------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
N-plant neighbors want radiation pills
Chinese prime minister arrives in India
India Wants Pakistan to Back Pledge
Pakistan says India fires as leader urges talks
A Story Of Iran's Quest for Power
Collapse of Soviet Union Proved Boon to Iranian Missile Program
The new Triple Alliance
Turning Arms Into Energy, if Not Into Much Cash
Toxic in Tonawanda?
Enron Also Courted Democrats

MILITARY
Nazi Saboteurs Captured! FDR Orders Secret Tribunal
War Books
Kabul to seek recovery billions
AFGHANISTAN FORCE
U.N. completes Sierra Leone disarmament
United States to chair Sudan peace talks
Sudanese Emigres Seek Peace
Sudanese leader meets Museveni; warns Somalia over militant groups
Somalia's lethal magnetism
Trainee reporter killed as Ugandan police fire on protesters
Thirty-six die in royal power struggle in Nigeria
Tehran delivered US-built missiles to terrorists
Bush May Limit Germ Weapons Info
U.S. Selling Papers Showing How to Make Germ Weapons
Focus of U.S. Anthrax Probe Is Domestic - Ridge
Colombian army poised to hunt rebels after talks fail
Remember the Drug War?
Hemp-Food Firms Fight U.S. Ban, Deny Marijuana Link
Phase II and Iraq
Israeli army slammed at home and abroad for Gaza mass house demolitions
Israel Attacks Palestinian Naval Base in Gaza
Japan considers revising defence forces law
Pakistan grabs more activists and yearns for peace
Pakistan arrests 800 militants
The Rogue to Fear Most Is the One Following Orders
Pakistani Militants Vow Violence
White House seeks graduated terrorism alerts
Three Russian Officers to Face Trial For Friendly Fire Deaths
Base uses space to guide war
Syria, US cooperate against terror despite strained relations
Fighting for oil
Pentagon warns of war lasting six years
Second phase of U.S. war on terror

POLICE / PRISONERS
Terror-training videos found in al Qaeda camp
Captives find tight security in Cuba
Hard time: Aging behind bars
Clashes few at supremacist rally
Pursuing the pros who pick pockets
Worship Event for Released Offenders
'Legal Lynching'
Car Bomb in Basque Region Injures 2

ENERGY AND OTHER
Court halts EPA bid to shift hazardous waste official
Why We Must Feed the Hands That Could Bite Us

ACTIVISTS
PROVOKE PEACE!
They Refused to Fight, Even in the 'Good War'



-------- NUCLEAR

-------- accidents

N-plant neighbors want radiation pills

By JACK KASKEY Staff Writer, (609) 272-7213,
January 13, 2002
http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/news/newjersey/011302IODIDE.html

Barbara Bailine lives about nine miles north of the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant in Lacey Township, so she wants to be ready for the worst.

The worst, she says, would be an accident or terrorist attack that releases enough radiation to spread cancer across southern New Jersey.

Although nuclear power plants are robust structures, some experts say the highly radioactive bundles of spent fuel at New Jersey's nuclear plants are vulnerable to attack by a suicide bomber.

"If you have people ready to give up their lives for a cause, you better be prepared for the worst," Bailine said. "I feel like I'm living on the side of a volcano."

So the Pine Beach resident purchased potassium iodide. Taken immediately after a radiation release, the over-the-counter pill prevents radiation from accumulating in the thyroid, where it can cause cancer.

Thyroid cancer is the biggest short-term cancer risk caused by breathing airborne radiation or eating food or milk contaminated by radiation.

New Jersey officials on Wednesday may decide to follow Bailine's example when a secret committee decides whether to stockpile enough potassium iodide to protect everyone living near the state's two nuclear power plants.

The committee also must grapple with the issue of how to distribute the pills.

New Jersey's former health commissioner, Christine Grant, recommended in August that the state stockpile 900,000 potassium iodide pills.

That's enough to give two days' protection to the estimated 450,000 residents and summer tourists who could be within 10 miles of nuclear plants in Salem and Ocean counties.

Because Ocean County has so many tourists, Grant recommended that the state distribute the pills after a radiation release, rather than giving them out in advance.

