------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Defence capablities of India, Pak
India says missiles 'in position'
Indian Jets Fly Near Pakistan Border
Journalist Is Convicted Of Treason In Russia
Experts fear crude radioactive device as potential terror weapon
Idaho project to shrink N-waste is funded

MILITARY
Critics' Attack on Tribunals Turns to Law Among Nations
Iran offers to help build an Afghan army
As Afghans Return Home, Need for Food Intensifies
Afghan Government Warns Al Qaeda Still Active
Thai security crackdown after attacks
Tracking Bioterror's Tangled Course
Chinese Seek Germ Warfare Reparations
Washington subway readies chemical sensors
Swiss continue army of citizens
Israel and Palestinians Clash in West Bank
Kim hints at allowing U.S. plan
Malaysian Muslim Cult Members Guilty of Rebellion
Tensions Continue to Mount Between India and Pakistan
US deficient in information warfare
Anniversary of Soviet Collapse Ignored
Chechen Guerrilla Leader Sentenced
Russians Defuse Bombs in Afghanistan
Air Force resists more bombers, prefers fighters
General tells sailors of mission
New Risks Emerge as U.S. Readies Afghan Offensive

POLICE / PRISONERS
Death Penalty Sought in Japan Trial

ENERGY AND OTHER
Sun power lights complex's exterior
What A Cell Phone Can Do To A Child's Brain In Just Two Minutes
Camel antibodies may help heal humans



-------- NUCLEAR

-------- india / pakistan

Defence capablities of India, Pak

December 26, 2001
Times of India
http://www.timesofindia.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=1942094489

INDIA

Army:
- 1.1 million personnel with five regional commands and 12 corps.
- Reserves: Territorial Army - 40,000 volunteers Equipment:
- 3,400 main battle tanks, including T-55, T-72, Vijayanta.
- 90 light tanks.
- 1,450 infantry combat vehicles.
- 300 armoured personnel carriers.
- 4,175 pieces of towed artillery.
- 155mm Bofors howitzers
- 130 mm guns.
- 105 mm guns.
- About 200 pieces of self-propelled artillery
- 2,400 air defence guns
- Unspecified number of searcher and other unmanned aerial vehicles
- 150 helicopters Navy:
- 53,000 personnel.

Equipment:
- 10 Russian-made Kilo-class submarines
- 4 HDW SSK submarines
- 2 Soviet era Foxtrot submarines
- 1 aircraft carrier with Sea King helicopters and Sea Harrier aircraft
- 8 guided missile destroyers
- 11 frigates
- 7 corvettes
- 39 patrol and offshore combat vessels
- 18 mine warfare vessels
- 7 amphibious combat vessels
- 32 support vessels. 20 Sea Harrier aircraft.
- 29 Dornier aircraft
- 10 Il-38 and Tu-142 reconnaissance aircraft
- 70 helicopters, including Ka-25s.

Air Force:
- 110,000 personnel with five regional commands

Equipment:
- More than 700 combat aircraft.
- Force include Su-30, MiG-21, MiG-23, MiG-29, Mirage 2000, Jaguar.
- More than 20 attack helicopters, including Mi-25 and Mi-35.
- 4 Boeing electronic intelligence aircraft
- 2 reconnaissance squadrons.
- More than 200 transport aircraft, including Dorniers, An-32, Avros, Il-76.
- More than 150 transport helicopters, including Mi-8, Mi-17 and Mi-26.

Missiles:
- Unspecified number of Prithvi nuclear-capable short-range missiles.

PAKISTAN:

Army:
- 550,000 personnel with nine corps headquarters.
- Reserves: 513,000 personnel.

Equipment:
- 2,300 main battle tanks, including M-47, M-48, T-55, Chinese-made Type 59, Type 69, Type 85 and T-80UD.
- 1,150 armoured personnel carriers.
- 1,400 pieces of towed artillery, including 155mm, 130mm and 203mm guns. 250 pieces of self-propelled artillery.
- More than 2,000 air defence guns, 20 attack helicopters, more than 100 transport helicopters and unspecified number of Bravo UAVs.

Navy:
- 25,000 personnel, including 1,200 marines and 2,000 personnel of Maritime Security Agency. Main base at Karachi.

Equipment:
- 10 submarines, including French-made Agosta, Daphne armed with Harpoon missiles, eight frigates, five missile crafts, three coastal patrol boats, one inshore patrol vessel, six mine warfare and nine support vessels
- 5 naval combat aircraft. 9 armed helicopters

Air Force:
- 45,000 personnel with three regional commands Equipment:
- More than 350 combat aircraft, including Mirage III, Mirage 5, Chinese-made Q-5.
- One reconnaissance squadron More than 20 transport aircraft, including C-130 Hercules, Boeing 707.

Missiles:
- Unspecified number of Hatf-I, Hatf-II short-range missiles.

-------

India says missiles 'in position'

By Harbaksh Singh Nanda
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
December 26, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/26122001-023827-3025r.htm

NEW DELHI, Dec. 26 (UPI) -- India's defense minister said the country's missile systems are "in position" along the border with Pakistan amid growing tension between the nuclear rivals.

George Fernandes told Press Trust of India that Indian troops will conduct military exercises along the border in the coming few days.

Tension is mounting in the subcontinent with both India and Pakistani building up troop deployment. Both sides have also moved their missiles closer to the border.

"At the moment, we are concentrating on Agni-II ballistic missiles (with a range of about 1500 miles). We do not have any plans now for a longer-range missile," Fernandes told PTI in an interview.

Newspaper reports in both countries suggest that India and Pakistan have deployed their missile armory near their common border.

Pakistan is reportedly in possession of Chinese-made M-11 and M-9 missiles with strike ranges varying from 600 to 750 kilometers, 'Ghauri I and II' (1150-1500 kilometers) and 'Shaheen-II' (2500 kilometers).

India has 150-kilometer range 'Prithvi-I' and Agni-II and some Russian made medium-range missiles.

India has scrapped its Army Day Parade scheduled for Jan. 15 due to troop deployment.

Indian and Pakistani troops traded heavy firing in Kashmir region Tuesday night.

Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee blamed Pakistan of thrusting a war upon India, while Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said his troops were ready for "any Indian adventure."

"We do not want war but war is being thrust on us and we will have to face it," Vajpayee told a rally organized by the youth wing of his Bharatiya Janata Party on his 77th birthday.

Musharraf told a rally in the southern port city of Karachi that Pakistan did not want a war but "is capable of defending itself if forced to fight."

Tensions between the rivals has risen since the Dec. 13 attack on the Indian Parliament. New Delhi India blames two Pakistan-based Muslim militant groups - Jasih-i-Mohammed and Lashkar-i-Toiba - for the attack and has urged Pakistan to crack down on them.

Pakistan has denied the charge and demanded proof linking the groups with the attack.

---

Indian Jets Fly Near Pakistan Border

By Laurinda Keys
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, December 26, 2001; 7:26 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A25827-2001Dec26?language=printer

NEW DELHI, India -- India said its missiles were "in position," air force jets flew near the Pakistan border every few minutes and frontier forces exchanged gunfire Wednesday as the two nuclear-armed nations prepared for a war both say they don't want.

India's Cabinet Committee on Security was meeting Wednesday evening to discuss further diplomatic pressure on Pakistan, including a possible ban on Pakistan airline flights, abrogation of a water treaty, downgrading of embassies, and cancellation of Pakistan's "most favored nation" trading status.

"Missile systems are in position," Defense Minister George Fernandes told Press Trust of India. India's arsenal includes medium-range Russian missiles and the Indian-made Prithvi I, which can be fired from a mobile launcher and has a range of 93 miles.

Pakistan and Indian news media reported that Pakistani missiles - including medium-range Chinese-made weapons - had also been put on alert, while troops on both sides moved toward the border.

Both sides' missile systems can be converted to deliver nuclear warheads, but it is not clear whether such steps have been taken.

There have been daily exchanges of gunfire between the troops, although officials from both sides said the border region was relatively calm Wednesday.

In contrast to previous periods of tension with India, Pakistan has been more cautious with its rhetoric this time. Officials in Islamabad have declined comment, saying they do not wish to escalate the war of words.

Bolstering Pakistan's position is its new presence on the world stage. Its cooperation with the U.S.-led coalition against terrorism - while angering some Muslim militants at home - has increased its stature in the international community.

Because of the mobilization of troops and weapons along the border, India on Wednesday canceled its Jan. 15 Army Day celebration, which includes parades with marching soldiers in many cities.

Tensions have increased since a Dec. 13 suicide attack on Parliament that India blames on Pakistan-based militants. India says Pakistan's spy agency sponsored the attack with the help of two Islamic militant groups - the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammed - which are battling to end Indian rule in Kashmir.

Pakistan froze the assets of both groups and briefly detained the leader of Jaish-e-Mohammed on Tuesday, but New Delhi said this falls far short of its demand that the groups' activities be halted and their leaders arrested and handed over to India.

"We do not want war, but war is being thrust on us and we will have to face it," Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said at a public address at his residence on Tuesday, celebrating his 77th birthday.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars since their violent division at independence from Britain in 1947. Two of the wars have been over Kashmir, the mostly Muslim Himalayan region that is divided between them. Both claim all of it.

Pakistan's military leader, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, assured his country on Tuesday that the armed forces "are fully prepared and capable of defeating all challenges."

India recalled its ambassador from Islamabad and announced plans to shut down train and bus service between the two countries on Jan. 1, saying the diplomatic offensive is intended to pressure Musharraf to take strong action against the guerrillas.

Islamic militants have carried out strikes in the Indian part of the Kashmir region since 1989, fighting for independence or merger with Pakistan in an insurgency that human rights groups say has killed more than 60,000 people. India says the militants have also struck elsewhere, including at Parliament, where 14 people, including five attackers, were killed.

Musharraf condemned the Parliament attack, but said he would take no action without proof against the militants, whom he calls "freedom fighters." He denies that his government aids or has any control over them.

India is also lobbying for international pressure on Pakistan, comparing the militants with the terrorist network that the U.S.-led coalition is fighting in Afghanistan.

Soldiers traveled to the border state of Rajasthan by train Wednesday and air force jets flew over the border town of Jaisalmer every seven minutes.

However, despite anti-aircraft batteries posted at airports and the army turning schools into bunkers, there were signs that war was not the first priority.

"I don't think anyone in India wants war and I don't think anyone in the subcontinent wants war," former Indian prime minister I.K. Gujral said on independent Star News television Wednesday.

A summit of the seven South Asian leaders - including Vajpayee and Musharraf - remained scheduled for next week in Katmandu, and Nepal said it had assurances that both men intended to come.

News reports quoted Indian military sources as saying they would not be ready for a full-scale war for several months, and would prefer to avoid fighting in the winter.

-------- russia

Journalist Is Convicted Of Treason In Russia
Critics Call Verdict Free Speech Violation

By Sharon LaFraniere
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, December 26, 2001; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A25014-2001Dec25?language=printer

MOSCOW, Dec. 25 -- A Russian military journalist who exposed nuclear waste dumping by the Russian navy was convicted today of treason and sentenced to four years in prison, a case that critics said illustrates the risks of antagonizing the military.

The ruling capped four years of legal twists and turns for Grigory Pasko, a 39-year-old navy captain from Vladivostok who reported on environmental abuses by the Russian Pacific Fleet. Although the judge threw out nine counts of treason against Pasko, he was found guilty of collecting information on secret military exercises with the intention of passing it on to Japanese journalists, his lawyers said.

"I find the sentence absolutely incomprehensible," Pasko said after it was handed down.

Human rights activists, environmental groups, and members of Russia's political elite immediately denounced the verdict as an example of how the Russian legal authorities can twist innocent behavior into acts of treason against the state.

Sergei Ivanenko, deputy head of the Yabloko faction in the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, said the verdict was "a challenge to all those people who believe there should be democracy, freedom of speech in Russia, that our citizens should have full and precise information about events to do with their security, their lives and health."

A prominent Russian legislator, Sergei Mironov, ridiculed the accusations Friday and said Pasko should ask President Vladimir Putin to pardon him.

"I consider it unnecessary for him to go and prove his innocence along the circles of hell of appeals to court," said Mironov, a Putin ally who heads the Federation Council, the legislature's upper house. "The world public has long figured out who is right and who is to blame here."

Pasko's lawyers and relatives said today that a presidential pardon would not satisfy Pasko because it would imply that he is guilty. It is also unclear whether any pardon mechanism still exists, since Putin declared this month that he intends to abolish the presidential pardon commission.

