------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Re: Has the Doomsday Clock moved?
U.S. Lacks Stockpile of Special Drug
DU Balkans coverup
Any mistake can trigger a nuclear war
India, Pakistan prepare for war
Israeli Activists Urge Army to Probe Civilian Slayings

MILITARY
Afghan fighters roughed us up as U.S. soldiers watched
Deal signed on Afghan force
Rout in Desert Marked Turning Point of War
Marines Said to Search for Taliban Leader Mullah Omar
Gulf Arabs Tell Iraq to Allow U.N. Arms Inspections
Turkish troops go after PKK in northern Iraq
Blankets allowed to cross into territories
N. Korea poses military threats to South
Islamabad makes arrest as peace offer
Kashmir is part of the mess that Britain left behind
Airborne Troops Relieving Marines at Kandahar Base

POLICE / PRISONERS
Diplomats Complain of Secret Detainees
Virginia executions reach 17-year low
Al-Qaida Files Revealed on PC

ENERGY AND OTHER
Tortoise Holds Up Army Training
Forgiveness Boosts Health; Effect Varies with Age

ACTIVISTS
Vigil at Indian and Pakistani Embassies?
A Happy New Year from Nuclear Free Kobe
ICIS-Institute for Cooperation in Space



-------- NUCLEAR

Re: Has the Doomsday Clock moved?

This message from bulletin@bullatomsci.org

Our board of directors met and had a discussion about the clock on Nov. 16-17. We do not have anything new to say about the clock at this time. However, if and when we decide to move the hands, we will issue a statement at a press conference in Chicago that will, if history is any guide, receive significant worldwide press coverage.

Stephen Schwartz Publisher/Executive Director Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists/Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science World Wide Web: www.thebulletin.org

-------- accidents

U.S. Lacks Stockpile of Special Drug
Anti-Radiation Doses Goal Unmet Since '79

By Justin Gillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 31, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42929-2001Dec30?language=printer

A generation ago, as a nuclear disaster unfolded in central Pennsylvania and 140,000 people fled the area, pharmaceutical executives were rousted from bed in the middle of the night by a plea for help.

At the federal government's request, they cranked up a production line in Illinois at 3 a.m., and hours later, thousands of bottles of potassium iodide, an anti-radiation drug, were secretly rushed to Harrisburg by military jet. Ultimately the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island was brought under control and the drug was not needed, but it was a close call. When it was over, policymakers in Washington vowed to stockpile the drug, saying they would not be caught short again.

It never happened.

Terrorists have spoken longingly of their desire to blow up the United States' nuclear plants and poison the land with radiation. But if a nuclear disaster were to occur today, whether by terrorist strike or otherwise, the government might well be in the same position it was in1979, trying to scare up supplies of the drug on short notice.

Potassium iodide is often billed on the Internet as a panacea for a nuclear emergency. It is nothing of the sort, offering no protection for most types of radiation exposure. But there is strong scientific evidence that it can protect the thyroid gland, the most radiation-sensitive part of the body, from absorbing trace amounts of radioactive iodine, particularly in young children.

Despite that finding, there has long been a serious debate about how valuable stockpiles of the drug would be in a real-world emergency, since it is most effective when taken within a couple of hours of radiation exposure. Unless people already had it in their houses, skeptics argue, getting it to them that quickly would be difficult, at best. Most European countries and four U.S. states stockpile the drug for general public use, while the rest of the states and the federal government do not.

That policy is under renewed scrutiny since the Sept. 11 attacks and the anthrax scare that followed. The federal government was better prepared for the anthrax emergency, in fact, than it would be to distribute potassium iodide for radiation. It had stockpiled millions of doses of antibiotics and was able to draw on those stores when thousands of exposed people needed preventive medicine.

The lack of a potassium iodide stockpile irks many doctors and other experts who have delved into the issue.

"The first thing is, there ain't none available," said David Becker, a Cornell University specialist in thyroid diseases. "Some of us in organizations like the American Thyroid Association have been yelling and screaming for 15 years about this. It seems to me it doesn't make any sense for the U.S. not to have any at all."

Potassium iodide is not expensive, nor is it difficult to manufacture or store for long periods. The drug is approved for thyroid protection by the Food and Drug Administration, a position the agency reiterated earlier this month.

One reason for the lack of a stockpile is that, however cheap it may be, potassium iodide is also controversial.

The nuclear power industry, which stocks potassium iodide to protect workers in its plants, has long opposed a large public stockpile, carrying as it would the implication that nuclear power might be unsafe.

Some experts charged with protecting the public from radiation oppose it, too, fearing the drug would be seen as a cure-all. These experts contend that evacuation and careful monitoring of the food supply would be better ways to protect public health.

In the halls of Congress and elsewhere in the nation, these arguments are being scrutinized anew. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, after going back and forth for years, has adopted a policy that is mildly favorable toward potassium iodide. The Health and Human Services Department is considering whether to add the drug to its national anti-terrorism stockpile.

Under the new NRC policy, states must decide whether to tap NRC funds to create regional or local stockpiles. This means a public discussion of the drug and its potential usefulness is likely to occur in virtually every state over the next year.

The drug is a hot political issue in some communities. Alabama, Arizona, Maine and Tennessee already have some form of stockpiling. The citizens of Duxbury, Mass., who live near a nuclear plant, passed a stockpiling plan last year. Vermont recently pledged an expanded stockpile, and a vigorous debate is underway throughout New England and in some towns in New York.

The World Health Organization recommends stockpiling for every country with nuclear reactors operating within or near its borders. Ireland just announced plans to send the drug to every household in the country.

Potassium iodide availability is one of those issues that rarely rises to public awareness, but it has a long underground history that has played out in Washington and in state capitals over decades. The arguments being heard today are familiar ones to participants in that debate, with fear of terrorism as the new twist.

"In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, it's déjà vuall over again," said Jerome Halperin, the man who rousted pharmaceutical executives from bed during the Three Mile Island crisis. He was then an officer of the FDA, and he has a hard time believing the nation has no stockpile 22 years after the federal government promised to build one.

"It's the appropriate, rational, public-health-preparedness thing to do," he said.

"Why wouldn't we expect it?"

But others are skeptical of the value of stockpiling. Illinois, for instance, has 11 nuclear reactors operating on six sites, more than any other state, and it has made some of the most elaborate plans in the nation for responding to a radiation emergency. They call for people to evacuate or take shelter when necessary to escape a radiation plume, but they do not call for potassium iodide.

Most other states that have considered the issue have adopted the same position.

The Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade association for the nuclear industry that has long opposed stockpiling, says it can live with the new NRC policy, but its experts remain skeptical of the real-world value of potassium iodide. "Concern No. 1 is that people not get confused that this is some sort of panacea for any kind of radiation exposure," said Ralph Andersen, chief health physicist at the nuclear institute.

The value -- and the limitations -- of potassium iodide have been known to researchers for decades, and there is little dispute on the scientific points.

Nuclear reactors produce many radioactive substances that can harm people.

One, radioactive iodine, poses a particular worry because the human thyroid gland uses iodine as a fundamental building block of hormones that play critical roles in metabolism. The body cannot distinguish the safe form of iodine present in food and table salt from the radioactive form that comes from nuclear reactors.

It has been known since the 1950s that young children are acutely sensitive to radioactive iodine, but the point was illustrated dramatically when the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine blew up in 1986, scattering radiation across hundreds of miles.

For those living at a distance from the plant, virtually the only known health effect has been a huge spike in cases of thyroid cancer among children. At least 2,000 "excess" cases in Ukraine, Belarus and nearby areas have been attributed to Chernobyl radiation. Thyroid cancer can usually be treated, but that may require surgery, regular monitoring and lifetime medication.

The idea behind potassium iodide is that the thyroid gland can store only so much iodine. A potassium iodide pill given near the time of radiation exposure floods the gland with safe iodine and reduces or eliminates the absorption of radioactive iodine. Potassium iodide is the same chemical used to add iodine to table salt, but the pills contain higher doses. Anyone can buy the pills, though they are not widely available in stores and most people do not know about them.

Potassium iodide can protect people only from radioactive iodine, not other kinds of radioactive fallout. Bearing that in mind, skeptics say the much-preferred course, in an accident, would be to get people out of the radioactive plume or into shelters. Advocates of the drug tend to agree, they but argue that if evacuation plans went awry, potassium iodide would be better than nothing.

Whatever the merits of these positions, there is no doubt that during Three Mile Island, the nation's closest brush with nuclear disaster, the government wound up scrambling to round up supplies of the drug at the last minute.

In that episode, a partial "meltdown" at a nuclear plant led to the release of small amounts of radioactive material, including iodine. For several days there was fear the reactor would explode, and state evacuation plans turned out to be woefully inadequate. Given the prospect of widespread radiation exposure, the FDA decided midway through the disaster to rush a supply of potassium iodide to Pennsylvania.

Hunkered down at an FDA emergency center, Halperin and colleagues spent the evening of March 30, 1979, desperately calling pharmaceutical and chemical companies. Finally Mallinckrodt Inc. of St. Louis said it had bulk drug on hand and could package it at a plant in Illinois. The first bottles were flown to Harrisburg the next evening by Air Force jet.

To forestall a riot, no public announcement was made about the drug. The emergency passed without it being used, and eventually the stockpile grew old and was discarded.

A presidential commission that investigated the accident, appalled by this frantic episode, recommended broad stockpiling of the drug in the areas around nuclear reactors, and the NRC agreed. But as memories of the emergency faded, the agency backed out of that commitment, and the issue has been periodically debated ever since.

Many opponents of stockpiling acknowledge that Chernobyl provides compelling evidence of the risk of thyroid cancer from a radiation disaster, but they say a comparable degree of exposure would be unlikely in this country.

When Chernobyl blew up, the Soviet Union spent days lying about the accident and failed to halt distribution of contaminated food. There is evidence that much of the radioactive exposure came from this failure. The radioactive iodine fell on fields, cows ate the grass, and children drank milk from the cows. Safety experts say the United States, by contrast, would almost certainly move quickly to block radioactive food.

The most recent federal policy change on potassium iodide came before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, but the issue has taken on a new urgency since those attacks.

The change was initiated from within the NRC itself. Peter Crane, then a lawyer on the agency's staff, was a thyroid-cancer victim who thought the failure to stockpile could not be defended. He filed a petition as a member of the public in 1995, then spent years prodding the agency. It eventually adopted a compromise under which it has pledged to pay for potassium iodide for states that want it.

The NRC is still finalizing plans to implement that policy. Meanwhile, the Health and Human Services Department is considering buying some of the drug to add to its own anti-terrorism stockpiles. However, there is debate about whether the drug could be distributed from these regional stockpiles quickly enough to do any good.

The most aggressive plan would be to follow several European countries in distributing the drug to every household. But American experience suggests that would be a difficult policy to maintain over the long term. Tennessee launched such a program in the early 1980s for people living near nuclear plants, but participation has dropped to about 5 percent of households.

Tennessee maintains stockpiles near its emergency shelters, however, and is confident it could make the drug available quickly to large numbers of people.

"It doesn't seem like very much of a burden, what we're doing," said Ruth Hagstrom, the state health administrator who would give the order if potassium iodide ever had to be used in Tennessee. "We're sort of happy with the way we do things, and we wonder why everybody else doesn't do it, too."


-------- depleted uranium

DU Balkans coverup

by ROBERT JAMES PARSONS,
December 31, 2001
http://www.thenation.com
http://urbana.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=3601&group=webcast

Last November, when stories first appeared in the European press of deaths from leukemia among Italian soldiers who had served in the Balkans, alarm bells started ringing across the Continent. The leukemia was--and still is--believed by many independent experts to be caused by radiation from depleted uranium (DU) arms used in the Balkans during the war. Since most European countries are members of NATO, most of them have troops stationed in or near areas believed to be contaminated.

In France, the February 2000 broadcast of a documentary about DU triggered a steadily increasing demand for more and better information. At the same time, reports were surfacing in Belgium of illness among that country's troops stationed in the Balkans. Early this year, Spain and Greece announced they will screen their soldiers for contamination, and Portugal has decided to remove its troops entirely from Kosovo.

Country after country summoned US ambassadors or dispatched delegations to NATO headquarters in Brussels in search of more information about DU. But NATO--which in effect means the United States--has stuck to the Pentagon's oft-repeated refrain: If there is a problem, soldiers' health should certainly be studied, but it is impossible that DU is involved because its radiation is so low as to be utterly harmless.

A major reason for Pentagon evasiveness is the almost 200,000 Gulf War vets apparently suffering from the variety of illnesses lumped together as Gulf War Syndrome who have filed claims against the VA for service-related illnesses. Three-quarters of that group are now classified by the VA as disabled, and almost 7,000 of the original total have died.

In the case of contamination by Agent Orange in Vietnam, the Pentagon ended up admitting claims from anybody who had served in the theater after use of the defoliant had begun. If this were repeated in the case of Gulf War Syndrome, most of the almost 700,000 vets who served on the ground in the Persian Gulf would be eligible to press claims.