Post-Sept. 11 urgency

To date, the recommendations have not been implemented, but there has been a national push to stockpile potassium iodide since Sept. 11.

On Dec. 10, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued new instructions for administering potassium iodide after a radiation release.

The FDA recommendation notes that after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident, children in countries downwind of the radiation have been developing thyroid cancer at 10 to 100 times the normal rate.

The exception is Poland, where quick distribution of potassium iodide prevented any increase in childhood thyroid cancers, according to the FDA.

On Dec. 20, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced it will buy potassium iodide for any state that requests it, on a first-come first-served basis.

"Obviously, Sept. 11 added some urgency to get this moving ahead," NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said. "Vermont has already expressed great interest."

Tennessee, Arizona and Alabama purchased their own stockpiles years ago.

The pills would be provided only to those within 10 miles of a plant because people near an accident would be exposed to more radiation and have less time to evacuate than people further away, Sheehan said.

People as far as 50 miles from a plant could be affected by a nuclear accident, depending on which way the way the wind blows, and federal law requires states to make emergency plans for people that far away.

No public input

When New Jersey's radiological emergency committee discusses the potassium iodide issue this week, no one from the public will be permitted to observe, said Dennis McGowan, a spokesman for the state Division of Health and Senior Services.

The meeting includes health, emergency management and environmental officials, as well as nuclear utility representatives, but it is closed to the public, he said.

However, any decisions made Wednesday must be finalized by the Health Department, said John Haggerty, a spokesman for the state Office of Emergency Management.

Ruth Fisher, a resident of South Dennis in Cape May County, was upset to learn that the nuclear utilities will help decide whether residents get potassium iodide, while the public will not.

"One of my grandchildren might survive if the unthinkable happened, and I want to do anything that might help them," said Fisher, who has been lobbying local officials to stockpile potassium iodide for a year.

Plants vulnerable

Dave Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer who has worked at the Salem and Hope Creek nuclear plants, detailed the vulnerability of the state's nuclear plants in a Jan. 7 letter to the NRC.

Spent fuel at Oyster Creek in Ocean County and Hope Creek in Salem County is stored above ground, making it particularly vulnerable to an air or ground assault that could drain cooling water, wrote Lochbaum, who now works for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C.

"The uncovered and uncooled irradiated fuel in the spent-fuel pool could then overheat and release large amounts of radioactivity into the atmosphere," Lochbaum wrote.

In addition, a fire large enough to prevent the safe shutdown of a plant could be started at any of the state's nuclear-generating stations by crashing a fuel-filled airplane or by saboteurs with inside knowledge, he wrote.

The nuclear industry, however, maintains that any attack would not lead to a major radiation release.

"We do believe that nuclear plants are the strongest physical assets of any kind of infrastructure in this country," said Mitchell Singer, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group.

He also cautioned that iodide pills will not make a person invulnerable against all the effects of radiation.

"One of the things we've always stressed is that in a nuclear emergency, evacuation is the safest precaution," Singer said.

Still, demand for potassium iodide is rising, particularly near nuclear plants.

At the Medicine Shoppe in Lacey Township, for instance, requests for potassium iodide have increased fivefold in the months since Sept. 11, pharmacist Tom Kelley said.

To satisfy the demand, Kelley said he stocked the shelves this month with potassium iodide for the first time in five years.

Ocean County resident Bailine already has purchased enough pills to protect herself, her sister, mother and brother-in-law, as well as her nephew, his wife, a friend and her cats and dogs.

If the worst happens, she wants to be heading out of town, not making a run to the drug store for potassium iodide.

"I figure that's a hell of a time to be looking for it," she said.

-------- india / pakistan

Chinese prime minister arrives in India, but New Delhi rejects mediation role

Sunday January 13, 9:07 PM
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020113/1/2aqi2.html

Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji began a landmark five-day trip to India as New Delhi made clear he was not here to mediate between India and Beijing's strategic ally Pakistan.

Zhu, the highest-ranking Chinese leader to visit India in a decade, landed in the afternoon in Agra. After a short rest at a hotel, he toured the Taj Mahal ahead of a flight to New Delhi.