Pasko's wife, Galina Morozova, said Pasko signed a request for an appeal at the guard's desk before he even left the courtroom.

But she said he has little faith that a Russian court will acquit him, and hopes eventually to be vindicated at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. The court arbitrates human rights for nations, including Russia, that are members of the Council of Europe.

Like every other espionage trial in Russia, Pasko's was conducted entirely in secret, and the only detailed accounts of what transpired in the courtroom came from Pasko's lawyers and relatives. His case paralleled that of Alexander Nikitin, a retired navy captain who was charged with treason for exposing the hazards of Russian nuclear submarines. Nikitin was cleared last year after a long legal struggle.

Pasko was initially acquitted of the treason charge 2 1/2 years ago. He was then convicted on a lesser charge of misuse of office, then freed from jail under a grant of amnesty.

Pasko and the prosecutors both appealed the earlier conviction. The military division of the Russian Supreme Court then ordered a second treason trial. Given what appeared to be the military's desire to dispose of the controversy, as well as the seeming sympathy of the judge, Pasko's supporters were optimistic that he would be found not guilty.

"We were all expecting him not just to be acquitted, but maybe even to be apologized to, because it appeared it was already a thing of the past, that it was already a relic," said Anatoly Pristavkin, chairman of the president's pardon commission, in a televised interview tonight.

Pasko was working for the Pacific Fleet's newspaper Boyevaya Vakhta, or Combat Watch, when the Federal Security Service arrested him in November 1997. As a military reporter, he had collected information about nuclear contamination from decommissioned submarines and waste sites.

Accounts differ about whether he also freelanced for Japan's largest television network. Earlier reports said he received as much as $300 a month from the Japanese news media.

But Anatoly Pyshkin, one of his lawyers, said today that while Pasko talked frequently to Japanese journalists, he never received any money.

According to Pyshkin, the Federal Security Service, Russia's domestic security service, taped Pasko's telephone conversations for about six months, and arrested him as he prepared to take a trip to Japan on military matters. He spent 20 months in jail before his first acquittal.

The judge today ruled that Pasko intended to give Japanese journalists his notes on a meeting of military officers in which they described secret naval exercises, Pyshkin said. In one taped telephone call, a Japanese journalist had asked him about the exercises.

Pyshkin said that conversation was general in nature, and no Japanese journalists testified against Pasko. "There was no evidence that he had any plans of passing that information to anybody," he said.

Nikolai Patrushev, director of the security service, said today that the judge's verdict was "an objective one." A spokesman for the FSB said Pasko was convicted not because he was an aggressive journalist, but because he failed to protect state secrets entrusted to him as a military officer. Putin previously was director of the FSB.

Outside the FSB, the verdict was widely condemned. William F. Schulz, director of the American branch of Amnesty International, compared Pasko to Soviet dissidents who were punished merely for exercising the right to free speech.

"His prosecution has been a window into a justice system that continues to operate in secrecy and in the service of political masters rather than the law," he said.

Alexander Pikayev, a military expert with the Carnegie Moscow Center, said he believes that Pasko might have "used his professional prerogatives to gain access to some materials." But the treason allegations, he said, seem to be "complete nonsense."

-------- terrorism

Experts fear crude radioactive device as potential terror weapon

Wednesday, December 26, 2001
By Joseph Verrengia
Associated Press
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2001/12/12262001/ap_radioactive_45971.asp

DENVER-- It's the nuclear equivalent of boxcutters. No atom-splitting required. It's called a "dirty bomb," assembled from TNT and radioactive material.

Elite scientific SWAT teams stand ready for larger nuclear attacks, but their plans, conceived during the Cold War and refined before Sept. 11, were not made to guard against a small bomb in a backpack or a truck.

To address such a terrorist threat, experts say, more needs to be done --from tighter security at hospitals and labs handling radioactive ingredients to better sensors and tracking at U.S. ports and borders.

"It's a particularly worrisome threat," said Bruce G. Blair, president of the Center for Defense Information, a Washington think tank. "It's less hypothetical than them acquiring a regular nuclear bomb."

Federal authorities say Osama bin Laden has tried several times since at least 1992 to obtain components of nuclear weapons. In October, he was quoted in a Pakistani newspaper as saying, "We have the weapons as a deterrent." Documents seized in terrorist safe houses in Afghanistan showed instructions on how to make various devices.

Unlike the devastation caused by a nuclear weapon -- which might kill 100,000 in lower Manhattan -- damage by a conventional bomb used to scatter radioactive dust would be limited to a few square blocks, according to the congressionally chartered National Council on Radiation Protection.

Those uninjured by the blast but near enough to absorb or swallow the dust or otherwise be exposed to the radioactivity would face an increased risk of premature cancers and other diseases.

Mostly, though, a dirty bomb "would create a nuclear panic," said Amy Sands of the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California.

"There is a psychological dimension related to anything nuclear," she said, "and terrorists would be exploiting that fear."

Materials that might be used in a dirty bomb -- such as plutonium, enriched uranium or cesium 137 -- emit radioactive particles that don't easily penetrate the body. They are weaker than the radioactive particles that come from fuel rods in a nuclear plant.

In the event of a dirty bomb explosion, many people would be safe by staying indoors with the ventilation system turned off until investigators had given the all-clear.

Blair said that if law enforcement had a warning about a dirty bomb, "it could be 10 times easier to find than a nuclear weapon because it won't be shielded as well."

And it wouldn't be hard for nuclear emergency teams to disarm a dirty bomb, a simple explosive with a detonator.

However, Blair said, "Intelligence is key. If they are out there looking randomly, they stand a pretty slim chance of picking up a well-smuggled device."

The Department of Energy's Nuclear Emergency Search Teams -- 1,000 members strong -- are trained to find and disable nuclear devices. Normally, NEST remains on standby at national labs and two federal locations in Nevada and Washington, D.C. Typically, they sweep targets enticing to terrorists such as the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999.

DOE declined to discuss whether NEST is routinely monitoring places like Lower Manhattan for radioactive materials, or if it will be deployed at events like the Super Bowl in New Orleans or the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

If a small radioactive bomb were detonated, NEST forces would descend, as well as specially trained teams from the military, the Environmental Protection Agency, law enforcement and trauma hospitals.

People would be tested for radioactive exposure. Medical treatment for those exposed would be limited: blood transfusions, antibiotics and hormones would be given to stimulate damaged immune systems.

In most cases, the radiation council says, people's fears would be far greater than the actual danger, and first-responders should carry monitoring devices to immediately determine the extent of contamination.

"A radiological assessment or decontamination should never take precedence over dealing immediately with life-threatening initial injuries such as shock, compound fractures and bleeding wounds," the NCRP stresses in a new report, "Management of Terrorist Events Involving Radioactive Material."

Council president Charles Meinhold said radioactive particles would spread beyond the actual blast area. But the limited release is something that public safety agencies are trained to contain and clean up.

Since Sept. 11, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been concerned about an airplane attack on a nuclear plant. With that in mind, it reversed a long-standing policy and allocated $800,000 to buy millions of potassium iodide, or KI, pills.

KI protects against thyroid cancer that might result that might result from radiation exposure in a nuclear explosion or reactor meltdown.

But the pills would be useless against the most likely forms of dirty bombs that would use weaker radioactive materials and don't rely on atomic fission that produces radioactive iodine.

Those are materials that would be easier for terrorists to obtain.

Two million hospitals, labs, factories -- even some food-processing plants -- using lower-grade radioactive materials go virtually unguarded.

Since 1986, the NRC has recorded over 1,700 instances in which radioactive materials have been lost or stolen.

In 1998, 19 vials of cesium-137 disappeared from a Greensboro, North Carolina, hospital.

Internationally, there is a thriving black market in radioactive substances. In November, authorities in Istanbul arrested two men for trying to sell enriched uranium suitable for use in a nuclear weapon for dlrs 750,000. The men said they bought it from an unidentified Russian.

"They were barely aware of what they were selling. They only knew it was a very expensive substance and wanted to make money," a Turkish police official said.

In the past eight years, the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna has documented 376 examples of illicit sales of nuclear wastes and radioactive materials, including 175 in former Soviet territories.

Moscow alone has more than 1,000 radioactive dumps, experts said.

"Nuclear waste there is simply not guarded with any seriousness," Blair said. "They just try to hide the stuff."

In 1993, operatives for bin Laden in Sudan tried and failed to buy enriched uranium produced in South Africa on the black market.

In the United States, customs officials are on the lookout for efforts to smuggle radioactive materials. They use handheld sensors to scan thousands of vehicles and cargo containers daily. But few are searched intensively. "We need to get a much better handle on the vulnerability of our ports," said Sands, formerly with the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. "We need better sensors and better tracking. We need to close down that option."

Dirty bombs are not entirely new. Iraq tested a crude radiological device in 1987, according to frequently cited intelligence reports

In 1995, Islamic rebels from Chechnya buried -- but did not detonate -- a 30-pound (13.5-kilogram) box of cesium 137 and dynamite near the entrance of a busy Moscow park.

Nor would its effects be entirely unanticipated.

One of the most recent examples of radiation exposure comes not from an attack, but an unfortunate incident in Goiania, Brazil.

In 1987, scraphunters pried open a canister of cesium-137 from an abandoned clinic. For fun, adults and children in a poor neighborhood rubbed the luminous blue powder on their bodies.

Within days, four people died and 244 became ill. More than 34,000 residents were tested. Cleanup workers leveled 85 homes. Information on cancer rates in Goiania since then were unavailable.

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

-------- idaho

Idaho project to shrink N-waste is funded

Wednesday, December 26, 2001
Associated Press
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,355014991,00.html?

BOISE - A team of scientists working on a process to treat nuclear waste is getting $800,000 to improve their idea.

"The idea is to segregate out this very small amount of radioactive material and concentrate this element of waste into the smallest volume possible," said Scott Herbst, a chemical engineer at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory.

The three-year grant was provided by the U.S. Department of Energy's Environmental Management Science Program. The money will go to the Idaho research center and a collaborating laboratory in Russia.

The Universal Extraction process is the first of its kind capable of removing multiple radioactive elements from high-level nuclear waste in one step.

The waste is a byproduct of nuclear energy and weapons development. It usually contains a mixture of long-lived radioactive elements and other hazardous materials.

Separating the radioactive elements from the other materials can shrink the volume of high-level waste and minimize the potential harm to people. The lower volume of waste also reduces disposal costs.

"We're combining three separate operations into one," Herbst said. "I'm mesmerized that we've even been able to get this thing to work. It flies in the face of what everyone has attempted to do before."

Using the process, the scientists trim the volume of high-level waste at least twentyfold; each gallon of waste shrinks to one cup.

The goal of the new project is to understand the process well enough to improve it.


-------- MILITARY

THE JUSTICE SYSTEM
Critics' Attack on Tribunals Turns to Law Among Nations

New York Times
December 26, 2001
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/26/national/26LAW.html

Going beyond claims that the military tribunals authorized by President Bush would violate civil liberties guaranteed by American law, some experts are beginning to argue that they would breach international law guaranteeing fair treatment of prisoners of war.

Critics of the administration say the president's order authorizing the tribunals conflicts with treaties like the Geneva Conventions, which give P.O.W.'s facing charges of egregious conduct protections that include the right to choose their own lawyers, to be tried in courts that are independent of the prosecution and to appeal convictions. None of those rights are assured in the president's order, which opponents say precludes at least two of them.

The critics, among them legal experts with military backgrounds, say the tribunals could create risks for the armed forces, including the possibility of charges by other countries that American officers who conduct tribunals are guilty of war crimes.

"If the U.S. government is going to pull the wool out from under the Geneva Conventions, that is going to be serious for our soldiers," said Francis A. Boyle, an expert on the law of war at the University of Illinois.

A central issue, experts on both sides of a growing debate about the tribunals say, is whether Mr. Bush meant to declare that members of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and other organizations that support terrorists would not qualify for the protections given prisoners of war.

The administration has sent contradictory signals on the issue. The Defense Department has said that those captured in Afghanistan are being provided the humane treatment guaranteed P.O.W.'s by international law. And in an interview, an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said, "It is not the case that we have abandoned the Geneva Conventions" in planning for the handling of those subject to trial by military tribunal.

