------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
UK Police Investigate Nuclear 'Guinea Pig' Claim
Weapons of mass destruction - going nuclear in Iraq
Getting Iran Right
Bush Pledges More Aid For Russian Arms Cuts
U.S. to accelerate aid in destroying weapons
U.S. Drops Threat to Cut Aid to Russia for Disarming
Russian Court Delays Researcher's Spy Case
Man to Plead Guilty in Nuclear Case
Fugitive Physicist Pleads Guilty
Bush Proposes Tighter Border Controls
Al Qaeda Probed Nuclear Weapons Use
NRC Mulls Reissue of Nuclear Plant Status Report
Bush OKs Intelligence, Defense Bills

MILITARY
Afghan jailers beat confessions from men
U.S. bombs leave wasteland
Debate Over U.S. Raid on Convoy
Interim Afghan Government Wants Bombing to End
Warlords Call for Foreign Intervention in Somalia
China says report in Times is 'groundless'
U.S. man admits nuke-linked sale to Israel
Southeast Asia Nations Draft Accord
Croatia back in chaos?
Yugoslav army chief to stay
India and Pakistan Exchange Shelling in Kashmir
Fighting in Indonesia kills 16 this week
Israeli Soldiers Kill Palestinian Suicide Bomber
Sinking Renews Debate on Japan's Military
Attacks bring old foes together
Pakistan dims hopes for diffusing standoff
India and Pakistan Exchange Sanctions
U.S. Anti-Terror Effort
Warlords Call for Foreign Intervention in Somalia
U.S. Navy Base in Cuba Has Tradition
Green Beret lessons
Bush Says bin Laden Will Not Escape

POLICE / PRISONERS
Police officer killed in training exercise
London targets radicals
Pyongyang to grant amnesty to prison laborers
Terrorism Tribunal Rights Are Expanded
Oklahoma tops Texas in executions for 2001
In Shift, Chinese Carry Out Executions by Lethal Injection
Exclusive: Terror plot on US carrier foiled
Xinjiang 'terrorists' have Chinese names
Terror Cells Slip Through Europe's Grasp

ENERGY AND OTHER
Oil has the kick

ACTIVISTS
S-1766, PRICE ANDERSON ACT- TAKE ACTION NOW
Stun grenades used on West Bank



-------- NUCLEAR

-------- britain

UK Police Investigate Nuclear 'Guinea Pig' Claim

December 28, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-britain-nuclear.html

LONDON (Reuters) - British police said on Friday they were investigating a complaint that military personnel were intentionally exposed by the government to deadly levels of radiation during nuclear tests on Pacific islands in the 1950s.

``I can confirm that the Met specialist crime group is carrying out a preliminary assessment of information received by them in August 2001,'' a spokesman for London's Metropolitan Police Service in reply to a question about the nuclear tests.

He declined to give further details or estimate when the investigations might be completed.

A police source said the investigation was prompted by the widow of a Royal Air Force pilot, Squadron Leader Eric Denson, who had been ordered to fly his plane several times through the mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb detonated on Christmas Island in the Pacific in 1958.

``The claim is that he...clearly in effect was being used as a human guinea pig,'' Shirley Denson's lawyer Alan Care told BBC radio.

Newspapers said Denson fell ill after the flight and became depressed, and committed suicide in 1976 after three attempts.

Several thousand British service personnel took part in the nuclear tests at Christmas Island and other Pacific atolls in the 1950s.

Protective equipment was scarce as full knowledge of the deadly effects of radiation sickness was only slowly coming to light after the nuclear bombs dropped by the United States on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

In the 20 years after the British tests many of the participants began complaining of illnesses they said were related to the radiation exposure.


-------- depleted uranium

Weapons of mass destruction - going nuclear in Iraq

By Ramzi Kysia,
December 28, 2001
Jordan Times
http://www.jordantimes.com/Thu/region/region1.htm

BAGHDAD - Dr Alim Abdul-Hamid's office at Al Mustanseriya Medical College in Baghdad is decorated in bright, cheerful colours, but what he has to say is anything but cheerful. Formerly Dean of Basra Medical College, Abdul-Hamid has had plenty of first-hand experience with Iraq's unprecedented plague of cancers and birth defects. "We have seen cases of breast cancer among women in their 20s. In their 20s!," says Abdul-Hamid. "This is really tragic, because, you know, in America, probably when you come across a case of breast cancer in a woman in her late 30s, you would consider that this is a young age for cancer, while we see cases of breast cancer in the 20s. There are increased incidences of colon cancer, thyroid cancer, in addition to, of course, leukaemias and lymphomas."

What's the source of this epidemic? According to Abdul-Hamid the problem is depleted uranium. Depleted uranium, or "DU", is an extremely dense, heavy metal, and a waste product of atomic bomb production. It has a half-life of over 4 billion years. It contains trace amounts of plutonium and is 60 per cent as radioactive as naturally occurring uranium. The US military uses it as ballast in their missiles, and they use it to coat shells and pellets. Because of its density, it is armour piercing - so it is used as an anti-tank weapon. DU is also aerosolising. When a shell coated with DU hits, it burns, releasing uranium oxide dust. This dust then rises in the air, is carried by the winds, and contaminates the entire surrounding environment.

The Pentagon admits to dropping 320 tonnes of DU in Iraq. The environmental organisation Greenpeace puts the estimate at over 800 tonnes. Hospitals throughout Iraq have reported as much as a 10-fold increase in overall cancer rates and birth defects over the last 11 years.

Abdul-Hamid points to an epidemiological study he headed in Basra, demonstrating the connection between DU and cancer in Iraq. The study looked at five factors: biological plausibility, strength of association, incidence rate, increased incidences of cancer among younger children, and the dose-response relationship. According to Abdul-Hamid, all these factors point to a strong, casual link between DU exposure and cancer in Iraq.

To test the biological plausibility of their hypothesis, the team of scientists studied the types of cancer being reported, most notably leukaemias, and explored their relationship to DU. The results strongly indicate a radioactive, rather than chemical, contaminant. Explains Abdul-Hamid: "Leukaemia is known to be related to radiation. We don't have evidence that leukaemia is related to chemicals."

Additionally, if the source of the epidemic were chemical, there would have been a sharp spike in cancer rates following the Gulf war, followed by rapid decreases as the source of the contamination disappeared. In contrast, with radiation the strength of association increases as time passes. The fact that cancer rates are still increasing at an exponential rate in Iraq strongly implies a radioactive source.

This increase is enormous. According to the study, malignancies and leukaemias among children under the age of 15 have more than tripled since 1990. Whereas in 1990 young children accounted for only 13 per cent of cancer cases, today over 56 per cent of all cancer in Iraq occurs among children under the age of 5. Abdul-Hamid explains that it isn't just direct exposure of the children to the radiation still present in the environment; it's also the cumulative exposure of their parents over time. This cumulative exposure does permanent damage to parental genes, damage which is then passed on to their children.

Finally, pointing to a map of Basra, Abdul-Hamid highlights the dose-response relationship between DU and cancers. "If we look at the map of Basra, southern Iraq, and monitor the incidences in different districts over time, we can come out with a very important conclusion. And that is that areas which have got the higher level of background radiation have higher levels of cancers." These factors overwhelmingly point to DU as the source of Iraq's current cancer plague.

Iraqi doctors aren't the only ones complaining about DU. US veterans are upset as well. DU may be a leading cause of the unprecedented levels of illnesses effecting Gulf war veterans. "The Pentagon claims that there are no significant health effects from exposure to depleted uranium, but their own research and documents show that this is not true," says Charles Sheehan-Miles, a Gulf war veteran and former president of the National Gulf War Resource Centre. Almost 25 per cent of US soldiers who fought in the Gulf war are currently receiving disability benefits from the US Veteran's Administration. This is twice the rate of disabilities as among Vietnam veterans.

Unfortunately, DU remains an integral part of the American military arsenal. According to Sheehan-Miles, "Depleted uranium, like landmines and cluster bombs, is a weapon with effects far beyond the battlefield, with innocents and children as the frequent victims. I resent this. As a former American soldier, I was trained to protect the innocent, not to kill them."

As the United States gears up for a new "Desert Storm" against Iraq, using weapons like DU, that is a lesson that more American soldiers, and the politicians who command them, should be reminded of.

The writer is a Muslim-American peace activist, and serves on the board of directors for the Education for Peace in Iraq Centre (www.saveageneration.org). He is currently in Iraq as part of a Voices in the Wilderness (www.vitw.org) peace delegation trying to end the war . He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.

-------- iran

Getting Iran Right
Improved ties could lead to cooperation on many shared priorities.

By John Newhouse and Thomas R. Pickering
Washington Post
Friday, December 28, 2001; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32732-2001Dec27?language=printer

Some big opportunities were left in the wake of Sept. 11. Take Iran, which pledged assistance in search-and-rescue operations for any downed American pilots on its soil, authorized the transit of humanitarian assistance and cooperated in the formation of the new Afghan government. The turmoil that has long agitated U.S.-Iranian relations could begin to give way, if only gradually, to a balanced and productive relationship between two societies that have more in common than either cares to admit.

Iran could become a stabilizing influence in a congenitally unstable region. It has attributes unique to the region: rudimentary but real politics based on free elections; a legitimate government; a history and culture all its own; and uncontested borders fixed by that experience, rather than imposed by other governments. Iran has had its revolution and never come close to imploding. Support for the hard-line Islamist clerics who came to power in that revolution has dwindled. Iran is a largely moderate and pro-American society.

Iran and the United States have enemies in common. They also have serious differences -- political and economic. Overcoming these won't be easy. The United States wants a dialogue but won't modify its position on diplomatic relations unless Iran agrees to (1) end its opposition to the peace process in the Middle East, (2) close off financial and other support of organizations involved in terrorist attacks against Israel and (3) pin down its pledge to forgo development of nuclear weapons.

Iran wants to be treated by the United States as a normal country and a respectable player within the international system. It urgently needs help with economic development. It confronts a demographic imbalance and must create employment for the disproportionate number of young people. Iran wants relations with this country because they will allow freer access to international capital markets. It also wants the United States to stop discouraging World Bank loans. And it wants to speed settlement of past monetary claims.

Above all, Iran needs Western investment in its oil and natural gas fields, along with Western management. In exploiting new oil fields, it wants to work with American companies instead of being limited to their European competitors. But U.S. sanctions forbid all such ventures even though the prohibitions are actually not enforceable against non-American oil companies, and U.S. companies are thereby being denied a level playing field.

Iran's 66 million people inhabit a dangerous and strategically pivotal neighborhood where weapons of mass destruction are being developed by deeply unstable states. Its immediate neighbor and enemy on one side is Iraq, an aspirant nuclear power. On the other side is Pakistan, which along with India now possesses nuclear weapons.

Before Sept. 11, an initiative designed to rebuild a normal relationship with Iran would have started with exchanges on the less sensitive issues. Now it may be possible to take a much longer first step, one designed to narrow, if not settle, differences over security. The U.N. Security Council could impel movement by adopting a resolution that would guarantee Iran's security against unprovoked aggression from an external force, thereby directly connecting the United States and Russia and other permanent members of the council to that effort. A lot would be required of Iran in return for so broad a guarantee, including a cessation of support for groups such as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Hezbollah and of opposition to the peace process. Iran would have to sign a protocol designed to ensure detection of covert efforts to develop nuclear weapons, with provision for adequate transparency and monitoring.

This package might be acceptable to the government of President Mohammad Khatami. But Khatami is pitted against the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his forces -- the real power on intelligence, security and military matters. President Khatami draws strength from his broadly based popularity and the steadily growing support for his moderate and creative approach both to domestic and regional issues and to external relations.

The society is insisting on improved economic performance, and equates access to markets and investment capital with regional stability. Khatami's government has improved relations with neighboring states and has developed good and productive relations with West European countries. All this conforms as well to the interests of the hard-line mullahs, for whom survivability of the Islamist regime is the first priority. They see the need to reengage the world and gave up trying to export revolution a long time ago. But the hard-liners still use American policy to justify their antagonistic approach to matters of importance to both countries and to excuse the underperforming economy.

The case for revising U.S. policy and encouraging the healthy trends underway in Iran is self-evident. Among other steps, the United States should, as progress in security matters develops, relax its sanctions against trade and investment in Iran; remove the prohibition on importation of Iranian oil; and assist Iran in its application to join the World Trade Organization.

Hard-liners in Tehran will resist change of this kind but won't be able to do so indefinitely if the change moves forward at a measured but steady pace. Moreover, improved U.S.-Iranian relations would further isolate Iraq within the region and hence should appeal to all sides, including the hard-liners. The era into which we've moved will be increasingly geo-commercial. The political-military issues that dominated most of the last century will be less on the center stage. Friendly and productive relations between Iran and the United States can and should evolve.

John Newhouse is a senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information. Thomas R. Pickering was undersecretary of state for political affairs from 1997 to 2000.

-------- russia

Bush Pledges More Aid For Russian Arms Cuts

By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 28, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32003-2001Dec27?language=printer

CRAWFORD, Tex., Dec. 27 -- President Bush pledged more money today to help Russia round up and destroy nuclear and chemical weapons, abandoning the skepticism he had expressed when he ordered a review of the U.S. assistance nine months ago.

In a statement issued while vacationing at his ranch here, Bush said most of the $750 million the United States spent on 30 such programs this year appears to be worthwhile. He called for cutbacks in a few programs, such as a costly effort to dispose of excess plutonium. But he urged additional spending and accelerated efforts on others, including construction of an incinerator to destroy Russian nerve agents.

White House officials said the administration would propose an overall increase in the aid when Bush submits his budget next year, and they depicted the decision as a milestone in the increasing cooperation between the United States and Russia. "Most U.S. programs to assist Russia in threat reduction and nonproliferation work well, are focused on priority tasks and are well managed," a White House statement said.

Foreign policy specialists said the announcement reflected the warming of relations with Russia and the administration's heightened concern about the proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Lawrence J. Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration who is director of national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the Bush administration had been "saying one thing and doing another" -- declaring support for cooperation with Russia while proposing cuts in nonproliferation assistance.

"Now, they realize these are important programs that could keep nuclear material out of the hands of terrorists," Korb said. "If these terrorists get hold of nuclear weapons, it will make September 11th look like a day at the beach."

Democrats on Capitol Hill said programs that had appeared likely to be cut under the administration's budget now appear likely to be given more money. They said the announcement was another example of Bush criticizing the policies of President Bill Clinton and then later adopting them.

"When all was said and done, they realized there were good reasons for the past policies," said a Democratic Senate aide who specializes in arms control.

Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), a leader in the 10-year-old cooperative threat reduction program, also described Bush's action as "good news."

The National Security Council began reviewing the programs in March. Bush said at a news conference at the time that it was in the nation's interest to "work with Russia to dismantle its nuclear arsenal." But he also said he had an obligation to the taxpayers "to make sure that any money that is being spent is being spent in an effective way."

Some administration officials had wanted, for example, to eliminate the Energy Department's Nuclear Cities Initiative, which aims to foster partnerships with U.S. companies and to spur investment in Russian communities long dependent on weapons factories. Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, had called such a cutback "absolutely foolhardy."

In today's statement, the White House said the Nuclear Cities Initiative would be consolidated into a related program and "restructured to focus more effectively on projects to help Russia reduce its nuclear warhead complex." But it stopped short of canceling the program.

Bush also said the Pentagon would accelerate a project to build a facility at Shchuchye, in Russia's Kurgan region, to incinerate tons of deadly nerve agents. The high-tech incinerator is the first major effort by the Russians to destroy chemical stockpiles, an effort they concede is decades behind schedule.

The House Armed Services Committee had for several years held up money for the facility, arguing that Russia had not fully disclosed its chemical weapons stocks or shouldered its share of financing. But earlier this year, the House withdrew its objection. With the Senate, it approved the project under certain conditions, including contributions from other countries and certification that Russia has revealed its chemical stockpiles.

With those provisions, Congress approved $35 million this month to get the project started. Russia has allocated $50 million for infrastructure work, such as building access roads and clearing land, according to congressional sources.

The administration also said today that it wants to accelerate cooperation with Russia to install equipment at border posts to detect nuclear materials. And the White House statement called in general terms, without citing budgetary figures, for expanding Energy Department programs to improve the security of Russia's warheads and nuclear materials.

Congress had already guaranteed an increase in that funding by providing an extra $286 million for nonproliferation programs in a supplemental appropriations bill this month. Of that amount, $120 million is for programs to upgrade protection and accounting for nuclear materials across the former Soviet Union.

Bush's announcement called for the expansion of the International Science and Technology Center, a joint U.S.-Japanese-European effort to help Russian weapons scientists switch to civilian work.

But the president also called for the restructuring of some programs. The White House statement said, for example, that the State and Energy departments will "examine alternative approaches" to a joint project to dispose of 34 metric tons of excess Russian weapons-grade plutonium, "with the aim of making the program less costly and more effective."

Some administration officials had urged cancellation of the plutonium disposition project, which has faced sharply increased costs -- estimated at more than $2 billion -- and disagreements over how to render the material harmless. But today's announcement said "the administration remains committed to the agreement with Russia to dispose of excess plutonium," although it is searching for an effective way to carry it out.

Bush had hinted at the outcome of the review during a speech this month on defense policy. In that Dec. 11 address at the Citadel in South Carolina, he called Russia "a crucial partner" in the effort to keep dangerous technologies out of the hands of terrorists and said the two nations "will expand efforts to provide peaceful employment for scientists who formerly worked in Soviet weapons facilities."

Staff writer Walter Pincus contributed to this report.

----

U.S. to accelerate aid in destroying weapons

By Bill Sammon
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 28, 2001
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20011228-71479774.htm

CRAWFORD, Texas - The Bush administration yesterday announced plans to accelerate construction of a chemical-weapons destruction plant in Russia and examine ways to cut costly inefficiencies in the disposal of plutonium in the former Soviet republic.

Also yesterday, the president signed a proclamation granting permanent normal trade relations status with China.

The moves on Russian-arms destruction come two weeks after President Bush notified Russia that the United States would unilaterally withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Although critics said the withdrawal would spark a new arms race between Russia and the United States, both sides have instead decided to slash their nuclear arsenals by two-thirds.

In an effort to speed this process, the Bush administration yesterday announced it had completed a detailed review of Washington's assistance to Moscow in dismantling the nuclear stockpiles of the Cold War era.

The United States currently spends $750 million a year to administer more than 30 programs aimed at helping Russia achieve "nonproliferation and threat reduction."

While most of the programs were found to be efficient and well-focused, the White House said several will be "restructured to focus more effectively on projects to help Russia reduce its nuclear-warhead complex."

Also, the Defense Department will turn over to the Department of Energy a program aimed at ending Russian production of weapons-grade plutonium.

Two days before announcing his withdrawal from the ABM pact, Mr. Bush emphasized the importance of helping Russia scale back its weapons programs.

"Together, we must keep the world's most dangerous technologies out of the hands of the world's most dangerous people," Mr. Bush said during a Dec. 11 speech at The Citadel in South Carolina. "A crucial partner in this effort is Russia - a nation we are helping to dismantle strategic weapons, reduce nuclear material and increase security at nuclear sites."

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago, one of Washington's biggest concerns has been the prospect of rogue nations hiring displaced Soviet scientists with expertise in weapons of mass destruction. Yesterday, the White House announced plans to expand a program that redirects these scientists to more honorable employers.

That fulfills a promise made by Mr. Bush during his Citadel remarks on U.S.-Russian relations.

"Our two countries will expand efforts to provide peaceful employment for scientists who formerly worked in Soviet weapons facilities," Mr. Bush said.

"The United States will also work with Russia to build a facility to destroy tons of nerve agent," he added. "I'll request an overall increase in funding to support this vital mission."

Under a program administered by the Pentagon, construction of the plant in Shchuch'ye, Russia, will be accelerated "at no increased expense," the White House said yesterday. It did not provide specifics of costs or construction timetables.

The administration has also decided to expand a Department of Energy program aimed at increasing the "transparency" of Russia's inventory of warheads and fissile material.

Mr. Bush yesterday called the granting of normal trade status for China, effective Jan. 1, "the final step in normalization of U.S.-China trade relations and welcoming China into a global, rules-based trading system."

China formally became a member of the World Trade Organization on Dec. 11. Last year, Congress granted permanent normal trade status to Beijing on the condition that China join the WTO.

The president yesterday also terminated the 1974 Jackson-Vanik law that withholds normal trade relations with communist states that restrict emigration.

Mr. Bush spent much of yesterday relaxing at his ranch here on the first full day of his longest vacation since the September 11 terrorist attacks. The president, who arrived here from Camp David on Wednesday, began yesterday with a three-mile run and later cleared some brush around his 1,600-acre ranch.

--------

U.S. Drops Threat to Cut Aid to Russia for Disarming

New York Times
December 28, 2001
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/28/international/28NUKE.html

CRAWFORD, Tex., Dec. 27 - After nearly a year of threatening to end programs aimed at helping Russia stop the spread of nuclear weapons, the White House announced today that it remained committed to an effort to help Russia dispose of hundreds of tons of military plutonium.

The Bush administration, its concerns about the availability of nuclear weapons heightened since Sept. 11, said it would also continue a program to reduce the dependence of some Russian cities on nuclear weapons development and to provide alternative jobs for nuclear scientists.

In addition, the White House said that the Pentagon would seek to speed up the Cooperative Threat Reduction project to construct a chemical weapons destruction facility at Shchuchye, 1,000 miles southeast of Moscow, allowing for its earlier completion.

The announcement marked the culmination of the Bush administration's yearlong review of Clinton-era programs, designed to work with Russia to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, and essentially left all of them intact. Early in the administration, Bush administration officials criticized many of the programs as expensive and ill conceived, and had threatened to eliminate them or greatly reduce their funding.

"I think it shows a fairly profound evolution of Bush administration views over the past year," said Rose Gottemoeller, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a senior Energy Department official during the Clinton administration. "They raised huge expectations early in the administration that they were going to slash and burn. I think they began to see the national security implications, and then after Sept. 11 it became untenable to cut the programs radically."

