clock protection. Federal judge Michael Mukasey, who presided over the 1993 trial of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman charged with conspiring to blow up five New York City landmarks, is still under 24-hour armed protection, a condition akin to being a mobster on the witness protection program. The sentences of defendants convicted in New York City of the East African Embassies bombings were scheduled days after September 11. Coincidence?
When I was negotiating with the German government to extradite Mohammed Hamadi, responsible for the 1985 hijacking of TWA 847 and the murder of Navy Seal Robert Stethem, my husband Joseph diGenova was the D.C. U.S. Attorney who would try the case. So both of us were government operatives bringing a Middle Eastern terrorist to trial.
After we requested Hamadi's extradition, a U.S. marshal showed up at Joe's office asking our blood type and insisting we move from our cul-de-sac so 24-hour surveillance would be easier to maintain.
We had no problem with these requests because fighting terrorism was a cause to which we were dedicated. But when the marshal also asked for locations and blood types of our three children, my heart skipped a beat. They hadn't asked for this danger.
We escaped that emotional call when the German government refused to extradite and, instead, tried and convicted Hamadi. Yet, the scenario made me keenly aware that the need for round-the-clock protection from death threats involves not just the judge, the prosecutor and the witnesses; it encompasses the families of those trial participants. Even if we had enough federal law enforcement personnel to provide full-time security for all parties involved in terrorism trials (and we do not), why would we want to impose on our government servants a choice of a life of confinement or vulnerability to terrorism for doing their jobs?
And then there is the jury. Who wants to serve as a juror, deciding guilt knowing that Osama bin Laden, his lieutenants, and worldwide cells would hold us accountable? Ireland, long ago in its Offenses Against the State Act, gave up using jury trials for terrorism cases because its citizenry was too intimidated to serve.
A further security concern is protection for the courtrooms. Any building utilized would become a citadel with the lives of all workers, trial related or not, at risk. Who wants to live or work within a bomb's blast of a building housing a terrorist trial?
In cases requiring evidence from outside the United States, there are problems that could prevent all relevant evidence of guilt to be used. The only situation worse than not capturing any terrorists is capturing them, bringing them back to the United States for trial and having to release them because evidence of guilt was kept from the U.S. government or not admitted into evidence.
When I was at the Justice Department, we refused to request arrest or extradition of a terrorist unless and until we had evidence beyond a reasonable doubt and were certain of its admissibility in a federal trial. There is no such luxury during war where we round up combatants whose names or evidence against them will not be known until weeks or months after capture.
September 11, 2001, was not a bank robbery in Sheboygan. Few, if any, U.S. located witnesses or documents will be relevant. It was an international plot by foreigners mostly outside our borders. Evidence of guilt will be gathered by foreign governments, either by their intelligence agencies or police forces. Obtaining admissible evidence is difficult under both situations.
As a Justice Department official, I had information of a foreign intelligence service possessing a tape of a terrorist's involvement in an attack in which a U.S. citizen was a victim. We should have prosecuted the case.
However, under no circumstances would the intelligence agency give us the tape, the only form in which a U.S. court would allow a jury to hear the words on the tape. ("We'll give you a summary if you don't tell where it came from.") To provide us the tape would mean that the fact of wiretapping would be known, revealing to the terrorists the phones being monitored.
For this country, preventing a future attack was more important than prosecuting a perpetrator.
To all who claim we have a law for admitting such evidence, I assure you that the Grey Mail Act, designed for spy cases and leaks of classified information, works in only a handful of cases. Many times sources and methods cannot be sufficiently hidden. The government does not reveal when disclosures required by the Act result in declinations.
Evidence collected by a foreign police force presents another problem but with the same result: the probability of not being used at trial. U.S. courts do not use relevance and reliability as the only factors for admitting evidence. In criminal cases, the courts can exclude evidence, no matter how probative of guilt, if the police officer does not follow certain rules such as obtaining a proper search warrant or giving Miranda rights. Under U.S. law, "guilty" persons can go free if the constable blunders.
For example, a foreign police officer enters a known terrorist cell and finds credible strong evidence of guilt: diagrams of Dulles airport, notes describing the speed and angle necessary to demolish a structure, and bank records showing transactions with the hijackers named on the Pentagon plane.
However, U.S. law is unclear whether evidence is admissible that does not comply with U.S. constitutional standards. Some courts allow it, others do not.
In many countries, there would be no warrant signed by a judge finding probable cause to search. Congress rejected a law ensuring this type of foreign evidence could be used in terrorist trials. U.S. prosecution means risk of losing credible strong evidence of guilt because a foreign constable blundered, a result that could mean release for the accused terrorist.