But in remarks on Nov. 29, the president, denouncing those who "seek to destroy our country and our way of life," described them as "unlawful combatants." That was the term applied by the Supreme Court in its 1942 decision upholding military tribunals for a group of German saboteurs who had slipped into the United States. In that ruling, the justices said spies and saboteurs were violators of the law of war and so were not entitled to prisoner-of-war protections.

Beyond the issue of whether the tribunals themselves would be lawful is the question of how broadly they should be applied. Critics say that grouping not only terrorists but also forces of the nations supporting them as unlawful combatants would invite other countries to so describe any American troops who were engaged in a campaign that a hostile nation deemed illegitimate.

"If we argue it is legal, we are arguing that other sovereigns - Libya, Syria, Iraq, Cuba - could also have tribunals," said Alfred P. Rubin, a former Pentagon lawyer who is a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

The administration's supporters say that no matter what rules the United States adopts in deciding how to try terrorists and their allies, the niceties of international law would be unlikely to limit abusive treatment of any Americans captured by some enemy nations.

But the critics say this country long ago decided that compliance with agreements like the Geneva Conventions was in American interests. During the Vietnam War, several experts noted, American military officials at first refused to grant captured Vietcong the protections of prisoners of war. But that decision was quickly reversed, they said, when it became clear that Americans, too, would become prisoners during the conflict.

Much of the body of international protections accorded warfare's sick, wounded or captured soldiers is laid out in the Geneva Convention of 1864 and its subsequent revisions.

Although prisoners of war are usually released at the end of hostilities, international law permits trial of captured opponents under certain circumstances. (How serious the alleged offense need be is a matter of debate.) But even those experts who back the administration say the president's "unlawful combatants" remark suggested that the tribunals would not comply with the detailed requirements of the prisoner-of-war pact formally known as the third Geneva Convention, of 1949, Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War.

"He was making the claim that in the view of the administration, the standards of Geneva III do not apply," said Ruth Wedgwood, an international-law professor at Yale and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, who is a defender of the tribunal plan.

Professor Wedgwood said the administration appeared to be laying the groundwork for arguing that terrorists and their allies are not entitled to prisoner-of-war protections, although the president's order said any military tribunals would conduct trials that are "full and fair."

The administration official who was interviewed said it would be premature to discuss the new criticism being directed at the tribunals, since the Defense Department was still drafting regulations on how they would be conducted. Those regulations, the official said, will comply with international law.

The official noted that the president had specified only minimal standards for the tribunals - that sentences, for instance, must be approved by a two-thirds vote. The official said the Pentagon could tighten those standards, providing that a death sentence, for example, require a unanimous vote.

But some critics say the president's order includes so many provisions violating the Geneva Conventions that it would be difficult for the regulations to meet the conventions' requirements. Michael J. Kelly, an international-law specialist at Creighton University School of Law, in Omaha, said a line-by-line comparison showed many such instances. For example, he said, the president's assuming the authority to make the final decision on the disposition of each case is in direct conflict with the third Geneva Convention's provision that no prisoner be tried by a court that fails to offer "the essential guarantees of independence and impartiality."

Further, the convention guarantees prisoners a right of appeal, while the president's order seems to bar it. And the convention guarantees a defense counsel of the prisoner's choice, where the president's order, while authorizing defense lawyers, does not say whether the prisoner can choose his own.

Some of the critics, including Jordan J. Paust of the University of Houston Law Center, who has taught at the Army's military law school, said the president appeared to have concluded that it was assaults on civilian targets like the World Trade Center that made the attackers unlawful combatants.

The trouble with that analysis, Mr. Paust said, is that it give terrorists the ability to claim that under international law, attacks on military targets like the Pentagon and the destroyer Cole are lawful acts of combat.

"What the president is doing," Mr. Paust said, "is legitimizing certain types of terrorism."

-------- afghanistan

Iran offers to help build an Afghan army

Briefly
Washington Times
December 26, 2001
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011226-89153746.htm

TEHRAN - Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani has suggested that Tehran help Afghanistan build a national army to contribute to local and regional stability, state radio reported yesterday.

Mr. Shamkhani, who made the suggestion during a military meeting in the capital, said a national army "would contribute to re-establishing security in the country and fight against drug trafficking," adding that such moves would be beneficial to all neighboring countries.

The Iranian Cabinet decided Sunday to name a special envoy to aid Afghanistan's reconstruction after the U.S.-led war to eliminate al Qaeda and its Taliban sponsors.

Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi also pledged Friday that Iran was going to take part in the reconstruction of Afghanistan, which has been devastated by more than 20 years of war.

--------

REFUGEES
As Afghans Return Home, Need for Food Intensifies

New York Times
December 26, 2001
By CARLOTTA GALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/26/international/asia/26REFU.html

MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan, Dec. 25 - Thousands of refugees have begun returning to northern Afghanistan from Pakistan and Iran, often without even enough money to get home to their villages, and all the while disregarding the bleak winter that lies ahead.

While the numbers are not yet overwhelming, aid officials warn that the return of tens of thousands of families to the areas that have been hardest hit by fighting, drought and poverty will ultimately intensify the need for aid at a time when the delivery of food remains blocked or woefully inadequate.

Today, Muhammad Qaim, 50, and his family climbed down from a bus after a four-day trip from Karachi, the Pakistan port city where they had sought refuge from the Taliban.

"We came back because there is peace here now and but also because I ran out of money in Pakistan," Mr. Qaim said. He was borrowing money from a relative to finish the journey to his hometown, Shebarghan, still a two-hour drive away.

Hundreds of thousands of people like Mr. Qaim left northern Afghanistan in recent years to find work and safety in neighboring Iran and Pakistan. Many fled the fighting or the repressive Taliban regime, which was particularly harsh on the ethnic minorities in the north of Afghanistan.

But most fled poverty, as the drought ate away their savings and cut into jobs and livelihoods. They swelled the Afghan refugee population in Pakistan to more than two million and in Iran to 1.5 million.

In the past four days, more than 1,000 refugees have arrived from Pakistan in 83 minibuses and trucks at the bus station in Mazar-i-Sharif, said the supervisor of the station, Amidullah Popal. Most said they were returning because they had lost their jobs in Pakistan. Others complained that they had encountered increasing police harassment or violence by Pakistanis, especially in the border regions, where many residents supported the Taliban and had lost relatives who had fought on the side of the Taliban.

Mr. Qaim said he was working as a clothes packer in Karachi but was laid off a month ago, so he decided to come home. "The main reason is there is no work," he said. "People have used up all their money. Most people had to borrow money for the journey."

But he also said Karachi had become dangerous. "During the U.S. bombing, the Pakistanis changed their attitude towards the Afghan people," he said. "They have never liked us northerners, they say we are not Muslim."

Those returning to Afghanistan could also face harsh treatment on several fronts. Mr. Qaim hopes to return to a state-owned store and regain his job there, which he lost under the Taliban. But others will return to looted or damaged homes, and may join the vast masses of unemployed in an economy crippled by war and uncertainty.

Sitting in a teahouse during a truck stop, Abdul Salam, 32, said his house had been destroyed and he would have to live with relatives in his village, in the far northwest, near the Turkmenistan border.

"What will I do? I don't know," he answered himself. "I hope to borrow money to fix my house." He and many people in his village, where carpet weaving is the main source of income, had been hurt by the collapse of the market since American forces began bombing Afghanistan.

Ghulam Haidar, 21, spent two years in Peshawar, Pakistan, washing carpets for an Afghan company, but lost his job after Sept. 11. Back home now, he is philosophical. "Here I am jobless, but when my country is peaceful, why should I stay in another country?" he said.

But the returning Afghans will stretch already thin resources. In many villages, people have only enough wheat to last them a few months, and few residents have seed grain to sow a new crop in the spring.

Afghanistan already has nearly one million displaced people, who fled their homes because of war or drought and are living a precarious existence in camps or in overcrowded houses with relatives. Northern Afghanistan, and in particular the provinces west of Mazar-i-Sharif, have been the hardest hit by the drought.

"They are coming back and they need all sorts of assistance," said Vladimir Smoljan, who works with the United Nations refugee agency in Mazar-i-Sharif, "food, nonfood items, shelter and quick-start projects." He said his agency, which only recently came back to Mazar-i-Sharif after being forced out by the Taliban, did not know how many refugees had recently returned and was trying to assess the impact.

A system for distributing food is still not in place, and aid agencies are increasingly concerned that more people will flood into the cities in search of food and aid.

United Nations officials said that despite the recent opening of a border crossing with Uzbekistan, the route remains effectively closed to food trucks. The International Committee of the Red Cross says it is the only agency making widespread aid distributions to the displaced people in local camps.

"We have to take care about the population and its capacity to absorb the returning refugees," warned Malik Allaouna, who heads Doctors Without Borders in Mazar-i-Sharif. "People have been sharing their food already with relatives, and we are concerned how to reach those people in need."

-------

Afghan Government Warns Al Qaeda Still Active

December 26, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-attack-afghan.html

KABUL, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Al Qaeda fighters are still active in Afghanistan, fueling the troubles of a land where guns are rife, banditry is on the rise and Osama bin Laden is still at large.

Bin Laden's al Qaeda militants were still operating in pockets of southern Afghanistan and U.S. troops would stay until they are destroyed, the new interim government's Foreign Minister, Abdullah Abdullah, said Wednesday.

But details of a foreign security force were still under negotiation, he said.

Ending the mystery over the whereabouts of the Saudi-born millionaire fugitive remains the goal of rising numbers of U.S. forces deployed in the rugged, landlocked country, and the United States has urged anti-Taliban fighters to join the hunt.

Bin Laden's disappearance and the vanishing act by the leaders of the ousted Taliban who protected him are added complications in a country plagued by rivalries forged during more than two decades of war.

``In some of the southern parts of Afghanistan, in Paktia province, we believe there are still pockets of al Qaeda,'' Abdullah told a news conference, adding that some al Qaeda forces were active around the former Taliban stronghold, Kandahar.

American troops would leave ``when the mission of eradicating terrorists and all the Taliban bases is accomplished,'' he said, speaking after the second cabinet meeting of the five-day-old interim government that will govern for six months in the run-up to a Loya Jirga -- or grand council of tribal elders.

For the British-led foreign security force, the government has sought a carefully agreed-upon mission since the troops could be called upon to intervene in disputes that have nothing to do with the Taliban.

``The final details of the tactical agreement (are) under discussion between our country and the leading troop contributing country, which is Britain,'' Abdullah said.

A few dozen British Royal Marines arrived last week. The bulk of the force, which will include Germans and Turks as well, has yet to be deployed, waiting for Britain to agree details with Afghan security officials.

Asked when the main contingent would arrive, Abdullah said: ''very soon... I'm talking about days.''

Afghanistan's new government has been loath to agree to a lengthy deployment of foreign troops on its soil and has also been in discussions on the size, trying to keep the numbers as small as possible.

``The cabinet meeting discussed security,'' said one Defense Ministry official tersely.

Security is a prerequisite for a government that must grow food in a land ravaged by three years of drought, where women have no jobs, children barely receive an education, 16 out of every 100 babies die at birth and life expectancy is just 43.

PUSHING INTO TORA BORA

U.S. forces were preparing for a new push in the hunt for bin Laden after a brief respite for Christmas.

Defense officials in Washington said U.S. and allied forces would soon make a fresh thrust into caves and tunnels in the Tora Bora area of eastern Afghanistan after bombing bin Laden's al Qaeda fighters there into submission.

Officials said last week about 500 Marines had been put on standby in Afghanistan for possible orders to help search the caves, al Qaeda's last major Afghan redoubt, for clues to bin Laden's fate.

``Some of those unaccounted for may actually be dead or they might be hiding in Tora Bora or elsewhere,'' coalition spokesman Kenton Keith said in Islamabad. ``Interrogation of captives and investigation of former hiding places will bring some clarification over the coming days.''

But he stressed that even with the fall of the Taliban, the U.S. war was far from over.

``One thing is clear, that the job isn't finished, therefore military action will continue,'' Keith said.

U.S. officials acknowledge they no longer know whether the Saudi-born militant, accused of masterminding the September 11 attacks on the United States, is dead or alive or has fled from Afghanistan.

BUILDING CONSENSUS

New leader Hamid Karzai has moved quickly to establish support for his cabinet, whose challenge lies in building consensus in a country where years of war have fractured a devastated land into a patchwork of areas run by ethnic warlords and tribal barons.

This week, he included Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek warlord, in the government to help build broad-based support among ethnic minorities and to fend off a powerful potential foe.