The administration released the announcement in a brief e-mail to reporters from the White House office in Crawford, Texas, where President Bush is vacationing on his ranch. Officials on the National Security Council oversaw the yearlong review of the programs.

The e-mail included only a short statement from Mr. Bush, taken from a speech he gave on Dec. 11 at The Citadel, the military college in Charleston, S.C. In that speech, Mr. Bush said that "together, we must keep the world's most dangerous technologies out of the hands of the world's most dangerous people. A crucial partner in this effort is Russia - a nation we are helping to dismantle strategic weapons, reduce nuclear material, and increase security at nuclear sites."

The White House review covered 30 programs with a combined annual budget of $750 million. Arms control advocates consider them a cornerstone of America's scientific and military relationship with Russia. The programs involve mostly the Pentagon, the Energy Department and the State Department, and pay for the dismantling of weapons facilities and the strengthening of security at sites where nuclear, chemical and biological weapons are stored.

Bush administration officials have said that their review, parts of which were made public by senior officials over the summer, does not endorse the Clinton approach. Rather, they say, the administration is trying to make the programs more cost-efficient and better-managed.

To that end, the administration has said it will pursue a less expensive approach in its effort to help Russia dispose of plutonium. The administration favors using plutonium in reactors as "mixed oxide fuel," as opposed to a more expensive method that mixes plutonium with glass and nuclear waste materials.

In addition, the White House has sought more financing from Russia and European nations to help build the chemical weapons destruction facility at Shchuchye. Critics said the original program was too costly and was not moving forward, and that Russia had not put up enough of its own money for the project.

Under the Bush review, the program to provide alternative jobs for nuclear scientists, called the Nuclear Cities Initiative, will be consolidated with another program, called Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention. The combined program will be restructured, the announcement from the White House said, "to focus more effectively on projects to help Russia reduce its nuclear warhead complex."

The Nuclear Cities Initiative was started in 1998 to help create nonmilitary work for Russia's 122,000 nuclear scientists and to help Russia downsize geographically and economically isolated nuclear cities, where 760,000 people live.

The aim of the program was to prevent nuclear scientists from leaving for Iraq, Iran and other would-be nuclear powers.

-------- spies

Russian Court Delays Researcher's Spy Case
Rights Groups Have Derided Charges

By Sharon LaFraniere
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, December 28, 2001; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32770-2001Dec27?language=printer

MOSCOW, Dec. 27 -- A judge today delayed issuing a verdict in the espionage case of Igor Sutyagin, saying the prosecution's case was too vague and must be reinvestigated, according to Sutyagin's attorney, Anna Stavitskaya.

The decision means that Sutyagin, 37, an arms control researcher at the prestigious Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada, will remain there indefinitely while the new investigation is conducted.

Sutyagin, who already has spent two years in prison, is accused of betraying secrets about Russia's nuclear submarines, nuclear weapons and early warning systems.

Prosecutors claim that the London-based firm Alternative Futures, which hired Sutyagin as a part-time consultant, was a front for the CIA. Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) identified one of the firm's founders, Sean Kidd, and an employee, Nadya Lock, as career U.S. intelligence agents, the Russian Interfax news agency said today.

Tonight, in an apparent attempt to rebut the judge's criticism, the FSB gave Interfax a videotape in which Sutyagin admitted that he suspected both Kidd and Lock had ties to a foreign intelligence service, the news agency reported. Sutyagin told the FSB agents he realized he was acting against his country's interests and nearly decided to cut off contacts but was persuaded otherwise, Interfax said.

Human rights activists and some Western observers contend the case against Sutyagin is bogus and, together with several other treason cases now underway, suggests a disturbing rise in the influence of Russia's security services.

On Tuesday, military journalist Grigory Pasko was sentenced to four years in prison for treason in a case that has been ridiculed even by some of President Vladimir Putin's political allies. Pasko was convicted on charges of collecting secret information about the Pacific Fleet with the intention of giving it to Japanese journalists. He has appealed.

The judge in Sutyagin's case in Kaluga, a town 100 miles south of Moscow, determined that prosecutors had failed to identify precisely which state secrets Sutyagin had revealed that were harmful to Russia's security, said Vladimir Vasiltsov, one of Sutyagin's attorneys.

The judge also said investigators failed to look into Sutyagin's contention that he used only public information, the attorney said. He added that the investigators never translated or studied numerous English-language texts on which Sutyagin relied.

Vasiltsov said Sutyagin will appeal the decision to keep him in custody. He said he and Sutyagin's other attorneys need to study the rest of the judge's findings before their client can decide whether to appeal them.

Vasiltsov said he fears that Sutyagin may spend another year in jail on accusations that the prosecution failed to prove in court. "It's outrageous," he said.

----

Man to Plead Guilty in Nuclear Case

By Andrew Bridges
Associated Press Writer
Friday, December 28, 2001; 12:04 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32994-2001Dec28?language=printer

LOS ANGELES -- A man accused 16 years ago of illegally exporting potential nuclear triggers to Israel will plead guilty Friday to two charges in federal court, his attorney said.

Richard Smyth, 72, a former electronics supplier, will plead guilty to two of 30 counts contained in his indictment, his attorney James D. Riddet said Thursday. He had previously pleaded innocent to all charges.

The remaining counts will be dismissed as part of a plea agreement.

The original indictment involved the alleged export of about $60,000 worth of krytrons, two-inch triggering devices that can be used in nuclear weapons.

Smyth intends to plead guilty to a single count each of illegal shipments and preparing false documentation for the export of roughly 800 of the tubelike devices. Authorities said they were sent to Heli Corp. in Israel between January 1980 and December 1982.

Krytrons may not be exported without a license or written approval from the State Department.

Smyth faces a maximum of seven years under sentencing guidelines. Riddet said he would ask that Smyth, who has been held since July, be sentenced to time already served.

Smyth fled the United States after pleading innocent in 1985. He was extradited from Spain last month, and re-entered his innocent plea Nov. 26. He is being held without bail.

--------

Fugitive Physicist Pleads Guilty

December 28, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nuclear-Triggers.html

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A physicist who dodged authorities for 16 years pleaded guilty Friday to two federal counts involving the export of potential nuclear triggers to Israel in 1982.

Richard Kelly Smyth entered his pleas before U.S. District Judge Pamela Riemer as part of a deal with federal prosecutors, who agreed to drop 28 other counts.

Smyth, 72, was first accused of the crimes in 1985 but fled to Spain. He was arrested in July and later extradited.

Defense attorney James D. Riddet refused to comment on Smyth's motive for exporting the devices to Heli Corp. but said he would address the issue during his sentencing, scheduled for Feb. 28. Until then, Smyth will be held in federal custody without bail.

The original 30-count indictment involved the alleged export of krytrons, two-inch devices that can be used in nuclear weapons or photocopying machines. A license or approval from the U.S. State Department must be obtained to ship them.

Smyth pleaded guilty to making false statements or false documents by signing or approving invoices to send the material to Israel in November and December 1982. He also pleaded guilty to exporting the devices without a license.

Smyth has been in federal custody without bail since July. His lawyer asked that he be sentenced to time already served. Smyth faces a maximum seven year sentence.

-------- terrorism

Bush Proposes Tighter Border Controls

By Barry Schweid
AP Diplomatic Writer
Friday, December 28, 2001; 3:52 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33532-2001Dec28?language=printer

WASHINGTON -- Reflecting concern that terrorists might obtain nuclear material from loosely managed stockpiles, the Bush administration says it will expand programs to help Russia keep the material under control.

Some analysts have questioned whether Russian officials know exactly how many nuclear weapons and how much weapons-grade material are stored in their country.

A Bush administration review suggests terrorists might acquire nuclear material and smuggle it into the United States for terror attacks.

More than 30 U.S. programs, with a combined budget of about $750 million, were reviewed, and a summary of the conclusions was released Thursday by the White House. Most of the programs were found to work well, the statement said.

However, the review proposed that the State Department and Energy Department find a less costly and more efficient way to help Russia dispose of excess plutonium, a key element of nuclear weapons.

The current program was expected to cost about $2 billion by the time it is completed several years from now.

The project to end Russian production of weapons-grade plutonium will be transferred to the Energy Department from the Defense Department and several programs to help Russia shutter nuclear weapons factories and install nuclear detection devices at border posts will be merged.

At the same time, programs to find jobs for Russian nuclear weapons scientists are to be expanded. The aim is to limit any incentive to sell dangerous material to suspect groups or nations.

And the United States will work with Russia to destroy tons of nerve gas at Shchuch'ye.

The decisions from the administration's review will be implemented vigorously, the statement said.

In a separate development, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said the results of a review of U.S. nuclear weapons programs would be announced next week.

He said it would lay the groundwork for a new approach to strategic deterrence - one that will include "truly deep reductions" in U.S. arsenals combined with deployment of an anti-missile defense capable of protecting the United States, allies and friends from attack.

--------

Report: Al Qaeda Probed Nuclear Weapons Use

December 28, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-attack-britain-weapons.html

LONDON (Reuters) - Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network was investigating the use of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons against the West and had conducted experiments on animals, a British newspaper reported on Saturday.

The Times said this had emerged from detailed examination of documents it discovered in abandoned al Qaeda houses in the Afghan capital Kabul after it fell to Northern Alliance forces on November 13.

The documents, which had been translated, proved al Qaeda was studying how to produce botulin poison in batches strong enough to kill 2,000 people, the paper said.

The hundreds of pages of photocopied, handwritten and printed matter were in a mixture of Arabic, Urdu, Persian, Mandarin, Russian and English.

Samples were photographed and sent to British-based professional translators with scientific qualifications, and to experts in the field of weapons of mass destruction.

The newspaper said they confirmed al Qaeda cells were examining materials to make a low-grade, ``dirty'' nuclear device.

The organization would not have been able to make a large-scale missile or nuclear device from the documents found, but it was ready to use such weapons if it could get them, the Times said.

One section described how chemical weapons were tested on rabbits. The animals died when subjected to cyanide and sodium.

The documents also showed al Qaeda was training units to assassinate Middle Eastern leaders sympathetic to the West.

The newspaper said documents discovered by British and U.S. agents in the Afghan cities of Kandahar and Jalalabad suggested that 40 Britons were given training at al Qaeda camps.

The United States is hunting for bin Laden, its prime suspect for the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

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

NRC Mulls Reissue of Nuclear Plant Status Report

December 28, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-utilities-nrc-report.html

NEW YORK (Reuters) - After withdrawing data from its Web site for security reasons after the Sept. 11 attack, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) said on Thursday it still has not decided whether to reissue its daily plant status report.

The NRC report listed the daily operating status of the nation's nuclear power reactors.

``We're still evaluating. It's a Catch 22. Our concern is a security issue. We're trying to balance that with the public's right to know,'' said Victor Dricks of the NRC Office of Public Affairs in Rockville, Maryland.

``We understand the plant status report is sorely missed ... not just by the trade press but by John Q. Citizen who likes to log onto the Web site and find out if the plant he lives near is up or down,'' Dricks said.

Wholesale electricity traders use the report, along with other data, to determine whether the price of spot power will rise or fall.

Nuclear power, which accounts for about 20 percent of all energy consumed in the United States, is one of the cheapest means of generating electricity.

When a nuclear power plant is shut, the regional grid operator, which dispatches the cheapest units available to meet the daily demand, has to turn on several smaller, more expensive fossil plants that burn oil or natural gas to generate electricity.

Shortly after the terror attacks in New York and Washington, the NRC and other federal agencies removed data from Web sites to evaluate whether that information could be used to harm the public.

Over the past few weeks, the NRC redesigned its Web site, www.nrc.gov, but did not reissue the plant status report or a related document, the daily events report, which lists safety-related events at the plants.

WHY OPERATORS WON'T HELP

In the wholesale power market information is king.

Those with knowledge of what will happen tomorrow can make a lot of money buying and selling electricity. To the power trader, electricity is a commodity, similar to oil, grain or gold. It rises and falls in value based on the law of supply and demand.

An electricity trader with nuclear plants has an advantage over other traders because he or she knows when the reactors will shut for work and how long they will be off line.

With this knowledge, traders with nuclear plants can buy power supplies at lower cost before prices rise when the reactor shuts.

To maintain the competitive edge, many nuclear operators, including the federally-owned Tennessee Valley Authoritywhich operates nuclear plants in the Southeast, refuse to discuss the operating status of their reactors.

``We can't force the utility to give you the information. We don't have that authority. We try to exercise whatever leverage we have to get (the operators) to be more forthcoming about (their plants) in the interest of building public confidence in nuclear power,'' the NRC's Dricks said.

``If they want to withhold the information, I'm not sure there's much we can do,'' Dricks explained, especially since the NRC itself has yet to decide what information the agency wants to make public on its Web site.

NEW YORK'S INDIAN POINT

But people who live near a nuclear reactor often care more about safety. They want to know whether the plant they live near is operating and when it is not operating.

Wednesday morning, unit 2 at the Indian Point nuclear station in New York tripped off line.

An official at Entergy Nuclear, a unit of energy giant Entergy Corp. of New Orleans which operates the station, would not discuss the outage for competitive reasons.

The company, however, did tell the NRC and Westchester County, where the plant is located, about the shutdown.

Despite rumors of the outage in the New York electricity market, news of the outage did not surface until Wednesday afternoon when Westchester Executive Andrew Spano issued a statement informing county residents of the shutdown.

In his statement, Spano said the plant, which is located about 35 miles north of New York City in the town of Buchanan, shut at about 0720 EST Wednesday morning.

He then told the public what they really wanted to know, that ``there were no safety issues associated with the shutdown'' and ``there was no risk of radioactive release.''

Some people who live near Indian Point are concerned about the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe in the heavily populated area following a string of safety-related shutdowns at the plant over the past few years, including a radioactive steam leak that shut unit 2 for most of last year.

``We're trying to resolve this the best we can,'' the NRC's Dricks said. ``We have to balance the public's right to know with security sensitivity.''

-------- us politics

Bush OKs Intelligence, Defense Bills

By SCOTT LINDLAW,
Associated Press Writer
Friday December 28 6:44 PM ET
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/ap/20011228/pl/bush_bill_signings_2.html

CRAWFORD, Texas (AP) - President Bush signed a bill Friday to raise intelligence spending but warned Congress he won't turn over documents that he thinks could compromise national security.

The president also signed a $343 billion defense bill that gives what he wanted for his missile defense program, provides the largest military pay raises in two decades and sets up a new round of base closures.

Bases will be closed in 2005, two years later than Bush had wanted. He said in a written statement that he regretted the postponement.

In signing the intelligence bill, Bush objected to a provision that he said ``purports to require'' the administration to file written reports to congressional committees on intelligence failures.

He said in a separate statement that he reserved the authority to ``withhold information the disclosure of which could impair foreign relations, the national security, the deliberative processes of the executive (branch) or the performance of the executive's constitutional duties.''

He said his intent was to ``protect intelligence sources and methods and other exceptionally sensitive matters'' and did not rule out providing verbal briefings to congressional panels.

The intelligence bill places new emphasis on traditional human spy networks in combating terrorism.

It would increase spending by 8 percent, compared with the 7 percent increase Bush sought. Besides focusing new attention and money on spies, the new law aims to increase the portion of collected data to be analyzed and turned into useful information.

Intelligence spending levels generally are kept secret. In 1998, the CIA revealed in response to a lawsuit filed by the Federation of American Scientists that spending totaled $26.6 billion in 1997 and $26.7 billion in 1998, the federation's Steven Aftergood said. Since then, it's been estimated at about $30 billion a year.

The new law sets out four intelligence priorities:

-Revitalizing the National Security Agency, which gathers and analyzes information from broadcasts, computers and other electronic communication. It shifts the agency's focus from intercepting broadcasts to tapping fiber-optic communication lines.

-Correcting deficiencies in human spy networks.

-Increasing the percentage of data collected that is converted into useful intelligence.

-Financing a research and development initiative, which will reverse declining investment in these areas.

The law also facilitates getting roving wiretaps by amending a law that requires agents to tap individual instruments at a given location. Modern communications have brought to widespread use moving targets such as cellular phones, with locations that keep changing. Under the law, if an agent is unaware of a target's location, it does not have to be listed.

The defense legislation Bush signed authorizes spending for the budget year that began Oct. 1 for the Defense Department and military programs of the Energy Department. It contains a $33 billion increase, up 10.6 percent, over 2001 spending, which matches Bush's request. A separate appropriations bill must be passed before the money can be spent.

Military service members would get pay raises of 5 percent to 10 percent, effective next Tuesday.

The bill provides more help with housing costs and a major boost in construction spending, including improvements to family housing.

On missile defense, Bush would get his full $8.3 billion request, a $3.1 billion increase over 2001.

Bush also signed off on plans to create a national museum to recognize the contributions of black Americans. The law creates a presidential commission to handle planning and logistics for a National Museum of African-American History and Culture.


-------- MILITARY

-------- afghanistan

Afghan jailers beat confessions from men
Concern for 3,000 detainees yet to be seen and put on Red Cross roll

Rory Carroll in Kabul
Friday December 28, 2001
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,625210,00.html

Afghanistan's new authorities are brutalising Taliban and al-Qaida prisoners to soften them up before handing them over to American forces. Guards admitted yesterday to the Guardian that they routinely tortured inmates during interrogations to extract information, which was given to American officials trying to identify suspects to be prosecuted in the US.

Beatings were an efficient and time-honoured method of persuading people to talk, they said.

Conditions in Afghanistan's dozens of jails vary from comfortable to atrocious and the Red Cross is investigating claims that 43 Taliban prisoners died from suffocation while being taken to a jail in the north, Shibarghan, 100 miles west of the city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

A week ago, a US spokesman in Pakistan said that American forces and their Afghan allies were holding about 7,000 Taliban and al-Qaida prisoners in various jails, including fortresses, a desert compound, an aircraft hangar and a warship. Most had been caught in the past month.

Talking to the Guardian, the governor of Kabul's so-called third directorate jail, Abdul Qayum, said of those held in his institution: "At first we use Islamic and humanitarian behaviour towards them to get confessions, and if that doesn't work then we use physical force."

Mr Qayum, whose jail answers to the national security ministry, declined to say exactly what violence was inflicted on the inmates, whom he said numbered between 40 and 50. After conferring with a colleague who had just visited the cells, he cancelled our planned tour.

There was nothing shocking in the admission of violence, said Mr Qayum, because it was well known that British jailers used nails on inmates. He offered no source for this information.

His prisoners, caught in Kabul six weeks ago and suspected of being low-ranking Arab and Pakistani members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network, would be probably handed over to the United Nations or the US, he said.

That they possessed guns but not passports or identity documents was proof of al-Qaida membership and confessions were needed to clinch their guilt, said Mr Qayum. They had been visited by the Red Cross, he added.

According to the humanitarian agency, Kabul had 22 detention centres, including cells beneath police stations and private houses. Northern Alliance soldiers and policemen said most had been emptied in the past fortnight and the captives moved to undisclosed locations in the Panjshir valley, one of the anti-Taliban heartlands.

Aghai Gul, a Northern Alliance soldier commanding a checkpoint at Kotali Hihana, on the northern outskirts of Kabul, said that all his prisoners had also been moved, but it emerged one was left.

Locked in a metal container behind the checkpoint was Mohammed Rahim, 40, pale from four weeks without sunlight. Arrested in Kabul on suspicion of being a Pakistani who helped the Taliban, he had been given enough food, water and blankets but complained of being kicked, punched and thrashed with a stick.

"They beat me so much they had to take me to the hospital, then they took me here. I'm still sick but they won't bring me a doctor." Mr Gul admitted Mr Rahim had been thrashed. "Of course we beat him; sometimes it is the only way to get the truth out of them."

Such maltreatment is mild compared to the torture and slaughter of each other's prisoners perpetrated by Taliban and Northern Alliance troops in recent years. Aid workers who have visited prisoners in the past month have said violence has tended to subside after initial questioning.

But the Red Cross is concerned that it has been able to register only 4,000 of the 7,000 prisoners which the US says it and its Afghan allies have in custody.

Afghanistan's new government appears to be hastening the transfer of prisoners to US forces, which are in turn speeding up construction of improvised jails in their military bases and navy warships.

Twenty bound and hooded Arab fighters were delivered yesterday on a C-130 aircraft to American marines at the southern city of Kandahar. Reports said that this raised to at least 45 the number of alleged al-Qaida members in US custody.

A number of these suspects have been sifted from the 3,000 inmates being screened at the Shibarghan jail in the north, a cold, overcrowded place said to be serving one meal a day. Abdul Rashid Dostam, the Uzbek strongman who is now deputy defence minister in the interim government in Kabul, has said all foreign prisoners would be handed over to US forces.

What will happen to them is uncertain. Washington calls them "detainees", not "prisoners of war", a term enshrined in international conventions that spell out what rights and treatment such people must be accorded.

----

U.S. bombs leave wasteland
Fierce attacks anger villagers, raise questions

By Paul Salopek,
Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent
December 28, 2001
http://chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0112280295dec28.story

MADOO, Afghanistan -- Dusty mounds of rubble sit where buildings once stood.

Sad artifacts of daily life are scattered across a wasteland of crater-gouged earth--buckets, shoes, shredded clothing. And there is the bruised smell of death: a nauseating reminder that 55 farmers and their livestock lie buried in the ruins of a U.S. air strike with one of the highest civilian casualty tolls in Afghanistan.

"American soldiers came after the bombing and asked if any Al Qaeda had lived here," said villager Paira Gul, naming the terrorist group headed by Osama bin Laden.

"Is that an Al Qaeda?" Gul asked, pointing to a child's severed foot he had excavated minutes earlier from a smashed house.

"Tell me," he said, his voice choking with fury, "is that what an Al Qaeda looks like?"