Further, in addition to helping solve the serious problem of what to do with nuclear waste, DU weapons play a key role in the US military's concept of a "no loss" war. If such arms performed brilliantly against tanks in the Iraq war, they performed equally brilliantly against the Serbian regime's huge underground installations ("hardened targets" in military jargon) in Kosovo, where NATO has admitted to using some nine and a half tons of DU. Hence, far from planning to remove DU from its arsenal anytime soon, the Pentagon wants to increase its use.

Thus, duly attentive to its own interests, the US government has consistently pressured its NATO allies and the UN--which has assumed responsibility for Kosovo--to keep the lid on DU contamination investigations (to the extent that such inquiries cannot be thwarted outright). Such pressure, however, has not stopped information from slowly leaking out, as evidenced by the French documentary and the reports from Belgium. But until the Italian government decided in December to launch an official inquiry into DU use in Kosovo, there was no general awareness of the danger among the European public. Significantly, Britain, whose government has long been at odds with its own veterans over Gulf War Syndrome and is the only country other than the United States to admit to using DU, has been a low-key but insistent supporter of the Pentagon line.

Much, in fact, is already known about DU. Contrary to what the Pentagon keeps insisting, the "depleted" in the name depleted uranium does not indicate uranium bereft of all but weak, hence harmless, radiation. Rather, it is depleted of its contents of the uranium isotope U-235, which, because it is fissionable, is used for bombs and for fuel in nuclear reactors. What's left, U-238, is 40 percent less radioactive but still extremely dangerous. Anybody handling DU metal must wear clothing resistant to high-level radiation, hermetically sealed and equipped with a respirator.

The Pentagon itself knows the dangers. On July 22, 1990, the US Army made public an exhaustive study of armor-piercing DU munitions (quoted in the Military Toxics Project's 2000 report "Don't Look, Don't Find"), which warned of respirable DU oxides, created during combat, that could cause cancer and kidney problems. It further warned that "following combat, the condition of the battlefield and the long-term health risks to natives and combat veterans may become issues in the acceptability of the continued use of DU kinetic energy penetrators for military applications." Nevertheless, since the Gulf War, the Pentagon has spent millions to convince the public--and especially Gulf War veterans--that radiation from DU is essentially harmless.

In May 1999, during the Kosovo war, the UN arranged for representatives of all humanitarian aid agencies involved in the conflict to make an initial assessment of the overall situation in the field. However, the UN Environment Program's report, sounding the alarm on DU contamination, was not made public until it was leaked to this journalist by people within the organization who described themselves as exasperated with UNEP director Klaus Töpfer's willingness, as they saw it, to defer to US foreign policy. According to the sources, the pressure had come directly from Washington, presumably from the Pentagon, through UN headquarters in New York. The leaked report appeared on June 18, 1999, in two Swiss French-language dailies, Le Courrier and La Liberté. Later, at a UN press conference in Geneva, Töpfer denied suppressing the report. Reminded that it had been written up in the press, he said that was proof that it was public information.

Another report, funded by the European Commission and published shortly after the war, made virtually no mention of depleted uranium. However, without identifying them, the report incorporated, verbatim, several paragraphs of the suppressed UNEP report.

Under pressure to do something after the end of the war, UNEP set up a working party, the Balkans Task Force, to make a full report. Töpfer appointed Finland's former Environment Minister Pekka Haavisto to lead it. Haavisto was adamant that depleted uranium was part of the overall pollution picture and could not be left out of the inquiry. When the resulting report was released in October 1999, it was shorn of all but two of its seventy-two pages on DU.

Throughout this period a procession of officials conspicuously uncritical of the US position on DU came to Geneva. These included Dennis McNamara, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees' special envoy to the Balkans, who stressed at a press conference on July 12, 1999, NATO's assurances that depleted uranium posed no problems. Dr. Keith Baverstock of the World Health Organization's regional office for Europe also insisted that there was absolutely no danger, though he added that depleted uranium could cause problems in a battle situation. And former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, now the UN Secretary General's special envoy to the Balkans, curtly stated that depleted uranium was a "nonissue."

After news leaked that the Balkans Task Force had received a targets map from NATO, Töpfer called a meeting in Geneva on March 20, 2000, to consider how to deal with the leak, but on the same day, Le Courrier published the map. The next day Haavisto was allowed to present it to the Geneva media. Töpfer received a second, much more detailed, targets map in early July. Haavisto is said to have become aware of it only in September, at which time he pressed to send a mission as soon as possible into the field to investigate at least some of the target spots before winter set in. Töpfer's response was to postpone any mission until after the October 24 municipal elections in Kosovo, allegedly out of fear that if disquieting information got out it might trigger mass exoduses such as had occurred during the war, thus marring the "democratic" system the "humanitarian war" had created. The mission finally began its investigation in November.

UNEP was far from alone in its timidity. As the world's highest instance of policy-setting in the area of public health and as a member of the UN system, the World Health Organization should have taken the lead in investigating DU. But the WHO is bound by an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)--whose mandate boils down to promoting nuclear power--to obtain the agency's consent whenever it proposes to undertake anything pertaining to radiation and public health. (When questioned by telephone, David Kyd, spokesman for the IAEA, claimed that his agency's mandate did not allow it to investigate DU, adding that DU was, in any case, perfectly harmless.)

Thus it is no surprise that the fact sheet on DU that the WHO announced as being in the works right after the end of the war was quietly canceled. A subsequent general study of DU due out in December 1999 has still not materialized, and a fact sheet hurriedly brought out this past January in response to the European public's outcry is vague, contradictory and at odds with current scientific knowledge about radiation and its effect on humans. When the Balkans Task Force undertook its initial 1999 Kosovo study, the IAEA did the measuring, and no radiation worthy of notice was found.

The November 2000 field assessment mission by the Balkans Task Force, which has just reported its findings, further perpetuates the cover-up. Using WHO radiation safety standards designed for measuring a brief "one event" source of radiation conceived of as hitting the whole body, it concludes that there is no real problem. However, the greatest danger from DU comes from the uranium oxide dust created when the metal hits its target and can then be inhaled. The Swiss government, whose military now cooperates with NATO, paid for the project, and people from a lab run by the Swiss military were part of the team, significant because the lab has echoed the Pentagon in declaring that the whole DU issue is not worthy of discussion. (Switzerland, with a huge Kosovar population that acted like a magnet for refugees during the war, has its own reasons for downplaying the danger.)

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the chief coordinator of humanitarian relief during and immediately after the war, took the contamination threat seriously enough to launch its own inquiries and to issue a directive made available to Le Courrier in early 2000 by Deputy High Commissioner Frederick Barton. Among other things, it lays down rules for personnel in the field: No pregnant women are to be sent to Kosovo, those assigned there must be given the option of another post elsewhere and those ultimately sent must have a note in their file to facilitate any later compensation claims. Barton also made clear on several occasions that efforts had been made to warn the refugees as they were returning to Kosovo--efforts that he said had later been thwarted by the UN administration, by NATO and by the local Albanian political leaders.

Others share this skepticism. Dr. Chris Busby, a low-radiation specialist, recently conducted his own field assessment, whose results were presented to Britain's Royal Society. In addition to finding radiation more than a hundred times higher than natural background levels near target sites, he has concluded that most of the uranium oxide particles are constantly being resuspended in the air, allowing them to be blown by the wind throughout the country and easily inhaled.

For those long critical of US influence in European affairs, whether they are concerned with the Continent's military structure or simply a European identity with reduced US influence, the DU dispute is heaven-sent. The latest UN report, as well as a whitewash from the European Commission a week earlier, far from calming the storm, seem to have intensified mistrust. The extent to which such feelings affect EU public policy will depend on how long the European public keeps up its demand for a reliable explanation of what is behind the "nonissue" now known as Balkans War Syndrome

-------- india / pakistan

Any mistake can trigger a nuclear war

December 31, 2001
By Anwar Iqbal
UPI South Asian Affairs Analyst
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/26122001-113358-5380r.htm

WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 (UPI) -- India and Pakistan are not ready to fight another war. At least not yet. Leaders on both sides want to take their nations as close to a war as possible without actually fighting it. By doing so, they hope to force the other to capitulate.

The objectives are obvious. India wants to settle the Kashmir issue.

Pakistan does not want to settle this 53-year old dispute at this stage when India is in a better position to influence the outcome. Instead it wants to weather the storm and seek a solution when it is in a position to negotiate a more favorable deal with India.

However, such eyeball-to-eyeball situation is always fraught with dangers. Indian and Pakistani leaders may not want a war yet but such excitement and tensions always increase the chance of an accidental war. In a situation like this even a minor incident can lead to, what both governments call the "unthinkable," a nuclear catastrophe.

The current crisis in the Subcontinent is linked to the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the United States. The Indians believe that the 9/11 tragedy has created a strong dislike in the world for guerrilla wars and armed struggles. They want to take advantage of this atmosphere to end insurgency in Kashmir where, according to one estimate, more than 30,000 people have been killed in clashes between Pakistan-backed militants and Indian security forces during the last 10 years.

This is why India responded so quickly and strongly against the Sept. 11 terror attacks, offering logistical support and even military bases to U.S. forces for operations into Afghanistan.

By doing so, India hoped to isolate Pakistan, a nation that helped the Taliban militia capture Kabul and remain in power for more than five years. Since several Kashmiri militant groups were trained by the Taliban and al Qaida network of Osama bin Laden, the Indians hoped that with some efforts they could turn the war against the Afghan and Arab terrorists into a war against the Kashmiri militants too.

The Indians were further encouraged when a U.S. bomb hit a building in Kabul, killing 16 fighters of Lashkar-i-Toiba, one of the two groups New Delhi blames for attacking the Indian parliament on Dec. 13.

But they were surprised and annoyed when Pakistan changed its Afghan policy overnight, dumped its Taliban allies and offered military bases to the United States for operations against the Taliban.

To India's dismay, Washington not only accepted Pakistan's offer but also removed economic and military sanctions imposed after the May 1998 nuclear tests by the two South Asian neighbors. Washington further annoyed India by also removing the so-called democracy sanctions imposed on Pakistan when President Gen. Pervez Musharraf toppled former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in October 1999.

Disappointed that Pakistan was so easily able to walk out of a situation that India hoped to exploit for its benefit, New Delhi continued to remind the world that "militants in Kashmir are also terrorists."

"We refuse to accept this distinction between terrorists on Pakistan's western border (Afghanistan) and those on its eastern border (Kashmir). Terrorists are terrorists," says India's Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh.

As the Americans crushed the Taliban and al Qaida and installed a new government in Kabul, the Indians felt that the U.S.-led forces may pull out of the region without helping them crush "the Kashmiri terrorists," as India's former foreign secretary, S. K.

Singh said.

The Dec. 13 suicide attack on the Indian parliament rekindled India's hopes. India's parliament is recognized as a symbol of democracy around the world. As the legislative body of the world's largest democracy, it enjoys a universal respect. An attack on this symbol of political stability was condemned across the globe.

Aware of its symbolic importance, the Indians decide to use the attack on their parliament to portray Kashmiri militants and their Pakistani backers as terrorists.

Demanding that Pakistan ban Lashkar and Jaish-i-Mohammed, the other group allegedly involved in the Dec. 13 attack, and arrest their leaders, India recalled its ambassador from Islamabad. It also decided to sever rail and road links with Pakistan and later banned Pakistani airlines from flying over its territory.

India also decided to halve its diplomatic staff in Islamabad and asked Pakistan also to do the same. It also banned Pakistani diplomats from traveling outside New Delhi.

Combining its diplomatic offensive with military maneuvers, India's Defense Minister George Fernandes reported moving tens of thousands of troops and "strategic missiles" along its border with Pakistan. "Strategic missiles" are capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

India's military and diplomatic offensive put Pakistan on the defensive. It took away the initiative from Pakistan and forced it to merely react to Indian moves.

Pakistan copied India in slapping similar restrictions on the Indian mission in Islamabad. It also imitated India in banning Indian airlines from flying over Pakistan.

Pakistan also was forced to move thousands of troops and "strategic weapons" to the Indian border. In doing so, it informed the United States that it may no longer be able to keep its troops along the Afghan border deployed there to catch al Qaida and Taliban fugitives.

Most of these measures will hurt Pakistan more than they will hurt India. Indian airlines do not fly over Pakistan but the Pakistan International flies over India. Now it will have to fly hundreds of extra miles for destinations in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

The Indian restriction was so effective that Pakistan had to seek exemption from India to allow its president to fly over to Nepal next month for attending a regional summit conference.

Similarly, travel restrictions hurt the Muslims of the Subcontinent more than they hurt India's majority Hindus. India has almost 200 million Muslims. Many of them have relations in Pakistan. Travel restrictions will prevent them from visiting each other.

India also has another card to play. It has already said that it is reconsidering the Sindh Basin Agreement that allows unrestricted flow of Indus and one of its tributaries to Pakistan. If India decides to cancel this agreement and stops the rivers from flowing into Pakistan it will play havoc with Pakistan's agriculture-based economy.

Seen against this backdrop, it seems that Pakistan has few options against India and fewer sympathizers around the world.

India has made it obvious that it will continue to increase its pressure on Pakistan unless Islamabad, 1) bans Kashmiri militant groups, 2) arrests their leaders, and 3) puts an end to armed struggle in Kashmir.