Dostum's inclusion also marks a first step to establishing a national army for Afghanistan from its many militias.

AIR STRIKES RESUME

U.S. defense officials said air strikes over Afghanistan had resumed Sunday north of Kandahar.

The strikes ended a lull following a deadly raid on a convoy in eastern Afghanistan last week that survivors said was a mistaken target.

Villagers in eastern Paktia province and survivors say up to 60 people were killed when U.S. aircraft attacked a motorcade carrying ethnic Pashtun tribal elders to Karzai's inauguration.

U.S. officials say they struck a legitimate target -- presumed to be Taliban militia -- after members of the convoy fired shoulder-launched missiles at U.S. aircraft.

Abdullah said the incident had been discussed by Afghan security officials and the U.S. military, but he was not aware of the details of the talks.

He said the cabinet agreed to create commissions for reconstruction and to combat drugs in the country that until a Taliban crackdown two years ago grew 75 percent of the world's heroin-producing opium.

Many drugs international officials fear that the end of Taliban rule and the return of warlords will prompt farmers to return to growing poppies, the source of opium and the most lucrative cash crop in one of the world's poorest countries.

In a signal of confidence in the administration of new leader Hamid Karzai, Afghan refugees from Pakistan started to return from Quetta and other border areas through the border town of Chaman.

``On Tuesday alone 800 families returned,'' a Pakistani border official told Reuters.

-------- asia

Thai security crackdown after attacks

December 26, 2001
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/26122001-014720-2893r.htm

BANGKOK, Thailand, Dec. 26 (UPI) -- Police tightened security at embassies, international organizations' headquarters and shopping malls in Bangkok Wednesday after a series of well-coordinated attacks believed to have been carried out by Muslim separatist rebels killed five policemen and one defense volunteer in southern Thailand.

Interior Minister Purachai Piumsombun said police and military officials would "work harder" to improve security throughout the country over the New Year's holiday.

National police chief Gen. Sant Sarutanond ordered extra security personnel to guard against attacks on places frequented by tourists, including train stations and bus terminals.

The security crackdown was prompted by a series of five apparently coordinated Christmas Eve attacks on police checkpoints in three of Thailand's predominantly Muslim southern provinces.

The attacks took place between 7 and 9:30 p.m. local time, beginning with an assault by five men on motorcycles on a police checkpoint in Khok Sila village in Narathiwat province, 550 miles south of Bangkok.

Four more attacks took place in Narathiwat and the neighboring provinces of Yala and Pattani, resulting in the death of five police officers and a village defense volunteer.

Police said the attackers, armed with M16 and AK-47 assault rifles, fled after each of the surprise hit-and-run attacks.

Local press reports said Muslim separatists had claimed responsibility for the attacks, but it was unclear which of several militant Muslim groups active in the south had carried out the raids.

Interior Minister Purachai said he believed the attackers were seeking revenge for the fatal shooting of a Muslim leader in the south last month. In November police killed two suspects believed to have been linked to the kidnapping and beheading of two Thai businessmen by Muslim separatists in June.

Military officials said they believed the attacks were carried out by the Pattani United Liberation Organization, or one of its off-shoots. PULO has been active for decades in fomenting rebellion among Thailand's Muslim minority.

The rebels want to create an independent Muslim nation in the five predominantly Islamic southern provinces, or merge with Muslim-majority Malaysia.

Intelligence officials said a possible motive for the attacks was to attract international attention in order to obtain outside financing for the Muslim rebels.

In the past PULO and other smaller Muslim rebel groups are reported to have received funds from Libya and other militant Moslem states and organizations.

-------- biological weapons

Tracking Bioterror's Tangled Course

New York Times
December 26, 2001
By ERIC LIPTON and KIRK JOHNSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/26/national/26ANTH.html?pagewanted=all

There was no commotion, no outcry. Except for the blond woman in the black dress sitting by herself in a back pew, no one knew that anything unusual had happened.

Johanna C. Huden, a 31-year-old editorial assistant at The New York Post, had first noticed the strange blister on her right middle finger the day before, Sept. 21. She had not thought too much about it; surely it was just a bug bite or a cat scratch.

Now, though, as she sat in the Long Island church, half-distractedly watching the wedding ceremony, the finger began to itch. She reached down and rubbed it gently against the coarse linen of her dress. Suddenly, a watery white liquid bubbled out across the cloth.

"Ee-yew," Ms. Huden recalls saying to herself. "That is just really bizarre."

The conventional understanding of America's first-ever anthrax attack says Ms. Huden was a bit player - a victim of skin, or cutaneous, anthrax who fully recovered and got on with her life. As anthrax spores spread through the mail, and events blurred across six states and the District of Columbia, hers became no more than a name in the middle of a long list of victims.

Yet the conventional understanding is wrong. In the light of hindsight, scientists can now see that the outbreak actually began that September afternoon.

Ms. Huden was the anthrax index patient - the pivot point upon which every outbreak investigation is based, the crucial clue that every medical investigator hopes can be found, and fast. But on that muggy day at Mary Immaculate Church, she suffered her mysterious wound very much alone.

No one knew.

Those words have become the theme of the medical investigation of the anthrax attacks, a refrain of epidemiological regret.

Certainly, the medical investigators have done much to contain the outbreak and save lives. Yet the inside story of that inquiry - pieced together from interviews with many of the lead investigators and other health-care officials - is also a tale of missed cues, misread evidence and erroneous assumptions that led scientists and decision makers to misjudge the threat to postal workers and, through the mail system, to the American public.

For weeks, primary-care doctors individually struggled to diagnose a disease they had never seen and never imagined they would see. In that uncertainty, medical investigators could never quite discern the sequence of infection that began with Johanna Huden. And only through the bitter experience of 5 deaths and 18 other confirmed or suspected cases did they learn how much they did not know about how anthrax spores traveled and infected their victims.

Of course, the medical inquiry is just one of several intertwined strands of the government's still unresolved investigation of the attacks. In recent weeks, in fact, the other aspects have taken center stage, as microbiologists try to pinpoint the nature and source of the mailed anthrax and criminal investigators search for a suspect.

But underpinning those efforts, at every point, are the epidemiologists, the medical detectives on the ground, tracing how the infection spread and whether the underlying pattern of cases can offer up some revelatory clue from the haze.

They can see now that Johanna Huden arrived first in that place of fear and fog. For weeks after the wedding, despite repeated visits to doctors and emergency rooms, her infection worsened and the cause of her illness was missed. And no one knew.

Florida
A First Case To Investigate

Every disease outbreak tells a detective story. The epidemiologist's job is to piece together the narrative threads - to work back to the beginning and so hasten the end.

Assume nothing; let the evidence speak for itself. That gumshoe credo was very much on Dr. Bradley A. Perkins's mind as the chartered jet roared toward South Florida on the afternoon of Oct. 4, carrying his 12- member team from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Dr. Perkins, a boyish-looking 42, chief of the centers' special pathogens branch, sat at a small conference table, chatting with the adrenaline-pumped scientists and passing around the latest papers on anthrax. But mostly he tried to concentrate on telling himself not to think about terrorists.

Everyone at the centers, of course, had been worrying about just that since Sept. 11 - planning for attacks of everything from sarin gas to smallpox to anthrax, perhaps the most widely developed bioweapon in history. But at that moment, all anyone knew was that a tabloid newspaper editor named Robert Stevens was dying of inhalation anthrax in a Palm Beach County hospital.

Perhaps Mr. Stevens had been infected deliberately - the first periscope glimpse into a mass bioterror attack. Perhaps. It was also possible that the bacteria had been picked up naturally, from a sick cow, even one long dead; anthrax spores could lie dormant in the ground for decades.

For now, this was just a medical case, though Dr. Perkins knew well that on his word a huge criminal investigation would be unleashed. The fear of being wrong was intense. "You don't pull the bioterrorism trigger lightly," he would say later.

Let the evidence speak for itself. That's how epidemiology had always worked. It was a rhythm of science, intuition and observation - an art essentially unchanged since the 1850's, when a doctor named John Snow stunned the medical world with the insight that every family with cholera in his London neighborhood drew water from the same pestilential well.

Dr. Snow took off the well's pump handle and became a legend. His cholera-cluster maps became the motif of a new science, premised on the belief that disease, in the dawning age of the germ theory, could be chased from the shadows of superstition and hunted to the ground.

Now, flying to Palm Beach, Dr. Perkins and his team planned the hunt for the handle of this latest pump. They would meet with county health officials, then fan out, testing as they went - Mr. Stevens's home, office, whatever made sense - with swabs that would pick up any errant anthrax spores.

By the time they landed, Dr. Perkins felt satisfied that he had pushed as hard as he should the admonition to leave no stone, quite literally, unturned.

But then, leaving the airport, he saw something that tested his assumptions all over again. Flight Safety International, the pilot school where some of the Sept. 11 hijackers were thought to have trained, had a flight simulator right at the airport. Could it be coincidence that here, of all places, and now, of all times, anthrax would just happen?

As he drove his rental car past the building, he had more or less the same thought that had flickered across Johanna Huden's mind two weeks before.

"This is weird," he said to himself.

The Northeast
Though Unreported, Patients Accumulate

Actually, up North, seven people were already mysteriously ill.

Teresa Heller, a letter carrier assigned to West Trenton, N.J., had checked into a hospital with an infection on her arm.

Richard Morgano, a maintenance worker at the mail distribution center in nearby Hamilton Township, had a similar lesion on his arm.

In Manhattan, the infant son of an ABC news producer was in a hospital, gravely ill with a high fever and an ulcerated arm.

Erin M. O'Connor and Casey Chamberlain, assistants to the NBC News anchorman Tom Brokaw, had skin lesions - Ms. O'Connor on her collarbone, Ms. Chamberlain on her leg.

Claire Fletcher, a CBS News aide, had two small infected pimples on her face.

And Johanna Huden had been to two emergency rooms and seen more than half a dozen doctors. Ultimately, on Oct. 1, a surgeon at New York University Medical Center had cut the dead skin out of her finger. Ms. Huden left the hospital with a large bandage on her hand but no better idea of what had made her sick.

None of those cases - misdiagnosed and misunderstood - were reported into the medical surveillance system on which epidemiology depends.

Without realizing it, Dr. Perkins and his team were starting in the middle. The Stevens case, they believed, was the index case. And that misperception was the first of many to guide the investigation - in Florida and then up North - in the coming days.

The next morning, Oct. 5, the scientists fanned out, checking things ;ole the vacuum- cleaner bags in Mr. Stevens's house and the ventilation system on the roof of the American Media International building, where he worked.

They went to a store where he bought spices in bulk; the store kept live animals, they had been told, and had to be checked as a possible source of natural contagion. They visited his favorite fishing hole and traced his Sunday bicycle route. A separate team went to North Carolina, where Mr. Stevens had first felt ill while visiting his daughter.

All trails led nowhere. The dead-cow vector, even as a remote hypothesis, faded. Mr. Stevens died that day, unable to help them.

Various pieces of evidence, though, eventually pointed toward the company's mailroom. Tests of a mailroom worker, Ernesto Blanco, hospitalized with a still-undiagnosed illness, turned up an anthrax spore in his nasal passage. Spores were also found on Mr. Stevens's computer keyboard.

But when the investigators first arrived in the mailroom late on the afternoon of Oct. 5, they realized to their horror that, in their exuberance or thoroughness, they had used up all but one of their cotton swabs.

One small swab to test the whole room - it seemed like the wildest shot in the dark.

So the scientists stood amid the postage meters and scales and argued the point: Though they could get more swabs, this was it for the day, and at a time when every hour felt laden with portents and pressures, the decision seemed enormous. Finally, they decided to use the last swab on a bin holding letters and packages for the photo department, where Mr. Stevens had worked.

The results came back the next day with a direct bull's-eye. The mail bin was heavily contaminated, and the conclusion, Dr. Perkins said, was unmistakable: Mr. Stevens had been the victim of a criminal act.

The finding sent a shock wave through the nation and changed everything about the case. This was not simply a medical investigation anymore. The F.B.I., which, like the disease control centers, had been preparing for bioterror attacks since Sept. 11, took over.

For the epidemiologists, the discovery was as if a fog had lifted just long enough to see that they were headed out into uncharted, and uncomfortable, territory. They were not just hunting an organism with genes and biological logic that could be tracked the traditional way. This was a weapon, deliberately wielded, with an exponentially increasing number of possible sources. That mixture - the biological and the psychological, the genetic and the perversely pathological - fundamentally altered the task at hand.