Four weeks after U.S. planes demolished Madoo, and a week after the bombing of a suspected Al Qaeda convoy that may have been carrying tribal elders, such questions are starting to haunt the waning days of the U.S.-led war against terrorism in Afghanistan, and meaningful answers may be a long time coming.

The Pentagon has yet to disclose the civilian toll from its hundreds of air strikes in Afghanistan, much less offer an explanation of how or why its bombs may have gone awry in a campaign that has targeted Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in towns, mountains, farms and on highways.

Indeed, even as the war appears to be winding down, information on the accidental victims of U.S. attacks remains so sparse that media tallies range wildly from scores to thousands.

Military experts say this is to be expected in a battlefield as remote and a conflict as secretive as the anti-terror campaign in Afghanistan.

Yet for many ordinary Afghans living in the affected areas, including even some pro-American commanders, the continuing silence from Washington is beginning to smack of indifference to civilian casualties.

Fierce operation

Perhaps nowhere is that perception more angrily held than in the rugged foothills of Tora Bora, where U.S. forces unleashed their latest and most ferocious operation to kill bin Laden--apparently at any cost, villagers here say.

According to death tolls gathered from elders in four communities in the area in recent days, at least 87 farmers and anti-Taliban soldiers appear to have died in intense U.S. air strikes on Tora Bora, the cave-riddled mountain stronghold of bin Laden.

At the time of the attacks, commander Haji Muhammad Zaman, a staunch U.S. ally in the Tora Bora offensive, branded the alleged mistakes "a crime against humanity."

For its part, the Pentagon at first categorically denied the bombing reports. An unnamed Pentagon source told reporters earlier this month that the attacks "never happened." More recently, however, the U.S. military has softened that view.

"It is certainly possible that there were civilian casualties who were not Taliban and Al Qaeda that we're not aware of" in Tora Bora, said Col. Rick Thomas, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, the headquarters of the Afghan campaign.

"We have used precision-guided missiles to target specific military targets, to minimize civilian casualties," Thomas said. "Anytime we have information where it looks like there were civilian casualties, we have attempted to investigate that."

Villagers say that uniformed U.S. soldiers did appear at some of the bombed sites but they mainly seemed interested in the whereabouts of Al Qaeda troops.

Yet the bomb destruction visible today and interviews with survivors make it clear that U.S. planes indeed killed either civilians or friendly forces at four locations in Tora Bora between Nov. 29 and Dec. 1.

Confusion appears to have led to the deaths of 12 pro-American Afghan fighters in the village of Land Khel, local people say. Their commander made the mistake of collecting abandoned Al Qaeda trucks in his compound, which drew a swift and fatal response from patrolling U.S. jets.

The targeting of a suspected Al Qaeda member named Gulab Khan in the village Agam Bazaar instead killed 14 of his family members, including women and children, neighbors say. Khan wasn't home at the time of the attack.

Meanwhile, the bloodiest civilian toll of all may have come from a feverish American attempt to kill bin Laden and a close Afghan associate named Merajuddin.

"We believe the Americans were always a few hours behind them, dropping bombs on villages they just left," said Habib Rahman, a village elder in the Zamar Khel district, where a huge bomb fell on the house of a man named Akal Khan, killing four family members, including two women.

"The people say Osama rode a horse through that night, and the American bombs fell afterward," Rahman said. "Then he rode off toward Madoo."

True or not, this is the only story local residents have to explain the carnage at Madoo.

Volleys of missiles

In four waves beginning in the predawn hours of Dec. 1, U.S. jets launched volleys of missiles and dropped guided bombs that obliterated the entire hamlet of 15 houses.

Twenty-five days later, three ragged men--the only male survivors of the attack--were still picking through the debris, searching for the body parts of their families.

"I swear to almighty Allah that we are not Al Qaeda or Taliban, we are farmers," said Abdul Hadi, whose wrinkled face and unkempt beard were covered with dust from digging. "We do not know why this happened to us. Only Allah knows."

Then Hadi carefully bundled up a hand from his nephew Khalid's home, where seven of his relatives died, and took it into the rocky hills for burial.

----

DISPUTED ATTACK
Debate Over U.S. Raid on Convoy Exposes Fluid Loyalties in Area Shaken by War

New York Times
December 28, 2001
By AMY WALDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/28/international/asia/28CONV.html

KABUL, Afghanistan, Dec. 27 - The tribal council of Paktia Province convened a news conference today at which its members insisted that the American airstrike last week on a convoy in Paktia was a mistake. Contrary to American claims, they said, the convoy contained no Al Qaeda members, but rather tribal elders en route to Kabul to pay homage to the country's new leader, Hamid Karzai.

"A spy told them they were Taliban," the group's spokesman, Abdul Hakim Munib, said, suggesting that false information was fed to the Americans to provoke the attack, which the elders said killed 15 convoy passengers and 50 people in surrounding villages.

Further statements indicated a more complicated reality.

Had anyone in the convoy been Taliban members at any time? Mr. Munib was asked.

"I myself was a deputy minister for communications, border and transport under the Taliban regime," he answered, adding: "They were with Taliban. I was with Taliban." He gestured at the assembled elders: "All the people you are seeing here were with Taliban."

The American attack on the convoy has laid bare the complex and fluid allegiances that shape life in Paktia. The Taliban came, Pashtun tribal leaders joined with them, and now the Taliban are gone. And so it is that a former Taliban deputy minister is now in Kabul to pay his respects to the government that came to power fighting it.

But negotiating such changes is not a simple matter, and Paktia is, in some ways, feeling the fall of the Taliban harder than most. The Americans have been bombing because the province has long harbored Al Qaeda bases. The Taliban's defeat has intensified tribal rivalries. And then came the attack on the convoy, which the Pentagon continues to say was a legitimate target.

In Washington today, Gen. Richard B. Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, "We have nothing to indicate anything other than what we said before, and that that convoy was, again, leadership that was involved in this war on terrorism."

All this is enough to have made Paktia, which borders Pakistan, a focus of the new government's concern. Tribal rivalries have simmered for decades in Paktia, said Abdulhalesh Fazar, a Pashtun minister in the government. The secret to peace, he said this week, is carefully calibrating the balance of power so that no one tribe is dominant.

"If one tries to bully the others, the others will take up arms," he said. "It needs very precise and careful policies and compromise."

The balance is off enough now to have Kabul worried, Mr. Fazar said. That morning, he had met with 45 tribal leaders to try to make peace. The Taliban had been a unifying factor for groups with very different motives: fundamentalist ideologues, people on the payroll of Al Qaeda, those who believed the Taliban essentially represented Pashtuns. Now that umbrella is gone, he said, and these people were throwing sharp elbows.

To be Taliban in Paktia meant something different than to be Taliban in Kabul, the capital, or Herat, in the Persian-speaking west. In Afghanistan's cities, the Taliban movement and its rules were ruthlessly imposed on a resistant population. But provincial villages and towns were more receptive, because it was village life and tribal law that Taliban rule was meant to propagate.

Such nuances pose something of a challenge for Mr. Karzai, a Pashtun from Kandahar. As the Pashtuns of Paktia see it, Mr. Karzai is one of them, which is why they came to him this week to ask him to stop American bombing in Paktia. For Mr. Karzai, born of and respectful of tribal structures, the lines between the old and new Afghanistan, between Taliban connections and tribal relations, are inevitably blurred.

The convoy that came under American attack may have contained some former Taliban members, but it was clearly welcome in Kabul. When it was rerouted along the way by what some here called a rival tribal faction onto a dangerous back road, members of the convoy tried to reach Mr. Karzai for assurances they would not be bombed, Mr. Munib said. They also used their satellite telephones to call American officials, he said, although he did not know which officials.

While Mr. Karzai is Pashtun, the military structure is mostly Tajik, and some soldiers in Kabul see people like the Pashtun elders as the enemy. The elders say that as they have come into Kabul, soldiers have harassed and even detained them for wearing turbans, accusing them of being Taliban arriving to cause trouble.

Of greater concern for the central government, as well as the American military and thus the people of Paktia, is the degree to which the province was, and remains, a haven for Al Qaeda.

Until very recently, terrorists - specifically Al Qaeda - had bases in Paktia, to which they had been invited by the province's most powerful Taliban official, Jalaluddin Haqani.

The elders insisted that all the camps were closed when the Northern Alliance took Kabul, but reports of a surviving Al Qaeda presence in the province continue to surface.

Some of those reports come from Amanullah Zadran, a powerful tribal leader from Paktia and the government's new minister of borders. He says that four of the men from the convoy who were killed were Arabs. And he has said repeatedly that 350 Al Qaeda members remain in Paktia. At a meeting with tribal elders this week, he ordered them to surrender Al Qaeda members. He pulled a list from his pocket and began to read names of clerics and ordinary men who he said were harboring Al Qaeda members.

"Please, if you're hiding Arabs, get rid of them, or your house will be bombed," he thundered.

"No, no, no," the elders protested. "The Arabs are gone."

"I know they are there," Mr. Zadran said. "I have been informed you are hiding them here and there."

"We will search every village," an elder promised, "and come tell you if we have Arabs."

Mr. Zadran may be sincere, but some question his motives, saying that his brother, Badshadkhan Zadran, is trying to consolidate power in Paktia and that it was he who called in the airstrike on the convoy.

All of this intrigue - the arguments in Paktia over who was entitled to make the trip to Kabul to see Mr. Karzai reportedly went on for days - may have some people longing for the more orderly days of the Taliban. Which may be why today Mr. Munib was singing the new government's praises in one breath, and in the next, saying that the Taliban had saved the country from disintegration. He and some of the men killed in the airstrike on the convoy had disagreed with the Taliban only in their support for terrorism, he said. "Mullah Omar would not listen to our wants," he said regretfully, of the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, as if wishing he could turn back the clock.

--------

Interim Afghan Government Wants Bombing to End

December 28, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-attack.html

WASHINGTON/KABUL (Reuters) - Afghanistan gave its clearest sign yet Friday that it wanted the war on terrorism to move elsewhere, demanding a quick end to U.S. bombing and insisting Osama bin Laden had fled to Pakistan.

Washington also risked fading resolve from its crucial ally Pakistan, whose attention has turned to a worsening crisis with India over the disputed Kashmir province.

The United States pulled diplomatic strings and urged the nuclear rivals to step back from a standoff triggered by a December 13 suicide attack on India's parliament.

Bin Laden, pursued for allegedly plotting the September 11 attacks on U.S. cities that killed more than 3,200 people, stayed out of America's clutches but taunted his adversary by video.

``The end of the United States is imminent,'' he said in the tape aired in full for the first time Thursday on Qatar's al-Jazeera television.

Afghanistan's Defense Ministry said bin Laden had escaped to Pakistan with nearly all his al Qaeda fighters to seek shelter with allies there, rendering further U.S. bombing pointless.

``Their remaining forces are few in number and may be annihilated in a maximum of three days. Once this is done there is no need for continuation of the bombing,'' ministry spokesman Mohammad Habeel told Reuters. ``We demand America stop its bombing of Afghanistan after this goal is achieved.''

In its first air strike in three days, Washington said Thursday its planes had destroyed a compound used by the Taliban southwest of Kabul, but a Pakistan-based news agency said 25 villagers were killed by bombs in the same vicinity.

RUSE

In Pakistan, Maulana Fazalur Rehman, head of the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam party who helped create the Taliban, denied Kabul's claim that he was protecting bin Laden and branded it a ruse to divert the U.S. campaign away from Afghanistan.

Pakistan's government faced unrest when it put Rehman under house arrest as the U.S. bombing began on October 7, but now has graver problems to deal with over Kashmir -- a dispute which has twice sparked war with arch-foe India.

Secretary of State Colin Powell -- whose government has branded the two groups India says attacked its parliament as terrorists -- worked the phones to defuse a crisis which could hamper the hunt for bin Laden and destabilize a whole region.

Washington fears Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf could move forces away from the Afghan to the Indian border, making it easier for bin Laden or his followers to escape.

The Americans say they are remain unconvinced that anyone really knows where bin Laden is or if he is alive or dead.

``We hear six, seven, eight, 10, 12 conflicting reports every day. I've stopped chasing them,'' Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said.

ALIVE AND WELL

Right on cue, another report cropped up in a U.S. newspaper.

``Osama is alive, healthy, and safe,'' said Qari Ahmadullah, the vanquished Afghan Taliban's chief of intelligence.

He said the world's most wanted man had been near the border with Pakistan and that he was in close contact with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar who had protected him.

In his latest video, probably shot in early December, the millionaire militant bin Laden appeared tired but defiant.

He called the September attacks blessed and urged Muslims to wage military and economic holy war against a fragile America.

``It is very important to concentrate on hitting the American economy with every available tool...the economy is the base of its military power,'' said a gaunt, hollow-eyed bin Laden, dressed in a camouflage jacket with a rifle beside him.

Any of his followers caught by U.S. forces are likely to be sent to the U.S. navy base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, which is to serve as a detention center.

U.S. military tribunals that may then try international terror suspects will require unanimity to impose the death penalty, according to draft procedures reported in The Washington Post.

U.S. forces are currently holding 45 prisoners.

In New York, Rudolph Giuliani, hailed worldwide for his leadership of the city, bade farewell to his job as mayor by urging construction of a ``soaring, beautiful'' memorial at the site of the World Trade Center destroyed in the attacks.

``This place has to be sanctified,'' he said.

-------- africa

Warlords Call for Foreign Intervention in Somalia

BY TSEGAYE TADESSE
Friday, December 28, 2001.
http://www.bayarea.com/rc/world/docs/1716917l.htm

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - Three Somali warlords called for international military intervention in Somalia on Friday, saying radical Islamic groups al Qaeda and al-Itihad had several bases in the Horn of Africa country.

Somalia's transitional government has strongly denied the presence of terrorist cells, and diplomats have warned that opposition warlords may use the U.S. war on terror to try and damage their opponents.

At a news conference in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, warlords Hassan Mohammed Nur Shatigudud, General Abdullahi Nur Gabyow and Hussein Aideed said foreign intervention was needed to stop extremist groups going underground.

``Al Qaeda and al-Itihad terrorist groups have got three major bases inside and around Mogadishu alone. The southern port city of Kismayu and Bosasso and the surrounding areas are their strongholds,'' Gabyow said.

``I myself can mobilize up to 50,000 of my militia and fight alongside any international force which would come to Somalia to help eradicate the terrorist group destroying our country.''

Somalia has been without central government since the 1991 overthrow of military dictator Mohammed Siad Barre and has been named as one of the countries the United States could target once it widens its war on terror beyond Afghanistan.

Soon after the September 11 suicide hijack attacks on the United States, Washington named the Somali al-Itihad al-Islamiya movement in a list of groups linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

Since then, international pressure for a single authority in Somalia has increased on the basis that a divided, anarchic Somalia could prove the perfect haven for terrorists.

WARLORDS USE WAR ON TERROR

But diplomats have warned that militia chiefs, who flourished in the chaos of civil war and control large parts of Somalia, have seized on the U.S. anti-terror campaign as their own route back to power.

They hope that accusing the Transitional National Government (TNG) of supporting terrorists will convince Washington to intervene and destroy their enemy on their behalf, the diplomats say.

The TNG, set up by a conference of clan elders last year, controls only parts of the capital Mogadishu and pockets of the rest of the country and has been trying to get the warlords on side since its inception.

On Monday it signed an agreement with some of the warlords in the Kenyan town of Nakuru calling for an ``all-inclusive government'' under which all clans would share power to be set up in Mogadishu within a month.

But several other warlords, including Aideed, Gabyow and Shatigudud, rejected the deal, casting doubt on its viability.

Although some members of the Somali Reconciliation and Restoration Council (SRRC) -- a loose coalition of opposition warlords -- signed the new pact, other senior SRRC members said the group did not recognize the delegation sent to Kenya.

Since the deal was signed, rival militias have fought running battles in Mogadishu, killing at least 13 people.

According to Gabyow, the fighting pitted the militias of warlord Muse Sudi Yalahow, who did not sign the Nakuru deal, against supporters of Osman Hassan Ali Atto, who did. He said the situation on Friday was calm.

-------- arms sales

China says report in Times is 'groundless'

World Scene
Washington Times
December 28, 2001
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011228-28311706.htm

China denied that it provided weapons to al Qaeda after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

Referring to a report in The Washington Times of Dec. 21 on the subject, the People's Daily quoted a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman as saying the report was "a sheer fabrication with ulterior motives" and "groundless."

The spokeswoman, Zhang Qiyue, also "reiterated that China opposes terrorism of all forms and its stance is definite and consistent," the daily said.

China also denied an Aug. 6 report in The Times that said China continued to supply missile parts to Pakistan.

The daily also made a personal attack on Times reporter Bill Gertz, author of the two reports, calling him "a Cold War mentality deeply-rooted person."

----

U.S. man admits nuke-linked sale to Israel

By Hil Anderson
12/28/2001
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=28122001-080648-7543r

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 28 (UPI) -- A former engineer admitted in federal court Friday that he smuggled 50 electronic devices to Israel that could be used for a number of applications, including triggering nuclear bombs.

Richard Kelly Smyth, who spent the past 16 years living in Spain as a fugitive, pleaded guilty in Los Angeles to a 1985 charge that he illegally exported a shipment of krytrons to Israel in 1982 without the appropriate U.S. licenses.

Smyth's guilty plea to one count of violating the Arms Export Control Act and one count of making a false statement to the Customs Service was expected to land him in federal prison for up to seven years when he is sentenced Feb. 28.

The U.S. Attorney's office described krytrons as "small devices that transfer precise bursts of energy."

"The devices can be used in nuclear weapons, in other military applications and in civilian products such as photocopying machines," the prosecutors said in a release.

At the time the 30-count indictment was issued, the Israeli government maintained that it had purchased the krytrons sent by Smyth's Orange County firm from Heli Trading Corp., an Israeli vendor, for purely conventional research purposes and not for use in nuclear weapons.

Tel Aviv also said it was not aware of U.S. export restrictions, however U.S. prosecutors said Smyth had been well aware of them. The Los Angeles Times said Friday that the plea agreement requires Smyth to answer any lingering questions U.S. investigators may have about his dealings in krytrons.

Among the questions on investigators' minds may be just how Smyth managed to get to Spain without the passport he had been forced to surrender shortly before his 1985 trial was scheduled to begin.

The Times said Smyth and his wife, Emilie, apparently lived quietly in southern Spain without attempting to conceal their identities. Spanish authorities arrested Smyth last summer after he attempted to open a bank account in Malaga and an Interpol check revealed the U.S. arrest warrant.

-------- asia

Southeast Asia Nations Draft Accord

By ADAM BROWN
Associated Press Writer
DECEMBER 28, 2001 09:45 ET
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=ASIA&STORYID=APIS7GM8B1G0

MANILA, Philippines (AP) - Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines agreed Friday on a draft accord to fight terrorism and border crime, including measures to create joint rapid response forces.

The United States has offered to help countries in Southeast Asia act against militant groups, saying it fears Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror group seeks to turn the area into a hub for operations.

Deputy foreign ministers of the three countries, all grappling with Muslim extremist violence, ended a two-day conference in Manila Friday to finalize the accord. Brunei and Thailand sent observers to the meeting.

The draft document calls for a system to determine how the countries' can collaborate to confront terrorism, arms trafficking and other crimes. Foreign ministers of the three countries are to debate and possibly sign the document in their annual meeting in Phuket, Thailand early next year.

The United States has provided equipment, intelligence and military advisers to help the Philippines in its fight against the Abu Sayyaf, an Islamic separatist group that has been linked to al-Qaida.

Muslim extremists are also thought to operate in other parts of Southeast Asia, including Indonesia and Malaysia.

Philippine Foreign Undersecretary Lauro Baja said the countries also tentatively agreed to draft and distribute among each other a list of terrorism suspects to watch out for.

Piracy and drugs and arms smuggling are rampant in the three countries' border areas, generating funds that could be used to finance further terrorism. Smuggled arms have also found their way into the three countries.

Such security cooperation would benefit the Philippines partly because of its weak military and its ongoing battle to destroy Abu Sayyaf guerrillas, who are holding an American couple and a Filipino nurse hostage on southern Basilan island.

Philippine officials, who drafted the accord, hope other Southeast Asian countries will later join the anti-terrorism effort spearheaded by the three countries, which are founding members of the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

-------- balkans

Croatia back in chaos?

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR [re: Croatia; Armenia/Azerbaijan]
December 28, 2001
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20011228-26484738.htm#2

I read with interest Jeffrey T. Kuhner's Dec. 26 Op-Ed column on Croatia and its difficult road to democracy, "Not yet Bush of the Balkans." Mr. Kuhner is right in critically assessing the pervasive Balkanesque cronyism and corruption in Croatian politics. Yet he briefly and only sketchily mentions the large-scale massacres and removal of thousands of Croat civilians and competent professionals by the former Yugoslav communist security apparatus, which is still partially alive in Croatia.

One's view of what happened in ex-communist Yugoslavia - and later in the late President Franjo Tudjman's Croatia - depends on the observer's vested interests, his ethnic prejudices and his historical perspectives. One thing remains certain, though: Croatia lacks solid elements of civil society and ignores the Western rules of meritocracy.

Similar to other post-communist countries in the region, modern Croatia is deeply infected by the legacy of communist mendacity and double-dealing and the spiral of silence and civic fear. Waffling empty Western-imported cliches about human rights and market democracy, the revamped Croatian diplomacy shows amazing signs of provincialism and incompetence. What a would-be democratic Croatia needs is a solid dose of re-education and decommunization.

Undoubtedly, a staggering number of Mr. Tudjman's officials were recycled communists who briefly put on display a feigned Croat patriotism. Was not the current President Stipe Mesic also Mr. Tudjman's pal until their fateful split in 1994?

These remarks may seem of minor importance, but what is worrisome is the present ungovernability of Croatia. Mr. Mesic and Prime Minister Ivica Racan may have good intentions about the country's future. Yet, good intentions do not suffice to make a good politician or make a country safe for entry into the rich men's club of the European Union or NATO.