Pakistan can either accept this demand or go for the obvious, i.e. a war. Many in Pakistan realize that this time a war with India will not be as "civilized" as the wars of 1965 and 1971 when both sides avoided civilian targets.

They know that this time the Indians will go for major economic targets, such as the Tarbela and Mangla dams near Islamabad.

The combined effect of destroying these two dams and blocking the rivers from flowing into Pakistan can trigger the beginning of the end for Islamabad.

India can also attempt to capture Pakistani Kashmir, merge it with India and thus settle the Kashmir dispute to its satisfaction. The other option will be to enter Pakistani Kashmir, destroy militant camps and go back to Indian Kashmir.

Yet another option for India is to attack Pakistan's soft-belly, a narrow corridor in the south that joins the southern Sindh province with the rest of Pakistan. Occupying this corridor will also sever Islamabad's links with its economic hub and the main port of Karachi.

Any of these attempts will trigger the process that will lead to the demise of the Pakistani state, as it exists today. Faced with this scenario, any government in Pakistan can be forced to go for "the unthinkable" and use the nuclear weapon for protecting the state.

However, the chief spokesman for the Pakistani president, Maj. Gen. Rashid Qureshi, told journalists in Islamabad recently that "both India and Pakistan are responsible states and for them the nuclear option is unthinkable."

Pakistanis hope that the fear of a nuclear war will prevent the Indians from pushing Islamabad to the brink. They believe that the Indians will continue increasing the pressure on Pakistan as long as they think they can reap political benefits from it.

They argue that the moment the Indians realize that the situation could actually lead to a nuclear conflict, they will relax their pressure.

"And once this pressure is relaxed, the two governments can then engage in useful talks for settling their disputes," said a senior Pakistani diplomat in Islamabad.

Reports from New Delhi suggest that while the Indians are not yet willing to reduce their pressure on Pakistan, they also do not want a war. At least not yet. Instead, they believe that they are in a position to force Pakistan to accept their demands without going to war.

But neither Pakistanis nor the Indians say what can prevent an accidental war in such a feverish situation.

----

India, Pakistan prepare for war

By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 31, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011231-659483.htm

Pakistan and India are readying their military forces - including their ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons - for war, The Washington Times has learned.

U.S. intelligence officials say Pakistani military moves include large-scale troop movements, the dispersal of fighter aircraft and preparations for the transportation of nuclear weapons from storage sites.

India also is moving thousands of its troops near the border with Pakistan and has dispersed some aircraft to safer sites away from border airfields, say officials familiar with intelligence reports of the war moves.

Pakistan is moving the equivalent of two armored brigades - several thousand troops and hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles - near the northern part of its border with India.

Indian and Pakistani troops exchanged heavy mortar fire over their border in southern Kashmir today, Agence France-Presse reported. Five Indian soldiers were seriously injured in the heaviest shelling in four months, a senior Indian army official said.

More than 1,000 villagers were evacuated from their homes overnight for the operation, according to the report.

Officials say the most alarming signs are preparations in both states for the use of nuclear-tipped missiles.

Intelligence agencies have learned of indications that India is getting its short-range Prithvi ballistic missiles ready for use. The missiles are within range of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

Meanwhile, Pakistan is mobilizing its Chinese-made mobile M-11 missiles, also known as the Shaheen, which have been readied for movement from a base near Sargodha, Pakistan.

Intelligence reports indicate that India will have all its forces ready to launch an attack as early as this week, with Thursday or Friday as possible dates.

Pakistan could launch its forces before those dates in a pre-emptive strike.

Disclosure of the war preparations comes as President Bush on Saturday telephoned leaders of both nations, urging them to calm tensions, a sign of administration concern over the military moves in the region.

The administration also fears that a conflict between India and Pakistan would undermine U.S. efforts to find terrorists in Afghanistan.

U.S. military forces are heavily reliant on Pakistani government permission to conduct overflights for bombing and other aircraft operations into Afghanistan, primarily from aircraft carriers located in the Arabian Sea.

With tensions growing between the states, U.S. intelligence officials are divided over the ultimate meaning of the indicators of an impending conflict.

The Pentagon's Joint Staff intelligence division, known as J-2, late last week had assessed the danger of conflict at "critical" levels.

Other joint intelligence centers outside the Pentagon, including those supporting the U.S.

military forces responsible for the Asia-Pacific region and for Southwest Asia, assess the danger of an India-Pakistan war as less than critical but still "serious."

Intelligence officials are especially worried about Pakistan's nuclear arsenal because control over the weapons is decentralized.

Even before the latest moves, regional commanders could order the use of the weapons, which are based on missiles or fighter-bombers.

The Prithvi has a range of about 155 miles, and the Indians are estimated to have some 75 Prithvis in their arsenal.

They also are working on longer-range Agni missiles.

U.S. intelligence officials believe India has about 60 nuclear weapons that can be delivered by missiles or aircraft.

Its nuclear-capable aircraft include Russian-made bombers, including 10 Tu-142 Bears and four Tu-22M Backfires, as well as several hundred MiG-27, MiG-29 and Su-30 fighter-bombers.

Pakistan's missile force consists of some 50 M-11s, which have a range of about 186 miles, enough to hit the Indian capital of New Delhi. Its medium-range Ghauri missiles have a range of about 800 miles, enough to hit most parts of India.

U.S. intelligence agencies have obtained reconnaissance photographs from one Pakistani missile base that show storage-shed doors open in preparation for the movement of missiles. One of the photographs shows a line of 47 rail cars on a track near the base in preparation for the movement of missiles and their warheads.

The private Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that Islamabad has between 24 and 48 nuclear weapons.

-------- israel

Israeli Activists Urge Army to Probe Civilian Slayings

By TRACY WILKINSON, TIMES STAFF WRITER
December 31, 2001
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-000103441dec31.story

JERUSALEM -- A 14-year-old boy throws a stone at a fortified army post in the Gaza Strip, and Israeli soldiers shoot him dead.

A cabdriver drops off a grocery sack left in his taxi, and troops riddle his body with bullets.

Three peasant women are killed by tiny darts that pierce their chests and stomachs when Israeli tanks shell their refugee camp. Fifteen months ago, the worst Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed in decades erupted, first at a disputed holy site in Jerusalem and then across the West Bank, Gaza Strip and in parts of Israel. From the start, Israeli, Palestinian and international human rights organizations have charged that the Israeli army has often used disproportionate force in putting down demonstrations and retaliating for Palestinian attacks. More than 1,000 people have been killed, roughly three-quarters of them Palestinian.

While the army challenges the criticism, one thing is not in dispute: In case after case, the army has killed Palestinian civilians but has only rarely investigated the deaths or punished the soldiers and officers responsible.

Most killings are given cursory, on-site review and, if any fault is found, chalked up to justifiable error or the fog of war. Fuller inquiry is seldom pursued.

Top army commanders defend this approach and insist that theirs is a "moral army," able to examine its mistakes and learn from them.

"We don't want to kill [civilians]. First of all, it is not moral. Second thing, we know it is against our interests," Maj. Gen. Dan Harel, the army's head of operations, said in an interview. But, he added: "This is not a police situation. It's almost a war."

Many Israelis, terrified by suicide bombers and fed up with months of violence, simply want the conflict to end and say they don't care what the army and government do to achieve that aim. A growing faction of hard-liners wants the army to act even more forcefully. To them, the idea of examining possible abuse is absurd.

Lately, however, a small number of influential Israelis--including the deans of the country's four leading law schools--have joined the chorus of criticism, worrying about the corrosive effect that ignoring abuse can have on the morale and discipline of the Middle East's most powerful military and on society as a whole.

By failing to conduct more than cursory investigations, these Israelis and other activists charge, the army is engendering a culture of impunity that stands in marked contrast not only to its own view of itself but also to its behavior during the intifada of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

"Something very sick has entered this system," said Ran Cohen, a legislator with the leftist Meretz Party and a former paratroop colonel who fought in the 1967 Middle East War and in Lebanon. "The Israeli [army] is indeed making a tremendous military effort, and there's no doubt that it increases the burden and the tension. But this should not justify lies and the loss of our moral values."

In the intifada that raged from 1987 to 1993 and ended with landmark Israeli-Palestinian peace accords, the standard practice was for the army to open a military police investigation each and every time a Palestinian was killed as a result of the actions of Israeli security forces.

The practice upheld a certain level of accountability, former army officers say, even if, in the opinion of human rights advocates, the investigations were flawed. More than 100 investigations a year were opened, the army says.

Now the nature of the conflict is very different. The first intifada was a popular uprising dominated by stone-throwing, and army troops routinely intermingled with Palestinian villagers because Israel then occupied all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. There was less lethal violence and greater visibility of Israeli actions.

The current conflict has included popular protest--but also armed confrontations. The Israeli military leadership considers investigations to be a secondary concern when its men and women are fighting a veritable war.

"It's a whole different world," said Harel, the army operations commander.

"In the [1987-93] intifada, people were throwing stones at us. It's not nice, sometimes very dangerous. But it's like police work. . . . Now . . . is not police work. Mortar bombs. Shooting. Suicide bombers. Side charges. Car bombs. This is not [police work]."

Few cases have incensed human rights watchdogs like that of Khalil Mughrabi.

The 11-year-old Gazan boy was shot in the head by Israeli soldiers, the army acknowledges, as he took a break after a soccer match in July. He died, and two of his friends, ages 10 and 12, were wounded.

Internal army documents confirm that the troops--who earlier had come under Palestinian gunfire--fired "warning shots" in the direction of the children, using a high-caliber, tank-mounted machine gun, despite regulations prohibiting the shooting of heavy weaponry at children.

The case snowballed when the army accidentally sent the internal documents to the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem. The documents show that Chief Military Prosecutor Col. Einat Ron concluded that the soldiers had broken the rules and that the shooting was unjustified. But for public consumption, Ron overruled her own findings and said she saw no "just cause" to open a criminal investigation.

To B'Tselem activists and other critics, this was the smoking gun that showed the army's reluctance to investigate itself.

A review by The Times of several civilian deaths reveals a pattern of questionable Israeli military action and minimal inquiry into what went wrong, as well as little if any disciplinary action. The Israeli army has defined the current conflict in a way that loosens the rules of engagement and allows soldiers wide discretion in opening fire, often with tragic consequences:

No longer able to work in Israel because of a ban on Palestinian workers, Radwan Shtyyeh drove a cab on West Bank roads near Nablus to earn a little money--20 or 30 shekels a day, not even $10.

On the day he was killed, his four children had asked him for new shoes. So he made another taxi run, carrying four passengers up a dirt road on the edge of his village, Salem, and depositing them so they could walk the rest of the way around a dirt-and-concrete barricade erected by the Israeli army.

But one of the passengers left a bag of vegetables in the cab. Shtyyeh, an amiable man described as wholly uninterested in politics, got out of the car, carried the bag up to the barricade and placed it in the road so the woman could retrieve it. Israeli soldiers halfway up a nearby hill, at least 50 yards away, opened fire. Bullets hit his upper body in at least eight places, according to his family, witnesses and a Palestinian coroner.

Two of his young sons, herding sheep in a nearby pasture, watched in horror as their father was killed, as did several other Salem residents.

"I went down to help, but the soldiers wouldn't let us get any closer," recalled Jihad Shtyyeh, a distant cousin and the first on the scene that afternoon of July 2. "He was still alive, saying, 'Help me, help me.' But the soldiers yelled at us to go away."

Radwan Shtyyeh, who was 37 and whose photograph shows a man with a small mustache and slightly goofy smile, left behind a 30-year-old widow, Amira, who is raising their children.

"Some of the people who worked with him in Israel told me that even the Israelis were upset when they heard he was killed," Amira said in her simple living room, where her husband's last pack of Imperial cigarettes sits in a glass display case. "He was a person who never made any trouble."

An army spokesman said the shooting was "tragic" but that the soldiers were on the lookout for roadside bombs and probably suspected that Shtyyeh was planting one. Requests to the army from B'Tselem for an official inquiry into the case have gone unanswered.

Deep in the Gaza Strip, near the Palestinian town of Khan Yunis, an Israeli army outpost rises up from the scruffy sand dunes. It is a heavily fortified bunker. It is not likely that Imad Zareb and the other youths who were pelting it with stones Sept. 15 posed much of a threat.

That day, Imad, 14, and the others had attended the funeral of two Palestinians killed by Israeli fire. Breaking off from the burial procession as it entered the Khan Yunis cemetery, they headed for the nearest Israeli military structure, erected to protect Jewish settlers in Gaza, who are often attacked.

Witnesses said Imad was about 10 yards east of the outpost when Israeli soldiers opened fire with M-16 assault rifles. He died about four hours after he was shot and was buried the next day in the Khan Yunis cemetery.

No formal inquiry has been launched into this shooting. An army spokesman said the army was aware of "disturbances" that day but no Palestinian casualties.

Rania Kharoufeh was terrified when Israeli forces invaded Bethlehem on Oct. 19. But the 24-year-old mother of two needed milk for her children. In a friend's car, she made a dash for the nearest corner market the next day.

The car came under fire, and Kharoufeh jumped out and took cover in a store. Within minutes, she was dead, killed by Israeli fire, according to her family and two witnesses.