A jury trial of a person charged with crimes associated with September 11 will not necessarily be fairer than a tribunal procedure. Both defendant and government are entitled to a fair trial. Any defense attorney, not just a good one, will take one nano second to argue there is no American city where the defendant could get a fair trial. If Timothy McVeigh's trial for bombing the Oklahoma federal building had to be moved to Denver because of local publicity and community outrage, where in America are those factors absent from a jury pool for the September 11 attacks?
On the other hand, the government could be deprived of a fair trial if the jury votes not guilty because it is so intimidated for fear of retaliation.
When deciding our options for response to September 11, we must not forget that, unlike ordinary crimes, our goal in war violations is not only to find the perpetrators. We must prevent another attack on our citizens.
In that regard, perhaps the most practical argument for the president to have the option of trying non-U.S. belligerents in a military tribunal is that he already has one: to kill them.
Victoria Toensing is a former deputy assistant attorney general, who supervised antiterrorism cases for the U.S. Justice Department, and is a founding partner of the law firm of diGenova & Toensing LLP.
----
500 Officers to Be Issued High-Powered Weapons Used by Elite Unit
New York Times
December 16, 2001
By RICHARD LEZIN JONES
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/16/nyregion/16COPS.html
Five hundred of the city's police officers will receive new, high- powered weapons once reserved for elite units but increasingly regarded as necessary for a police department with a sharper focus on fighting terrorism, officials said yesterday.
Under the plan, first reported yesterday in The New York Post, the officers will be equipped with assault rifles and submachine guns in addition to their standard-issue handguns. The allocation will double the number of officers with high- powered weapons.
Although the proposal was in the works long before Sept. 11, it gained momentum in the weeks after the terrorist attacks, officials said.
"To be effective, law enforcement agencies must provide their personnel with the tools they need to respond to all possible situations," Police Commissioner Bernard B. Kerik said yesterday.
"Equipping specific officers with these weapons will enhance the N.Y.P.D.'s ability to respond quickly and effectively to an even wider range of contingencies," he said.
Those include the department's daily duties staffing security checkpoints around the city and ensuring an effective response to emergencies. Officials said the checkpoints largely reinforced the new weaponry proposal.
Department officials said that when they began placing officers at bridges, tunnels and other important security posts around the city - assignments that typically require greater firepower than those given to most of the rank and file - they were forced to choose from a relatively small pool of officers trained in the use of heavy-duty weapons.
High-powered weapons have traditionally been the almost exclusive province of the department's elite Emergency Service Unit, which is made up of about 500 officers. Department officials hope to have the new plan in place over the next few weeks. Of the total 40,000 officers in the city, as many as 8 in each of the 76 precincts will be issued the new weapons and trained in their use under the plan.
Many of the weapons to be issued are already in stock. The weapons include MP5 submachine guns, Mini- 14 assault rifles and more commonplace firearms like shotguns. Specially trained officers are already using many of those weapons at posts around the city.
For instance, the Mini-14 - a variation on the M-14 rifle that was favored for years by the military - is among the weapons issued to officers assigned to security checkpoints at police headquarters.
-------- terrorism
Bin Laden videotape was result of a sting
The CIA may have set up the terrorist leader to incriminate himself
Ed Vulliamy and Jason Burke,
Sunday December 16, 2001,
The Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,619480,00.html
.... This weekend, as the debate the tape has provoked continued across the Islamic world, several intelligence sources have suggested to The Observer that the tape, although absolutely genuine, is the result of a sophisticated sting operation run by the CIA through a second intelligence service, possibly Saudi or Pakistani.
'They needed someone whom they could persuade or coerce to get close to bin Laden and someone whom bin Laden would feel secure talking to. If it works, you have got the perfect evidence at the perfect moment,' said one security source. 'It's a masterstroke.'
The focus of suspicion is the Saudi dissident preacher who appears to have taped the interview, conducted according to the timecode on the video on 9 November, in what appears to be a guesthouse in the Afghan city of Kandahar. Though unidentified in the one-hour recording, security sources have told The Observer that the interviewer, who appears to be disabled from the waist down, is Ali Saeed al-Ghamdi, a former assistant professor of theology at a seminary in Mecca. Saudis who watched the tape said the interviewer's accent betrayed roots in the south-west of their country, either the lower Hejaz or Asir province, where most of the 15 Saudi hijackers were from. Bin Laden bows down to greet the cleric, who has not stood up to greet him. Only someone who was incapable of rising would not be on his feet in the presence of such a famous and revered man, Islamic experts said yesterday.