Furthermore, the coalition government - at bureaucratic loggerheads with Mr. Mesic - has an unsavory international reputation as a coalition of five swingers making poorly mimicked passes at the European Union. Apparently, this is because of a naive effort to extract a certificate of good democratic behavior or some putative charity from credulous EU and U.S. taxpayers. With mutual mudslinging within this motley crew of four diverse parties, a question remains: Is Croatia a governable entity?

Mr. Tudjman did his best to bring Croat ex-communists and anti-communists together. His motto was "reconciliation." The present Croatian government is doing exactly the opposite; it is unstitching the country and driving a wedge between expatriate and homeland Croats, between the former communists and the right-wing opposition figures, and between the politically correct and politically incorrect.

Outside of regurgitating - in broken English and in the old wooden communist lingo - slogans such as "free market" or "necessity for economic transition," the present political class in Croatia is a carbon copy of the late "homo sovieticus" universe - albeit with the mandatory and feigned liberal veneer.

Forty-five years of communist and Titoist terror brought about negative selection and depleted the Croatian society of honest, law-abiding and professional Croatian politicians - irrespective of their ideological creed. Hence, the country is gripped by paralysis and slated for long-term instability.

Slowly, but surely, Croatia is pushing its way back into a still unnamed and unknown chaos.

TOMISLAV SUNIC Novi Zagreb, Croatia

--

History sheds different light on U.S. sanctions against Azerbaijan

Allow me to make several points regarding your Dec. 23 editorial "The importance of Armenia and Azerbaijan."

As you state, Americans are not very knowledgeable about realities in the region. This is especially true with regard to the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan as well as to the consequences of Armenian aggression against my country. It is an internationally established fact that Armenia has occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, turning almost a million of my compatriots into refugees and internally displaced persons. Yet even experts writing on these issues sometimes present a distorted picture of the situation, be it intentionally or involuntarily.

Lack of knowledge is the main reason why the powerful Armenian lobby has succeeded in misrepresenting the cessation of normal trade relations, quite natural between two warring parties, as a blockade. Thus, it misled the U.S. Congress into adding insult to injury and passing Section 907 of the 1992 Freedom Support Act, containing sanctions against Azerbaijan. Despite the opposition of successive U.S. administrations to 907, it was only after September 11 that U.S. policy on this matter was reconsidered.

As far as Armenia's "admirable restraint" and "gracious response to the relaxation of U.S. sanctions against Azerbaijan" are concerned, I would like to set the record straight. After September 11, the president of Armenia himself went on record viciously opposing any modification of Section 907. At the same time, a high-ranking Armenian delegation was dispatched to Washington to enforce this position.

We do welcome the Bush administration's engagement in the process of peaceful settlement of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, and the congressional decision to provide the president with authority to waive 907 is an important step toward making this engagement truly unbiased. That is precisely the sort of U.S. involvement in world affairs that is needed to counter the aggressive separatism that, merged with international terrorism, threatens to destroy our values and way of life.

Finally, with respect to both Armenian-Azerbaijani and Turkish-Armenian relations, I believe the only way to settle these kinds of disputes is to look to the future, not appeal to what took place or is claimed to have taken place in the past.

HAFIZ PASHAYEV Ambassador Embassy of Azerbaijan Washington

----

Yugoslav army chief to stay

December 28, 2001
Agence France-Press
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011228-84163832.htm

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia - President Vojislav Kostunica said yesterday he had refused the resignation of the Yugoslav army's chief of staff, Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic, despite pressure from his coalition partners and the international community.

"He offered to withdraw, but I asked him to stay because of [army] reforms, which he has initiated and created," Mr. Kostunica told reporters.

Gen. Pavkovic, a top Yugoslav general named to the post by former strongman Slobodan Milosevic, who is awaiting trial at the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague on charges relating to the wars in Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia in the 1990s, has kept his position ever since.

He led the third army that controlled Kosovo during the war in the southern Serbian province, which has been under U.N. administration since June 1999.

Mr. Kostunica's partners in his ruling coalition have demanded that Gen. Pavkovic be removed.

Yugoslav Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic said "it will be impossible for Yugoslavia to join NATO's Partnership for Peace program as long as Pavkovic is the army chief of staff," Beta news agency reported.

Some international officials have indicated that Gen. Pavkovic should not keep the post, linking him to atrocities committed in Kosovo during the Milosevic era.

Meanwhile, Mr. Kostunica yesterday called for talks with Kosovo Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova about the future of the Serbian province.

Mr. Kostunica said he already had invited Mr. Rugova for talks after taking office in October last year following Mr. Milosevic's ouster, but added, "Now I can renew this call, convinced that this is the best solution."

The U.N. mission and the NATO-led peacekeepers "will not stay forever in Kosovo," Mr. Kostunica told a press conference.

But "Serbs and Albanians will and that is why the solution [for Kosovo] should be found in their mutual accord, no matter how painstaking the road is," he added.

Mr. Rugova, whose Democratic League of Kosovo won the largest number of seats in parliamentary elections Nov. 17, is the only candidate for the post of Kosovo president.

-------- india

INTERNATIONAL
India and Pakistan Exchange Shelling in Kashmir

December 28, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-India-Pakistan.html

NEW DELHI, India (AP) -- Indian and Pakistani troops shelled each other in disputed Kashmir overnight, and the Indian army ordered the evacuation Friday of some 20,000 villagers from the border, raising fears of war.

Pakistan told the United States that the possibility of war with India may reduce its ability to support the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan, senior military and diplomatic officials said. Pakistan may have to move soldiers to the Indian frontier from the Afghan border, where they are currently hunting followers of Osama bin Laden, the officials said.

President Bush said Friday that his administration was ``working actively to bring some calm in the region, to hopefully convince both sides to stop the escalation of force.''

The two nuclear-armed neighbors on Thursday exchanged diplomatic and economic sanctions seen as the toughest since they last fought a war in 1971. Tensions have surged since a Dec. 13 suicide attack on India's parliament that left nine Indians and five attackers dead. India accuses Pakistan of supporting the attack and demands it crack down on two Islamic militant groups. Pakistan denied the charges.

Speaking at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, Bush praised Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, saying he had arrested militants and was ``responding forcefully.'' He added, ``I hope India takes note of that.''

Pakistan, a key ally for the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan, told Washington through official channels on Friday that it may need to move troops from the Afghan to the Indian border, a senior Pakistani diplomatic official said. A senior army official confirmed the report. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity and did not say how many troops might be transferred

Islamabad warned that India's build-up of troops at the border could make a confrontation inevitable. ``The Indian government is putting itself into a corner where it would be difficult for them to now back off,'' said Gen. Rashid Quereshi, spokesman for Pakistan's military-led government.

Bush said Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke to both sides Friday, urging restraint. The State Department urged the leaders of the two countries to come to an understanding at a South Asia summit in Nepal on Jan. 4-6.

Among the sanctions each country imposed was a ban on overflights by the other's planes. India's Foreign Ministry said Friday the government would make an exception to its ban to allow Musharraf to fly through its airspace to attend the Nepal summit.

Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee is also to attend the summit, but India has not said if the two leaders will meet.

The armies fired mortars at each other for five hours Thursday night in the Poonch sector along the cease-fire line that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan, an Indian army official said on condition of anonymity. The exchanges died down Friday morning, he said. There was no immediate comment from Pakistan.

The Indian army told some 20,000 people in more than 40 villages in Kashmir to leave their homes within 36 hours, officials told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity Friday. The army had already warned about 10,000 people in 24 villages near the Pakistani border to move.

Villagers in Indian-ruled Kashmir fled their homes with cots and clothes, saying they fear India and Pakistan will go to war for the fourth time since they became independent from Britain and were separated in 1947.

``The war is about to break out,'' said Sumitra Devi, an elderly woman sheltering with her sons and grandsons at a dilapidated school at Koota in Jammu-Kashmir state.

Devi's house was demolished in the 1971 war with Pakistan, and she said she was already packed Thursday when soldiers came to her village, Mangoo Chak, and told people to evacuate.

Tens of thousands of soldiers, squadrons of fighter jets, artillery and ballistic missiles face each other along the 1,100-mile border. Both sides say they don't want war, but each says it is ready.

In the mutual sanctions announced Thursday, India and Pakistan each ordered half the other's embassy staffs sent home, as well as the overflight ban.

Since Indian planes already avoided Pakistani airspace, the flight ban -- due to come into effect Tuesday -- hurts Pakistan more. Pakistan International Airlines said Friday it would cancel 12 flights a week to India and reroute 13 others to Asian destinations because they use Indian airspace. No details on the economic cost were available.

Like two of the neighbors' wars, the current tensions have their roots in Kashmir, a mostly Muslim province divided between Hindu-majority India and Muslim Pakistan but claimed by both.

India accuses Pakistan of fomenting violence in its part of Kashmir, where Islamic guerrillas have waged a separatist war that has killed tens of thousands of people since 1989. Pakistan denies the charge and calls it an indigenous struggle.

India demands Pakistan shut down and extradite the leaders of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, two militant groups fighting in Kashmir that it accuses in the Parliament attack. Pakistan says it will take action against the anyone whose involvement in the attack is proven.

Pakistan has frozen assets of the groups and arrested members of Jaish-e-Mohammed, but India has said the moves are only cosmetic.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Munir Ahmad in Lahore, Pakistan, and Binoo Joshi in Koota, Jammu-Kashmir contributed to this report.

-------- indonesia

Fighting in Indonesia kills 16 this week

Briefly
Washington Times
December 28, 2001
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011228-728138.htm

JAKARTA, Indonesia - Fighting in Indonesia's rebellious Aceh province has left at least 16 persons dead this week, officials said yesterday.

Lt. Col. Supartodi said his troops shot dead four rebels during an ambush in Beungga village in eastern Aceh on Monday. Abu Razak, a guerrilla spokesman, confirmed the deaths in a telephone interview.

Government troops also killed eight insurgents in clashes Tuesday and Wednesday, said Maj. Zaenal Mutaqin, a military spokesman.

The separatists, however, said those victims were civilians forced by military officers to guide them in searches for rebel bases.

Yesterday, a government official and three rebels were killed in separate clashes in northern Aceh, Maj. Mutaqin said.

At least 1,300 people have died from violence in the oil- and gas-rich province on the northern tip of Sumatra island this year.

-------- israel / palestine

Israeli Soldiers Kill Palestinian Suicide Bomber

December 28, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Palestinians.html

JERUSALEM (AP) -- A Palestinian suicide bomber tried to carry out an attack in Gaza on Friday, the Israeli military said, the first such attempt since Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat called for an end to attacks earlier this month.

Meanwhile, in a sign of easing tension in the West Bank, Israel lifted its blockade around Bethlehem as a Christmas gesture early Friday, but kept a ban on Arafat entering the biblical town despite international protests.

The Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad, which has not promised to abide by Arafat's call for a cease-fire, took responsibility for Friday's bombing attempt in a fax sent to The Associated Press in Beirut.

The Israeli military said the Palestinian attacker, carrying an assault rifle and an anti-tank missile, approached Israeli forces near the Netzarim junction in central Gaza. Soldiers shot and killed him, and found that he was wearing an explosives belt that did not detonate. Palestinian security officials had no comment.

On Dec. 16, Arafat called for an end to attacks against Israelis, saying he has always denounced suicide bombings. In response, the militant Hamas announced it was suspending suicide attacks in Israel but would continue targeting Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza.

In its statement Friday, Jihad vowed to ``continue with Jihad (holy war) and resistance, using all means and in any part of our nation Palestine, until the occupation ends.''

The body of Tsion Ohana, an Israeli missing for 11 days, was found Friday in a West Bank cave, police said. Israel's West Bank police commander, Shahar Ayalon, said three Palestinians were directly involved in the killing, and it was apparently a criminal and not a terrorist assault. He said the Palestinians sold Ohana's car the day of the killing.

Around Bethlehem Friday, Israeli soldiers opened roadblocks, allowing Palestinians to enter and leave freely for the first time in weeks, witnesses said. However, they were not allowed to enter Jerusalem, a few miles away. Palestinians without special permits are still banned from the city.

Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said that Israel was lifting the blockade around Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, to ease access to holy sites during the Christmas season.

The roadblocks have choked off West Bank Palestinian towns through most of the 15 months of Palestinian-Israeli fighting.

The Israelis say the restrictions are necessary to keep militant attackers out of Israel, and tightened the closures earlier this month after a series of Palestinian suicide bomb attacks. Palestinians charge that the restrictions, which have ruined their economy, are collective punishment and pressure.

On Wednesday, Israeli troops lifted the blockade around Jericho, a Palestinian town in the Jordan River valley.

Though restrictions around Bethlehem were lifted, Israel said Arafat would still not be allowed to visit the town.

Raanan Gissin, spokesman for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said Arafat would not be permitted to take part in Orthodox Christmas observances in Bethlehem on Jan. 6. Israel banned Arafat from Latin Christmas celebrations this week, setting off a wave of international criticism.

Arafat has been marooned at his West Bank headquarters in Ramallah since an Israeli air strike destroyed his helicopters on Dec. 3 in response to the suicide bombings.

Gissin said he would not be allowed to leave Ramallah until he arrests the assassins of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi, gunned down in Jerusalem on Oct. 17.

In 15 months of violence, 851 people have been killed on the Palestinian side and 242 on the Israeli side.

On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon assured critics in his right-wing Likud Party that he, and not moderate Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, will manage future peace negotiations with the Palestinians. ``When the day comes for peace talks, I will run them,'' Sharon said.

Peres has been holding informal talks with Palestinian Parliament Speaker Ahmed Qureia, a key negotiator. They have been discussing a framework for a possible peace deal in which Israel's recognition of a Palestinian state would be a first step, officials on both sides said.

The two sides remain far apart on the dimensions of such a state and hopes for progress are slim, but Sharon has nonetheless come under fire from his hard-line constituents for not stopping the Peres-Qureia contacts.

Asked about the talks in an interview on Fox TV broadcast Friday, Arafat said, ``We are ready to be very positive if they offer something concrete.''

Sharon insisted that there can be no peace negotiations before all violence stops. But he added, ``The contacts can continue on a specific issue to aid us in reaching an end to terrorism and to a cease-fire.''

-------- japan

Sinking Renews Debate on Japan's Military
Critics Doubt Legality of Stopping, Firing at Suspected North Korean Vessel

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, December 28, 2001; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32771-2001Dec27?language=printer

TOKYO, Dec. 27 -- Opposition politicians and military analysts are questioning whether the Japanese coast guard acted properly in trying to stop a suspected North Korean boat and repeatedly firing on it outside Japan's territorial waters Saturday. The ship exploded and sank, and its estimated 15 crew members died.

North Korea has denied the ship was its property and the Japanese government has been thrown on the defensive by questions as to why the vessel was tracked for more than a day before it went down in waters inside Chinese jurisdiction.

In addition, some critics in Japan are questioning whether the coast guard had the jurisdiction to use force to interdict the ship, and why none of its crewmen was picked up alive.

"It is extremely doubtful if use of weapons on the open sea is within Japanese policy," Sekisuke Nakanishi, a Social Democratic Party official, said in demanding parliamentary hearings on the incident. "The shooting was outside Japan's territorial waters and outside the authority of the coast guard law."

The incident, which won initial public approval, has become the focus of debate over the governing party's desire to expand Japan's military powers. This fall, the government of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi sent Japanese naval vessels to the Indian Ocean to aid the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan and got new anti-terrorism legislation passed. Critics have suggested that with the suspect ship, the government was too quick to show its willingness to use military force.

"The problems begin when we do not act on legal frameworks, but on political decisions," said retired vice admiral Kazuo Sakairi, a former chief of staff of the Japanese navy and now an adjunct fellow at the Pacific Forum Center for Strategic and International Studies. "We have to remember our history" in which the military led Japan into World War II, he said.

Koizumi said the incident proved the need for easing the strict rules on the use of weapons by Japanese forces, and has called for changes in laws that have bound those forces since the war. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda this week criticized the rules that restrict Japanese forces to defensive use of firepower.

"If we don't suffer casualties when we are shot at, does this mean we can't do anything?" he said.

The unidentified ship sank after an exchange of gunfire Saturday night, more than 29 hours after it was sighted by a patrol plane. At first sighting, the ship was outside of Japan's territorial waters but within a 200-mile boundary claimed by Japan as its Exclusive Economic Zone .

Tokyo has suggested the ship was a North Korean spy ship or was smuggling drugs, citing debris that had Korean writing and a profile that fit other North Korean ships. But the government has acknowledged the proof is inconclusive and the ship's identity still is undetermined.

After four days of silence, North Korea said Wednesday the claim was "sheer rumor." The official Korean Central News Agency said the sinking of the ship was "nothing but brutal piracy and unpardonable terrorism" committed by "samurais of Japan in defiance of international laws."

Japanese authorities said the coast guard attempted to stop the ship, which by some accounts resembled a fishing vessel, to determine if it was fishing in the Japanese exclusive economic zone. Maritime law allows Japan to enforce its fishing regulations in that zone, they said.

When the ship refused to stop and would not identify itself, a chase began that took it out of the Japanese zone and into waters claimed by China as its exclusive economic zone. During the chase, the coast guard said it fired more than 500 rounds it called "warning shots," but said some hit the hull of the fleeing ship.

Around 10 p.m., as the vessel was hemmed by four Japanese coast guard ships, crewmen on the vessel opened fire with small arms and at one point in the exchange allegedly fired hand-held rockets. Three Japanese sailors were slightly wounded. The Japanese ships opened fire with machine guns and an explosion sank the ship.

Authorities say they do not know if the explosion was caused by the gunfire, or if the ship was deliberately scuttled to avoid capture, a known North Korean practice. Crewmen were seen in the water, but the coast guard retrieved only two bodies.

"I have a big question about the failure to rescue those crewmen, or if they were considered suspects, the failure to arrest them alive," said Gabriel Nakamori, an independent military analyst. "I think the coast guard did not do enough to try."

Japanese authorities have suggested the crewmen may have poisoned themselves to avoid capture, another practice said to be standard for North Korean infiltrators. The Japanese government is considering performing autopsies on the two bodies it has retrieved.

Koro Bessho, an aide to Koizumi, said Japan was "following legal procedures" when it pursued the ship. "There is a right to pursuit," he said. "It didn't listen to calls to halt. The Japanese authorities chasing had a right to physically make it stop."

But Nakanishi, the member of parliament from the opposition party, said: "The legal basis that allows shooting on a ship in the open sea is extremely vague." New powers requested by Koizumi and approved in November by parliament allow Japanese ships to use firepower, but only within the country's territorial waters, he said.

Sakairi, the retired vice admiral, said Japan has adopted a tougher policy following an incursion by two suspected North Korean spy vessels in 1999. Those ships outraced Japanese patrol boats, causing considerable consternation in Japan. "It's clear that since the 1999 incident, Japan has changed her attitude and said it will never happen again without a punishing blow," he said.

Yoichi Toda, a coast guard spokesman, said the force has "police authority" to stop boats to investigate suspected crimes, including smuggling of drugs or humans. "Because the other party is committing a crime by not answering questions, we are allowed to use weapons," he said. "This is Japanese law. As to international law, it's not written anywhere, so it's not a problem."

Richard J. McLaughlin, a maritime law specialist at the University of Mississippi School of Law, said countries have "a legal right to try to prevent [intruders] from fishing" in their exclusive economic zones, but he said there "is no customary rule or international law" describing what force, if any, can be taken in the enforcement.

-------- nato

Attacks bring old foes together

By David R. Sands
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 28, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20011228-114920.htm

NATO, having spent most of the past five decades trying to contain Russia as a military threat, now finds itself struggling to contain its own enthusiasm for Russia as a partner.

Pivoting on the terrorist attacks of a single morning in September, relations between Russia and the West have undergone a profound transformation marked by unprecedented diplomatic gestures, close cooperation in the war in Afghanistan and intense discussions on an expansion of Moscow's role in the 19-nation NATO alliance.

The year began with a string of confrontations over spies, missile treaties and human rights between the incoming Bush administration and the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin. It ends with Mr. Putin spending the night at Mr. Bush's Texas ranch while providing crucial diplomatic cover and logistical support for the U.S.-led military force in the hills of Afghanistan.

The shift represents, in the words of the Texas-based Stratfor private intelligence service, "the most consistent reversal of Russian foreign policy since the Soviet breakup, if not the 1917 [Bolshevik] revolution."

With much of the world's attention focused on the military campaign in Afghanistan, NATO officials in Brussels have been contemplating a major upgrade in relations with Russia - the country the alliance was formed to combat 52 years ago.

"In the past, we were divided by fences, walls, ideologies and weapons," NATO Secretary-General George Robertson said in an interview with the Russian newspaper Rossiskaya Gazeta last month. "Today, the threat to the Russian people is similar to the threats that the peoples of the NATO countries are dealing with.

"International terrorism has been transformed into global terrorism," said Mr. Robertson. "Why should we solve the problems separately?"

U.S. Ambassador to Russia Alexander Vershbow, who formerly served as U.S. representative to NATO, said: "I believe that the NATO allies, as they tackle new threats such as terrorism, will be increasingly prepared to engage Russia as a full and equal partner. This would mean working with Russia from the earliest stage - that is, before NATO members have taken their own decision."

For his part, Mr. Putin insists he is "not asking for any indulgence" as he seeks a greater role for Russia in NATO's decision-making councils.

"We are simply drawing the attention of our partners to the simple fact that it is in their interests to treat Russia as an equal partner," he said in an interview with the London-based Financial Times earlier this month.

"The earlier our partners come to understand this logic, the better it will be both for ourselves and for our partners. And in pursuing these policies, we do not at any time prejudice the national security interests of Russia," Mr. Putin maintained.

Even the Bush administration's decision earlier this month to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty - widely predicted by arms-control advocates and nervous European governments to sour relations with Moscow - has been taken largely in stride by the Kremlin.

Mr. Putin called the ABM decision "a mistake," but added: "We have no intention of raising any anti-American hysteria."