"Usually we're talking about trying to define normal biologic transmission," Dr. Perkins said. "This is a terrorist transmission route."

Investigators followed that route from the mailroom to the delivery truck, to the Boca Raton post office and through the county's mail system, finding spores all along the way.

What they did not find were any sick postal workers. They had no reason to connect Mr. Stevens to Teresa Heller and Richard Morgano and the others up in New York, because they did not yet know they existed.

The postal system, they now knew, had been used as an instrument of attack, an important finding. But it went only so far. Since no postal workers seemed even remotely affected, the postal connection was treated as one clue among many, not the sure, single pathway suffused with risk.

On Oct. 9, President Bush told an edgy nation that the Florida case appeared to be "an isolated incident."

But Dr. Perkins, the epidemiologist, recalls feeling "extremely uncomfortable."

"We know someone is out there with the ability to cause disease, but we don't know how much mail is out there or whether the mode of delivery is going to change," he recounted. "We're operating on data that are inadequate for the situation."

New Jersey
Delayed Recognitions Of Cases Missed

"You heard about Hamilton?"

That was the question Dr. Michael Dash's wife yelled out as he arrived home Saturday afternoon, Oct. 13, on what was to have been a quiet weekend with the family.

She had been checking the headlines on the Internet that afternoon when she happened upon a news bulletin: an anthrax-laced letter had been found in New York that had been postmarked at the Hamilton Township mail- sorting center near Trenton.

"Oh no," Dr. Dash thought after reading the story. "That is what that man had."

That man was Richard Morgano, 39, a barrel-chested maintenance worker at the Hamilton postal center, who had come into Dr. Dash's New Jersey office on Oct. 1 with a strange infection.

Mr. Morgano had scratched his arm on Sept. 20 while reaching into a Hamilton mail- sorting machine. A blistered wound had formed, oozing a yellowish liquid around back spots of dead skin. His arm was twice its normal size, his lymph nodes swollen and his hand unbendable.

At that first meeting, Dr. Dash put Mr. Morgano on a strong dose of antibiotics and, after checking a reference book, asked Mr. Morgano a line of questions fearing he was facing a condition he had never before seen.

"You doing any hunting recently? You've been working with pelts? Been around goats or any farms?" Dr. Dash asked, checking possible natural causes of anthrax.

But Dr. Dash had never imagined that a postal worker in central New Jersey would be the victim of a terrorist attack. So when Mr. Morgano answered "no" to each of the questions about natural sources of anthrax, Dr. Dash had ruled it out.

Dr. Dash was far from the only physician who had a sudden and disturbing realization that weekend. The discovery in New York of the anthrax-contaminated letter, which had infected an NBC News employee, evoked a series of calls to local and federal authorities in New York and New Jersey.

In fact, on the same day Mr. Morgano was at Dr. Dash's office, Ms. Huden and the ABC producer's baby were just eight floors apart at the New York University Medical Center.

"I kick myself when I think about it now," Dr. Douglas Yoshia, the attending physician on duty when Ms. Huden showed up at the emergency room.

Like Dr. Dash, upon hearing about the NBC case and the Hamilton letter, Dr. Yoshia immediately realized Ms. Huden had had anthrax. But he had one more complication to overcome: He could not remember her name. It took a few days of searching through hospital records to track it down and by the time he reached Ms. Huden, her case was already being investigated.

It was only once these cases bubbled to the surface that the true pattern of the outbreak started to become apparent. And, perhaps most important, health officials now had hard evidence that postal workers were, at a minumum, at risk of cutaneous anthrax.

Even so, the full significance of this discovery was not initially recognized. It took five days to confirm that Mr. Morgano and Ms. Heller, the West Trenton letter carrier, had anthrax.

By Oct. 18, when these cases were confirmed, seven other postal workers - three in New Jersey and four in Washington - had begun to feel sick, most with the more serious version of inhalation anthrax. The second wave was under way, this time from poisoned letters postmarked at Hamilton on Oct. 9 on their way to Capitol Hill.

In this wave, a few of the cases would be identified quickly, and the postal employees would recover. But again, some doctors who encountered these sick postal workers would not make the anthrax connection. And this time, the implications would be fatal.

District of Columbia
The Medical Becomes Political

It was still dark and silent that Saturday morning, Oct. 20, when Dr. Michael S. A. Richardson picked up the telephone in the hallway of his Washington townhouse to call the office. During the night, he had received a message on his new cellphone - issued to go with his new job as an acting senior deputy director at the District of Columbia Department of Health - but no one had taught him how to retrieve messages.

Now, as he realized what he had missed during the night, he stretched the phone cord into the living room, perched on the arm of a chair and scribbled notes as fast as he could.

A worker at the Brentwood Road postal center in Washington, Leroy Richmond, had been tentatively diagnosed with inhalation anthrax. The implication was staggering.

"We are in the middle of this," Dr. Richardson recalled thinking. "And it's a huge deal."

Washington is where the anthrax story became political, social, even racial, theater. And it is where the assumptions of the investigation - woven from decades of conventional scientific wisdom and weeks of evidence and missed cues - all unraveled.

When he picked up the phone that morning, Dr. Richardson did not know about the second wave. What he - and the rest of the nation - did know was that just five days earlier, on Oct. 15, an anthrax-laced letter had been opened in the Capitol office of Tom Daschle, the Senate majority leader. And though reports conflicted, suspicions ran deep - and had been played in banner headlines - that the material in this letter was dangerously different. Many of the government's bioweapons experts were saying that the anthrax spores seemed much smaller, perhaps capable of staying airborne longer, and thus far more likely to penetrate deep into the lungs.

Even so, Dr. Richardson knew of no postal worker who had developed the life-threatening inhaled form of the disease, despite the trail of spores across the postal system. And the disease control agency had said that only people in the immediate vicinity when a poisoned letter was opened were at risk.

Dr. Richardson also knew that an initial test at Brentwood Road, where the Daschle letter had been processed, had turned up no evidence of contamination. And there was the curious case of the worker at the P Street station, who had tested positive for inhalation-anthrax exposure immediately after the Daschle letter, but then, after retesting, was put back on the negative list. Both those results seemed to reinforce the conventional wisdom.

Now it was all dreadfully wrong. Postal workers were in direct and dire danger. Sealed envelopes could leak. The inhalation case at Brentwood had presented, literally overnight, a new signature of threat.

What was clear, too, was that the full implication of tinier, airborne spores had not been thought through; early hints, like the P Street worker, had become missed opportunities rather than signal flares suggesting that more testing might be needed. In Atlanta, it would be another week and a half before the C.D.C. opened what turned out to be a very prescient e-mail - a warning from Canadian researchers, sent Oct. 4, that tests had shown that anthrax spores could leak through envelopes.

Dr. Richardson has no illusions that an earlier grasp of the dangers of the Daschle anthrax could have kept Mr. Richmond or the three other infected Brentwood workers from getting sick; they had already been exposed. But it might have meant faster diagnosis and faster treatment. With physicians on the alert, the words "I work for the postal service" would have opened doors and minds in doctors' offices everywhere.

"Everybody and their mother would have known that a postal worker is potentially at risk," Dr. Richardson said. "And so that famous tape of this man Morris, saying that he went to his doctor and the doctor told him don't worry, would probably not have happened." Thomas Morris Jr., a Brentwood worker, died on Oct. 21; Mr. Richmond recovered.

The flawed assumptions had other consequences. Because postal workers had not been considered at risk, only people at the Capitol were tested and given the anthrax antibiotic Cipro after the Daschle letter was opened. Now, Dr. Richardson saw, a huge intervention - running late and behind the curve - would have to begin.

And in Washington, where conflicts of race and class simmer even in the best of times, a late start would have its own costs and consequences.

The city's health commissioner, Dr. Ivan C. A. Walks, faced it first-hand when the congregation at an African-American church peppered him with questions about why postal workers, many of them black, were being treated differently than people at the Capitol. While some postal workers ultimately were tested with nasal swabs, the process was stopped, epidemiologists said, because the technique was unreliable.

" `The folks on the Hill got swabbed, now you're not swabbing us,' " said Dr. Walks, who is black, recalling the uncomfortable questioning in the church. " `White people got swabs, black people didn't get swabs.' "

People also questioned the switch from Cipro to doxycycline - a far less expensive, but equally effective, antibiotic.

"The white folks got Cipro - we're getting doxy," Dr. Walks said, replaying the exchange. "They got the expensive drug - you're trying to save money with us."

It was not just a matter of anger. The shifting understanding of anthrax also created doubt about just how much the epidemiologists should be trusted or believed.

Dr. Richardson saw the doubt that Sunday night, as health officials distributed antibiotics to postal workers downtown. Around 10 p.m., Dr. Richardson was approached by a distraught man who said the disease agency was wrong to believe that only a directly poisoned letter was a threat. The man said he worked at Brentwood and knew how mail got tossed around in the sorting machines.

"You don't know, it's not one place, things get mixed up," he said. "There has to be cross-contamination." In other words, even mail that came in contact with poisoned letters might not be safe.

"I had no idea what he was talking about," Dr. Richardson said. He told the man to share his information with the C.D.C.

Atlanta
Debating Public Policy At the C.D.C.

The national cerebrum of the anthrax crisis was a small conference room at Centers for Disease Control headquarters plastered with bioterror versions of Dr. Snow's cholera maps. There were detailed floor plans of newsrooms and Senate offices, and now, the shop floor at Brentwood Road, all color- coded to indicate the different paths the spores had traveled.

Most of the room was taken up by a rectangular table with a speakerphone that linked the center's scientists with the other players in the investigation - the F.B.I., the postal service, the homeland-security bureaucracy and local law-enforcement officials across the nation. The scientists found themselves exercising some unfamilar mental muscles. Dr. Perkins says he thought that a Cliff Notes compendium of fictional bioterror plots would have come in handy.

It was in that conference room, on Monday, Oct. 22, that centers officials began debating what they say were among the most difficult questions the agency had ever addressed: Was the postal system itself contaminated? Should it be shut down? Such a decision, the officials knew, would rip through the economy, not to mention the delicate psyche, of a nation under siege.

"Is there a health hazard here of such a magnitude that it would warrant that type of action?" asked Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, the centers' acting deputy director of infectious disease, who two decades before had seen the AIDS epidemic emerge in San Francisco.

The magnitude of the anthrax hazard certainly seemed to be growing. Two Brentwood workers had died; two others were in intensive care. In New Jersey, a postal worker appeared to have the state's first case of inhalation anthrax. Four days earlier, state health officials closed the Postal Service's regional distribution center near Trenton.

But there was also a conundrum underlying the debate. In an atmosphere of rising crisis, Dr. Gerberding and others felt huge pressure to act decisively, even as events in Washington had made it clear to them that decisiveness was hardly warranted.

What's more, they were in an unaccustomed, and uncomfortable, position of power. While the agency could only recommend shutting the system down, officials knew their advice would carry great weight. The debate became a test of leadership, science and nerve, all bound together by constant stress and sleepless nights.

Dr. Walks, the Washington health commissioner, who participated in some of the discussions by speakerphone, said it had become hard to discern the line between the need to be confident and the need to be right.

More than once, he said, as he stood alongside public officials at news conferences in Washington in mid-October, he inwardly groaned because old answers about anthrax were still being given and he realized that even information a week or two old could no longer be trusted. Some officials were still saying, for example, that a certain number of spores - 8,000 to 10,000 was the commonly quoted figure - were needed to contract inhalation anthrax. Given what was now known about the dangers for postal workers, perhaps that old assumption was no longer true either.

"I think it's time for us to stop needing to say we know and let people know what we don't know," he recalled thinking at the time. "Because if we don't do that they won't believe us when we come to say we know stuff, and that's critical."

The verdict was to keep the system open - not because it was deemed clean and uninfected, C.D.C. officials said, but because there simply was not enough evidence of widespread contamination. The finding did little to ease anxieties, though. Closing the system would have affected millions of people; not closing it might, too.

New York

A New Victim. A New Wave? Dr. Stephen M. Ostroff's darkest hour came sometime before the dawn of Oct. 30. New York, he'd come to believe through a long, sleepless night, was under attack, and as the chief epidemiologist at the C.D.C.'s National Center for Infectious Diseases and the agency's point man for the city, the list of things he didn't know seemed endless.

"It was my worst moment," he said.