Four days later, Brig. Gen. Gershon Yitzhak, the Israeli commander of troops in the West Bank, announced with confidence that Kharoufeh had been felled by Palestinian fire. He based his conclusion on a field investigation by men under his command, who questioned the soldiers present.

But a Times inspection of the site where Kharoufeh was killed showed big holes, clearly made by large-caliber ammunition, in the door facing Israeli positions. The Israelis' likely target, a unit of Palestinian police with small-caliber arms, would have been positioned down the street, on the other side.

There is no allegation that the Israeli forces targeted the young woman. But the army came under criticism from human rights organizations for using tanks and heavy weapons in a largely residential area. Palestinian gunmen who attempted to fight off the Israelis were also criticized.

Bethlehem's Roman Catholic-run maternity hospital, hit several times by Israeli fire during the same incursion, is suing Israel for damages.

The family of Mousa George abu Eid, a Palestinian Christian, also plans to sue Israel. The 19-year-old high school graduate was one of several Palestinians shot in their homes in Bethlehem and the adjacent town of Beit Jala during the October incursion. Abu Eid, who friends and family said was a simple youth uninterested in politics, had taken refuge with his family on the lower floor of their two-story home as tanks rumbled into their neighborhood at 4 a.m. Oct. 19.

When the shooting subsided that night, Abu Eid and his father ventured upstairs to fetch sheets and blankets. In those moments, an Israeli sniper who had taken up a position next door shot and killed Abu Eid, family and witnesses said. The window shows a single, clean bullet hole. Abu Eid was hit in the neck.

These cases are not obscure. Most were reported at the time in Israeli, Palestinian and foreign news accounts and have been denounced by human rights or political activists. Several have been taken up by B'Tselem, which has collected testimony and demanded investigations, to no avail.

An estimated 800 Palestinians have been killed and more than 10,000 wounded in the last 15 months. Though many of those were combatants, at least 194 of the Palestinian dead were children, according to UNICEF. Among Israelis, whose population is nearly twice that of the Palestinians, about 250 people have been killed and 2,300 wounded.

Israel's army has officially classified the violence as an "armed conflict short of war," Col. Daniel Reisner, head of the military's international law division, said in an interview. The size and scale of clashes and casualties make the conflict a war, he said, but the status of the parties--the Palestinians technically do not have an army--means the confrontation falls short of formal war.

This "middle ground" definition has loosened the open-fire regulations, allowing a soldier to kill in many instances even when his life is not in danger, and created broad discretion over whether and how shootings should be investigated, Reisner and Deputy Chief Military Prosecutor Lt. Col. Liron Libman said.

The most common form of inquiry, they said, is a debriefing in the field after any incident in which a Palestinian is killed. The unit commander hears from his soldiers about what happened and whether anything went wrong. A commander can mete out discipline on the spot or send a soldier to a court-martial.

Reisner said there probably have been "dozens" of cases of both commander-level discipline and courts-martial, but he could not provide statistics because all such cases are grouped together and can include anything from a dress-code violation to a shooting.

In the most serious incidents, a criminal investigation by the military police is opened. This is considered the highest level of scrutiny and can lead to a trial of the soldiers or officers involved.

A total of 59 military police investigations have been opened since the start of the current conflict, of which 15 involve shooting incidents. From those investigations, three criminal indictments of Israeli soldiers have been handed down, according to figures released by the office of the military advocate general. Three cases have been closed without disciplinary action. No one has been sentenced.

One of the indictments involves two sergeants and a soldier who are currently on trial, accused of mistreating Palestinians at a checkpoint near the West Bank city of Hebron. Among other things, they allegedly stopped a Palestinian taxi in July and at gunpoint forced the driver to beat and slap the passengers.

A second case involves a captain in the reserves who in October allegedly ordered a soldier to fire a warning shot at a Palestinian man who posed no danger; the man was critically wounded in the head. The third indictment involves the case of a Palestinian woman killed by Israeli fire as she rode in a car.

Reisner said the vast majority of wrongful shootings are the result of negligence, not malice.

"You are allowed to make mistakes," he said.

But Yael Stein, the head researcher at B'Tselem, said the army has repeatedly violated humanitarian laws in its treatment of Palestinians. A failure to investigate, she said, encourages continued abuse. The opening of 15 probes, in the context of the thousands of people who have been killed and wounded, "is nothing," she said.

"If there are no investigations, then by definition, no one is watching," she said. "The issue of accountability is not rooted in this society."

Army officials point out a series of technical difficulties that impede investigations. In contrast to the earlier intifada, Israeli authorities rarely if ever have access to bodies--under Muslim tradition, bodies are buried quickly, without autopsy--and often do not have access to the site where a person was killed because it is under Palestinian control.

And the Israelis say the Palestinian authorities are wholly uncooperative when it comes to any sort of probe.

"Maybe they have something to hide. Maybe it's the general attitude against any cooperation with Israel. Maybe they don't have trust in our system--even when they'd have a vested interest in our taking a look," said Libman, the deputy chief military prosecutor.

Retired Maj. Gen. Amram Mitzna, who commanded troops during the first intifada, agreed that the nature of the conflict vastly complicates investigations of abuse. Still, he said, making an effort is vital.

"It is very important for the morale of the unit that is concerned, important for the discipline of the army as a military institution, and important that the army know what the soldiers are doing and whether they are acting according to the orders that they get," Mitzna, who is now the mayor of the port city of Haifa, said in an interview.

The Israeli army has also come under pressure to investigate the shootings of 40 journalists, most of whom were injured while working in the West Bank and Gaza Strip for foreign media in the early weeks of the current conflict. In the vast majority of the cases, according to a study by Reporters Without Borders, the journalists appeared to have been hit by Israeli fire.

The army issued a report this month, saying it found no army culpability except in one case: the shooting of an unarmed female American photographer in Bethlehem last year. In that incident, in which an American ambassador personally pressed the Israeli prime minister for action, the commanding officer received a reprimand.

"The absence of concrete results in practically all of the cases does not suggest that the investigations were thorough and comprehensive," the Foreign Press Assn. in Israel said in a statement. "The message this delivers to soldiers is that preventing the shooting of journalists and punishing those who shoot them are not of utmost importance."

Ronen Shnayderman, another researcher with B'Tselem, argues that cases are investigated only when there is ample publicity. Shnayderman has sent letter after letter to the army requesting investigations of some of the most egregious cases. He has never received a positive reply, he said.

One case in which publicity apparently prompted the army to investigate at the highest possible level involved three Bedouin women who were killed when Israeli forces shelled the Gaza refugee camp where they lived.

Thousands of razor-sharp steel darts, known as flechettes, that were packed in a 120-millimeter shell were fired at the camp by Israeli tanks after Palestinians shot at the Israelis. In addition to the three women who died in the June 10 incident--Nassereh Malalha, 61, Salmiya Malalha, 37, and Hikmat Malalha, 17--several other women and children were injured.

An army investigation was ordered, but it came to nothing until a special military prosecutor was appointed after reports in the local press and complaints from Israeli politicians. The military attorney general, Brig. Gen. Menachem Finkelstein, is now handling the case--one of only two given such high-level review. The other case concerns a Palestinian man who was shot this year in front of his home during an Israeli raid on his West Bank village.

Cohen, the Israeli legislator, has frequently accused the army of trying to shirk its responsibility for civilian Palestinian casualties. The topic came up again at a recent meeting of the defense committee of Israel's parliament after the Nov. 22 death of five Palestinian schoolboys. They were blown up by an explosive device the army had planted in an area that was used by Palestinian gunmen to shoot at nearby Jewish settlements but was also a common path to the boys' school.

In a heated exchange with Cohen, the army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz, denied that the army was insensitive to civilian casualties.

"If that were true," Mofaz told the committee, "there would have been many more people hurt in the 10,000 incidents in which the army has been involved in the last 14 months."

Cohen, in an interview, said he is not interested in pointing fingers of blame or seeing soldiers in the brig. His concern is that the army, one of Israel's most vaunted institutions, loses what he and many Israelis see as its moral authority if impunity reigns.

"My cause is to try to save the values of ourselves and of our army," he said. "If we lose our values, we lose our power. If we lose our justice, we lose our case."


-------- MILITARY

-------- afghanistan

Photographers: Afghan fighters roughed us up as U.S. soldiers watched

By The Associated Press
12.31.01
http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=15562&printerfriendly=1

TORA BORA, Afghanistan - Three photographers said they were detained at gunpoint by Afghan tribal fighters and roughed up while U.S. Special Forces soldiers watched.

David Guttenfelder, chief Asia photographer for the Associated Press based in Tokyo, also said Dec. 20 that he and two photographers on assignment for The New York Times had discs containing digital photographs taken away by the tribesmen.

"We strongly protest this action and have asked the Pentagon to immediately investigate the matter," said Vin Alabiso, AP vice president and executive photo editor.

In Washington, Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said she would look into the incident.

Guttenfelder said the photographers were working from a hilltop vantage point that they had used during the siege by tribal fighters and U.S. troops against al-Qaida forces in the Tora Bora area. They photographed half-a-dozen U.S. Special Forces who were looking through materials, possibly recovered from nearby caves.

The Afghan interpreter for the U.S. soldiers told the photographers to leave, Guttenfelder said, and they did so, driving about 20 minutes toward a nearby village when they were stopped by tribal fighters who set up a roadblock with their truck.

"They pointed their guns at us, took off the safeties, pulled out the bayonets and pointed them in our faces in the car," Guttenfelder said. "We didn't know what was going on. We thought they were bandits."

"There was a 17-year-old with a gun; he was sticking it straight at us," said Joao Silva, a New York Times photographer based in South Africa. "He was out of control."

Silva said he believed the incident had been engineered by the American forces to retrieve the images the photographers had taken.

The other photographer was Tyler Hicks, 32, of New York City, working on a contract for The New York Times.

The Afghans forced the photographers to drive back up the hill, where the tribal fighters seized the three men's cameras, computers and other belongings.

The photographers saw two U.S. Special Forces men nearby and yelled for help.

The two soldiers walked over, Guttenfelder said, and one said to him, "We know what journalists are trying to do, but we had to do this because taking our pictures puts us in danger." The tribal fighters continued to push the photographers and rifle through their belongings.

Guttenfelder said he told the U.S. soldiers "look, you don't have to turn these guys loose on us, our discs could be erased" and thereby eliminate the photographs of the soldiers.

Guttenfelder asked the Americans to calm the tribal fighters.

"We have no more control over them than you do," one of the soldiers said. As the Americans walked away, one of them said, "Don't worry, they won't kill you," Guttenfelder said.

After another 45 minutes of negotiations, the photographers got their equipment back and were allowed to leave, he said. The tribal fighters refused to return the discs that held photographs from their digital cameras.

Clarke said that Pentagon policy on covering U.S. operations was that "as long as operational security is not hindered, people's lives are not put at risk, and we are not revealing classified information, we try to facilitate media coverage."

----

Deal signed on Afghan force, US jets said to kill villagers

Monday December 31,
AFP
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/011231/1/28gqz.html

British and Afghan officials signed a deal to put an international security force on a legal footing ahead of the New Year, as a US bombing raid on an Afghan village reportedly killed at least 70 people.

Moves to bring stability to Afghanistan also coincided with growing regional tensions as Pakistan rounded up Islamic militants in an apparent bid to placate its neighbour India, amid fears of war between the rival nuclear powers.

The agreement on the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was a victory for the international community's attempts to return peace to Afghanistan after the downfall of the hardline Taliban regime.

But violence is still rife in the country, where US troops and planes are hunting Osama bin Laden and the remnants of his al-Qaeda group of Islamic radicals, which is accused of planning the September 11 attacks on US cities.

Villagers from Niazi Qala, 20 kilometres (12 miles) north of Gardez in Paktia province told AFP that on Sunday US planes bombarded the village and killed at least 70 people.

A report by the Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) put the number of dead at 92 and said no members of al-Qaeda network were in the village.

Qismat Khan, interviewed in Kabul, said an ammunition depot of the now ousted Taliban regime was previously sited in the village. It was not known whether it was still there and if so, whether it had been hit.

Mira Jan, another villager, said some al-Qaeda fighters loyal to bin Laden were still in the provinces of Khost and Paktia and most were Arabs or Chechens.

He said two former Taliban commanders were sheltering the foreign militants in Zormat district 25 kilometres south of Gardez.

Mira Jan also claimed some local security officials nominally loyal to Afghanistan's new government were helping al-Qaeda members elude capture.

Reports of the attack came just one day after Kabul's new interim government backed away from earlier calls for the bombing to be abandoned and gave the green light for further raids to flush out bin Laden and his supporters.

Washington has vowed no respite in its campaign until bin Laden, his allies and other "terrorist groups with global reach" are defeated -- but the Saudi extremist has proved elusive, amid claims he has fled to Pakistan.

Pakistan has denied these claims, and vowed to hand him over if he is found on Pakistani territory, but its heightened antagonism with India has provoked fears in the West that President Pervez Musharraf could be forced to turn his attention away from the hunt for bin Laden.

Two Indian soldiers were killed and five injured during a heavy exchange of mortar fire with Pakistani troops guarding the frontier between the Indian and Pakistani controlled areas of Kashmir, an Indian officer told AFP.