New challenge for NATO

The changed landscape presents a major navigational challenge for NATO, which faces several major decisions in the coming year.

In May, foreign ministers of the 19-nation alliance will meet in Reykjavik, Iceland, to consider whether to endorse proposals to give Moscow a more formal role in NATO councils in such key areas as counterterrorism, nonproliferation, European missile defense and civil emergencies.

Since 1997, Russia-NATO relations have been managed through the so-called "Joint Permanent Council," but the Kremlin has long complained the JPC gives it only a limited, reactive role to positions already adopted by NATO members. Relations plummeted after NATO's 1999 air war in Kosovo, a campaign bitterly opposed by the government of President Boris Yeltsin.

The proposed new NATO body, building on a proposal by British Prime Minister Tony Blair last month, would give Moscow a much greater say on certain issues, although NATO officials were quick to insist that Russia would not join NATO or take part in the alliance's integrated military command.

And NATO leaders will gather in Prague in November for a critical summit whose high point is expected to be the issuing of invitations to up to 10 Eastern and Central European states to join the alliance. Those invited are now widely expected to include the three Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, a move that has long been bitterly opposed by leading Kremlin strategists.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov revealed last week that NATO will be opening a military liaison office in Russia in May.

Chill turns warm

The warmth of Russia-NATO relations at the end of the year is in distinct contrast to the chill at the beginning, when pointed disagreements between Moscow and the new Republican administration led many to speculate about a revival of old Cold War animosities.

Mr. Bush came to power criticizing the Clinton administration's dealings with Moscow, saying during the campaign that Mr. Clinton had relied too heavily on his personal relationship with former Russian President Boris Yeltsin and overlooked many Russian failings.

The State Department bluntly criticized Russia's military campaign in the breakaway republic of Chechnya and slammed Moscow for muzzling critics in the press.

New National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, the administration's top Russia expert, said in an interview in January that Russia "constitutes a threat to the West in general" and to the United States' "European allies in particular."

Mr. Bush's staunch backing for a defensive missile shield not only upset Russian military strategists. His oft-stated intention to junk the ABM deal and downgrade Russia's role in U.S. military foreign policy struck at deep-seated fears in the Kremlin about Russia's loss of superpower status with the collapse of the Soviet empire.

Relations took a nose dive in February when U.S. investigators charged FBI official Robert Hanssen with spying for the Soviet Union and Russia for more than a decade. The Bush administration expelled 50 Russian diplomats in protest and Mr. Putin answered in kind, the largest such tit-for-tat expulsions since the Cold War.

Mr. Putin, for his part, railed against a "unipolar" - meaning U.S.-dominated - world in a series of trips to European and Asian capitals. In July, amid much pomp and ceremony, Mr. Putin and Chinese President Jiang Zemin signed a "friendship and cooperation treaty" with distinct anti-Washington undertones.

The atmosphere improved somewhat when Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin appeared to establish a personal rapport at their first face-to-face meeting in Slovenia in June.

"I was able to get a sense of his soul," Mr. Bush said in remarks that startled his own advisers. Mr. Putin "is a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country."

Prophetically, Mr. Putin at the Slovenia joint press conference produced a recently declassified Soviet letter, written in 1954, inquiring about membership in NATO. The request, Mr. Putin noted, was summarily dismissed by France, Britain and the United States at the time as "completely unrealistic."

But it was the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that provided the true turning point.

Crisis brings change

President Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell have repeatedly noted that Mr. Putin was the first world leader to call the American president after the hijacked planes slammed into their targets September 11.

Mr. Putin offered Russian support for the United States and said he was calling off an ongoing military exercise to avoid any confusion in the chaotic aftermath of the attacks. He offered intelligence and security assistance to the emerging U.S.-led counterterrorism effort.

Perhaps most critically, the Russian president overruled his own defense minister and said Moscow would not object to the use of former Soviet states in Central Asia such as Uzbekistan as a staging ground for the U.S. military campaign. Russian strategists have long viewed those states as part of the country's natural sphere of influence.

The support has not been cost-free for the West.

In addition to contemplating a larger role for Russia in NATO, Western nations have toned down criticisms of Mr. Putin's internal rule, notably in Chechnya, which Russian officials insist is an integral part of the militant Islamist threat posed by Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said on a visit to Moscow shortly after the September 11 attacks: "Regarding Chechnya, there will be and must be a more differentiated evaluation in world opinion."

The Bush administration has also pledged to work to expand the market for Russian goods here and back Moscow's bid to join the World Trade Organization.

Speed or haste?

The warming of relations has come so quickly that there are voices both in Russia and the West who fear things have gone too fast.

In Moscow, leading analysts say Mr. Putin has decisively cast his fate with the West and faces grave political dangers if his offers are not reciprocated.

"Putin has clearly made a long-term decision to westernize Russia," wrote defense analyst Pavel Felgenhauer in the Moscow Times earlier this month. "If this pro-Western drive is rejected, will there be another chance?"

Sergei Rogov, director of the Moscow-based USA and Canada Institute, argued Russia has a right to expect a lot in return for its actions since September 11.

"I don't think it is an overestimation to say that Russia's assistance - political, military, technical and intelligence - to the U.S. war against bin Laden is no less important than the support provided by all the NATO countries taken together, Britain excepted," Mr. Rogov said in a recent interview.

"We should use this opportunity to formalize the breakthrough achieved at the top political level in practical agreements and treaties, in new mechanisms of collaboration," he said.

But U.S. officials have been quick to say that enhanced NATO-Russia relations will not undermine the alliance's ability to act in its own interests.

NATO's 19 members "will retain [their] prerogative to act independently on any issue," Mr. Powell said in Brussels earlier this month, even as the decision to create a more powerful new joint council with Russia was being made.

But suspicions run deep among the Central and Eastern European nations that have been clamoring for years to join NATO, in large part because of their long-standing distrust of Moscow.

"One must be very cautious in these matters," said Martin Palous, the Czech Republic ambassador to the United States. "National interests will always remain on the map."

He recalled the compromises made when the United States and Britain enlisted Stalin as an ally in the fight to defeat Hitler.

"No historical analogy is ever exact," Mr. Palous said, "but our predecessors made their mistakes in assembling previous grand coalitions to fight a particular evil and we should not repeat those mistakes."

Latvian Foreign Minister Indulis Berzins said he hopes his country can join NATO next year and hopes that NATO will be worth joining. An effective Russian veto over key security decisions could jeopardize that, he said.

"We want to be part of a strong NATO, not just a place where people talk and talk," he said.

Veteran U.S. strategists such as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski have also warned of the danger to NATO of allowing Russia a major role in the alliance.

Even the modest, circumscribed role seen for Russia in NATO councils could prove dangerous, Mr. Kissinger recently wrote.

"NATO is, and remains, basically a military alliance, part of whose purpose is the protection of Europe against Russian invasion," according to Mr. Kissinger. "To couple NATO expansion with even partial Russian membership in NATO is, in a sense, merging two incompatible courses of action."

For now, both sides insist that NATO can improve ties with Moscow without undermining its core functions - what's been called the "bear's nose under the tent" trap.

Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said in Brussels earlier this month: "Nobody, and I am speaking of the Russian position in particular, intends to create a new format with a view to torpedoing joint action."

The Pentagon has been more skeptical of the idea, but appears ready to move ahead with its old enemy.

Saying he could not predict how the relationship would evolve, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said last week in Brussels: "Our goal should be to find concrete ways for NATO to work together with Russia where our interests coincide while preserving NATO's ability to work independently."

He added: "No country should be treated as a de facto member of the alliance or given privileges that are otherwise denied to NATO aspirants."

-------- pakistan / india

Pakistan dims hopes for diffusing standoff

12/28/2001
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=28122001-021735-9571r

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Dec. 28 (UPI) -- The chief military spokesman for Islamabad on Friday dimmed hopes for a peaceful way out of Pakistan's latest standoff with neighboring India, saying he doubted whether the beefed-up Indian forces eyeballing the Pakistani army at the border would "back off."

"A certain momentum is established by these deployments and these continued concentration of forces close to the borders," Gen. Rashid Quereshi said. "It seems that the Indian government is putting itself into a corner where I think it is going to be difficult for them to now back off."

Quereshi spoke to reporters as tensions continued to mount along India and Pakistan's shared frontier, where both countries over the last 15 days have increased an already large number of forces in the area in anticipation of military clashes.

The military buildup by both sides at the border follows a suicide attack Dec. 13 on the Indian parliament. New Delhi says the attackers were supported by Pakistan, a charge Islamabad officials deny.

Pakistani officials held out some hope, however, that talks could diffuse the situation, though New Delhi has recently withdrawn its ambassador, shut down rail and road links across the border and announced plans to close off airspace to Pakistani civilian flights. Both sides have also ordered each other's embassies to reduce their staff sizes in tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions and thrown up nearly identical sets of economic sanctions against each other.

"We hope that better sense will prevail," said Pakistani Foreign Ministry Spokesman Aziz Khan. "We hope and continue to strive for negotiated settlements of all outstanding issues."

India has long accused the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment of backing militant organizations fighting Indian rule of the disputed Kashmir region, a predominantly Muslim Himalayan region that has sparked three wars between India and Pakistan since 1947.

Pakistan insists it only offers moral support for mostly Islamic separatists struggling against the largely Hindu government in New Delhi.

India blamed two groups, Lashkar-i-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, for the New Delhi attacks. Both organizations are known to operate in Pakistan and Kashmir.

On Wednesday, the United States added the two Kashmiri militants groups India says orchestrated the Dec. 13 attack on its parliament to its list of foreign terrorist organizations.

The ministry spokesman said all suspected terrorist groups were "under scrutiny" in Pakistan but said so far Islamabad has not seen convincing evidence against the groups blacklisted by the United States.

Pakistani officials have frozen the financial assets of Jaish-e-Mohammed and arrested its leader, Maulana Masood Azhar and other ranking members of the organization. But Islamabad has so far refused to take further action as demanded by New Delhi, saying India must provide evidence of the groups' involvement in the parliament attack.

Both sides regularly fire heavy guns across the so-called Line of Control, the boundary that runs the length of Kashmir where Pakistani and Indian forces accuse each other of provoking artillery duels.

quereshi said there had been no shelling at the line of control in the past 24 hours, though.

Meanwhile, at least 22 people have been killed in clashes between militants and Indian security forces in Kashmir during the same period of time, police officials said Friday.

The officials told Press Trust of India news agency that nine militants and eight Indian soldiers were among those killed since Thursday. Security officials later identified three of the nine militants as "top leaders of the Lashkar-i-Toiba separatist group."

----

India and Pakistan Exchange Sanctions
Air Travel Restrained, Diplomats to Be Expelled

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, December 28, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32497-2001Dec27?language=printer

NEW DELHI, Dec. 27 -- Escalating its dispute with Pakistan, India today banned Pakistan's national airline from entering Indian airspace, ordered Pakistan to withdraw half of its 110-person diplomatic mission here and ruled out talks to defuse a tense military standoff along their shared border.

Pakistan immediately retaliated by barring Indian airliners from its airspace and expelling a similar number of Indian diplomats.

The reciprocal sanctions further heightened tensions between the nuclear-armed rivals, both of which have launched massive deployments of troops and military equipment, including ballistic missile batteries, along their 1,800-mile border in recent days. The military buildup, the largest in more than a decade, was sparked by a terrorist attack on India's Parliament earlier this month that authorities here blame on Pakistan-based Muslim militant groups fighting to end Indian rule in Kashmir, a Himalayan region claimed by both nations.

Although India's foreign minister said he hoped the latest diplomatic measures would encourage Pakistan to mount an aggressive crackdown on the militant groups, a senior Indian government official said today that the nation's top leaders do not expect the strategy to work, raising the chances of a military confrontation.

"I can't say we're very confident," the official said.

Speaking in bellicose terms in an interview, the official also said the government has decided it must respond with force if Pakistan does not shut down the groups. "The attack of Parliament cannot go unpunished," he said. "We have to put an end to this one way or another."

The official would not elaborate on the targets India might try to strike in Pakistan, but he suggested that they could go beyond the militants' training camps to include assets of Pakistan's military and intelligence services, which India accuses of supporting the guerrillas.

"What we are engaged in is a fight against state-sponsored terrorism," the official said.

Pakistan's government has denied supporting the militant groups. In response to pressure from India and the United States, Pakistan has started to clamp down on the militants, placing the leader of one group under house arrest and detaining several of his followers. Pakistan also said it has frozen the assets of the two groups India blames for the attack, Lashkar-i-Taiba (Army of the Pious) and Jaish-i-Muhammad (Soldiers of Muhammad).

India's foreign minister, Jaswant Singh, today called Pakistan's efforts "a joke" and insisted that the groups be shut down fully. He said Pakistani leaders have failed to "understand the gravity of the situation."

"The depth of concern in India, the totality of rejection by the entire cross section of our country's opinion of Pakistan's continued sponsorship of cross-border terrorism and its promotion of terrorism as an instrument of state policy has also not been sufficiently appreciated," he said.

Pakistani officials said they were committed to cracking down on Jaish and Lashkar -- the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, recently accused them of working to "undermine Islam" -- but the officials said the government must move cautiously because the organizations enjoy broad popular support.

The spokesman for Pakistan's military government, Maj. Gen. Rashid Qureshi, warned that his country would respond in kind if attacked and India would "pay heavily if they engage in any misadventure."

Military analysts said even limited Indian strikes across the border could spiral into a full-scale war. Both nations have mobilized hundreds of thousands of troops along the border, along with tanks and heavy artillery. Fighter jet crews have been placed on around-the-clock alert and holidays have been canceled for military personnel.

The senior Indian official said the government here understands the risks of war. "If we move militarily, it will be with the full expectation that it will lead to a large-scale confrontation between India and Pakistan," he said.

Although both nations possess nuclear weapons, Qureshi said he did not expect either side to use them in the event of war. "It's something that I think one should not even consider," he said. "Pakistan and India are responsible nations."

U.S. officials have expressed concern that the escalating tensions could result in a redeployment of Pakistani soldiers stationed along the border with Afghanistan and disrupt efforts to capture members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network who are attempting to escape into Pakistan.

"It would be a big disappointment to us," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today of the possibility that Pakistan could redeploy troops toward India and away from Afghanistan. He said the Pakistani soldiers participating in the hunt for bin Laden "are performing an important task."

The Bush administration has implored both nations to take steps to defuse the crisis, with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell making repeated phone calls to leaders on both sides, urging them to resolve their differences through dialogue.

State Department spokesman Philip Reeker warned today that military movements and missile deployments "can only heighten tension and uncertainty in the situation, and we believe it's important for each country to avoid actions that could raise tensions and spiral out of control."

Pakistani officials said today that they would heed U.S. calls for dialogue. "The ball is in India's court," said Aziz Ahmed Khan, a spokesman for Pakistan's Foreign Ministry. "Anytime, anyplace, anywhere, at any level. It is up to India to respond."

But Singh, India's foreign minister, said India is not interested in discussions until it sees evidence of Pakistani actions against the militants. "It's not practical at the moment, nor possible for talks," he said.

The senior Indian official said U.S. officials have urged India to refrain from military action until U.S. forces finish their hunt for bin Laden and al Qaeda members in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the official also said India would not heed that request if it felt compelled to strike.

"We understand what the U.S. is trying to achieve in Afghanistan," he said. "It is in their interest. That is fine. But we have our own security concerns."

Singh said the ban on Pakistan International Airlines from entering Indian airspace would begin Jan. 1. The restriction will affect not just Pakistan International's flights to Indian cities but also those that travel over India to destinations in East Asia, including Bangkok, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Pakistan International operates four flights a week between Pakistan and India and seven flights a week between Pakistan and East Asian cities.

Pakistan's prohibition of Indian flights is largely symbolic. India's state-run carrier, Air India, ceased flying over Pakistan in October, and Indian Airlines stopped its only flight to the country last month.

Singh said Pakistan would be forced to send home within 48 hours half of its 110-person staff at its diplomatic mission in New Delhi. The remaining embassy staff will be restricted to the capital, he said.

He accused Pakistani diplomats of being "involved in espionage as well as direct dealings with terrorist organizations." India expelled a Pakistani diplomat on charges of spying earlier this week.

Two hours after Singh announced the sanctions, Pakistan said it would impose the same staff cuts and travel restrictions on the Indian mission in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.

"The government of Pakistan has been really disappointed by these steps by India," Khan said. "Because of these steps, an already tense situation has been aggravated."

Last week, in India's first round of diplomatic moves against Pakistan, New Delhi recalled its top envoy to Islamabad for the first time in 30 years and said it would suspend bus and train service between the countries, beginning Tuesday.

India's defense minister, George Fernandes, said today that his country's troops would be in position along the border, from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea, by this weekend. "In the next two to three days, the deployment process will be completed and the forces will be ready for any eventuality," he said.

Special correspondent Rama Lakshmi contributed to this report.

----

U.S. Anti-Terror Effort May Be Diluted If Pakistan Calls on Army to Fight India

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, December 28, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32561-2001Dec27?language=printer

CAMP SHAHEEN, Pakistan, Dec. 27 -- Pakistani and Indian troops eyed one another today across a 200-yard ravine here in the steep Kashmiri hills, a potential flash point for renewed conflict that was not in the script when the Bush administration recruited Pakistan as its main regional ally in the war on terrorism.

"Even a small little action could degenerate into a chain reaction that nobody could control," declared Brig. Mohammed Yaqub Khan, who commands about 4,000 Pakistani soldiers on high alert along this section of the Line of Control dividing Kashmir into its Pakistani- and Indian-run parts.

"The two nuclear states, well, if they go to war, it can become a big catastrophe for the entire world," Khan told a group of foreign reporters at this dug-in military post about 75 miles due west of the Indian city of Srinagar.

This latest tension between two countries that are never fully at peace began Dec. 13, when gunmen shot their way into India's Parliament complex in New Delhi. India blamed Pakistan-based militant groups for the raid, in which 14 people died, including the five attackers. The crisis threatens to draw Pakistan's resources away from the border with Afghanistan and the U.S.-backed war against Osama bin Laden. Pakistan has been a major staging area for U.S. military and intelligence operations in the Afghan conflict.

Since Sept. 11, the U.S. military has taken control of about a third of Pakistan's airspace to facilitate operations over neighboring Afghanistan and the search for bin Laden and his al Qaeda fighters in the western border hills of Pakistan.

About 60,000 Pakistani soldiers have been deployed along that border to aid in the search. And as many as 35,000 Pakistani troops have been assigned to protect U.S. troops and equipment using bases on western Pakistani soil, at a cost of more than $400 million from a Pakistani military budget of $2.7 billion.

That heavy U.S. involvement in western Pakistan has made the Bush administration a major if reluctant player in the tensions here in the east as well. So far, the U.S. role has been to urge restraint by India, which seeks to retaliate for the attack on Parliament, and to demand that Pakistan crack down on two extremist Islamic groups that India alleges carried out the assault.

And so far, it has worked. But the tensions seem to mount daily, and India and Pakistan alike have moved troops and equipment forward in case a full-fledged conflict erupts. Both sides declare they want to avoid war, but have turned up the rhetoric and mobilized in ways that raise the chances for miscalculation and war by default. A half-dozen people have been killed in shelling along the Line of Control in recent days.

If the dangers evoked by Khan at his frontline position are realized -- if Indian planes and missiles attack Pakistan and if the 600,000-strong Pakistani military is called on to fight against its perennial enemy -- the U.S. role here could turn into something far more complicated than hunting for bin Laden, and that search could be compromised.

Pakistani officials said they had no doubt the army would have to reduce its cooperation with the United States along the Afghan border if the standoff along the Line of Control flared into fighting. In a 1999 flare-up with India in Kashmir's Kargil area, they noted, the Pakistani military moved large units from Peshawar and Quetta, on the western border, to reinforce positions here along the eastern border.

That could be done confidently then, they explained, because the Taliban movement ruling Afghanistan was considered a reliable ally. This is no longer the case. Afghanistan's new government is dominated by the Northern Alliance, a coalition of ethnic groups traditionally unfriendly to Pakistan and linked to India.

Senior Pakistani military officials have said repeatedly they do not believe India will launch the attack it has been threatening since Dec. 13. According to some reports, the United States has relayed assurances to that effect after intense diplomatic consultations with the government in New Delhi.

The Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has demonstrated no panic. He returned late Monday from a five-day trip to China and has spent the last two days in Karachi on domestic business, far from his military headquarters in Rawalpindi.

"I don't think there is a real chance of an India-Pakistan war," said retired Lt. Gen. Ali Quli Khan, a former chief of the Pakistani military's general staff and director of the army's military intelligence wing. "They [the Indians] are just trying to exact maximum advantage of this global campaign against terrorism, and the current military buildup only has political objectives."

Pakistani officials said their military reinforcements all along the border with India, from here in Kashmir down to the Arabian Sea, also served to show India and the United States that any retaliatory strike by India would provoke a serious response and raise the ante between the two nuclear rivals. The reinforcements included matching India's forward positioning of medium-range missiles, military officials said.

"By moving ground, air, naval and strategic assets, we made sure that New Delhi received our message loud and clear," a ranking military official said. "We want India and the whole world to know the exact cost of such a military conflict in the region."

Some officials suggested that India's willingness to announce its military buildup and forward positioning of equipment indicates that the real goal in New Delhi is to win help from the United States in pressuring Pakistan to crush the Islamic extremist movements active in the uprising against Indian rule in Kashmir. According to the Indian argument, the United States should pursue these groups as vigorously as it pursues bin Laden's al Qaeda group because, in Indian eyes, they are terrorists of the same ilk.

Responding to U.S. pressure, Musharraf has frozen the assets of both groups that India blames for the Parliament attack, Lashkar-i-Taiba and Jaish-i-Muhammad. His military government announced Wednesday that the Jaish founder, Masood Azhar, had been put under house arrest. Both groups have been labeled terrorists by the Bush administration.