Al-Ghamdi, who is known to Saudi intelligence services, is a marginal figure who tried to make a name for himself through inflammatory anti-Western speeches before being banned from preaching in 1994, one Saudi close to the government said. In the late Nineties he preached in obscure mosques along the highway leading from the port city of Jedda - where bin Laden grew up - to the holy city of Mecca, but his firebrand oratory drew only small audiences.
Senior Saudi government figures and religious scholars tend to dismiss such men as insignificant. 'They are not big-time and they don't have the legitimacy and the religious scholarship that the big guys have,' said Nawaf Obeid, a Saudi security analyst. 'They make a name for themselves with how extreme they are. They aggrandise themselves by claiming they are with bin Laden.'
Security sources stress that, despite his Islamist credentials, al-Ghamdi would still be a potential point of contact for Pakistani, Saudi or Egyptian intelligence.
'He was known because he was suspected of being involved in the gathering of international finance for al-Qaeda. He is a peripheral figure who wants to be something bigger and is frustrated. It's a classic profile. They could have turned him,' one security official for a Gulf intelligence agency contacted in Peshawar said. Experts told The Observer that the tape bears a marked resemblance to secretly filmed evidence used by the FBI against major American Mafia figures in recent years.
And though US security officials said there was 'no confirmation' that the tape was made by an 'intelligence source', a Pentagon official confirmed to The Observer that 'curious circumstances' surrounded al-Ghamdi, who appeared to be aware of the taping.
Whatever its provenance, the video has polarised opinion in the Arab world. 'The vast proportion of people always believed he did it and condemned him for it. They have not altered their view,' said Abdul Wahab Badrakhan, the deputy editor of al-Hayat newspaper. 'Only those with a fanatical mindset would deny what they can now see.'
One such man is Syed, a 38-year-old man who fought alongside bin Laden in Afghanistan during the Eighties. 'There is no way Osama would have done something like this,' he said. 'He was a quiet man with great reverence for human life. The Osama I see happily describing people dying is not the Osama I knew and loved.'
Images of the 44-year-old Saudi-born dissident, who studied civil engineering as a young man, laughing as he talks of how he used his specialist knowledge to calculate how much damage the planes would do, have been difficult for supporters to explain.
General Hamid Gul, a hardline former head of Pakistan's ISI spy agency, suggested that the figure in the video might be a lookalike. Others have queried the translation of the poor-quality Arabic soundtrack and the way that certain key elements - such as the location where the film was made - are inaudible.
----
Bin Laden reported in Iran
Sunday, December 16, 2001
Kyodo News
http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=8&id=186762
ISLAMABAD - Accused terrorist Osama bin Laden escaped his besieged Tora Bora hideout last week and entered Iran, Pakistani newspapers reported Sunday.
The Urdu-language newspaper Jang quoted "highly authoritative sources" as saying bin Laden took advantage of a lull in U.S. bombing when his al-Qaida forces at Tora Bora held talks with anti-Taliban eastern alliance forces on a negotiated surrender.
-------- activists
Greenpeace Storms Aussie Reactor
DECEMBER 16, 22:47 ET
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=AUSANT&STORYID=APIS7GEMLGO0
SYDNEY, Australia (AP) - Dozens of Greenpeace activists dressed up as nuclear waste barrels stormed a nuclear reactor Monday, scaling the walls and unfurling protest banners.
Detective Inspector Laurie Pettiford of the New South Wales state police said 46 people were arrested Monday and would be charged with trespassing.
A four-wheel-drive vehicle was used to block the gates of the Lucas Heights reactor in southern Sydney as two truckloads of activists ran onto the grounds, scaling a radio tower, the main building and a waste storage facility.
Some unfurled banners reading: ``Nuclear never safe.'' One protester chained himself to the top of the main building.
Pam Keenan, a spokeswoman for the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization, the government authority that runs Lucas Heights, said Lucas Heights has ``layers'' of security.
``Because of that security in-depth approach, there wasn't any breach of the secure part of the site,'' she said.
The facility, a research reactor where scientists produce radioactive medicines sold to hospitals, also supplies irradiated silicon for the semiconductor industry.
The reactor, about the size of a washing machine, possesses only enough radioactive uranium to fill a coffee cup.
Built in 1958, Australia's only reactor is due to be replaced next year.
``A new reactor is unnecessary,'' Greenpeace activist Stephen Campbell said in a statement explaining the protester's actions.
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