"This is the heaviest mortar shelling we have seen for four months," Brigadier P.C. Das said. Separately Indian forces killed 10 Kashmiri militants in three clashes within the Indian-controlled territory, during which one soldier and a civilian bystander were also killed, police and army officials said.

But despite the clashes and the largest troop build-up at the disputed border in 30 years, there was one sign of decreasing tension between the powers, the day after US President George W. Bush appealed for calm.

Indian officials welcomed the arrest by Pakistan of 50 militants including the founder of the Jaish-e-Mohammad group, Maulana Masood Azhar, and the leader of the Lashkar-e-Taiba organization, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed.

"If this information is correct, this is certainly a step forward in the right direction," Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh told reporters after a meeting of India's cabinet committee on security.

India blames Pakistan for supporting Kashmir's Muslim separatist groups, and tensions soared after a gun attack on the New Delhi parliament on December 13 which India said was masterminded by Islamabad's ISI intelligence agency.

The two countries have fought three times since gaining independence from Britain in 1947, twice over the disputed Kashmir border region, and Singh's comments were the first positive recognition of progress in improving relations since the December 13 attack.

Both armies are equipped with missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads -- which both countries are known to possess -- and the military build-up has sparked fears of a catastrophic regional conflict.

Meanwhile, more British troops arrived in Kabul on Monday as Afghan Interior Minister Yunus Qanooni and British Major General John McColl, who is to lead the international force, finally signed a deal on the deployment.

The deal was held up by weeks of haggling over an array of questions including whether the foreign troops would be held to Afghanistan's Islamic law, and will give the UN-mandated ISAF formal status. The multinational force will number between 3,000 and 4,000 troops to help provide security as the new government of interim leader Hamid Karzai tries to rebuild the nation after the ouster of the hardline Taliban militia.

Around 70 British personnel arrived in Kabul on Monday, the first reinforcements for the 200-strong British contingent already patrolling the capital and providing visible support to Karzai's administration.

The new convoy also brought in medical officers and supplies, an AFP reporter saw. The arriving staff included female personnel.

British embassy spokesman Paul Sykes told AFP a second British convoy from Bagram air force base was expected to enter Kabul later Monday.

"They are here to set up the ISAF headquarters," he said.

General Deen Mohammad Jurhat, a senior Afghan public security official, said the peacekeeping deal would have been signed Sunday evening if not for the issue of whether Islamic law would apply to the troops.

"Last night we would have signed the agreement but it did not happen because of two articles in this agreement," he said.

"Afghanistan is an Islamic country and Afghanistan's laws are Islamic," he explained. "For example, drinking alcohol and having sexual affairs are usual in the countries the troops come from. They must obey Afghanistan's laws." Britain will lead the force for the first three months of its six-month deployment in Afghanistan. An advance party of up to 250 German troops is expected to arrive here sometime late this week or next.

Washington launched a military campaign in Afghanistan on October 7, in response to the Taliban regime's refusal to hand over bin Laden, accused of masterminding the September 11 attacks.

Since the Taliban was ousted from power and replaced by a UN-mandated interim regime, which took power on December 22, US forces appear to have lost track of bin Laden.

Speculation that he may have fled Afghanistan has focused on reports that he is in Pakistan or heading for a hide-out in Yemen or Somalia, where al-Qaeda has some supporters, or Iraq, whose President Saddam Hussein is at loggerheads with the United States.

But on Monday The New York Times added another country to the list of suspects with a report that al-Qaeda contacted Iranian intelligence agents in the mid-1990s seeking to forge an alliance against the United States.

Citing still-classified US intelligence reports, the newspaper reported that a bin Laden ally sought out Iranian intelligence officers in Afghanistan in 1996, in the hope that Tehran would join forces to strike US targets.

----

Rout in Desert Marked Turning Point of War
U.S. Firepower Decimated Taliban at Tarin Kot

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, December 31, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42687-2001Dec30?language=printer

TARIN KOT, Afghanistan -- What may have been the decisive battle in the Afghan war could also qualify as the most obscure.

It was fought here, in the remote high-desert outpost that senior Taliban commanders regarded as home. After an opposition force had taken Tarin Kot in the first days of Ramadan without firing a shot, Taliban troops rushed to recapture the town -- and ran into a hail of fire that finished them as a fighting force.

In the early morning hours of Nov. 18, the first of perhaps 1,000 Taliban fighters in about 100 double-cab pickups were approaching the outskirts of Tarin Kot when an armada of U.S. fighter jets swarmed to meet them. Over the next six to eight hours, according to witnesses, Taliban truck after Taliban truck was blasted into flames by bombs directed by U.S. Special Forces spotters lurking on the ridgeline above.

Scores of Taliban soldiers were blown apart in the beds of the pickups before awareness overcame surprise, and they began scrambling from their vehicles for the relative safety of the surrounding rubble.

When it was over, at least 30 charred chassis lay along a road also lined with fresh graves. The trail of destruction ran from the valley just above Tarin Kot to the edge of the Desert Bom (pronounced boom).

The Taliban forces who survived the rout fled back to Kandahar, still breathing but with the fight apparently taken out of them. From that point on, the last major battles of the war would be fought not by Taliban soldiers, but by Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda fighters, defending their base at the Kandahar airport and the mountain redoubts of Tora Bora.

"When the Americans destroyed their vehicles and also killed their troops, we knew we could take Kandahar soon," said Malim Rahmadullah, the newly installed governor of remote Uruzgan province, long known among Afghans as the Taliban's true stronghold.

"It was easy," Rahmadullah said. "They fled. They knew they should not fight with America."

The U.S. commander on the scene spied victory in the wreckage of the valley floor as well.

"We broke the back of the Taliban that day," Capt. Jason Amerine said in an interview this month at a hospital in Germany, hwere he wasrecovering from wounds inflicted by an errant U.S. bomb two weeks after the fighting at Tarin Kot. There were no U.S. casualties at Tarin Kot.

In northern Afghanistan, the front lines were often within camera range, but the battle for the south was as remote and isolated as Uruzgan province. Located in the center of the country, the province is ringed by mountain ranges that open into deserts. Tarin Kot, its capital, is reached by gravel tracks that in some long stretches disappear into river beds, and in others simply disappear.

People here are regarded as poverty-stricken even in a nation where per capita income hovers around $800. But Uruzgans also are respected as fighters, a quality the Taliban exploited as it recruited the army that swept over the country between 1994 and 1996, with funding from foreign governments eager to see Afghanistan's chaos replaced by an Islamic regime.

An aid worker with experience in the province said he knew of a woman who sent her son to join the Taliban, but not out of the religious fervor that motivated the leaders of the radical movement.

"She sent him to the front lines because there was no bread," said Gavriel Langford of Mercy Corps International. "Imagine, for a mother to do that. It just accentuates the extent of the poverty in Uruzgan."

The black turban that became the national symbol of the Taliban is the customary male headgear in Uruzgan, where the Taliban leader, Mohammad Omar, lived for a time in the 1980s. Masam, a former mujaheddin who like many Afghans uses one name, recalled Omar fighting Soviet occupation forces with "only one American gun."

"I said, 'Bring that gun and come with me,' " Masam said. "Omar said, 'No, I want to go somewhere else.' "

Omar returned to Kandahar, where he and other religious students, or taliban, formed the movement that by 1996 controlled most of Afghanistan. They made Kandahar their unofficial capital, yet Tarin Kot loomed large enough within the movement to become the primary military target of Hamid Karzai, the Taliban foe and former mujaheddin leader who this month took office as head of Afghanistan's interim government.

"He told me early on that Tarin Kot was the heart of the Taliban, and he said if we could squeeze the heart of the Taliban and crush it, then the Taliban would be through," Amerine said in Germany.

Karzai, an ethnic Pashtun who had been exiled in Pakistan during Taliban rule, enjoyed strong U.S. political backing at the conference in Germany that set up the interim government. In Uruzgan province, U.S. support arrived in the form of Amerine and seven other members of the Army's 5th Special Forces Group, who joined Karzai's effort in mid-October.

Karzai managed to take Tarin Kot without firing a shot. Instead, he canvassed tribal elders on a satellite telephone provided by the Americans, orchestrating a civil rebellion. The local population drove out the Taliban administration in an uprising that reportedly ended with the body of the mayor hanging in the central square.

Three days later, on Nov. 17, Karzai and the Americans rode past the shabby mud shops that make up main street and took up residence at the white concrete governor's house, the most substantial building in town.

"We didn't fight," said Abdul Qayyoum, one of Karzai's senior commanders.

"We just arrived."

Shortly after dark, word arrived that Taliban forces had overrun a checkpoint to the south. The report confirmed calls from spies in Kandahar that as many as 1,000 Taliban soldiers were en route and would be approaching Tarin Kot before dawn.

The attack was inevitable, anti-Taliban officials say, even from a wary enemy that had made a great effort since Sept. 11 to hide its forces from U.S. airstrikes.

"All the Taliban commanders are from here," said Rahmadullah, the former teacher Karzai installed as governor. "They said, 'We have to take control of these mountains.' They said, 'We should lose Kandahar, not Uruzgan.' "

By some accounts, the Taliban sent three convoys of about 100 vehicles each north from Kandahar. The accounts could, however, reflect repeated sightings of the same convoy at three points on its journey, now marked by the skeletons of Toyota trucks and, at one point, the exposed tail fins of an unexploded, half-buried U.S. bomb.

Birader, a Tarin Kot native, led the line of double-cab pickups, a Taliban signature, through the night. The convoy snaked through a deep gorge in the Spin Khotal mountains, then negotiated a second range before overwhelming Karzai's pickets at a checkpoint called Gardini Gau, killing at least two opposition soldiers, according to their comrades.

Ahead lay only the dun-colored foothills that merge into the open plain on which Tarin Kot sits, fully exposed. But so was the road descending to it.

After midnight, Afghan fighters guided Amerine and his fellow commandos to the ridge above the narrow valley that the road follows just before it reaches town. One of the guides said the Americans carried lasers, which they trained on the Taliban's trucks to direct the bombs. Amerine described only hand-held global positioning devices and two-way radios.

The latter let the commandos speak directly to the Air Force and Navy pilots alerted hours earlier and now gathering above.

"We didn't have a shortage of aircraft," Amerine recalled.

The attack itself was directed by Sgt. 1st Class Daniel Petithory, who later died in the friendly fire incident that injured Amerine. He said Petithory talked in the jets, describing the terrain unfolding below the pilots and the movement of the targets across it.

When the bombs hit -- which they did with remarkable accuracy, to judge by the scarcity of craters -- the pickups exploded in fireballs that reduced some to shards the size of a human hand and left the frames of others intact but a scorched gun-metal blue. At least a dozen trucks, each carrying an average of 10 men, witnesses said, appeared to have been hit while proceeding toward Tarin Kot. Others had turned tail, and over the hours of bombardment scores of them were seen scrambling over the hills toward Kandahar. Commanders said the convoy included al Qaeda fighters as well as Pakistani volunteers who had crossed the border expecting to confront U.S. ground troops.

"I saw a Pakistani and an Arab running on this road," said a hotel-keeper at Dara Noor, located at the entrance to a pass one mountain range and one desert away.

As the Taliban retreated, U.S. pilots apparently hunted the road south. Their gun sights found Taliban trucks and Land Cruisers tucked against rock faces, hidden from the road but still visible from the air. Others might have been found on the road but were blown many yards away by the impact.

"When the Americans [first] attacked, those in front called to the rear and told them to turn back" to Kandahar, said a Karzai fighter named Jan, who said he traveled with the U.S. team.

Indeed, by every account, the majority of the trucks that had left Kandahar managed to turn back in time. But after such a punishing attack, the Taliban was never so threatening again.

As Karzai's forces proceeded south in the coming days -- with the commandos continuing to call in airstrikes where the Taliban mounted resistance -- the worst the allies faced on the road to Kandahar was friendly fire: the errant U.S. bomb that killed three Americans and five of their Afghan allies Dec. 5.

"It was a very important fight," said Abdul Rahman, a shopkeeper in Arghandab, just north of Kandahar, whose store was scorched by the fire an American pilot aimed at a fleeing Taliban truck.

"The Taliban could not fight anymore," he said. "They were weak after this fight."

Correspondent Peter Finn in Berlin contributed to this report.

--------

Marines Said to Search for Taliban Leader Mullah Omar

December 31, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Afghan-US-Military.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Helicopters filled with U.S.

Marines in full combat gear took off from a base in southern Afghanistan Monday, and the country's prime minister said they were hunting for Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.

The helicopters left just before sunset from the Marines' base at the airport in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. They appeared to head toward the northwest, according to an Associated Press photographer who witnessed the departure. Afghan officials have said they believe Omar is hiding out in Baghran, about 100 miles northwest of Kandahar.

Afghanistan's interim prime minister, Hamid Karzai, told The Associated Press that his government had been notified of the U.S. operation.

``If he's there, he'll be arrested,'' Karzai said, referring to Omar.

``We are determined to see him arrested.'' President Bush would not confirm that any mission was under way, but repeated that the U.S. military is intent on getting Omar and Osama bin Laden.

``We're going to get him. It's just a matter of when,'' Bush said of bin Laden as he stopped for lunch while vacationing in Crawford, Texas. ``Any time you got a person running it means you're going to get him soon.