The Pakistani high command decided during a long Christmas Eve meeting to put a stop to political activities by Pakistan's radical religious groups, some of which sent hundreds of young men to fight alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan.

At the same time, officials here warned, the Kashmir cause has long been central to Pakistani foreign policy, particularly in the military. As a result, they said, a military crackdown to prevent help for Kashmiri guerrillas fighting what is regarded here as repressive Indian occupation seems unlikely.

Those sentiments seemed visible today at Camp Shaheen, where Pakistan's 1st Azad Kashmir Brigade faced off against Indian soldiers in bunkers scraped into the mountain on the other side of Talyana Creek, which cascades down the ravine. Khan referred to the guerrilla war that has been waged on the other side of the Line of Control since 1989 as "a highly spirited, indigenous struggle for independence."

"The Indian government is trying to control this freedom struggle with brute force," he charged, saying 700,000 Indian troops and security police, one for every seven Kashmiris under Indian rule, have been deployed in the region. "Kashmir is bleeding and burning."

For decades, Pakistan has been seeking implementation of U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for a plebiscite to decide Kashmir's future.

The resolutions date from shortly after British rule of colonial India ended in 1947 with partition into India and Pakistan. The two new states quickly fought a war over which should control the spectacularly beautiful region of mountains, streams and lakes and its overwhelmingly Muslim population. Kashmir has been divided into Indian and Pakistani zones ever since.

"It's high time that the world community pays attention to this problem," Khan said, alluding to the greatly enhanced U.S. role in Pakistan.

India, however, has argued that the uprising in Kashmir, in which 75,000 people have been killed in a little over a decade, is an internal Indian security problem. On that basis, it has refused international mediation or foreign-sponsored negotiations. India reiterated that refusal today.

Special correspondent Kamran Khan in Karachi contributed to this report.

-------- somalia

Warlords Call for Foreign Intervention in Somalia

December 28, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-attack-somalia-warlords.html

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - Three Somali warlords called for international military intervention in Somalia on Friday, saying radical Islamic groups al Qaeda and al-Itihad had several bases in the Horn of Africa country.

Somalia's transitional government has strongly denied the presence of terrorist cells, and diplomats have warned that opposition warlords may use the U.S. war on terror to try and damage their opponents.

At a news conference in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, warlords Hassan Mohammed Nur Shatigudud, General Abdullahi Nur Gabyow and Hussein Aideed said foreign intervention was needed to stop extremist groups going underground.

``Al Qaeda and al-Itihad terrorist groups have got three major bases inside and around Mogadishu alone. The southern port city of Kismayu and Bosasso and the surrounding areas are their strongholds,'' Gabyow said.

``I myself can mobilize up to 50,000 of my militia and fight alongside any international force which would come to Somalia to help eradicate the terrorist group destroying our country.''

Somalia has been without central government since the 1991 overthrow of military dictator Mohammed Siad Barre and has been named as one of the countries the United States could target once it widens its war on terror beyond Afghanistan.

Soon after the September 11 suicide hijack attacks on the United States, Washington named the Somali al-Itihad al-Islamiya movement in a list of groups linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

Since then, international pressure for a single authority in Somalia has increased on the basis that a divided, anarchic Somalia could prove the perfect haven for terrorists.

WARLORDS USE WAR ON TERROR

But diplomats have warned that militia chiefs, who flourished in the chaos of civil war and control large parts of Somalia, have seized on the U.S. anti-terror campaign as their own route back to power.

They hope that accusing the Transitional National Government (TNG) of supporting terrorists will convince Washington to intervene and destroy their enemy on their behalf, the diplomats say.

The TNG, set up by a conference of clan elders last year, controls only parts of the capital Mogadishu and pockets of the rest of the country and has been trying to get the warlords on side since its inception.

On Monday it signed an agreement with some of the warlords in the Kenyan town of Nakuru calling for an ``all-inclusive government'' under which all clans would share power to be set up in Mogadishu within a month.

But several other warlords, including Aideed, Gabyow and Shatigudud, rejected the deal, casting doubt on its viability.

Although some members of the Somali Reconciliation and Restoration Council (SRRC) -- a loose coalition of opposition warlords -- signed the new pact, other senior SRRC members said the group did not recognize the delegation sent to Kenya.

Since the deal was signed, rival militias have fought running battles in Mogadishu, killing at least 13 people.

According to Gabyow, the fighting pitted the militias of warlord Muse Sudi Yalahow, who did not sign the Nakuru deal, against supporters of Osman Hassan Ali Atto, who did. He said the situation on Friday was calm.

-------- us

U.S. Navy Base in Cuba Has Tradition

By Ron Kampeas
Associated Press Writer
Friday, December 28, 2001; 2:52 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33369-2001Dec28?language=printer

WASHINGTON -- Guantanamo Bay has a decades-old tradition of welcoming refugees from neighborhood revolutions. Now it will jail accused terrorists from far, far away.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday that the U.S. Navy base in Cuba would be used to hold Taliban and al-Qaida fighters. U.S. forces now hold 45 prisoners in the Afghan fighting, in Afghanistan and on a ship off the coast of Pakistan.

Base spokesman Chief Petty Officer Richard Evans noted that Guantanamo has detention facilities for about 100 people, dating from the mid-1990s, when it housed thousands of Cuban and Haitian refugees.

The flood of refugees created new military terminology, "migrant surge ops," one of Guantanamo's four declared missions today. The others are to refuel and repair patrol boats; maintain the port and airfield; and support anti-drug operations in the Caribbean.

The oldest U.S. overseas outpost has repelled enemies and welcomed refugees since 1898, when U.S. Marines fighting the Spanish-American War set up camp at the natural harbor on Cuba's southeast coast.

It was the base for several U.S. interventions during Cuba's turbulent history, and was a refuge for Cubans fleeing revolution in 1917 and 1933.

Besides its impressive security, the base would offer advantages should it ever host the type of military tribunal President Bush authorized on Nov. 13, although Rumsfeld says there are no plans for it to do so at the moment.

The base is close enough to the United States - two-hour flights depart regularly from Jacksonville, Fla. - to quickly ferry in and out legal teams, and yet its offshore status makes any verdict virtually appeal free. A landmark 1950 Supreme Court decision established, in unusually direct language, that nonresident enemy aliens have "no access to our courts in wartime."

Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft have said they prefer military tribunals because they better protect U.S. secrets, and because they believe enemy aliens are not entitled to constitutional guarantees.

"The Bush administration appears to intentionally be following a pattern of making sure there is no judicial review," said Scott Silliman, a former Air Force lawyer and Duke University law professor who recently expressed his concerns about the tribunals in testimony to the Senate.

Most of the time, life for the 2,700 people on the 45-square-mile base is bucolic. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, a senior Naval officer described the base in a memo as "a community with overtones of suburbia."

Not much has changed: Three quarters of the residents are civilians - family to the sailors and Marines posted there, and maintenance staff from Jamaica and the Philippines.

This Christmas, residents - whose affectionate term for the base is "Gitmo" - organized a boat parade and tour of some of the homes on base. They enjoy a view from John Paul Jones Hill that takes in the bay and the surrounding mountains.

Kids attend the airy W.T. Sampson school, run recycling drives and take tae kwan do. There are yoga and fishing expeditions for the adults.

The latest issue of the Guantanamo Bay Gazette frets about a couple of "invasions" of the decidedly unarmed kind: "Weight Control During the Holidays" is one headline; "Screwworm: a Threat to You and your Pets" is another.

Such determination to create a home away from the American hearth masks the fortress that would keep the detainees secure.

The base does not have any entrances from the main island, frustrating any attacks or attempts to help prisoners escape - and hampering protesters and journalists.

It is secure, in part, because of obstacles Cuban leader Fidel Castro ordered placed to stop his people from seeking refuge there - among them a ring of cactus plants. The Cuban military controls an area of about 20 miles on the Cuban side around the base and prohibits all access.

U.S. forces stand ready to assume high alert, and have done so during the island's various revolutions, as well as during the missile crisis in 1962 and after Castro's order to cut off the base's water in 1964.

The "water crisis" led to the building of a desalination plant and now the base is fully self-sufficient. Recently declassified Pentagon documents suggest that the base has stored nuclear weapons - probably submarine-seeking depth charges - since the 1962 crisis.

President Theodore Roosevelt leased the land from Cuba in 1903, and his nephew Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered the base expanded in 1939. FDR anticipated the need for submarine patrols should the United States enter World War II, which it did two years later.

----

Green Beret lessons

Inside the Ring: Notes from the Pentagon
Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
December 28, 2001
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20011228-90234992.htm

Some Army Special Forces soldiers (the Green Berets) are saying that while their mission in Afghanistan has gone extremely well, some "lessons learned" must be addressed for future unconventional warfare.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has credited the Green Berets with helping to turn the tide of battle in November. The commandos joined with anti-Taliban forces and found military targets for bombers and fighters to strike.

But soldiers say the operations revealed flaws. There is not enough training in direct fire. They also lack vehicles to move around in harsh terrain, such as Afghanistan's mountains and deserts.

They tell of infighting at U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla., among those advocating resources for Army Rangers, Delta Force anti-terrorism teams, the Green Berets, Navy Seals and other units.

We obtained one Green Beret's lessons-learned list:

•Not sufficient training in firing weapons. "They are in situations where they might have to hold off a hundred guys for a day or two with their personal weapons. Can't do that if you spend your time cutting grass and teaching ROTC cadets how to use a compass [Special Operations Command] stopped developing SOF-unique [unmanned aerial vehicles] a couple of years ago as a policy decision, a shortsighted and bad decision." Such a spy system, the soldier said, would help Green Beret "A teams" of 12 troops see the enemy first and direct fire.

•Green Berets need a special inventory of vehicles from which to draw depending on the terrain.

"Our guys need to be able to move," the Green Beret said. "Need pre-stocked 'tool kit' of ground transportation in every theater, and at home station for training, for the Kosovos, the Afghanistans, the whatever. Mix of Humvee platforms, Toyota 4-by-4s, whatever, with configurable armor, weapons, sensors, must be available fast. Cannot tell you how much mobility has become critical factor Also need air transport independent of multimillion-dollar helos and fixed wing."

TV cameras this week captured U.S. special operations forces riding on all-terrain vehicles as they continued their hunt for al Qaeda terrorists.

•Radios are critical lifelines for Green Berets working clandestinely in what is called "denied territory."

"We are using every bit of comms gear we have. Whoever thought that two, or four [radios] per Special Forces team was good enough, well, in my opinion, well forget it. Just anger here. Need one [radio] per man. Need as many good, multi-waveband long-range radios per team as we can get. Need simpler and lighter. Need less power usage."

•Language proficiency.

"Must get better at this Send the guys with high aptitude to [Defense Language Institute] or create a like capability at Fort Bragg, with year long courses designed to maintain Special Forces skills I submit that means four or five guys on each team who are near fluent in a variety of languages of value in their [area of responsibility], not 12 guys who can order coffee in one language."

Commandos tell us their units have killed more than 600 Taliban militia members and al Qaeda fighters in firefights, mostly in the areas of Kandahar in the south and Tora Bora in northeastern Afghanistan.

China ties questioned

Two members of Congress are urging Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to maintain a ban on military exchanges with communist China.

Sen. Robert C. Smith, New Hampshire Republican, and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, California Republican, questioned in a letter recent statements by Adm. Dennis Blair, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, about the utility of renewing military contacts.

"As currently constructed, we respectfully disagree that these contacts are mutually beneficial," the congressmen stated in a Dec. 12 letter. "Moreover, if renewed military exchanges with China are [done] in the hope of engaging China in the global anti-terror campaign, we are deeply concerned that China's terrorist agenda is to rein in Falun Gong and Muslim separatists in its western provinces, while it continues to supply rogue regimes and state sponsors, such as Cuba, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, the former Yugoslavia and up until September 11, Afghanistan, including critical sales such as telecommunications and fiber optics. In short, China is not a good prospect for counterterrorism cooperation."

The letter was written before a senior U.S. official revealed to us that China had continued to supply weapons to the Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists after the September 11 terror attacks, including shoulder-fired SA-7 anti-aircraft missiles.

The letter was written in response to comments made by Adm. Blair in Bangkok recently. He said that developing military ties with China will lead to "a more cooperative relationship between the two nations."

Adm. Blair stated that the recent U.S.-China summit had boosted the prospects for restarting high-level military contacts. Exchanges were cut off after the April 1 incident involving a Chinese interceptor jet and a U.S. EP-3 reconnaissance aircraft.

Adm. Blair also said the Beijing-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization made up of China, Tajikistan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan could become valuable in regional security mechanism. His assessment comes while critics note that organization members must accept China's formulation that Taiwan is part of communist China.

Mr. Smith and Mr. Rohrabacher said the cutoff of military exchanges following the EP-3 incident, when 24 crew members were held captive by the Chinese military, showed "welcome realism" toward Beijing by the Bush administration. They reminded Mr. Rumsfeld that U.S.-China military exchanges are restricted by provisions of the fiscal 2000 national defense authorization act, curbs that were largely ignored by the Clinton administration.

The congressmen stated that U.S.-China military exchanges have failed to reduce tensions, have lacked mutual benefit and have provided militarily useful information to the Chinese.

"We fail to see the benefit of the [People´s Republic of China] gaining a better understanding of the U.S. military and its vulnerabilities, since it has repeatedly threatened the U.S. with military attacks, and repeatedly threatens to attack democratic Taiwan," they said. The two added that Adm. Blair recently approved several new exchanges with China's military that should be reviewed by the defense secretary.

The congressmen said one U.S. Air Force mission to China in 1999 revealed how the Air Force trains for information warfare, long-duration flights, and incorporates war lessons into training. "How does sharing such information lessen tensions between the U.S. and China or contribute to 'confidence-building?'" they asked.

Also, a recent briefing for Chinese officers at a U.S. war-fighting experimentation center violated congressional restrictions that prohibit providing the Chinese with data that could boost their military, they said.

The lawmakers asked for a Pentagon briefing on proposals for future military exchanges. They also asked Mr. Rumsfeld to find out if Adm. Blair is "subsidizing tuition" for Chinese military officers to study U.S. defense planning at the Hawaii-based Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies through private donations to the military-sponsored center.

•Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough are Pentagon reporters. Mr. Gertz can be reached at 202/636-3274 or by e-mail at bgertz@WashingtonTimes.com. Mr. Scarborough can be reached at 202/636-3208 or by e-mail at rscarborough@WashingtonTimes.com.

--------

Bush Says bin Laden Will Not Escape

New York Times
December 28, 2001
By DAVID STOUT
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/28/national/28CND-PREX.html

WASHINGTON, Dec. 28 - Virtually ignoring the possibility that Osama bin Laden may never be found, President Bush pledged again today that the United States will bring him to justice, "dead or alive." And though he expressed total confidence in how the war in Afghanistan is being waged, he emphasized that American troops will not be coming home soon.

"He is not escaping us," Mr. Bush said of Mr. bin Laden, whom he called a "parasite." The president said he had seen only snippets of the terrorist leader's latest monologue on videotape. "Who knows when it was made?" he said.

While conceding that Mr. bin Laden's pursuers do not know where he is, or even whether he is alive, the president talked of him as though he is on the run and still a danger to Americans. "I hope 2002 is a year of peace," Mr. Bush said. "I'm also realistic."

In a news briefing at his Texas ranch with Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the head of the Afghanistan campaign, Mr. Bush imagined the world from Mr. bin Laden's standpoint, assuming that he is alive. "This is a guy who three months ago was in control of a country," the president said. "Now he's in control of a cave."

The latest videotape of Mr. bin Laden, which was purportedly made in the last few weeks, surfaced this week. It shows him thinner, his beard grayer than a tape of him just after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that he is suspected of orchestrating.

"We will bring him to justice," Mr. Bush said. "I don't know if it will be tomorrow. But I didn't say to Tommy, `Get him tomorrow.' I just said, `Get him."'

Mr. Bush said American troops will be in Afghanistan a long time, not just chasing Mr. bin Laden (assuming he has not fled to neighboring Pakistan) and helping Afghan forces mop up Taliban and Al Qaeda remnants, but processing the scores of suspected terrorists already taken prisoner and determining who might face trials by military tribunals.

"My timetable will be set by Tommy Franks," Mr. Bush said. He said it will be time for American military people to come home only when the general tells him, "Mission accomplished, Mr. President." Asked whether he would prefer Mr. bin Laden's being found alive or dead, Mr. Bush said as he has before, "Dead or alive is fine with me."

At another point, he said, "If he's alive, he's on the run."

General Franks said he had been moved by the dedication of the American military people in Afghanistan, and moved by the prospect of the Afghan people being able to govern themselves at last. But while an interim government has been installed and the Taliban practically eliminated as an effective fighting force, the general offered no predictions for a homecoming of United States troops. "It will take as long as it takes," he said.

Mr. Bush was asked whether he was concerned that some terrorists may escape harsh justice if the military tribunals that try them require a unanimous vote for a death sentence. He replied that the rules are only preliminary at this point. In any event, he said, "Our system will be more fair that the system of bin Laden."

Mr. Bush expressed annoyance over news reports about the tribunal regulations that are being drafted, stressing that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had not even reviewed them yet.

The president spoke with reporters for about 20 minutes in a session dominated by foreign policy matters. He said Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had spoken to officials in both India and Pakistan urging "restrain and calm" on both sides. The bitter rivals have traded fire in the mountains of Kashmir, a region they have long fought over.

Mr. Bush said he was pleased that a passenger on an American Airlines flight from Paris had been disarmed on Saturday while trying to ignite explosives in his shoe. Referring to the quick action of an airline "stewardess," he quickly corrected himself and used the term "flight attendant."

Mr. Bush shrugged off a question about whether the Sept. 11 attacks and everything since have changed him. "Talk to my wife," he said.


-------- POLICE / PRISONERS

Police officer killed in training exercise

Around the Nation
Washington Times
December 28, 2001
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20011228-18980864.htm

EAST PROVIDENCE, R.I. - A police officer was shot to death yesterday during a training exercise that was not supposed to involve live ammunition.

Police Chief Gary Dias said the officer was shot by a fellow officer with a rifle as a 12-member SWAT team took part in a hostage drill in a parking lot.

The officer with the rifle was sedated and taken to a hospital, apparently because of shock. The chief said the SWAT team officers were all veterans of the force and staged drills at least once a month.

----

London targets radicals

By Paul Martin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 28, 2001
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011228-23385724.htm

LONDON - Stung by revelations that a British Muslim convert had tried to blow up an airliner last weekend, Britain vowed yesterday to get tough on Muslim hard-liners who so far have appeared immune from arrest because of concerns over restrictions on civil liberties.

British Home Secretary David Blunkett said anti-terrorism legislation introduced earlier this month would "make a difference" to "root out those who use Britain as a base" for terrorist activities.

He had given orders, he said, for its "rigorous" enforcement.

He also revealed changes to the country's immigration rules that would give homegrown or British-trained Islamic religious leaders advantages over the current preponderance of immigrant imams. He said it would take considerable time for these rule changes to have any perceptible effect.

These new moves come as a result of an outcry led by centrist Islamic figures over radicalization and indoctrination techniques that they say have gone on without much resistance in and around many British mosques.

Two of the most outspoken Muslim leaders on the issue are Sheik Ahmed Badawi, who heads the Muslim College, an educational institute for clerics, and Abdul Haqq Baker, an Afro-Caribbean who converted 12 years ago.

Mr. Baker runs the London mosque, an educational center that has spawned at least two men now accused of connections with attempted airplane bombings.

He fears that he could be killed for his openness.

Sheik Badawi yesterday welcomed the home secretary's announcements but said it was "better late than never."

He revealed that he had been campaigning for two decades to get the British government to close down about 300 after-hours "schools" in which radical Muslims taught children hard-line ideas, including jihad and martyrdom.

The government says it will look into these schools, but claims that its efforts are hampered by the refusal of the House of Lords to approve legislation against incitement to racial hatred.

The main problem, say both Sheik Badawi and Mr. Baker, is the quality and skill of the people who are in charge of most mosques for the large immigrant Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities.

Those foreign clerics are virtually unable to speak English and are out of touch with the needs of westernized but often frustrated Muslim youths, caught between their parents' restrictive traditionalism and the more open society around them.

Many grow up in areas of high unemployment or feel alienated from local white youths; some feel discriminated against in employment opportunities.

This, Sheik Badawi said, makes them easy prey to slick, well-spoken and well-funded groups of Muslim hard-liners whose funds come from abroad, usually the Arab countries in the Gulf region.

These radicals, he said, often denigrate the local imams as inferior to them in knowledge, weaker in Arabic and corrupted by their participation in "the system."

Sheik Badawi is demanding that the British government sponsor his Muslim College and other centrist institutes of training to produce better, homegrown clerics, or to bring existing imported clerics or converts up to standard.

Mr. Blunkett announced he would be helping this process not by funding - which he said would lead to demands for similar funding from other religious groups - but by making it easier for people being trained in centrist Islamic centers here, to stay in Britain.

The current rules say that any imam appointed by a mosque must return first to his home country and then reapply for a visa.

That makes it easier for local mosque committees to appoint someone who is already in Pakistan or Bangladesh, and under current rules for all clerics of any faith, the British authorities give them immediate entry.

Some radical clerics openly preach jihad at mosques they control. Abu Hamza al-Masri, one such radical, says the vast majority of Muslim clerics are "like sacks of potatoes."

"These imams you hear from are just part of the corrupt pro-Western system," said Imam al-Masri, who openly follows the blind New Jersey-based Sheik Omar Rahman, jailed for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

----

Pyongyang to grant amnesty to prison laborers

Briefly
Washington Times
December 28, 2001
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011228-728138.htm

SEOUL - North Korea announced yesterday it would grant amnesty to "reform through labor" inmates in January to mark the 90th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il-sung, founder of the communist state.

"An amnesty shall be granted for those sentenced to reform through labor for committing crimes against the country and people," said a decree by the Supreme People's Assembly, North Korea's parliament.