He had just learned from the city's Department of Health that a 61-year-old stockroom clerk at a Manhattan hospital, Kathy T. Nguyen, was on a respirator and declining quickly from inhalation anthrax.

Part of Dr. Ostroff's anxiety stemmed from the fact that Ms. Nguyen - the city's first inhalation case - fit no previous pattern. The first wave of anthrax-contaminated letters in mid-September had been aimed at news organizations; the second in early October had been sent to political leaders. Was she the sentinel patient of a third wave, focused on the health care system?

But he was also haunted that morning by the long shadow of Washington, and the presumptions that he and other epidemiologists had been so wrong about. Dr. Ostroff had been one of those playing down the threat to postal workers from sealed letters. "None of us, to our eternal dismay, would have ever imagined that an unopened letter could do what they did," he said. Would Ms. Nguyen's illness reveal yet another missed link in the chain of reasoning and evidence?

Dr. Ostroff was hardly a novice. In 15 years at the disease control agency, he was one of the agency's most trusted detectives, helping to respond to the outbreak of hantavirus among American Indians in the Southwest, West Nile virus in New York, Ebola in Reston, Va.

Now, on the morning of Oct. 30, preparing to help the city respond to this new threat, Dr. Ostroff anxiously arrived at City Hall so early that the night-duty police officer had to let him in. He was escorted to the mayor's anteroom, where he fell asleep on a couch. The mayor woke him up when he arrived for the 8 a.m. meeting about the Nguyen case.

"We are about to see a lot of sick people in New York," Dr. Ostroff kept thinking.

New York - hardest hit by the Sept. 11 attacks - still seemed deeply vulnerable, both to attack and to panic. The city's health department, only a few blocks from the still smoldering ashes of the World Trade Center, had been intently preparing for a bioterror attack that might send tens of thousands of acutely ill people to city hospitals all at once.

But as the inquiry intensified, the mysteries only deepened. Investigators could not find even a single spore of anthrax near Ms. Nguyen's home in the Bronx, or at the Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital, where she worked. No else got sick, which eased anxieties at the health department but also added to the sense of incomprehensibility.

Ms. Nguyen, who died Oct. 31, was not the harbinger of a feared new mass attack - but neither, it seemed, would the evidence about her infection provide the break in the investigation that Dr. Ostroff and others had hoped for. One F.B.I. theory had been that Ms. Nguyen might have crossed paths with the bioterrorist. Now, all they knew for sure was that she had somehow been infected with anthrax in a place health officials could not find and in a way that had left no trace.

Connecticut
Revising the Textbook, One More Time

Dr. Joxel Garcia, Connecticut's health commissioner, had been working almost nonstop for six days to unravel the death of Ottilie Lundgren, the 94-year-old widow from Oxford, Conn., who on Nov. 21 became the nation's fifth fatality - and his state's first - attributed to inhalation anthrax.

Investigators had been sent to her favorite neighborhood dinner spot, her hairdresser, her bank, her church, her library and, of course, her local post office and her home. Nothing so far had turned up.

But on the evening of Nov. 27, Dr. Garcia's staff had made a discovery that at first seemed like wild coincidence: An 85-year-old man who had lived in the town of Seymour, about a mile and a half from Mrs. Lundgren, had also recently died. And he had lived right next door to a family that Postal Service officials said had received a letter postmarked in Hamilton, N.J., at nearly the same instant that the toxic letter to Senator Daschle had been processed.

Perhaps, this new evidence suggested, a letter that merely crossed paths with an anthrax-laced envelope could pick up enough spores to kill. If so, maybe that was how Mrs. Lundgren caught the disease, and her elderly neighbor, Oscar B. Haines - and Ms. Nguyen in New York as well.

The implications were disturbing. Hundreds of thousands of letters - perhaps millions - had passed through the postal system since the anthrax mailings, and might now be contaminated with small amounts of anthrax that, if the theory held, might be lethal under certain conditions.

Dr. Garcia immediately called Gov. John Rowland, then the F.B.I., then the state's chief medical examiner. The first question on everyone's mind was as ghoulish as it was simple: Where was Mr. Haines's body now?

An F.B.I. agent and three state epidemiologists were dispatched to wake up the Farkas family, which had received the Hamilton letter, and swab their mailbox for spores. H. Wayne Carver II, the chief state medical examiner, tracked down the funeral home director who had Mr. Haines' body and ordered it sent over immediately to the state laboratory for examination.

Two months after the first anthrax victims like Ms. Huden had suffered in anonymity, the nation's sprawling investigation had come to this: a desperate search in the night for the body of a man who might or might not have had the disease, and who in any case could no longer be helped, but who might still bear silent witness for the prosecution.

The autopsy, begun at 2:47 a.m., revealed that Mr. Haines did not have anthrax. His heart had simply failed. Dr. Carver called Dr. Garcia at about 4 a.m. with the news.

But when the investigators arrived at the Farkas's house on Great Hill Road in Seymour, they found to their astonishment that the letter postmarked in Hamilton on Oct. 9 had, for other reasons, been saved.

By Nov. 30, the investigators had the results - the letter was positive for spores, and the news quickly spread out across the United States, once again changing the state of science about anthrax.

Cross-contamination was definitely possible. An innocuous letter, passing through the labyrinth of the postal system at the wrong moment, could become dangerous, as the Brentwood postal worker had insisted to Dr. Richardson weeks ago. Though it had not killed Mr. Haines, cross-contamination still might explain Mrs. Lundgren's death.

Epidemiologists were still confused. How could anthrax that had merely settled on a safe envelope suddenly get back into the air so it could be inhaled, causing the more serious form of the disease? That spores could become airborne again in the whirring tumult of a mail-sorting machine now seemed perfectly reasonable, but on a kitchen table? The answer had been found when they went through Mrs. Lundgren's trash - clue-hunting of the sort Dr. Snow himself would smile on.

Mrs. Lundgren, it turns out, was quite particular about her mail. Again and again, she tore her letters precisely in half before throwing them in the trash, an act that could easily send any dust or anthrax spores flying back into the air.

The epidemiologists still did not know if in fact a cross-contaminated anthrax letter had arrived in Mrs. Lundgren's mailbox, and for all that they had learned, they didn't know whether, in the end, tearing such a letter in half had actually made a difference. But by then the idiosyncrasies of a little old lady seemed to be all they had to go on.

"In science, we keep the door open for everything," Dr. Garcia said then, two months and counting into the nation's anthrax inquiry.

--------

Chinese Seek Germ Warfare Reparations

December 26, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Japan-Germ-Warfare.html

TOKYO (AP) -- Relatives of Chinese victims of alleged World War II germ attacks wrapped up a court case Wednesday that seeks to force Japan's government to take responsibility and pay reparations.

Eight plaintiffs, representing a group of 180 people who sued the Japanese government in 1997, gave their final testimony in Tokyo District Court. A verdict is expected early next year.

``We lost our houses. We lost people. Our village was destroyed,'' said Wang Jindi, 67, from Chongshan village in China's western province of Zhejian. ``For nearly 60 years now, I have stayed angry over what the Japanese military did to us.''

In October 1942, Jindi's younger brother, uncle and five other relatives died within days of developing plague that China contends was spread by the Japanese army's germ warfare unit. Two months later, Japanese soldiers burned the entire village, leaving 700 people homeless.

The lawsuit contends at least 2,100 Chinese were killed in biological warfare experiments conducted by Unit 731, a Japanese army unit based in northern China.

Some Japanese veterans have testified they mass-produced cholera, dysentery, anthrax and typhoid at the unit's base in Harbin in the early 1940s.

The Japanese government has refused to confirm those accounts. It acknowledged the existence of Unit 731 several years ago after decades of denial, but has yet to disclose its activities.

Historians say Japanese units used biological weapons mostly in 1940-42, before the war started to turn against Japan.

``Crimes committed by Japan's Unit 731 was as serious as the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the United States,'' said plaintiff Gao Mingshun, 57, whose five relatives died of plague in 1941.

-------- chemical weapons

Washington subway readies chemical sensors

Wednesday, December 26, 2001
By Reuters
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2001/12/12262001/reu_subway_45969.asp

WASHINGTON--After two years of experimenting in secret, Washington's subway system will activate sensors in two downtown stations next month and become the first subway in the world that can detect a toxic-chemical release, the Washington Post reported Tuesday.

The Post cited federal scientists as saying the move showed the technology was ready for use in other subway systems and in airports, shopping malls and large, enclosed public spaces in general.

The Aum Shrinrikyo cult in Japan attacked Tokyo subways with sarin nerve gas March 20, 1995, killing 12 people and sickening more than 5,000. The cult had an apocalyptic theology that sanctioned mass killing.

Anthony Policastro, an engineer at Sandia National Laboratory who is overseeing the project in Washington's Metro system, was quoted as saying his team would continue to improve the sensors but the basic system worked.

"We have been testing for some time, and we're satisfied," he told the Post.

Subway managers in Chicago, Atlanta and Los Angeles have expressed interest in the technology, as have National Park Service officials, Policastro was quoted as saying. Boston has begun experimenting with a sensor at the suggestion of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory, which is providing technical expertise. The Park Service is considering installing sensors in the Statue of Liberty, the paper said.

ATTACKS CHANGED PRIORITIES

It said work on Washington's $7.5 million Metro sensors began in 1999 and was progressing quietly until Sept. 11, when terrorist attacks made it a priority among lawmakers and administration officials.

Thursday Congress approved $15 million to expand Metro's sensor program from two stations to 12. Transit Police Chief Barry McDevitt said the goal was to install sensors in all 47 underground stations in the Metro system, the Post reported.

Although chemical sensors have been available to the military for some time, their use in public spaces such as shopping malls and subway stations is new.

Metro asked The Washington Post not to identify the two stations that are getting the shoebox-sized sensors, which are to be hidden from view while they continuously suck in air and analyze it.

When they detect one of several toxic chemicals, they sound an alarm in Metro's operations control center. Policastro would not discuss the chemicals the sensors were designed to detect, the Post said.

The devices were described as not yet able to pick up biological agents, such as anthrax bacteria and smallpox viruses. The military has sensors that can detect biological agents, but they are bulky and expensive and have been troubled by false warnings. Policastro told the paper it would be a couple of years before one was developed for use in the subway.

-------- europe

Swiss continue army of citizens

By Andrew Borowiec
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 26, 2001
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011226-92274934.htm

GENEVA - Switzerland has not been at war for two centuries, but it firmly believes that its costly "citizens army" is not a waste of time or money.

Rallying around the slogan "No army - no Switzerland," the Swiss once again have defeated a campaign to disband the army as a pointless relic of the past, particularly in the post-Cold War era.

The decision to continue compulsory military service was made earlier this month in a referendum - a time-sanctioned method of deciding major and often minor issues affecting this neutral Alpine nation of 6 million people.

It is not an army in a classical sense.

Every able-bodied male citizen up to the age of 50 or 55 - depending on his rank - is a soldier. After an initial boot camp of 118 days, he remains a "soldier at home" with periodic call-ups.

A group known as "the elite" - those between the ages of 20 and 32 - undergoes 20 days of supplementary training each year. The frequency decreases with age.

A Swiss citizen-soldier keeps his automatic rifle, ammunition, helmet and uniform at home.

Accidents involving weapons are rare.

The system thus has entwined civilian and military lives and reduced the permanent military cadres to fewer than 10,000 men.

"Switzerland does not have an army - it is an army," quipped a career officer.

The Swiss boast that they can mobilize 625,000 men in less than 48 hours - a European record but one that has not been tested since the start of World War II.

Many Swiss believed it was their readiness and their entrenchment in Alpine bastions that prevented a Nazi invasion.

The present Swiss military doctrine is still based on a statement by former Defense Minister Kaspar Villiger that "without its army, anyone could simply walk over Switzerland."

The image of an insular, alpine bastion has evolved in recent years.

The Swiss have approved the concept of joint maneuvers with NATO forces and, in yet another referendum last June, narrowly agreed to arm Swiss soldiers taking part in international peacekeeping missions.

Banks and insurance companies encourage their executives to strive for higher military ranks.

Some 1,000 employees of the giant Union Bank of Switzerland hold senior army ranks, serving up to 1,513 days during their 35-year commitment.

The army is Switzerland's second-largest land owner. It maintains a maze of tunnels and fortifications filled with state-of-the art hardware. Some of its uniforms are made at home by women in mountain villages at an average cost of $200.

Because of the multilingual nature of the country, there are separate units speaking French, Swiss German and Italian. The training is strictly defensive.