Same with Mullah Omar. We're going to get him.'' A Pentagon official speaking on condition of anonymity confirmed the departure of the Marines. Military officials declined public comment.

U.S. forces have been searching for Omar since Dec. 7, when Kandahar fell to anti-Taliban Afghan forces.

Kandahar is Omar's hometown and was the last major Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan.

Omar probably is somewhere in the mountains northwest of Kandahar, a U.S. intelligence official said Monday.

Bachran is in a remote, mountainous area of Afghanistan's Helmand province. Omar has close links to Baghran's tribal chief, Abdul Wahid, who was apparently involved in negotiations that led to Kandahar's surrender.

Terrorist leader Osama bin Laden also remains at large.

The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Sunday that the latest reliable reports suggest bin Laden is still alive. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., said it was unclear whether bin Laden was still in Afghanistan or had fled to neighboring Pakistan.

Karzai said he did not know if bin Laden was in the same area as Omar or was elsewhere.

``There are so many rumors about where Osama is,'' Karzai said.

U.S. officials say they believe bin Laden was in the mountainous Tora Bora area of eastern Afghanistan at least until mid-December. In a new videotape, the terrorist leader wanted in connected with the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States implied he was speaking in early or mid-December.

Meanwhile Monday, U.S. forces in Afghanistan took custody of 30 more suspected Taliban or al-Qaida prisoners, said Pentagon spokeswoman Maj. Cynthia Colin.

Twenty-five more prisoners were taken to the base at Kandahar, bringing the total there to 164, Colin said.

Another five joined the two being held at the air base in Bagram, north of Kabul.

The additions bring the total number of prisoners held by the United States to 180. Another prisoner is being held in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif. Eight others, including American John Walker Lindh, are held aboard the USS Peleliu in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Pakistan.

Military officials also disputed reports that a U.S.

airstrike early Saturday killed more than 100 civilians in an Afghan village.

The airstrike hit a compound used by Taliban and al-Qaida leaders, not a village, said Cmdr. Dave Culler, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command.

``If any innocents or civilians were killed in the attack, the cause would be the Taliban and al-Qaida leaders living alongside people who are not complicit with their crimes,'' Culler said Monday.

Marines also continued preparations to hand over the Kandahar base to soldiers from the Army's 101st Airborne Division.

The Army troops will take over operations at the airport base, where Marines have been preparing runways for humanitarian flights and building facilities to hold hundreds of detainees.

Interrogators from the military, FBI and CIA are questioning the prisoners about the al-Qaida network and bin Laden's whereabouts.

The Marines being replaced at the Kandahar facility are part of two Marine Expeditionary Units based on amphibious assault ships now in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Pakistan. Their replacement in Afghanistan will give the Marines ``the opportunity to prepare for future missions,'' said another Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col.

Mike Humm. He could not say when the transfer would be complete.

Associated Press correspondent Kathy Gannon in Kabul contributed to this report.
On the Net: Pentagon: http://www.defenselink.mil

-------- iraq

Gulf Arabs Tell Iraq to Allow U.N. Arms Inspections

December 31, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-oman-gulf-iraq.html
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-81350.html

MUSCAT (Reuters) - Gulf Arab states urged neighboring Iraq Monday to allow U.N. weapons inspectors back into the country or risk more tension in the Middle East.

The leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) also called on Iraq to show good will toward its neighbors and respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Kuwait, which Baghdad invaded in 1990 before being driven out seven months later by a U.S.-led multinational force.

The GCC alliance groups oil-rich Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar and Bahrain.

``The council calls on both Iraq and the secretary-general of the United Nations to resume negotiations to renew cooperation based on foundations whereby the Security Council can lift economic sanctions imposed on Iraq and end the suffering of the brotherly Iraqi people,'' said a communique at the end of a GCC summit in Oman.

The United Nations says sanctions, imposed on Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait, cannot be lifted unless Baghdad allows international weapons inspectors back into the country to check for weapons of mass destruction.

``We hope Iraq's obstinacy toward some Security Council resolutions will not lead to more tension in the region and cause more suffering to the brotherly Iraqi people,'' GCC Secretary-General Jameel al-Hujailan told the summit.

He also criticized Baghdad for continuing antagonism toward its pro-Western neighbors Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

The leaders called on Iraq to cooperate over the issue of Kuwaitis and other nationals missing since the 1990-1991 Gulf War and to return Kuwait state property.

President Bush has warned Iraqi President Saddam Hussein he will ``find out'' the consequences if he does not re-admit the arms inspectors, triggering speculation Iraq might be the next target of the U.S.-led anti-terror war after Afghanistan.

Baghdad, which is on a U.S. list of states sponsoring terrorism, has denied any link to Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden, who Washington accuses of planning the deadly September 11 attacks on U.S. landmarks.

Hujailan said Saturday the GCC would oppose any attack against any Arab country.

The U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq in December 1998, on the eve of a U.S.-British bombing raid, after the two Western powers accused Baghdad of not cooperating with the arms experts. They have not been allowed to return since.

Iraq insists it does not have weapons of mass destruction and demands an immediate lifting of the crippling sanctions.

----

Turkish troops go after PKK in northern Iraq

Reuters,
December 31, 2001
http://famulus.msnbc.com/FamulusIntl/reuters12-31-031742.asp?reg=EUROPE

TUNCELI, Turkey, Dec. 31 - Hundreds of Turkish soldiers have pushed into northern Iraq in the past two days in pursuit of rebel Turkish Kurds of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), military and customs officials said on Monday.

The officials told Reuters trucks carrying around 800 Turkish commandos had passed through the Habur border gate.

''There are PKK bases in the region which constitute a threat to Turkey. That is why they entered the northern Iraqi territory,'' said one military officer.

The officials said the troops went to Behdinan region controlled by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of two rival Iraqi Kurd factions that control northern Iraq.

Turkish troops regularly pursue separatist Kurdish rebels from southeast Turkey into northern Iraq, which Iraqi Kurds wrested from Baghdad's control after the 1991 Gulf War.

Ankara says some 5,000 Turkish Kurd separatists have been based in northern Iraq and Iran since fighting in their campaign for independence dropped off dramatically after the 1999 capture of Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the PKK.

U.S. and British warplanes based in Turkey patrol a no-fly zone over northern Iraq established in 1991 to protect the Kurds in the area.

The PUK and the rival Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) have both agreed not to allow the PKK to base themselves in northern Iraq and receive economic help from Turkey in return for their support against the PKK.

-------- israel / palestine

Blankets allowed to cross into territories, but food supplies continue to rot

By Dalya Dajani
December 31, 2001
Jordan Times
http://www.jordantimes.com/Mon/homenews/homenews5.htm

AMMAN - At least a few Palestinian families under siege for the past 15 months will receive a small measure of comfort with the delivery of blankets donated by neighbouring Arab countries to help them make it through the winter.

Three trucks carrying 1,500 blankets successfully made their way across the King Hussein Bridge to the West Bank this week after being permitted access by Israeli border security.

Securing access for other relief supplies, however, continues to be hampered by stringent Israeli border security checks, according to Palestinian ChargÈ d'Affaires Atalla Khairi.

Such measures have left food stocks such as powdered milk, rice and dates rotting in warehouses around Amman over the past year as they wait to receive an Israeli stamp of approval to cross the bridge.

"Around 15 tonnes of dates that were donated by Iran last year were recently sent to the incinerator after Ministry of Health inspectors found they were no longer fit for consumption," said Khairi.

But an official at the Israeli embassy told The Jordan Times in November that date consignments arriving at the King Hussein Bridge were allowed entry by Israeli border inspectors.

Khairi also said that three trucks loaded with rice were also turned back from the bridge earlier this month after being stranded there for a week, although permission for their entry had been secured.

"All we kept hearing from Israeli border inspectors every day was that the rice shipment would be allowed to pass the next day, until eventually it was turned back."

In a show of support for the Palestinians in their staunch resistance against the Israeli occupation, Arab countries have continued to deliver humanitarian aid and other assistance to Palestinians injured in the Intifada.

Khairi told The Jordan Times that several Tunisian charitable societies in cooperation with the Tunisian embassy in Jordan also recently donated critical medical supplies to the Palestinian people.

"We were promised (by Israeli border security) that two donated ambulances would be allowed to cross the bridge tomorrow [Monday]. I hope their delivery will be secured without further complications," said Khairi.

Last month, 10 ambulances donated by Arab countries were rejected entry since they did not meet Israeli quality checks, according to the Israeli embassy source.

-------- korea

N. Korea poses military threats to South

By Jong-Heon Lee
UPI Correspondent
December 31, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/31122001-061456-6061r.htm

SEOUL, South Korea, Dec. 31 (UPI) -- North Korea has amassed an arsenal of 2,500-5,000 tons of biological and chemical weapons, including anthrax bacteria, South Korea's Defense Ministry said Monday.

The ministry also said that despite an increase in inter-Korean exchanges, the communist North has continued to build up its military, posing threats to South Korea.

"Inter-Korean exchanges and cooperation have increased since the June 15 inter-Korean summit talks last year, but the military threat from North Korea remains strong," the ministry said in an annual defense report.

Under its ruling principle of "army-first politics," North Korea has produced and deployed long-range ballistic missiles and armored tanks, the report said. "North Korea has sought the modernization of major conventional weapons including armored vehicles, naval vessels and aircraft, and conducted infiltration drills," it said.

The report cited the North's stockpile of biochemical weapons estimated at 2,500-5,000 tons as the most serious threats to the South. South Korean military authorities have decided to buy vaccines against anthrax capable of inoculating 10,000 soldiers from the United States and Russia next year, worth $2 million, defense sources said.

North Korea's spending in 2001 for its 1.17 million-strong army would account for more than 30 percent of its national budget, the defense report said. Pyongyang announced that its defense outlays last year increased 4.4 percent from the previous year to reach $1.42 billion, or 14.5 percent of the total budget.

The North purchased $196 million worth of weapons during 1994-98, while South Korea became the world's fourth largest arms importer by purchasing $6 billion between 1995-99, the report said.

The military report came instead of the defense white paper which was skipped this year due largely to concerns that it may trigger angry reaction from North Korea.

Conservative critics accused the Defense Ministry of being afraid of provoking North Korea, which has denounced Seoul's white paper as evidence that Seoul is unwilling to reconcile.

South Korean defense white papers have described the North as Seoul's "principal enemy." In angry response, the North broke down reconciliation events with the South.

Seoul has said the "principal enemy" issue would be settled naturally if both Koreas substantially built up trust.

The two Koreas have remained technically at war since their 1950-53 war ended in armed truce, not a peace treaty. Their border has been sealed with nearly 2 million troops deployed on both sides.

-------- pakistan / india

Islamabad makes arrest as peace offer

By Nicholas Kralev
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 31, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20011231-5712260.htm

Pakistan, in a bid to defuse the escalating crisis with India, said yesterday it had arrested the leader of a militant group accused by New Delhi of carrying out an attack on its Parliament, but India kept up pressure on Islamabad, equating its actions with the U.S. ultimatum to the Taliban after September 11.

Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, also said India's military buildup and Islamabad's need to respond to it are tying his hands in dealing with the real problem of terrorism in his country.

But India, dismissing recent steps Pakistan has taken to freeze assets of terrorist organizations and arrest their leaders as "too little, too late," yesterday said it is in the same position the United States was in after the attacks in New York and on the Pentagon.

"We did exactly what President Bush did when he gave notice to the Taliban, saying they should hand over the al Qaeda, close down the terrorist networks or face the consequences," India's ambassador to Washington, Lalit Mansingh, said on "Fox News Sunday."

"Just as the United States put its forces on alert after the attack on September 11, our forces went on alert after the ghastly attack on the Parliament," he said.

The Dec. 13 attack, which killed nine persons, was "one of the most dramatic events for us in our entire history," he said. New Delhi has demanded that Gen. Musharraf's government "shut down" at least three groups India says organized the attack: Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed and Harkat-ul-Mujahideen.

Asked whether India would take unilateral action against these terrorist organizations if Pakistan doesn't crack down on them, Mr.

Mansingh responded: "We have said that we have all the options before us. We are right now trying the diplomatic option. Hopefully, this will succeed."

Although he insisted that "it's not our intention to start a war," the ambassador said, "We do expect further attacks, and we are not going to sit back and wait for them."

Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, head of Lashkar-e-Taiba, was arrested yesterday, a top Pakistani security official said.

"He has been arrested for making inflammatory speeches to incite people to violate law and order," the official was quoted by Agence France-Presse as saying.

Gen. Musharraf's government, which denies involvement in the attack on the Indian Parliament, had already arrested Masood Azhar, leader of Jaish-e-Mohammed, the other group India accuses of being behind the terrorist act.

Last week, the United States added both Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed to its list of foreign terrorist organizations. The Bush administration also has been trying to mediate a solution to the crisis, which Washington fears may hurt its anti-terrorism effort.

Both India and Pakistan last week put missiles on alert and prepared for a war they say they don't want. They also traded sanctions, halving their embassy staff and banning aircraft from the other country from flying over their airspace. Mr. Bush urged Gen. Musharraf on Saturday to take new steps to rein in "extremists," while assuring Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee that the United States would cooperate with India in its fight against terrorism.