"The Cabinet and institutions concerned shall take practical steps to enable those set free to work and live in normal conditions," it added.

North Korea's last known amnesty to prisoners was in 1978, on the 30th anniversary of the communist state.

-------- death penalty

Terrorism Tribunal Rights Are Expanded
Draft Specifies Appeals, Unanimity On Death Penalty

By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 28, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32508-2001Dec27?language=printer

International terrorism suspects brought before U.S. military commissions would be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, could be sentenced to death only by a unanimous vote of the commissions' members and would have the right to an appeal, according to draft procedures for the commissions.

The proposal, which is circulating among legal officials in the Bush administration, reflects the current thinking of Pentagon lawyers about how to prosecute captured suspects. They could include the growing number of alleged al Qaeda and Taliban members held by U.S. forces, including 37 at a Marine base in Afghanistan and eight aboard the USS Peleliu in the Arabian Sea.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday that the Pentagon is planning to transfer such detainees to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He said that the base would not be ready for a number of weeks, however, and that there are no plans yet to hold commission proceedings there.

The draft does not include definitive language on some major issues, including exactly how, and in what forum, appeals would be heard, an administration official said yesterday. Rumsfeld must approve any final proposal. The procedures are being developed by the Defense Department's general counsel in consultation with the White House, the State Department, the Justice Department and outside experts. A Pentagon spokeswoman declined to comment on the process.

Still, the draft -- major portions of which were read to The Post by an administration official -- provides the most detailed indication yet of the administration's plans for the commissions. It also appears to address questions about their fairness and openness that have been raised by human rights organizations and members of Congress since President Bush authorized the commissions in a Nov. 13 military order. One administration official described the draft language as "pretty close" to final.

"Assuming that the final regulations look like [the draft], it would go a considerable distance toward meeting the concerns that have been voiced," said Eugene R. Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, which has taken no position on the commissions. "That said, big legal issues remain, such as the precise parameters of the appeals process."

The U.S. government has not yet designated anyone to stand trial before a military commission, authorized under Bush's order for any non-U.S. citizen whom the president determines "there is reason to believe" belongs to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network or is otherwise involved in international terrorism aimed at the United States. John Walker, a U.S. citizen and Taliban fighter being held aboard the USS Peleliu, would not be covered and could face a civilian trial.

Among the most sharply criticized aspects of Bush's Nov. 13 order were the provisions that permitted sentencing -- including the application of the death penalty -- by "only" a two-thirds vote of a commission and that denied a right to appeal in "any" court.

But in the draft procedures, those parts of Bush's order have apparently been interpreted as allowing room for a unanimous vote on capital punishment and for appeals to what an administration official called "an appeals body." One idea under discussion is to create a separate military review panel that would not technically be a court, a person familiar with the administration's deliberations said.

The draft says trials before the commissions will be presumed open to the public and the news media and can be closed only when a commission decides it must hear classified material.

Defendants would have a right to a military lawyer at government expense and may hire their own civilian lawyers if they choose -- though civilian lawyers would need special government clearances to handle classified evidence. Defendants may see the evidence against them, cross-examine prosecution witnesses and present witnesses of their own. They will also enjoy a right not to testify.

These rules would be broadly similar to those used in the U.S. military's own courts martial, though the commissions could still admit hearsay evidence, which is normally barred in both civilian trials and courts martial.

Public opinion polls have shown widespread support for the commissions, but the expansive wording of Bush's Nov. 13 order prompted concerns among civil libertarians and many legal experts that the president had assumed broad new prosecutorial authority without any specific authorization from Congress.

Administration officials have consistently defended the president's order, noting that he was empowered to prosecute an armed conflict by a joint congressional resolution, and that the ordinary methods of criminal prosecution could not be counted on to handle the extraordinary threat posed by the foreign-based terrorist network that destroyed the World Trade Center and badly damaged the Pentagon.

"Are we supposed to read [terror suspects] their Miranda rights, hire a flamboyant defense lawyer, bring them back to the United States to create a new cable network of 'Osama TV,' provide a worldwide platform for propaganda?" Attorney General John D. Ashcroft said during a recent hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

At the same time, members of the administration have sent signals seemingly aimed at soothing its critics. White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales told a gathering of the American Bar Association that "despite the broad language in the military order, which talks about cutting off other avenues of court proceedings for commission defendants, we fully contemplate that habeas [corpus] review will be available" for defendants arrested, detained or tried in the United States -- though not for those outside the country.

Rumsfeld called the heated debate over civil liberties "useful." He asked a group of veteran lawyers to advise him on how to construct the commissions. These advisers include former CIA and FBI director William H. Webster; Griffin B. Bell, President Jimmy Carter's attorney general; William T. Coleman, President Gerald R. Ford's transportation secretary; and Lloyd N. Cutler, President Bill Clinton's White House counsel.

An administration official said yesterday that the draft procedures do not represent a concession to the critics. "The president wanted them to be full and fair trials, and this does that," the official said.

But another person familiar with the legal consultations over the commissions said that "the debate in Congress and the press has been a very wholesome thing, and I hope and expect the procedures will be responsive to that."

Sources familiar with the draft procedures said they may reflect the input of the military's own lawyers, known as judge advocates general, who have a strong personal stake in preserving the legitimacy of military justice.

"Uniformed lawyers are anxious to become involved, both as prosecutors and defense attorneys," Fidell said. "There will be no shortage of volunteers."

Staff writer Vernon Loeb contributed to this report.

----

Oklahoma tops Texas in executions for 2001

December 28, 2001
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20011228-23839477.htm

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) - Texas has lost the title of America's No. 1 death-penalty state for the first time since 1996, with 17 executions in 2001 to Oklahoma's 18.

The number of inmates put to death in Texas this year was down 57 percent from 2000 and contributed to a national decline of 22 percent.

The drop is attributed to the usual ebb and flow of death-row appeals, and Texas' numbers appear likely to rise again next year as a cluster of Houston-area cases works its way through the courts.

"I liken it to a boa constrictor that has swallowed a pig for dinner," said prosecutor Roe Wilson, whose office handles capital case appeals. "You watch the pig progress down the boa constrictor, and that pig is the big glut that is in the federal courts right now."

Harris County, which includes Houston, accounts for a third of the 450 or so inmates awaiting lethal injection in Texas. That is more than Oklahoma's entire death-row population.

Texas topped the annual execution list from 1997 to 2000. Virginia led in 1996 with eight; Texas had three, tying it for fourth place.

Nationwide, the number of executions fell in 2001 from 85 to 66. After Oklahoma and Texas, the most were in Missouri, with seven; North Carolina, with five; and Georgia, with four. No other state had more than two.

In Oklahoma, "there was such a backlog on death row, and the cases were old," state Attorney General Drew Edmondson said. "We were working through the appeals process."

He said he expects 10 executions at most next year.

Texas has also seen such bursts in recent years, as cases that were backed up in the legal system came to a conclusion all at once.

In 1996, three executions were carried out, followed by 37 the next year. In 1998, there were 20; in 1999, 35.

Texas sent 40 to the gurney in 2000, the most executions in a single year by any state in U.S. history.

Four Texas inmates are scheduled to go to the death chamber in January. Two more are scheduled for February and another in early March.

Death-penalty opponents struck a cautious note over this year's numbers.

"While the past year had been a time of real progress in addressing the problem areas of the death penalty, the crisis continues," said Richard Dieter of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center.

--------

In Shift, Chinese Carry Out Executions by Lethal Injection

New York Times
December 28, 2001
By CRAIG S. SMITH

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/28/international/asia/28LETH.html

BEIJING - Liu Renwen knows the horror of China's "gunshot ghosts," as convicts who are executed with a bullet in the back of the head are known in this country. During a brief stint as a county judge in Hebei Province, he witnessed three executions in a remote rice paddy where a gaggle of spectators gathered each time to watch the gruesome act.

One man required a second shot to finish him off, Mr. Liu recalled recently during a conversation in a Beijing restaurant. The bullets grotesquely disfigure the corpse's face.

"I couldn't think of eating anything afterward," he said, motioning to his throat and then to a bowl of milky soup on the table in front of him, "especially soup."

Mr. Liu, now a lawyer and member of an influential Beijing research institute, is a proponent of lethal injection, which China's People's Supreme Court has urged be put in effect in all provincial capitals and major cities by the end of this year.

The court, responding to growing international concern over the way thousands of people are executed each year, issued regulations on the use of lethal injection in September. Since then, many places around the country have begun using the method to dispatch some of the prisoners being put to death in China this year.

The city of Kunming has already used lethal injection to execute more than 70 people, according to press reports, and Shanghai has executed more than 50 people with the method, including eight last month.

China Daily, the country's main English-language newspaper, said the change "proves the country's respect for the dignity of all human beings, even those who committed serious offenses." It did not mention the volume of executions this year, estimated at 5,000 to 10,000 by people who study the subject.

The new method may eventually remove one of the previously most applauded, if appalling, aspects of execution here: public display, meant to reassure law-abiding citizens that justice is being done and to warn criminals that crime does not pay. Condemned prisoners are often read their final judgment at mass rallies and are usually paraded through town in an open truck before being taken to the execution ground, which is also often in public view.

But the exact reasons for the proposed change, which has been little debated in a China more preoccupied with economic expansion, remain unclear. The tone of several newspaper articles on the subject this month, some of which mention China's new membership in the World Trade Organization, suggests that it is a response to international criticism. They also suggest that the new method has been adopted because execution by injection is simply cheaper, a factor that has become more important as the number of prisoners being executed has risen this year.

But a darker motive may exist. The change may facilitate one of the most controversial aspects of Chinese capital punishment: organ harvesting from executed prisoners, who make up the country's largest source of transplantable organs.

While it's not clear what drugs are used for lethal injection in China, even the narcotic-poison mix used in the United States would not damage vital organs wanted for transplant. The condemned need only be given an injection of the anticoagulant heparin beforehand, doctors say. With the proper preparation, even the heart could be transplanted if it were removed quickly.

"I'm concerned with the shift to lethal injection because of the secrecy of the entire execution process in China," said Thomas McCune, a transplant doctor in Virginia.

He notes that lethal injection puts the execution in a more controlled environment than is possible with executions by gunshot. Currently, organ harvesting operations in China are often done in the backs of ambulances at the execution ground. Some executions by injection are also carried out outdoors, but most will eventually be done in hospital-like rooms.

The country legalized lethal injection in 1996 and the People's Supreme Court commissioned the Pharmaceutical Institute at the China Academy of Medical Science to develop the drugs to carry it out. The institute has completed its work and courts can now buy execution kits, including lethal drugs and syringes, from the Supreme Court in Beijing.

Several cities began experimenting with the method in 1997, particularly Kunming, which has a high rate of executions because of chronic heroin trafficking.

Thousands of animals were put to death as various combinations of drugs were tried and refined. Kunming began executing people with injections in March that year.

An officer of the Kunming Intermediate People's Court, reached by telephone on Monday, said that executions by injection were still carried out in a field there, although the city was building an execution chamber. He confirmed the details of an account of an early execution by lethal injection there published recently by The China Youth Daily.

On Nov. 4, 1997, four men convicted of trafficking heroin were taken to a field outside the city, according to the account. Zhang Rongcai, a man from Shanghai, was the first to die. The presiding judge asked him if he was nervous. He said no, but when a court officer asked him to roll up his sleeve and lie down, "his face became ashen and his limbs stiffened," the newspaper said.

A doctor rolled up his sleeve and bound a rubber hose around his arm to make it easier to find a vein.

"Take it easy, it's like a normal injection," the doctor told him, according to the newspaper.

"I feel my head drifting, my body is weak," Mr. Zhang said as the drugs took effect and before his voice failed. His heart stopped beating 32 seconds after the injection began.

There have been many news reports in recent weeks touting the benefits of lethal injection. Many reports emphasize the economy of the method, a tacit acknowledgment of the high volume of executions carried out each year in China.

"The cost of shooting them all was too high," reported the Dec. 12 edition of Sanlian Life Weekly, a government-owned current affairs magazine. The magazine said it cost about 700 yuan, or $85, to execute a prisoner by gunshot, including "at least 100 yuan" paid to the executioner.

During nationwide anticrime campaigns, when the number of executions doubles or triples as it has this year, "there aren't enough shooters" to keep up with demand, the magazine said.

Courts around the country are building execution chambers fitted with pumps that will allow executioners to start the flow of lethal drugs with the push of a button. Some of the chambers have several beds and several pumps to allow for multiple executions. China frequently executes groups of people at one time.

The magazine quoted an executioner named Li Shusheng, who said the new method meant "less terror" for the triggerman. Mr. Li, who could not be reached for comment, told the magazine that executioners had to fire their guns at very close range to ensure that they did not miss. He said most executioners used a semiautomatic rifle and aimed at the "yuzheng" accupressure point on the back of the convict's head. The executioners usually wear gloves and gauze surgical masks to protect themselves from spraying blood, bone and brains.

Mr. Liu, the lawyer, said part of his job as a judge was to take the executioner out drinking to help steady his nerves the night before an execution.

The condemned, on the other hand, do not usually struggle, even if they did not necessarily deserve to die. One of the people Mr. Liu saw executed was convicted of stealing about $1,200. Another man was executed for killing his wife inadvertently and in self-defense after finding her in bed with another man, Mr. Liu said. All walked calmly to their deaths.

"By then, I think they were numb," Mr. Liu said.

-------- terrorism

Exclusive: Terror plot on US carrier foiled

By Pamela Hess
UPI Pentagon Correspondent
12/28/2001 4:59 PM
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=28122001-032841-5914r

WASHINGTON, Dec. 28 (UPI) -- Acting on U.S. intelligence gathered in Afghanistan, the Singapore government earlier this month raided a "terrorist nest" and arrested 12 alleged al Qaida members suspected of planning an attack on the island nation's deep-water Navy port, top Pentagon and other government officials said.

Two suspected terrorists escaped arrest, Pentagon officials said.

Singapore officials have also failed to locate two tons of explosives intended to be used in the attack or attacks, a military official said.

Neither the Singapore government nor the Pentagon has publicly acknowledged the raid out of concern over compromising the source of the intelligence, a Pentagon official told United Press International.

Singapore Embassy officials in Washington, D.C., said they were unaware of the operation. American officials said they could not put an exact date on the raid nor identify the Singapore agency that carried it out.

The USS Carl Vinson was scheduled to use the port later in December so "people were pretty squirrelly" about the information and moved swiftly to act on it, a U.S. government official told UPI on Friday.

In October 2000, suicide bombers in Yemen attacked the USS Cole, a destroyer that was refueling in a port, killing 17 sailors. The bombing is still unsolved but has been linked to al Qaida, fingered in the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

Pentagon and Navy officials said there was no direct connection between the Vinson's visit and the planned attack in Singapore, the exact targets of which remain unknown.

The Carl Vinson and its crew of 5,000 -- fresh from more than three months' flying attack missions into Afghanistan -- visited the port as scheduled for three days over the Christmas holiday, according to a Navy official.

Additional security precautions were already being taken around the port and the visit would only have been canceled if there was a specific threat against the ship, the official told UPI.

The Vinson's home ported is Bremerton, Wash.

U.S. officials declined to specify the exact nature of the intelligence provided to Singapore. The military, the CIA and the FBI have been interrogating the hundreds of prisoners captured by anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan and reviewing reams of paperwork and videotapes collected from sites abandoned by al Qaida. As of Friday U.S. Marines were holding 70 detainees in Kandahar and aboard the USS Peleliu.

Singapore inaugurated its deep-water port at the Changi Naval Base in March 2001 with a visit from the USS Kitty Hawk. Until the berth was built, U.S. aircraft carriers had to moor in a commercial harbor at much greater risk, especially in the wake of the USS Cole bombing.

Singapore, known for its strict enforcement of law and low crime rates, is an important stop on major Pacific shipping routes. The safety of its port and the Malacca Strait is especially vital to key U.S. allies Japan and South Korea for oil and raw materials.

In October, Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong told a conference of union leaders that the government last year discovered a plot by Middle Eastern terrorist groups to recruit Singaporean Muslims and found a video of the coastline made by another terrorist group seeking to attack passing U.S. ships.

Singapore is expected to be among the hardest hit economically by Sept. 11 because of its close ties to the U.S. economy and its reliance on healthy supply chains for shipping, according to a study completed by Harvard University in October.

----

Xinjiang 'terrorists' have Chinese names

Briefly
Washington Times
December 28, 2001
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011228-728138.htm

BEIJING - More than 300 suspected members of terrorist organizations apparently led by Han Chinese rather than ethnic minorities have been arrested in China's northwestern Xinjiang province over the past few days, local sources say.

Some 318 suspects were stopped in the Tianshan area, the region's public security chief said, referring to an autonomous region of ethnic Uighur Muslims where unrest has been attributed largely to non-Han separatists.

He said 26 were members of a terrorist group directed by a man known as Li Fei, while 17 belonged to a terrorist group under another leader, Ma Fuquan.

An unspecified number were aligned with a third group directed by Wang Meng.

All three names are Han Chinese, rather than Uighur. Beijing has labeled Uighur separatist elements as terrorists.

--------

MISSED SIGNALS
Terror Cells Slip Through Europe's Grasp

New York Times
December 28, 2001
By STEVEN ERLANGER and CHRIS HEDGES
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/28/international/europe/28EURO.html

PARIS - Late last July in Afghanistan, after months of terrorist training, Jamal Beghal, an Algerian-born Frenchman, was summoned to the home of a senior aide to Osama bin Laden.

The time for action had come, said the aide, Abu Zubeida. Mr. Beghal was instructed to return to France via Morocco and Spain and orchestrate a suicide bombing of the American Embassy in Paris. According to a senior French intelligence official, Mr. Beghal shaved his beard, put on Western clothing, and, before leaving, was given three gifts from Mr. bin Laden - a toothpick, prayer beads and a flask of incense.

On July 28 - six weeks before Sept. 11 - in the Dubai airport transit lounge, Mr. Beghal's plan fell apart. With his name on a watch list, he was arrested for a forged visa extension. His lawyer said that he was tossed into a darkened cell, handcuffed to a chair, blindfolded and beaten and that his family was threatened. After some weeks he talked and out poured a wealth of information. Agents in half a dozen countries went to work.

It was a real intelligence break, later recounted in detail by senior French intelligence officials, but it would prove too late to stop the World Trade Center plot. Enough time and work could have led investigators from Mr. Beghal to an address in Hamburg where Mohamed Atta and his cohorts had developed and planned the Sept. 11 attacks. But the hijackers had already slipped into the United States and were within days of carrying out their mission.

Those missed opportunities and the case of Mr. Beghal tell a great deal about the world of Muslim militancy that took root in Europe in the 1990's, its shifting focus and varied structure, as well as the failure, many intelligence officials now acknowledge, of most European governments to understand its gravity, danger and depth.

Terrorist cells formed, carried out specialized tasks, dissolved and then re-formed elsewhere, careful to maintain isolation and disguise their identities.

Mr. Beghal, who lived on the margins of French society and wandered across Europe finding others like himself, typifies the immigrant Muslims who fell under the sway of Al Qaeda in the 1990's.

The mission he was leading was one of three known bin Laden plots being hatched last summer in Europe, including the World Trade Center attack and the assassination of the anti-Taliban leader of the Afghan Northern Alliance, Ahmed Shah Massoud. Mr. Beghal's path crossed that of activists of the other two plots; the way they made plans and built cells explains why Europe became the forward operating base for Islamic terror over the last decade.

European officials now ruefully admit that they were not paying enough attention to these Islamic networks in their midst. Their focus was largely domestic - the British worried about the militants in Northern Ireland, the Spanish about the Basques, the French about the Algerians. There was not enough cooperation.

Different countries had different political and legal cultures, different traditions of police power, different levels of concern for individual rights to privacy and protection from the state. The reach and sophistication of Al Qaeda was underestimated.

"The problem was bigger than we thought," a senior British official said.

In Britain and Germany, security and immigration laws are now being changed and toughened, and traditional protections for religion-based communities, including those that preach hatred, are being diluted.

But these laws amount to a belated reaction. By following the path of Mr. Beghal from the time he first came to the attention of French authorities eight years ago until his confession, a picture emerges that helps explain how the tranquillity of the United States was shattered three-and-a-half months ago.

A Radical's Journey: After Immigration, Jihad Offers Meaning

Mr. Beghal's journey is typical of that followed by thousands of Islamic radicals in Europe, who find meaning in jihad after lives of alienation. Born in 1965 in Algeria, Mr. Beghal was brought to a gritty suburb of Paris as a child.

He grew up there in the public housing projects of Corbeil-Essonnes, where his name, until October, was still on the intercom of the first-floor apartment of building C-5. In some ways, Mr. Beghal integrated well. He married a French woman, Sylvie, with whom he has three boys. He speaks flawless French.

But like many immigrants he was stuck on the bottom, drifting between menial jobs in grimy food stalls in an outdoor market near Paris. For a man with intelligence, charisma and a penchant for leadership, it was a frustrating existence.

According to intelligence officials, he began to frequent the mosques in the projects, where he was exhorted to build the new Islamic society and where he heard Western society excoriated for its decadence, selfishness and godlessness.

He learned about Muslims in Bosnia, Chechnya, the West Bank and Gaza Strip and Iraq. As an Algerian he was also painfully aware of the annulment of the Algerian elections in 1991 when Islamic parties swept to victory only to be denied power. France played a pivotal role in backing the military government that broke the Islamic insurgency.

"In the suburbs many people belong to the Algerian network although they are French nationals," said Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, the French magistrate-prosecutor who specializes in investigating terrorist organizations. "They have no job. They have no information, no hope for the future. One day they meet a guy who is interesting, who has good knowledge of Islam. They tell him, `I can give you something, a task for you, for the future.' They explain Islam. They bring a global conception of their life, teach them a skill and they say, `We have a goal for you in the future.' They say, `You can continue to deceive, continue to forge papers, but now you do it as a sign of the measure of God, for Allah.' "

In 1994, Mr. Beghal was picked up in a police sweep of Algerian Islamic radicals who were waging a terrorist campaign inside France. It is not clear whether he was imprisoned.