When fully mobilized, the Swiss can expect to muster three field corps, each having three divisions, and a special mountain corps. The army has 33 arsenals scattered around the country.

Those calling for an end to compulsory military service have met fierce resistance from an estimated 1.5 million soldiers and ex-soldiers who enjoy the camaraderie of mountain maneuvers away from their offices, shops and factories.

Feelings are so strong that a bank in the city of St. Gallen recently refused to open an account for the Movement for a Switzerland Without an Army.

A soldier called up for service receives the equivalent of $3 a day, plus compensation for loss of salary and an allowance for his family up to $84 a day. The critics of military service claim that interruptions because of the continuing call-ups cost the country an estimated $2 billion a year.

-------- israel / palestine

INTERNATIONAL
Israel and Palestinians Clash in West Bank

December 26, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Palestinians.html

JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israeli troops fired from tanks and helicopter gunships at Palestinian gunmen holed up in a West Bank house Wednesday, killing one man and wounding two in an incursion into a Palestinian-controlled town. In a separate raid, Israeli troops arrested 17 suspected militants in a West Bank village.

Despite the fighting, Palestinian officials said Israel eased some restrictions, permitting the rebuilding of the landing strip at Gaza International Airport which Israeli forces destroyed this month, and agreeing to reopen the border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt.

Troops also opened roads in and out of the West Bank town of Jericho, but barriers around other Palestinian communities remained in place.

Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said he believed Palestinians and Israelis can now resume peace talks after 15 months of violence, and that the worst is behind them.

``I think that the chances for peace had reached the lowest point, the zero point, in relations between the Palestinian Autonomy and Israel,'' Peres said during a visit to the Ukraine. ``I think we have departed from the zero point and begun to move.''

However, the moderate Peres does not necessarily speak for hardline Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Earlier this week, after Peres and Palestinian Parliament Speaker Ahmed Qureia confirmed they have been talking about the terms of resuming peace talks, Sharon angrily denied knowledge of the contacts. Only later did Sharon confirm he knew about the Peres-Qureia talks.

Sharon is under growing pressure from his right-wing Likud party not to make any concessions to the Palestinians, seen as unavoidable if peace talks resume.

Environment Minister Tsachi Hanegbi, chairman of the Likud's central committee, said Wednesday he wants to convene the body of about 3,000 members to pass a resolution opposing the establishment of a Palestinian state. The move is aimed against Sharon, who has said a Palestinian state is inevitable, but that Israel must try to keep its dimensions small.

Israeli and Palestinian security commanders met Wednesday at the Erez crossing between Israel and Gaza Strip, their first talks in a week.

The two sides agreed to reopen the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt, which had been closed off and on during 15 months of fighting, said the Palestinian police chief in Gaza, Maj. Gen. Abdel Razek Majaidie. Israeli military officers, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that the Rafah crossing would be open longer hours, and restrictions would be eased on Gaza roads.

Majaidie said Israel also agreed to let Palestinians rebuild the landing strip at Gaza International Airport, which Israeli bulldozers tore up earlier this month as part of a campaign to prevent Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat from traveling abroad, reprisal for Palestinian attacks against Israelis. The Israelis said they had no objection to the repairs.

However, Raanan Gissin, Sharon's spokesman, said that despite the airport reopening, Arafat would not be allowed to travel until Palestinian police arrest the assassins of an Israeli Cabinet minister gunned down in October. Arafat has been stuck in the West Bank town of Ramallah since Dec. 3, when Israel destroyed his helicopters in a reprisal raid after Palestinian suicide bomb attacks in Jerusalem and Haifa.

In the West Bank town of Jenin, a gunfight erupted Wednesday after Israeli troops said they spotted several armed Palestinians and chased them into a building in town. Israeli tanks drove about 300 meters into Jenin, residents said.

The military said soldiers encircled the house, and a gun battle ensued. Tanks fired two shells at the building, and helicopter gunships also opened fire. Palestinian officials said a 50-year-old Palestinian was killed and two others were wounded, including a policeman. The army said one of those hit by Israeli fire was armed.

Earlier Wednesday, Israeli troops entered the village of Azun, which is under joint Israeli-Palestinian control, and arrested 17 suspected militants, the army said. Five of those arrested were Palestinian policemen, according to the mayor.

-------- korea

Kim hints at allowing U.S. plan

By Jong-Heon Lee
UPI Correspondent
December 26, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/26122001-041040-3852r.htm

SEOUL, South Korea, Dec. 26 (UPI) -- South Korean President Kim Dae-jung strongly indicated Wednesday that he will accept a controversial U.S. plan to build an apartment block in its army base in central Seoul.

"We have to maintain a solid military alliance with the United States, and therefore we have to help improve the living conditions of American soldiers stationed here under a mutual defense treaty," Kim told a meeting with military leaders.

"This is proper etiquette toward the guests, and it is helpful to our vital national interests," he said.

Saying the South Korea-U.S. security alliance is "stronger than ever," Kim stressed the role of U.S. forces in South Korea as a force for stability on the Korean peninsula and the Asia-Pacific region.

The remarks came amid heated debate over the U.S. plan to build 20 high-rise apartments in its Yongsan Army Garrison, located in one of Seoul's most populous areas. The housing complex is needed to replace aging accommodations for American troops and their families, the U.S. military says.

But critics insist the investment is a scheme to station American troops permanently in South Korea, calling for the U.S. military to scrap the plan and carry out a promise to move out of Yongsan base.

In a series of protest rallies, civic activists also demanded the resignation of South Korea's defense minister, saying he "could not protect people's lives and properties any longer."

Seoul Mayor Goh Kun also has strongly opposed to the U.S. plan to build a mammoth military complex in the heart of the capital, vowing to press ahead with his plan to replace the U.S. military site with a new city hall building and a park.

The U.S. military presence has been a source of anti-American sentiment in South Korea over the years. In particular, the Yongsan base has been blamed for dumping toxic chemical waste into a river, a main source of drinking water for Seoul's 1.2 million citizens.

Kim asked for military leaders to "steadfastly" maintain combined defense readiness for any kind of contingencies ahead of the FIFA World Cup soccer finals and the Asian Games the country is to host next year.

-------- malaysia

Malaysian Muslim Cult Members Guilty of Rebellion

December 26, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-malaysia-treason-verdict.html

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysia's High Court found 19 members of a little-known Muslim sect guilty of armed rebellion on Thursday and the men could now be sentenced to hang.

The leader of the shadowy Al-Ma'unah cult, Mohamed Amin Razali, and his followers were captured after a shootout in the jungle just weeks after the gang pulled off daring arms heists at two army camps in the middle of last year.

``I hearby find the accused guilty of waging war against the government to set up an Islamic state through violent means under the name of Islamic jihad (holy war),'' High Court Judge Zulkefli Ahmad Makinudin said.

After handing down the verdict, the judge declared a short break in proceedings before moving onto sentencing and mitigation pleas by the defense for the accused men, who could face the death penalty or life imprisonment.

Leaders of the Al-Ma'unah sect said its mission was to fight on behalf of suppressed Muslims, and convinced followers they possessed mystical powers that would protect them in battle. The emergence of the hitherto unheard of Al-Ma'unah was regarded as an isolated episode in a country regarded as one of the most stable and peaceful in Southeast Asia.

-------- pakistan

Tensions Continue to Mount Between India and Pakistan

December 26, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-India-Pakistan.html

NEW DELHI, India (AP) -- India said its missiles were ``in position'' and air force jets flew near the Pakistan border every few minutes Wednesday as Pakistan accused India of whipping up ``war hysteria'' between the nuclear-armed neighbors.

Despite the tensions, daily exchanges of gunfire at the countries' border subsided Wednesday, officials from both sides said. Anwar Mahmood, Pakistan's information secretary, said Islamabad would ``act with restraint.''

India's security Cabinet met Wednesday to discuss ``further diplomatic offensives,'' Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh said. Further steps could include a possible ban on Pakistan airline flights, abrogation of a water treaty, downgrading of embassies and cancellation of Pakistan's ``most favored nation'' trading status.

No decision would be made until Thursday, when Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes returns from visiting Indian troops on the Siachen Glacier, which borders Pakistan and China.

News reports quoted Indian military sources as saying they would not be ready for a full-scale war for several months and would prefer to avoid fighting during winter.

And Singh confirmed that Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee would go to a summit of South Asian leaders in Katmandu, Nepal, next week that Musharraf also plans to attend.

Still, Fernandes told Press Trust of India that ``missile systems are in position.'' India's arsenal includes medium-range Russian missiles and the Indian-made Prithvi I, which can be fired from a mobile launcher and has a range of 93 miles.

Pakistani missiles -- including medium-range Chinese-made weapons -- have also been put on alert, Pakistan and Indian news media reported, as troops on both sides moved toward the border.

Both sides' missile systems can be converted to deliver nuclear warheads, but it is not clear whether such steps have been taken.

Mahmood said ``Indian leaders are generating a war hysteria because of domestic compulsions.'' He promised restraint from Pakistan, saying, ``Our hope is that better sense will prevail in India also.''

Tensions between the two countries have spiraled since India accused Pakistan's spy agency of sponsoring a deadly Dec. 13 attack by gunmen on Parliament in New Delhi, a charge Islamabad denies. India says two Pakistan-based Islamic militant groups conducted the attack.

Pakistan has so far arrested 30 members of one of the two groups, Jaish-e-Mohammed -- including its founder, a commander in the group, Hassan Bark said Wednesday. The Pakistani government said the group's founder, Maulana Masood Azhar, was arrested Monday and was being held in an undisclosed location.

India has been demanding Islamabad take action against Jaish-e-Mohammed and the second group it accuses in the attack, Lashkar-e-Tayyaba. Both are battling to end Indian rule in Kashmir. Pakistan has frozen the groups' assets.

``We do not want war, but war is being thrust on us and we will have to face it,'' Vajpayee said Tuesday at his residence, where he was celebrating his 77th birthday.

Musharraf warned India against any military action, saying Pakistan's armed forces ``are fully prepared and capable of defeating all challenges.''

But he also criticized Muslim militants in Pakistan, who he said have ``undermined Islam to a level that people of the world associate it with illiteracy, backwardness, intolerance.''

In contrast to previous periods of tension with India, Pakistan has been more cautious with its rhetoric. Officials in Islamabad have declined comment, saying they do not wish to escalate the war of words.

Pakistan's position has been bolstered by its new presence on the world stage, which has increased with its cooperation with the U.S.-led coalition against terrorism.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars since their violent division upon gaining independence from Britain in 1947. Two of the wars have been over Kashmir, the mostly Muslim Himalayan region that is divided between them. Both claim all of it.

After the Parliament attack, India recalled its ambassador from Islamabad and announced plans to shut down train and bus service between the two countries on Jan. 1, saying the diplomatic offensive is intended to pressure Musharraf to take strong action against the guerrillas.

Islamic militants have carried out strikes in the Indian part of Kashmir since 1989 in its fight for independence for the region or a merger with Pakistan in an insurgency that human rights groups say has killed more than 60,000 people.

India says the militants have also struck elsewhere, including the Parliament attack, which killed 14 people, including five attackers.

Musharraf condemned the Parliament attack but said he would take no action without proof implicating the militants, whom he calls ``freedom fighters.'' He denies that his government helps or has any control over them.

India also is lobbying for international pressure on Pakistan by linking the militants to the terrorist network that the U.S.-led coalition is fighting in Afghanistan.

Soldiers traveled to the border state of Rajasthan by train Wednesday and air force jets flew over the border town of Jaisalmer every seven minutes.

-------- propaganda wars

US deficient in information warfare

By Lou Marano
12/26/2001 2:25 PM
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=26122001-123923-4943r

WASHINGTON, Dec. 26 (UPI) -- "Guerrillas don't hold ground," a specialist in information warfare warns those who take comfort in the apparent success of the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden is a classic guerrilla leader, said Chuck deCaro, a former CNN correspondent who is adjunct lecturer of strategy and information warfare at the National Defense University in Washington. Americans should not believe bin Laden's al Qaida network has been neutralized "just because you've swept over the top of Afghanistan, where this guy was a parasite on the ruling government."

It's the nature of guerrilla movements that have been punished to emerge later at another place, he told United Press International.

DeCaro is one of a small group of defense intellectuals who for years have been saying that "archaic" Cold War, machine-age solutions won't work against enemies that have adapted to the information age. Bin Laden, he says, is a four-dimensional "virtual" terrorist whose area of operations is global. America must fight him by making its case to the world.