A week ago, Pakistan froze the bank accounts of Lashkar-e-Taiba and another militant organization, Umma Tameer-e-Nau, which the United States has accused of passing nuclear arms data to terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.

Yesterday, Pakistan's central bank said it had frozen the personal bank accounts of two nuclear scientists and an industrialist suspected of having links with bin Laden.

A spokesman for the State Bank of Pakistan said the accounts of scientists Bashiruddin Mahmood and Abdul Majeed and industrialist Mohammed Tufail had been frozen. All three were on the board of Umma Tameer-e-Nau.

•This article is based in part on wire service reports.

----

Kashmir is part of the mess that Britain left behind
This futile crisis cannot be separated from the 'war' against terrorism

Peter Preston
Monday December 31, 2001
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0%2C3604%2C626099%2C00.html

The prime minister of India warned that, unless Pakistan reined in its Kashmir guerrillas, there'd be war. The president of Pakistan solicited the "good offices" of the US - and sent in his guerrillas anyway.

Bloody miscalculation, bloody incompetence all round.

But that was 1965, number two out of four conflicts that have wracked the subcontinent since independence. And here (quite possibly) we go again.

Accidents - bloody accidents - keep happening.

Forget the end of history, forget the blah-blah of hope as the year turns: forget especially any sheeny triumphalism attached to the "war" against terrorism.

New Delhi and Islamabad seem to have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. They are locked in the time warp of half a century ago. Only the nuclear warheads in their arsenals are new.

Kashmir, perhaps even more than the Middle East, is the world's most intractable, most punishingly futile crisis. Decade after decade it rumbles insolubly on, claiming dead on the battlefield but, beyond that, claiming millions of lives lost to poverty and sickness, people ground down by an obscene weight of military spending. The generals and politicians who made the first blunders have long since passed away: though the excuses have changed, their heirs perform as though from memory.

Remember Sir Hari Singh, the playboy maharajah of (Hindu) Jammu and (Muslim) Kashmir, who paid £50,000 for an imported dancing girl and flip-flopped his misbegotten statelet into Delhi's embrace at the last moment of independence. Remember the referendum India promised and then forgot.

Remember the endless intrigues that went with the cold war. Remember Nehru's belief in the "basic ideal" of secularism that could not be compromised.

All this is gone now. Messrs Putin and Bush are best buddies. China is coming in from the cold. A Hindu nationalist prime minister rules India. What's left is one glorious valley where no tourists tread and a desolate, impoverished slab of rock and ice sustained only by stubbornness. Kashmir's sole remaining importance is as a casus belli.

Benign diplomats, left to themselves, would have no difficulty. Set Kashmir in the context of a wider Indo-Pakistani settlement, open borders to trade and travel, even create a subcontinental common market.

Offer Kashmir itself (but not lowland Jammu) a measure of independence like Andorra or the Channel Islands: neutral, semi-autonomous, free to grow rich on American Express cards. Hold your plebiscites and proclaim a victory for pragmatism.

Everyone wins.

But that is not the way of this world. Pakistan, through 50 years of governmental failure, has turned the "liberation" of an Indian Kashmir (which would probably recoil from Islamabad's embrace) into a symbol of struggle that keeps its swollen army - and successive military dictators - in place. Kashmir, at least in the rhetoric, is one definition of nationhood.

And India, having spent so much blood and blood money, responds in kind. If Kashmir goes, who can say what other fractious state may wish to follow?

Those are mountains of fear, self-interest and pride left to climb. They are also mountains of unreality.

What does Mr Vajpayee hope for if his troops move over the Pakistan border? Probably (because of superior manpower and equipment) a short, conventional campaign in the flatlands of Punjab and Sind that makes General Musharraf sue for peace and then topples him. But it's hard, in the miserable pantheon of history, to see how this helps. It will be killing business as usual in the hills again all too soon. And the parallels with Sharon and Arafat also operate.

India assumes, as Israel assumes, that Musharraf can turn off terrorism like a tap. It ain't necessarily so.

Where, since you ask, is Osama bin Laden? Maybe somewhere in Pakistan. General Musharraf would love to round him up and hand him over - but he's an Arafat, the temporising victim, not the master, of events. His writ barely runs through the tribal areas.

He doesn't know whether his notoriously flaky secret service, the ISI, is for him or against him. Can he click his fingers at Azad Kashmir as Taliban remnants trek in? Did he welcome the suicide attack on India's parliament, which sparked off this round? Of course not. But has he the physical and political clout to track down the perpetrators, close down their networks and seem Vajpayee's patsy? No: he's stuck, betwixt and between.

Kashmir, in sum, isn't separate from the "war" against terrorism. It has swiftly become an umbilical part of it.

Terrorist groups like Jaish-e-Mohammed have seen the chance of a fruitful mayhem. India has upped the ante in the shadow of Sharon. Musharraf, having risked so much to side with the White House coalition, finds himself dependent on an army loyalty which could be withdrawn if he goes soft on his nationhood symbolism. More bloody miscalculation, more bloody incompetence.

Yet, for once, there is a difference. The difference we call September 11. This, in the second phase, is "our war" between members of our coalition. This is "our" Pakistani dictator, suitably pavilioned in praise, cash and assurances. These are "our" nuclear weapons on both sides, sanctions withdrawn. These are "our" arguments for action or inaction, suitably reprocessed. This, when and if the tanks roll around Sialkot, will be our nightmare.

George W, miffed that the net around Osama is suddenly full of holes, may not welcome such a show.

America's war doesn't include trading old flashpoints for new. But we ought to be grimly clear. Fifty years on, the mess that we Brits left behind returns to haunt us all. And this time, with this coalition, we need to sort it. We've started: we have to find a finish.

p.preston@guardian.co.uk

-------- us

MILITARY
Airborne Troops Relieving Marines at Kandahar Base

New York Times
December 31, 2001
By JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/31/international/asia/31MILI.html

WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 - The Pentagon has ordered soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division to relieve the Marine Corps in southern Afghanistan, paving the way for a long- term American military presence in the country, military officials said today.

Over the next two weeks, elements of the 101st out of Fort Campbell, Ky., will begin moving into a makeshift Marine Corps base at the Kandahar airport, where they will assume the duties now being performed by more than 1,000 marines.

The Army's mission will be essentially the same as that of the Marine Corps, officials said: guarding scores of Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners awaiting interrogation, securing an airfield for use by cargo planes carrying military and relief supplies, and searching for remnants of the Taliban army near Kandahar.

Although the 101st is a light, fast- moving force similar to the marines, it is typically used for longer-term missions than the Marine Expeditionary Units now in the region are accustomed to.

Those units are trained and equipped for 30-day missions where they are expected to conduct lightning assaults and secure territory but not hold it for long periods. That, historically, has been the job of the Army.

Today's announcement underscores the changing nature of the American military mission in Afghanistan. As the fighting dies down and the new Kabul government takes shape, American forces are increasingly needed to help control hundreds of Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners, as well as provide security at airfields from which food, medicine and other supplies will be dispensed.

Even though the mission is changing, the Marine Corps' role may not be over yet, Pentagon officials said. While marines from the 15th and 26th Marine Expeditionary Units in southern Afghanistan will return to amphibious assault ships in the north Arabian Sea, they will not necessarily leave the region soon, and could be dispatched for other tasks in the campaign against terrorism, the officials said. "This frees up the marines to do other things," said Lt.

Col. Martin Compton, a spokesman for the United States Central Command in Tampa, Fla. A third Marine Expeditionary Unit, the 13th out of Camp Pendleton, Calif., is to arrive in the Arabian Sea by mid-January with 2,200 more marines.

The Pentagon has not ruled out using marines or Special Operations forces to comb through caves in Tora Bora for signs of Osama bin Laden. But for the moment, the Pentagon seems prepared to let a dwindling number of Afghan soldiers do that work.

With little fresh information about Mr. bin Laden's whereabouts, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said today that he thought it likely that the Al Qaeda leader was alive, possibly outside Afghanistan.

"The latest intelligence we had indicates that the high probabilities are that bin Laden is still alive," Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, said on CNN's Late Edition. "Where he is, is a question mark." More than 50 American Special Operations troops remain in the Tora Bora region. They are not searching caves, but are evaluating materials seized from the caves.

The possibility that Mr. bin Laden escaped the bombing attacks on Tora Bora has fueled debate over whether the Pentagon should have sealed off the border using American forces. Instead, the United States relied on Pakistani forces, Afghan militia and American air power.

Despite growing concerns that Mr. bin Laden had escaped, the Senate Democratic majority leader, Tom Daschle, today defended President Bush's cautious approach. "We've done everything we know how to do in searching the caves and using the intelligence tools that we have available to us," Mr. Daschle said on NBC's Meet the Press. "I think we've got to find ways with which to aggressively continue to pursue this effort beyond that which we've done," Mr. Daschle added. "We've got to keep the pressure on, we've got to find him." The Pentagon is also hoping that information from Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners will help track down Mr. bin Laden and his top lieutenants, although those interviews have not provided a bonanza of useful intelligence, American officials said. American forces have custody of 150 Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners in the region, all considered to be of high enough rank to warrant intensive interrogation, the Pentagon said.

American warplanes continued to ply the skies of Afghanistan today but did not drop any bombs, Pentagon officials said. The most recent airstrike was on Friday night, when two B-1 bombers attacked buildings outside the eastern city of Gardez. The Afghan Islamic Press reported that civilians were killed in that attack, but the United States Central Command asserted that the target was a Taliban command post.

On Saturday, a Marine Corps CH- 53 Super Stallion helicopter damaged its landing gear after it was forced to make an emergency landing during a reconnaissance mission northwest of the Kandahar airport, military officials said. No one was injured.


-------- POLICE / PRISONERS

Diplomats Complain of Secret Detainees

December 31, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Diplomats-Detainees.html

NEW YORK (AP) -- Foreign diplomats say they are getting scant information from the U.S. government about hundreds of immigrants from their countries who remain in custody nearly four months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

``The light we are seeking does not come as it should,'' said Mohamad Hafeez, Pakistan's consul general in New York. ``As time passes we worry more and more.''

Some of the 460 men rounded up on immigration violations have been behind bars for three months, and diplomats say there have been reports of mistreatment.

Diplomats said they have been given little or no indication of when the men will be released. They said they have not even been provided the names of those behind bars -- just country of origin and the alleged immigration violation. Diplomats have identified some of the detainees through family members who have come seeking help.

The State Department said the government is living up to its obligations under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, which requires that the United States notify arrested or detained foreigners of their right to contact their embassy or consulate.

But it is up to the individual to make that choice, and some detainees might have chosen not to have their consulates notified, said Christopher Lamora, spokesman for the bureau of consular affairs at the State Department.

The painstaking pace of the investigations has also raised questions.

The most severe penalty for the immigration violations facing the detainees is deportation; some have agreed to leave the United States. But federal immigration officials said they cannot be released until the FBI completes its investigation into the lead that brought the person to the attention of authorities.

Human rights and civil rights groups filed a federal lawsuit earlier this month challenging the detentions.

``The most alarming aspect of these cases is the secrecy that's surrounded them,'' said Alistair Hodgett, a spokesman for Amnesty International, one of the plaintiffs.

Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesman Russ Bergeron could not say how many detainees have been cleared or released so far. In addition to those held on immigration violations, 77 are in custody on criminal charges such as possessing hazardous materials. The Justice Department officials will not say how many people are being held as material witnesses.

``Very troubling,'' said Sedat Onan, deputy consul general for Turkey, which has 43 citizens being detained. ``Turkey is one of the strongest and most loyal allies of the United States. Our citizens are being treated like common criminals.''

The detentions come as the United States seeks continued support for its war on terrorism from Muslim nations such as Turkey and Pakistan. Pakistan has 208 citizens in custody -- more than any other nation -- and is especially sensitive, given the political risks it has shouldered in siding with the United States.

``It's helping to sow the seeds of hatred in the Pakistani community against the U.S. government,'' Pakistani vice consul Irfan Ahmed said. One Pakistani man died in custody from heart problems. And Ahmed said the consulate knows nothing about 75 of the detainees, except that they are from Pakistan.

Ahmed said a number of Pakistani detainees told him they were encouraged not to contact their consulate, saying it would slow down the process. But State Department spokesman Jo-Anne Prokopowicz said, ``I've never heard of that.''

Canadian officials told a similar tale concerning citizen Shakir Ali Baloch, who has been held since September. After being asked to locate Baloch by his family, Canadian officials said Baloch told them he had been denied contact with his consulate or a lawyer. American officials had trouble even locating Baloch at first, eventually finding him at a lockup in New York City.

``This is a troubling period -- we understand that -- but basic legal rights cannot be set aside,'' said Reynald Doiron, a spokesman for the Canadian Consulate.

While the fate of the detainees is being determined, their families are left anxious and wondering.

Uzma Naheed, 39, said her husband and brother have been in jail for about three months and she has not been permitted to visit them. Her Bayonne, N.J., home is barren because she is selling off her possessions to make do. She is behind on the mortgage.