Many Islamic radicals in France have prison records. The French refuse to release figures on those of North African descent in the prison system, but social workers estimate that it runs as high as 70 percent. The prisons have become more efficient recruiting grounds than the mosques.

"Prison is a good indoctrination center for the Islamic radicals, much better than the outside," said a French Interior Ministry official. "There are about 300 Islamic radicals in prisons in Paris, and they spend a lot of time converting the criminals to Islam."

After his first encounter with the French police, Mr. Beghal threw himself into work on behalf of militant Islam. He began to speak in small storefront mosques and Islamic centers. He raised money for Muslims fighting in Chechnya and Bosnia. Then, one night in 1997, he packed his wife and children in a car and left for London.

A Terrorist Vortex: Radicals' Plots Hatched in London

It was a trajectory similar to that of several leaders of Islamic networks in Europe. London is filled with Arab dissident groups, many of which fled there from Beirut during the 1975-1991 civil war in Lebanon. Others had fled the repression in countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Many of the Muslim terrorist plots that have plagued Europe and the United States have had crucial ties with clerics in Britain. The perpetrators of three plots - the failed attempt to blow up the American Embassy in Paris, the World Trade Center attack and the assassination of Mr. Massoud - all had London in common. Several of the people involved had met there, forging ties that would be cemented in Afghan camps.

In London, Mr. Beghal met another French child of immigrants, Zacarias Moussaoui, according to British intelligence officials and members of two London mosques. While there is no evidence that Mr. Beghal had any direct ties with the September attacks, Mr. Moussaoui had a connection to the Hamburg cell of Mr. Atta.

Now under arrest in the United States, Mr. Moussaoui is believed by investigators to have been selected to be the 20th hijacker.

It was from London that Mr. Beghal made frequent trips to Europe, including Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and France. He built up a coterie of followers, several of whom would go with him to Afghanistan to train. While he was in France in 1999, French authorities picked him up and questioned him about his activities.

When he was in Britain, the French received reports from British intelligence about his activities. Mr. Beghal, like Mr. Moussaoui, frequented the mosque of Abu Qatada, a 41-year-old Palestinian from Jordan, sentenced to life imprisonment there for involvement in bombings. The cleric fought in Afghanistan and was granted political asylum in Britain in 1994.

Abu Qatada, born Omar Mohamed Othman, is described as Al Qaeda's "spiritual guide." Videotapes of some of his sermons were found in Mr. Atta's apartment.

Mr. Beghal and Mr. Moussaoui also attended the Finsbury Park mosque, in north London, where Sheik Abu Hamza al-Masri preaches jihad and the overthrow of the impure governments of Islamic states like Saudi Arabia, whose leaders they view as betrayers of Islam because they have allowed American troops to be stationed on Saudi soil.

Mr. Beghal was often seen with Abu Walid, the right-hand man of Mr. Qatada, intelligence officials said. He became part of a circle with Mr. Moussaoui and Kamel Daoudi, another Algerian-born Frenchman whom Mr. Beghal later recruited for his plot to blow up the American Embassy in Paris.

Mr. Beghal and Mr. Daoudi were friends with Jerome Courtailler, a French convert to Islam, who lived in London as Mr. Moussaoui's roommate. Another friend of Mr. Moussaoui, Xavier Djaffo, another French Arab, died fighting in Chechnya in 1998.

Borderless Rebels: Autonomous Cells Re-Form With Ease

The capture of Mr. Beghal in July was no accident. He had been under surveillance for two years. The French intelligence services, after a wave of bombings and attacks by Islamic radicals in France in the early 1990's, were better equipped than most to follow potential terrorists like Mr. Beghal. Their prosecuting judges have enormous authority to order surveillance on suspects. While American agencies have too few Arabic speakers to translate intercepted conversations, the French have separate translating units for the 20 Algerian dialects alone.

But even as the French broke the Algerians terrorist groups, they and officials in other countries began to face a far deadlier, multinational terrorist mutation.

As efforts in the 1980's and early 1990's to overthrow the governments in Algeria, Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia stumbled, the focus of many Islamic rebel groups shifted away from their home countries toward a transnational war against the West, especially the United States.

Pan-Islamists groups gravitated toward each other. They were inspired by the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan to the mujahedeen or Islamic holy warriors. They were also encouraged by the Islamic revolution in Iran. Meanwhile, Western economic sanctions against Iraq, the Russian war in Chechnya and the growing acceptance and power of Israel fueled their anger.

But no longer did they meet only in mosques or Islamic centers or stay within structured groups, all habits that made them easier to track and destroy. Rather, they broke into autonomous cells that, to mask their activities, did not show outward signs of traditional Muslim piety and had only loose connections to one another.

Many even adopted the outward habits of the West, drinking and dating in the belief that jihad required such deception. The new terrorist cells became a huge intelligence headache, since many carried out one attack, dissolved and re-formed with new members across the porous European borders.

"For these groups, there are no borders," said Judge Bruguière. "They may consider it better or easier to have explosive materials in some countries and support bases in other countries, electronic matters in others, and financial support - forged papers, or forged credit cards and so on - in still others."

Most of those in the European cells were equipped with European passports, some of them false, making movement between states easy. Various responsibilities were divided among different parts of Europe, with many cells specializing in narrow and specific tasks, French and Spanish intelligence officials said.

The centers for forged documents were in Spain and Belgium. Spain also seemed to be a frequent meeting point for operatives and a source of funds through petty crime and credit card fraud. (In apartment raids, equipment was seized that is used to alter the magnetic strips on the cards.)

A card stolen anywhere in Europe could be shipped overnight, copied 10 times and given to members who could run up several thousand dollars in bills before the number was reported stolen, intelligence officials said. Usually the men bought electronic gear or gasoline, which could be resold for cash.

The leader of the Al Qaeda cell arrested in Madrid in November, Eddin Barakat Yarkas, known as Abu Dahdah, was said by Spanish authorities to be the chief bin Laden aide in Europe. He was known to have made dozens of trips across the continent, including 20 to London. His number was found in Mr. Atta's papers and in the diary of Said Bahaji, one of his Hamburg roommates.

Phone conversations to Abu Dahdah had been taped, including one on Aug. 27 that picked up a phrase used by a North African named Shakur. He said, "In our lessons we have entered the field of aviation and we have cut the bird's throat." The police believe now that this was a reference to the World Trade Center plot. Other clues found among the Madrid cell's apartments were videotapes on airplanes and a CD-ROM on the infrastructure of an American airport.

Britain was generally used as a way station for those sent to Afghanistan. France was more often the home of the foot soldiers who carried out the attacks.

A cell uncovered in Milan, where Italian authorities recorded conversations by a Tunisian, Essid Sami Ben Khemais who trained in Afghanistan, showed that some operatives were little more than Osama bin Laden hopefuls, aspiring radicals who had never had direct contact with Al Qaeda but who reached out to fight on its behalf anyway. They contacted radical groups in Germany, Britain and Spain in the hope of being brought into the network. Mr. Khemais was arrested in April.

The cells also mutated, changing their style frequently, intelligence officials say.

"We may have a grasp of some cells, what they did, but we can't use this knowledge for the future," Judge Bruguière said. "Everything changes. If you have good knowledge of the network today, it's not operational tomorrow. I compare these networks to AIDS. It's a virus. It's a moving shape. It's impossible to grasp it and to destroy it."

Certainly, Germany missed some important clues. Mr. Atta, a leader of the Sept. 11 plot was registered in Germany with three different passports and no one noticed.

With no global ambitions outside Europe and careful of their own business interests in the Middle East, the Germans tended to be more worried about domestic terrorism and neo-Nazis. Given Germany's Nazi past and its strict laws protecting privacy, the German prosecutor was more meticulous than his French counterpart about requiring substantial evidence before authorizing arrests and investigations.

The German police, in 2000, did smash a terrorist cell in Frankfurt plotting an attack on Strasbourg, France. But officials earlier that same year dropped an inquiry into the group in Hamburg that was busy planning the Sept. 11 attacks. The federal prosecutor felt there was insufficient evidence to continue surveillance on the apartment where Mr. Atta and at least four other plotters lived. Mr. Moussaoui was apparently not on any American watch list; nor was Mr. Atta.

A Transnational Mix: Sleeper Cells Bond and Wait to Strike

In November 2000, Mr. Beghal left London for Afghanistan, intelligence officials said, shortly after Al Qaeda operatives bombed the destroyer Cole off the Yemeni coast, killing 17 American sailors. The 1998 attacks on the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were considered resounding successes and the American responses tepid.

Mr. Beghal was already the leader of an eclectic group of followers, most of whom appeared to move easily in European society. The transnational mix included French converts to Islam nicknamed the "Gauls" or "the white moors," along with students, petty criminals, computer specialists. All looked to Mr. Beghal. He would soon be anointed to lead what would have been an audacious strike in the heart of Paris.

"He oversaw a group of mixed nationalities, although there were a fair number of Tunisians, who are some of the most zealous militants," said the French Interior Ministry official. "These people had time in Afghanistan to get to know each other and plan activities. They ate the same food. They lived in the same conditions. It is like the bonding that comes from military service. Once these groups return to Europe their loyalty is to the cell, even if members come from different countries. They forget their past, their origins."

After he departed for Afghanistan, French intelligence officials lost track of Mr. Beghal. They put out a watch for him, but while they wanted him stopped, they did not want him arrested because they hoped to follow him.

As it turned out, he headed last July to Morocco, where he was to pick up $50,000 to carry out the Paris attack, and move on through Spain. But the Central Intelligence Agency, which had put out a warning of a possible terrorist attack against American interests a month before, insisted he be held and questioned.

Mr. Beghal's lawyer, Fabrice Dubest, said that after his arrest in Dubai, he was repeatedly interrogated about strikes against American targets.

According to French intelligence transcripts of his interrogation, Mr. Beghal said he planned to buy a van at the Salon de l'Auto car fair in Paris. A former soccer player, Nizar Trabelsi, born in Tunisia and living in Brussels, would drive the van into the embassy compound and blow it up in a suicide mission.

Operatives in Brussels had already begun to collect chemicals for transport to Paris, French intelligence officials said. In the final weeks before the planned attack, Mr. Beghal intended to rent a house, start a business as a cover for the activities of the group and open a small cybercafe so he could communicate in code with Mr. bin Laden's operatives in Afghanistan. Most codes, French intelligence officials said, were hidden in pictures transmitted over the Internet. The final approval to strike, they said, was to come from Afghanistan.

"Beghal did not give us the names of the other Islamic terrorists in Europe he was working with, but he gave us addresses and physical descriptions," said a French official. "All of them used pseudonyms."

Mr. Beghal was known as Abu Hamza and Mr. Trabelsi was known as "le Noir," French intelligence officials said.

"We checked our files and matched his descriptions to those we suspected of involvement in terrorist activities," said a French intelligence official. "It was a perfect fit. Then we began to follow everyone."

On Sept. 23, shortly before he was turned over to the French, Mr. Beghal signed 32 documents in Arabic with 16 questions that summarized his confessions. Once in France, Mr. Beghal retracted his confession, telling his lawyer that he was forced to sign the papers, which he had not been allowed to read, after being tortured.

Some European officials say that after the arrests in Europe and the collapse of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the group has been crippled for now. A Spanish police commander estimated recently that "probably 50" members of Al Qaeda had been jailed in the European sweeps. He expressed confidence that many others "fled and are now fearful because of the information we have." He is convinced, he said, that "the hard core has been jailed, and I don't believe there are other cells."

But others say they are bracing for a new wave of attacks. The nature of sleeper cells - people apparently integrated into society - makes it hard to know.

French officials estimate that as many as 100 French Muslims of North African descent were fighting alongside Mr. bin Laden. They say that after escaping to Pakistan they are working their way back to France.

"These fighters did not cross into Pakistan and head for the mosques," said a senior French intelligence official. "They are headed back here to set off bombs."


-------- OTHER

-------- energy

[To reply, mailto:letters@washingtontimes.com - et]

Oil has the kick

Washington Times
Charles Rousseaux,
December 28, 2001
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/ed-column-2001122818174.htm

For many of us, a cup of Starbucks constitutes our most important source of energy. We depend on it as much as we do another anthracite, energetic fuel - oil.

About 60 percent of American oil is imported, 25 percent from the Middle East. Even under peaceful conditions, it's a precarious proposition, one that the war on terrorism has again highlighted.

One energy fix often offered by environmental groups and left-of-center ideologues is increasing America's dependence on renewable sources of energy, such as wind power, solar power, geothermal power and burned biomass. Unfortunately, while renewables are touted as clean, safe and affordable, they are actually far more similar to a decaffeinated cup of Starbucks - disappointingly underpowered, somewhat environmentally benign, and barely affordable.

Only about ten percent of the energy Americans use comes from renewables. Hydropower generates about half of that; contributions of wind and solar power are almost negligible. Even though America is forecast to need a third more energy in 2020 than it does now, renewables are actually expected to loose market share over that period, according to projections made by the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Cost is the primary reason. The EIA report noted, "Generally higher projected costs are a disadvantage for renewables relative to fossil-fueled technologies over the forecast period as a whole." At a recent, first-of-a-kind conference on expanding renewable energy on public lands co-hosted by the Energy Department and Interior Department, David Garman, the assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy, suggested hopefully, "Renewable sources generally cost more [than fossil fuels] . . . but the good news is that they cost far less than they once did."

While that is certainly true, it doesn't mean Americans can afford to rely on renewables to fuel their daily energy needs, any more than they can Starbucks (and make that a double espresso). Conference speaker Dean R. Gosselin, a former president of the American Wind Energy Association, admitted that electricity generated by wind power costs at least a third more than that generated by fossil fuels. Ditto geothermal power, according to an extremely sympathetic paper presented to the conference by Jane C.S. Long, dean of the Mackay School of Mines, and Lisa Shevenell of the Nevada Bureau of Mines. Solar power doesn't do much better.

And while renewables seem far cleaner than fossil fuels, they also come with environmental drawbacks. Windmills have an unfortunate habit of endangering birds, especially those who don't realize that they are endangered. Burning biofuels, whether weeds or woodchips, is like burning coal 300 million years or so too early - the emissions problems are similar. Many environmentalists dislike hydropower because of the damage that those turbines do to fish.

Moreover, unlike the corner Starbucks, renewables are often found in inconvenient, environmentally pristine areas. Nor (especially unlike espresso) are they the most reliable sources of energy: Winds don't always blow as hard as expected, and darkness and cloud cover can dim anyone's enthusiasm for solar power.

The bottom line is that all sources of energy come with inherent drawbacks, and none of them come for free. It's not a question of economics - its a question of physics. The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy is conserved throughout a system - if you want the energy of a cappuccino, you have to either take it from Peter or buy it from Paul. Even worse, the Second Law of Thermodynamics makes it clear that some of that energy will invariably be wasted. There will be some caffeinated sludge at the bottom of the cup that you never can get to - not matter how hard you suck on the straw. Too much espresso, and the energy that should be used on writing editorials, is instead lost in talking to coworkers at 100 miles an hour.

That's approximately 1/1000th of the speed that federal agencies often move in permitting renewable energy projects on public lands. Jonathan Weisgall, the president of the Geothermal Energy Association complained in his conference testimony, "In state after state, there continues to be a de facto moratorium on geothermal development on public lands as federal agencies fail to take timely action on lease applications." One of the most notorious examples cited was the CalEnergy Corporation's attempt to develop geothermal resources on national forest lands in northern California. The project finally received a denial from the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service after a 21- year waiting period.

Ultimately, renewables will probably continue to play only a limited role in the nation's energy future. Small solar panel units may well be cost-effective in isolated areas where building conventional power infrastructure is too expensive. Hydropower will continue to be important in areas with rivers running through them, regardless of how hyper it makes Robert Redford.

Yet even if costs continue to come down and bureaucracies behave, renewables simply won't reduce America's dependence on foreign fossil fuels - no matter how much taxpayer money is "invested" in them. Those who say otherwise are simply wasting energy (and make that a triple espresso).

On the other hand, perhaps Washington should be turned into a monument to renewable energy: Giant windmill blades could be added to the Washington Monument; solar panels might be placed atop the Jefferson Memorial and the Lincoln Monument; biomass power could be generated by the burning of Internal Revenue Service files; geothermal energy could be supplied by either the leaks of deep sources or the steam rising from the heads of incessantly delayed Metro riders; hydropower could be supplied by the Army Corps of Engineer's sludgy releases into the Potomac. Best of all, the entire Mall could be turned into a plantation for Starbucks coffee.

Charles Rousseaux is an editorial writer and commentary editor for The Washington Times. E-mail: crousseaux@washingtontimes.com.


-------- activists

S-1766, PRICE ANDERSON ACT- TAKE ACTION NOW

Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001
Sender: owner-nukenet@envirolink.org

Both your Senators can be reached through the Congressional switchboard at: 202-224-3121. Please call them and tell them NO to S-1766. The nuclear industry is a catastrophe waiting to happen, nuclear power plants are stationary nuclear weapons and even if these and other problems like nuclear waste & low level rad didn't exist, if an industry can't stand on it's own 2 feet, especially since 1957- 44 years- then it dosen't deserve to exist. We do live in a capitalist country and world.

Please dissemenate this as widely as possible to as many interested parties as possible and ask them to do likewise. Our Senate needs to hear from us NOW. No to S-1766.

From Mitzi Bowman:

Take action starting Jan. 2. Contact your U.S.Senators and tell them to vote NO on Extension to the Price Anderson Act (S1766, Energy Policy Act of 2002). For those of you who know what this is, get on the phone and email and tell the nation. The Senate will reconvene Jan.23, as I'm told, and this bill is on the agenda having been passed by voice vote in the House. Remember the number S1766.

For those who don't know, please read on: In the mid-50s, under the Eisenhower administration, there was growing and vocal opposition to continued research, development and testing of nuclear (atomic) weapons. In order to split the anti-nuclear protest movement in two, nuclear power vs nuclear weapons (they were successful) and pacify public anxiety, the "Peaceful Atom" was conceived - Nuclear Power. But there was a catch.

No insurance company would come forward to cover this obviously hazardous technology. Utilities hesitated. The administration used the carrot and the stick to persuade them. 1. Do it or we'll nationalise electicity production and build the reactors. 2. The Price Anderson Act was passed which put a cap on liability, and the bulk of what was to be covered would be paid by the taxpayers.

It was supposed to last only 10 years until the nuclear industry could stand on its own feet, BUT that didn't happen. One thousand plants were expected to be built by 2000AD. Public opposition and the complexity and cost of the technology kept the number to about 103, despite government subsidised R&D and waste "management". And you and I have been paying for this and insurance ever since. The PA act has been renewed periodically.

If you don't want this to continue, act now. It's especially important because there is a new subsidised generation of nukes on the drawing board, the Pebble Bed Modular Reactors, smaller and without containments to protect them from sabotage, and because of a new law that limits public participation in decision-making, they can be clustered on older nuclear sites, in cities, anywhere. If we stop Price Anderson now, they will not be covered by insurance and may not be built at all. The nuclear industry is lobbying hard for this extended indemnification. Tell your legislators that you want S1766 voted down and call for repeal of the Price Anderson Act. No more nukes, power OR weapons.

Mitzi and Peter Bowman, Coordinators, Don't Waste Connecticut. For more information, (203)389-2067, mailto:upthesun@cshore.com mailto:cindy@nirs.org (202)328-0002 Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) or mailto:jfriedeco@aol.com People's Action for Clean Energy (PACE) in Canton, Ct. MOTHERSALERT HOME PAGE: http://www.mothersalert.org http://www.mothersalert.org/moreinfo.html

----

Stun grenades used on West Bank

From AP
28dec01
http://www.dailytelegraph.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,3503402%255E401,00.html

SOLDIERS have fired tear gas and stun grenades into a crowd of European protesters a few hundred metres from a West Bank compound where Yasser Arafat has been marooned for more than three weeks.

No injuries were reported. The day before, demonstrators from the same group said police punched and wrestled them to the ground as they tried to enter the Gaza Strip for a two-day solidarity visit with Palestinians. The police said no violence was used to turn them back.

Some Israelis have denounced the foreign demonstrators as publicity-seeking provocateurs.

In the centre of Ramallah today, about 40 demonstrators from Italy, France and England marched toward the ring of Israeli tanks outside Arafat's West Bank headquarters after a joint demonstration with several hundred Palestinians. The Palestinian leader has been confined there since December 3, when Israel destroyed his helicopters in a reprisal raid after Palestinian suicide bomb attacks in Jerusalem and Haifa.

The demonstrators stood with their hands up in front of a row of Israeli tanks and army jeeps.

A soldier with a gas mask strapped to his face popped out of a hatch in the roof of an army jeep, levelled his rifle and fired tear gas canisters into the crowd.

The protesters - some with cotton stuffed into their nostrils and protecting their faces with scarves - ducked and disappeared behind thick white plumes of gas. Someone in the crowd hurled one of the tear gas bombs back at the soldiers.

The Israeli military said several hundred demonstrators approached Israeli forces, throwing rocks. The soldiers used riot dispersal methods to protect themselves and restore order, the military spokesman's office said.

Melanie Jarman, 30, from Manchester, England, said she was overcome by the gas. "I couldn't see anymore. Everyone panicked and started to run," she said.

Jarman, a magazine writer, came to the region for two weeks to join the group of foreign demonstrators to show support for Palestinians.

"It's very important to challenge the (Israeli) occupation and to say that the occupation is killing Palestinians and cannot continue," Jarman said. "The international solidarity actions give people hope." Israel and the Palestinians have been locked in violence for 15 months, after peace talks broke down.

The Palestinians did not accept an Israeli proposal of a state in all of the Gaza Strip, more than 90 per cent of the West Bank and a foothold in Jerusalem.


-------

------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)

------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!