DeCaro said that the apparent success in Afghanistan won't be fully realized until after a lot of angry Taliban and al Qaida sympathizers who have dealt their way out of capture are convinced that post-Taliban Afghanistan is a better place to be.

"You have to get at the reason for the guerrilla movement" and remove that as a motivation for potential recruits, he said. An information campaign is necessary, even if the message is: "You're not that good, and we'll come at you. And, Oh, by the way, here is a better, stable, and prosperous Afghanistan after the Taliban."

DeCaro envisages a continuous marketing campaign. One approach is the unending provision of video news releases documenting U.S. efforts in styles aimed at the various "demographics" within the Islamic world. If those news releases aren't enough, buy airtime, he said. "Women's issues could be especially highlighted, but it doesn't go 10 days and stop. This is long term."

After Afghanistan, the United States should conduct similar information campaigns everywhere bin Laden might have a cell or a population from which to draw people -- whether it be Indonesia, the Philippines or Trenton, N.J. -- and demonstrate that "screwing with the United States is not a good idea while playing ball is a very good idea."

DeCaro doesn't shrink from the word "propaganda." He does not advocate promulgating falsehood, however, but rather getting America's story out to the world.

These information programs would play on every station or network that the U.S. government could successfully promote them. DeCaro also advocates buying air time on local television and, if necessary, starting or assisting competing networks beamed at the "target demographics." Such an effort would be somewhat like Radio Free Europe, he said, "but bigger, televised and more prolific."

"If we're giving away powdered milk, I want to be there taping it," he said. "I want to follow that kid doing better in school. Make that available." In the machine age, this sort of thing was done with leaflets and posters.

DeCaro used the advertising of Coca Cola to illustrate the need for constancy in information warfare. "They sponsor a program. And that gives you the hook to the demographic watching. Then you drop that commercial on them." DeCaro characterized Coke's unchanging message as: "You want to drink this really cold brown fizzy stuff from this can because it does this for you."

"Do they do that once?" the information warfare specialist asked rhetorically. "Everybody in the world knows what Coca Cola is, and the company still spends billions of dollars a year to maintain its market share. And we need to do the same thing."

Even a military success "does not engage the problem of a mindset," he said.

Asked what the U.S. government should be doing differently, he replied: "We could have a thoroughly modern global information campaign demonstrating what the United States is, what we're trying to do, where we're going, and what it is we can do to help you." This would be an interagency effort involving the Defense Department, the National Security Council, the State Department, the Commerce Department and others.

"We ought to be selling our case -- and not just the military case. We need to get the message across that we are a land of equal opportunity. We tolerate other religions. This is not a war against Islam. This must be done over and over and over, because not everybody's wired in and gets the message the first time."

DeCaro said the United States represents economic opportunity. Washington's message: "We're not here to take away all your resources and strip you blind. We want to do business. We are a nation of businesses. In trading with us, we'll make your life better."

This is a dynamic process that must be tailored to the target audience. Such public relations campaigns would change from place to place and season to season.

The bodies politic are not all within geographic borders, he said. "You literally have to sell them your approach" with the steady reassurance: "We are not a threat to you."

DeCaro is president of Aerobureau Corp., the heart of which is a four-engine, turboprop airliner that serves as a platform from which broadcast news can be gathered and transmitted.

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Anniversary of Soviet Collapse Ignored

WORLD In Brief
Associated Press
Wednesday, December 26, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A24969-2001Dec25?language=printer

MOSCOW -- Ten years after Mikhail Gorbachev closed the book on the Soviet Union, the anniversary went almost unnoticed in the Russian capital.

On Dec. 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union. He handed over the so-called nuclear suitcase -- containing the codes and communication equipment for launching the country's nuclear missiles -- to Russian President Boris Yeltsin. It marked the end of a process that had been accelerating since the previous August, when pro-Yeltsin forces defeated an attempted coup by Communist hard-liners.

The anniversary was noted by only one major newspaper. NTV television ran a documentary about the Soviet Union's final days, but most channels didn't mention it during their news broadcasts.

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Chechen Guerrilla Leader Sentenced

WORLD In Brief
Reuters
Wednesday, December 26, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A24969-2001Dec25?language=printer

MOSCOW -- The most important Chechen guerrilla leader captured by Russian forces was sentenced to life imprisonment.

After a five-week trial, Salman Raduyev was convicted of leading an armed group, banditry, terrorism, premeditated murder, hostage-taking, organizing explosions and other offenses.

Raduyev, who has played no role in the second Chechen war, which began in 1999, became one of Russia's most-wanted men after leading a raid on the Dagestani town of Kizlyar in 1996 during the 1994-96 war in the rebellious Russian region.

Raduyev and his group took more than 2,000 people hostage. More than 70 died in a series of battles before the attackers escaped despite a siege and assault by heavily armed Russian commandos.

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Russians Defuse Bombs in Afghanistan

December 26, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Afghanistan.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- Russian army engineers have defused nearly 5,000 explosives in the Afghan capital of Kabul and in a key tunnel connection once used by the former Soviet Union to send troops into Afghanistan.

Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu expressed hope Wednesday that the Salang Tunnel, a vital link between northern and southern Afghanistan, could be reopened to cars in February. But he added that its ventilation system and lights still need to be restored in cooperation with French and British agencies.

As Afghanistan begins to recover from more than two decades of hostilities, it needs the tunnel to deliver aid to Kabul and connect the capital with the major northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

The tunnel was blown up in 1997 by Afghan anti-Taliban forces and can be crossed only on foot or by donkey. It remains inaccessible to vehicles.

Russian workers have also cleared 600 feet of debris at the southern end of the tunnel, Shoigu said at a news conference.

Russia is supplying humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. It has set up a field hospital in Kabul, which has provided medical aid to 2,560 patients and ferried more than 5,940 tons of wheat sent by the United Nations' food agency on trucks via the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan.

Some 385 tons of food have been delivered directly to Kabul aboard the ministry's transport planes, Shoigu said.

Russia remains haunted by the humiliating defeat of Soviet armed forces in the brutal, 10-year war in Afghanistan that ended in 1989, and officials have stressed that Moscow will not provide military help in postwar Afghanistan. They say that Russian troops will not take part in the peacekeeping force, except to secure aid shipments.

Shoigu said his ministry was working to help start regular deliveries of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan across the so-called Friendship Bridge spanning the Amu Darya River. Uzbekistan closed the bridge in 1997 amid battles between the Taliban and their opponents, and it has been reluctant to reopen it despite the Taliban's defeat.

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Air Force resists more bombers, prefers fighters

By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 26, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011226-15843558.htm

Senior Pentagon civilians believe they know an important "lesson learned" from the Afghanistan war: The Air Force needs more global-reach heavy bombers.

But the Air Force is resisting, triggering a fierce internal budget debate on the war's real lessons even before the last bomb is dropped on Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist army.

The private tussle rages as President Bush prepares to present his first five-year defense budget to Congress early next year. The plan will both articulate his ideas on how to transform the military for new threats, such as terrorism, and show what the generals and admirals learned from Afghanistan.

"We will clearly learn some things that we did well and some things that we'd like to be able to do better and some things that we ought to have that we don't have," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said last week of the war's lessons. "That will go forward, as it does after every conflict, and the process is now under way."

The battle lines fall this way: Civilian budgeteers, led by Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, want the Air Force to restart production of the Northrop Grumman Corp. B-2. The nation's first, and only, long-range stealth bomber has found new fans after missions over Kosovo and Afghanistan.

Mr. Bush has called for weapons with global reach, yet Pentagon officials say the Air Force's five-year plan calls for zero money to buy long-range bombers, while providing nearly $300 billion to procure tactical fighters.

Air Force Secretary James G. Roche, a top Northrop Grumman executive before Mr. Bush nominated him to his Pentagon post, is adamantly opposed to more B-2s. In fact, a Pentagon official says he gets "downright emotional" when the topic is raised.

His fear: If Mr. Rumsfeld sides with his civilian staff and approves more B-2s, money may have to be siphoned from the Air Force's top priority, the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter. The plan is to buy 339 for $62 billion, thus giving the United States the most advanced air-to-air and ground-striking jet ever put into combat.

Officials say that as an alternative to additional B-2s, Mr. Roche is proposing development of a supercruise bomber later this decade.

The Air Force secretary's fears may be real. A Pentagon official says an idea has been floated among Mr. Rumsfeld's staff to cut the F-22 buy down to 150 and use the savings to produce more B-2s.

Supporters say strategic bombers, long thought of as relics of Cold War, are showing new utility.

Reason one: With the United States unable to win basing rights for Air Force fighters adjacent to landlocked Afghanistan, strategic bombers flying from the United States and an Indian Ocean base dropped the largest share of Air Force munitions.

Reason two: The expanding deployment of the joint direct attack munition (JDAM) since its first use in Kosovo in 1998 means bombers can perform the same precision strikes as more nimble, low-flying jet fighters and carry eight times as much payload.

In Afghanistan, bombers even executed the close-air-support role. They loitered for hours over the battlefield, waiting for Army Special Forces to designate a target and then radio the geographic coordinates of a Taliban or al Qaeda ground target. The bombardier fed the coordinates into JDAM's Global Positioning System satellite-guidance system and released the bomb.

While not as accurate as a laser-guided weapon, a JDAM can strike within a few yards of a target and, unlike lasers, is impervious to poor weather.

In a bomber, the weapon reaches a new operational dimension just by sheer numbers. A B-2 can carry 16 2,000-pound JDAMs, meaning in theory it can hit 16 different targets in one mission. The Air Force's F-16C fighter carries two of the 1-ton bombs.

"Bombers have resurrected themselves," said an Air Force source, noting that the B-2's radar-avoiding characteristics makes it a prime weapon against stiffer air defenses such as Iraq's.

The B-2 still has its critics. It is based at Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo., where crews must tend to its high-maintenance radar-absorbing "skin." The long-distance missions of more than 30 hours round trip drive up operational costs.

The Pentagon once had planned to buy 132 B-2s for $70 billion. But Congress cut the buy to 20 aircraft after the Soviet Union's collapse. Northrop Grumman has made an unsolicited offer to build 40 new aircraft for $29 billion.

B-2 supporters include some members of the Air Force fighter community. But instead of offering up cuts in the F-22, they say the money should come from the Marine Corps' troubled V-22 Osprey or the Army's Comanche helicopter.

The Air Force is not in danger of losing the F-22 or the $300 billion joint strike fighter (JSF) being developed for the Marines, Navy and Air Force.

The Pentagon's top acquisition officer, Pete Aldridge, vouched for both systems last week. He said, "When we get the F-22 and the Joint Strike Fighter, we'll have, with essentially all-stealth capability, we'll have the ability to just dominate the skies over any adversary."

Perhaps signaling no more B-2s, Mr. Rumsfeld seems wary of taking too many lessons from fighting terrorists in a backward country.

"It is hard for me to imagine another Afghanistan," he said. "If you think about that situation, it is kind of distinctive. Now, it doesn't mean that some of the things that are working there won't work elsewhere, but the totality of it is distinctive I don't think we're going to run around with a cookie mold and repeat this."

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General tells sailors of mission

December 26, 2001
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20011226-9451861.htm

ABOARD THE USS THEODORE ROOSEVELT (AP) - The commander of the military campaign in Afghanistan said yesterday that anti-terrorism operations are being conducted "in a great many places" around the world in the wake of the September 11 attack on America.

On a Christmas Day visit to sailors in the Arabian Sea, Army Gen. Tommy Franks said America's anti-terrorism hit list extends outside the Middle East.

"It is too early to suggest which countries, but it is not too early to remind ourselves that September 11 put us on course to root out this terrorist problem around the world," Gen. Franks, commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, told the Associated Press.

"If you look within this region and other places around the planet, you find a lot of states which we categorize as sponsors of terrorism," he said.

As a result, overt and covert U.S. military operations are "going on in a great many places that are designed to do away with these pockets of terrorism," he said in the interview, without giving details.

Gen. Franks addressed about 1,000 sailors in the hangar bay aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, telling them the ongoing war in Afghanistan was "about you and about [protecting] your grandbabies and my grandbabies" from future terrorist attacks.

Gen. Franks is in charge of all military operations inside Afghanistan, where U.S. forces launched devastating air strikes on Oct. 7 to pave the way for removing the Taliban government and for destroying Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist group.