``I am really in a lot of big trouble here,'' Naheed said. She said her husband, Anser Mehmood, has been in the United States since 1989 and had let his visa lapse. On the morning of Sept. 11, Mehmood, a truck driver, was scheduled to make a delivery to the Pentagon. That helped draw the attention of authorities.

She said her husband is innocent: ``He always respects the law.''

-------- death penalty

Virginia executions reach 17-year low

December 31, 2001
AP
http://www.washingtontimes.com/metro/20011231-8511613.htm

RICHMOND - Virginia executed two men this year, the fewest since 1984.

The state executed 14 men in 1999, and eight were put to death in 2000.

The reason for the drop is simple, said Randy Davis, spokesman for the Virginia attorney general's office. In 2001, only one Virginia death-row inmate, Christopher Beck, completed all of his state and federal appeals.

He was executed on Oct. 18.

Another condemned killer, Thomas Akers, waived his appeals and was put to death on March 1. Walter Mickens, the senior man on Virginia's death row, was to have been executed, but the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear his appeal.

This year's decrease is consistent with the national trend. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics figures show that 66 inmates were put to death in 2001, down from 85 in 2000, and 98 in 1999.

It marks the first time since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 that the number of executions across the country has declined two years in a row.

Virginia had record numbers of executions for several years in the mid- to late-1990s because of a bulge of cases that came through the appeals process once new state and federal laws took effect that sped up the process.

Critics contend that the faster process has risked error and less-than-thorough reviews of cases by appeals courts. Only in the past year or two have appeals courts begun taking harder looks at cases, perhaps in light of highly publicized cases of wrongful convictions and death sentences nationally.

Earlier this year, former Virginia death-row inmate Earl Washington Jr. was freed on a gubernatorial pardon after a new DNA test cleared him of a 1982 rape and murder.

Because of the relatively large number of executions through last year, Virginia's death-row population, once 60 inmates, is now less than 30. The state has executed 83 men since 1976, second to Texas, which has carried out 256 executions.

Nationally, the Death Penalty Information Center's 2001 year-end report found that in addition to the 22 percent decline in executions, there has been a drop in public support for capital punishment.

Richard C. Dieter, the center's executive director, noted that Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were among those urging a closer scrutiny of capital punishment in 2001. These concerns prompted lawmakers in nearly every state retaining the death penalty to consider a variety of reform bills.

Also this year, five states banned the execution of the mentally retarded, and 17 states acted to provide greater opportunity for post-conviction DNA testing.

Stephen B. Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights and a capital punishment foe, said he believes courts "have been more careful in the last couple of years after throwing caution to the wind in 1998 and 1999."

"People all are for executions in the abstract, but when the pace of executions really picks up, as it did in Louisiana several years ago, and in Texas and Virginia more recently, people are uncomfortable with it and put the brakes on," he said.

-------- terrorism

Al-Qaida Files Revealed on PC

The Associated Press
Monday, December 31, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A44615-2001Dec31?language=printer

NEW YORK -- A computer taken from a building used by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida in Afghanistan contains letters and memos about the organization's internal operations, justifications for attacks, and efforts to obtain chemical weapons, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

A looter said he got the desktop computer in Kabul after a U.S. bombing raid in November that killed several senior officials of al-Qaida, the Journal said.

The Journal said it bought the machine from the looter for $1,100, and that U.S.

officials had confirmed the authenticity of the files it contained.

The terrorist group functioned like a multinational corporation, with memos referring to al-Qaida as "the company" and its leadership as "the general management," the newspaper said.

One memo referred to a "legal study" of the killing of civilians, in which the writer said he had found ways to keep "the enemy" from using the killing of "civilians, specifically women and children," to undermine the militants' cause, the Journal said.

A letter addressed to top al-Qaida lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahri said "hitting the Americans and Jews is a target of great value and has its rewards in this life and, God willing, the afterlife," the Journa eader Ahmed Shah Massoud, to be conducted by "one of our best journalists, Mr. Karim Touzani," the Journal said.

Massoud was killed by a bomb on Sept. 9 while being interviewed by two men posing as journalists, one carrying a passport in the name of Karim Touzani.

A video file made after Sept. 11 uses television footage of people fleeing the World Trade Center, combined with a sound track of mocking chants and prayers in Arabic, the Journal said.

Text files include an outline of an al-Qaida project to develop chemical and biological weapons, code-named al-Zabadi, Arabic for curdled milk, the newspaper said.

One memo, apparently written by al-Zawahri, says "the destructive power of these weapons is no less than that of nuclear weapons," the Journal said.

The memo adds that "we only became aware of them when the enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concern that they can be produced simply."


-------- OTHER

-------- environment

Tortoise Holds Up Army Training

December 31, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Army-Tortoise.html

FORT IRWIN, Calif. (AP) -- Just about every month, the Krasnovians and their Pahrumphian allies lay siege to this arid land in the Mojave Desert.

The warriors, U.S. troops portraying a fictional enemy, use real tanks and fake ammunition to stage mock attacks on as many as 5,500 American soldiers arriving to support the made-up Republic of Mojave, which broke away from the nation of Krasnovia.

The combat on the 643,000-acre desert battlefield at the Army's National Training Center amounts to the world's biggest war games.

But now a move to expand the training ground to make it even more realistic is being held up by two endangered species -- the desert tortoise and a plant called the Lane Mountain milkvetch.

Environmentalists and wildlife biologists fear that combat will put the species in jeopardy.

It could take months of environmental study -- and probably a courtroom battle -- before the tanks can roll beyond their current limits and into prime tortoise habitat. The Army's most optimistic estimate is 2004.

``We think they are going to have a hard time expanding Fort Irwin and complying with all the nation's environmental laws,'' said Daniel Patterson, desert biologist for the Center for Biological Diversity.

Interest in expanding Fort Irwin began more than a decade ago. But it was not until December that Congress gave the Army 110,000 acres of federal land to expand the training area.

``We have asked for what we need to train, and nothing more than that,'' said Tim Reischl, an Army consultant in change of planning the expansion.

Because of the war on terrorism, environmentalists are being more careful than ever not to disparage the Army's intentions, even though the military has not cited the war as a reason for the expansion effort.

``We're not against the Army at all, but they've got to be able to continue training in a way that doesn't destroy the landscape,'' Patterson said.

Since 1982, more than 1.2 million soldiers have honed their skills at the training center about 110 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

The Army says expanding to the east and southwest would enable training on two fronts simultaneously.

But military installations already occupy about 25 percent of the 7.2 million acres of tortoise habitat in the western Mojave Desert, environmentalists say. And the land in question is home to two-thirds of the known population of the Lane Mountain milkvetch.

Smoke from tank training ``is a big problem for the plant life out there because coating all the plants with heavy dust inhibits growth, which reduces the quality of the habitat. We also worry about direct kills of the tortoise, its burrows and the vegetation it depends on for its livelihood,'' Patterson said.

The tortoise population in some areas of the western Mojave has dropped nearly 90 percent in 30 years, according to biologist Kristin Berry of the U.S. Geological Survey.

In addition to soldiers and tanks, other threats are disease, cars, off-road vehicles, livestock, non-native plants, development and ravens.

-------- health

Forgiveness Boosts Health; Effect Varies with Age

Friday December 28 5:26 PM ET
Reuters Health
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011228/hl/forgive.html

NEW YORK - To err is human and to forgive divine, according to the old adage, but humans who forgive are known to experience significant physical and mental health benefits from doing so.

Now researchers report that these beneficial health effects appear to vary by age, along with the willingness to forgive others, the willingness to forgive oneself and the feeling of being forgiven by God.

``Taken together, our findings emphasize that forgiveness is a multidimensional phenomenon,'' write study lead author Dr. Loren L.

Toussaint of the University of Michigan and colleagues. ``There are age differences in some forms of forgiveness and in their relationship to health.''

Their conclusions are based on survey responses from more than 1,400 adults during a 5-month study period.

In general, young adults (18-44 years) reported that they were less likely to forgive others than middle-aged (45-64) and older adults (65 and older).

They were also less likely than older adults to believe that they had been forgiven by God, the investigators report in the Journal of Adult Development.

Among survey participants of all ages, however, reports of forgiveness of themselves and others were associated with decreased psychological distress, including feelings of restlessness, hopelessness and nervousness.

Further, young adults who reported high levels of self-forgiveness were more likely to be satisfied with their lives, whereas middle age and older adults who reported high levels of forgiveness of others were more likely to report increased life satisfaction.

But not all foregiving is immediately beneficial, the findings suggest.

Proactive forgiveness-asking for forgiveness, rather than granting it--was associated with increased psychological distress among all study participants. Other acts of proactive forgiveness would include asking God's forgiveness for hurting someone or praying for someone who has hurt them.

The researchers speculate that this may be because such proactive individuals are ``'taking the first step' in the process of forgiveness,'' which may lead to heightened stress.

In other findings, attendance at religious services was associated with decreased psychological distress, particularly among young and middle-aged adults, and increased life satisfaction among young and old adults. Service attendance was also associated with higher self-rated health among all age groups.

The study was partly supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.

SOURCE: Journal of Adult Development 2001;8:249-257.


-------- activists

Vigil at Indian and Pakistani Embassies?
India's is on Mass Ave around 21st Street (DC);
Pakistan's on Mass Ave around 23rd st.
Gandhi Memorial is right in between.

A vigil with nice big posters of gandhi would be very appropriate, say Wednesday evening??

Anyone want to do it? email or call Carol 202-635-3739

Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2001
From: Carol Moore <carol@carolmoore.net>
See http://www.antiwar.com for lots more details about the situation.

----

A Happy New Year from Nuclear Free Kobe (27 anniversary on May 18th 2002)

Against both terrorism and violent retaliation !! Make a New Century free from nuclear weapons and war, where every people will co-exist in peace.

Please send a short message for encouragement and solidarity to us.

Naomi Iwai from Nuclear Free Kobe mailto:<ntiwai@hotmail.com

----

ICIS-Institute for Cooperation in Space- launches public campaign to adopt a World Treaty Banning Space-Based Weapons

Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2001
ICIS: http://www.peaceinspace.com

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

Saturday, December 29 - I participated in an extraordinary meeting in Marin County, California. Eighteen representatives from alternative energy, the peace movement, aerospace industry and journalism had gathered to help launch a campaign to deweaponize space permanently. This campaign is initiated by the Institute for Cooperation in Space (ICIS), a nonprofit educational foundation, whose leader, Dr. Carol Rosin, chaired the meeting.

Over the next several months the campaign will pursue these dual objectives:

1) promote passage of Congressional Bill HR 2977, the Space Preservation Act of 2001, (introduced by U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio). A parallel Senate Bill will be introduced by a major U.S. Senator over the next couple weeks. HR 2977's objective is "to preserve the cooperative, peaceful uses of space for the benefit of all humankind by permanently prohibiting the basing of weapons in space by the United States, _and_ to require the President to take action to adopt and implement a world treaty banning space-based weapons.";

2) persuade all governments on Earth to sign the World Treaty Banning Space- Based Weapons. This World Treaty preserves space for peaceful and cooperative uses. The Treaty establishes a permanent ban on space-based weapons, and establishes a space peacekeeping agency to verify the ban on weapons.

The World Treaty builds on earlier space law, including the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, and adds the vital element of keeping weapons out of space. A catalyst for the World Treaty is President Bush's December 13th announcement that on June 13, 2002 he intends to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, thus opening a drive to positioning terrible new Star Wars weapons in space. Dr. Rosin, who is spearheading the campaign for the World Treaty ought to know: she was formerly head of aerospace research and development at Fairchild Industries, a leading defense contractor. Now she works for peace in space.

Dr. Rosin states succinctly the choice facing Earth now: "We can build space battle stations and weapons pointed towards earth and into space, or we can build space habitats, hospitals, schools, farms, labs, industries, hotels and resorts, elevators and craft, and free ourselves to explore the universe."

The Institute for Cooperation in Space has impressive Board members. In addition to Dr. Carol Rosin, a space and military defense consultant, Board members include: Apollo 14 Astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, scientist-author of "2001", etc., Daniel Sheehan, JD, University of California Professor and hero-litigator in the Pentagon Papers, Iran- Contra, Three Mile Island, and Karen Silkwood cases, and Alfred L. Webre, JD, MEd, futurist and former delegate to the UNISPACE Outer Space conference.

The campaign to adopt the Space Preservation Act of 2001 and the World Treaty Banning Space-Based Weapons is not just ICIS's baby; everyone must get involved. Will 2002 be the year that the ABM Treaty falters and a horrible new Star Wars arms race crescendoes between the U.S., Russia, China, and others in a lawless frontier of space? Or will 2002 be the year that the countries of Earth pledge themselves to keep space peaceful and free for all who come in good will, a place to build microgravity quarters, learn new wonders, and prepare for our cosmic future - in space? Your involvement now can make the difference. It's time to act. - Richard Boylan, Ph.D. www.drboylan.com

To contact ICIS or Dr. Rosin about how you can help:

Institute for Cooperation in Space
P.O. Box 25040
Ventura, California 93001 , USA
(805) 641-1999 Fax: (805) 641-9669
URL: http://www.peaceinspace.com E-mail: rosin@west.net

ICIS-INSTITUTE FOR COOPERATION IN SPACE
http://www.peaceinspace.com
Email: info@peaceinspace.com

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