"It is a wonder of the world and a treasure of history," Zhu wrote in Chinese in the visitors book at the 17th century monument.

India stressed as Zhu was arriving that the Chinese premier was not out to defuse the tension between it and Pakistan, both of which have been massing troops on their common border since an attack on the parliament in New Delhi on December 13.

"China has neither any intention, nor shall it play any mediatory role between India and Pakistan," Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh told reporters in New Delhi.

But Singh said Zhu's visit showed that relations between the world's two most populous countries were in good shape.

"I am confident that there will be progress (in the relationship) during his visit," Singh said.

Zhu, in an interview with the Press Trust of India, said he would press New Delhi during his visit to revoke anti-dumping duties on more than 50 Chinese products.

India and China have a standing border conflict dating from their brief border war in 1962.

New Delhi has also made Beijing unhappy by providing refuge to Tibet's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, who fled his homeland after China crushed a failed uprising in 1959.

India is home to 100,000 Tibetan refugees, and the Dalai Lama's government in exile has said it would protest Zhu's visit to India.

Hundreds of Tibetans protested in New Delhi ahead of the trip, calling on India to tell China to stop military aid to Pakistan and grant Tibetans their rights.

"India should ask China to free illegally occupied Tibet and stop violating human rights in Tibet as well as in China," Gyari Dolma, vice chairwoman of the Assemblies of Tibetan People's Deputies, told media at the rally.

Pakistan announced last week the arrival of a first batch of 40 Chinese-made F-7PG fighter aircraft, although both countries stressed the delivery was not related to the crisis on the subcontinent.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has visited China twice in as many months, where he has sought assurances of Beijing's backing for Islamabad.

Zhu is arriving in Agra from Dhaka, where he held two days of talks on expanding trade cooperation between China and Bangladesh.

Zhu's visit comes as a string of other foreign dignataries travelled to the region to try to defuse the crisis, by urging Pakistan to take tough action against Islamic extremists and asking India to exercise caution.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell leaves for Pakistan and India on Tuesday, a week and a half after a similar tour by British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

----

India Wants Pakistan to Back Pledge

By NIRMALA GEORGE,
Associated Press Writer
Sunday January 13 11:59 AM ET
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20020113/ts/india_pakistan_137.html

NEW DELHI, India (AP) - India's government on Sunday welcomed a commitment by Pakistan to stop allowing its territory to be used for terrorism, but said it wanted to see that statement translated into action.

``This commitment must extend to the use of all territories under Pakistan's control today,'' Indian External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh said Sunday, responding to the Saturday night address by Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

``We would assess the effectiveness of this commitment only by the concrete action taken.''

In an address to the nation on Saturday, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf banned five Islamic groups, including the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammed groups that India blames for attacking its Parliament on Dec. 13.

On Sunday, President Bush (news - web sites) called Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to thank Musharraf for his speech and urge both sides to work out their differences. Both leaders agreed to try to defuse the tension, White House spokesman Sean McCormack said.

Police in Pakistan have arrested more than 900 activists linked to the named groups since Saturday and closed hundreds of their offices in a nationwide sweep.

Several members of the groups vowed Sunday to continue their efforts to end Indian rule in the disputed region of Kashmir (news - web sites). Singh said India would be prepared to resume dialogue with Pakistan once cross-border terrorism stops.

He quoted Vajpayee as saying, ``For every one step Pakistan takes we will take two.''

``Pakistan has only stated its intention. Let it first walk the talk,'' Singh said.

Singh said Pakistan still had not taken action against 20 men accused of bombings, airplane hijackings, assassinations and other crimes in India. Maulana Masood Azhar, leader of Jaish-e-Mohammed, is the only one on the list who has been detained.

Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, the leader of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, is also in custody, but his name is not among the 20 on the list India has given to Pakistan. India has demanded the suspects be extradited.

Musharraf said Saturday night that no Pakistanis would be sent to India for trial, and that Pakistan would consider action against non-Pakistanis in its territory if given proof of their guilt. He also called for international mediation of the dispute - an idea that Singh rejected.

``There is no scope for any third-party involvement,'' Singh said.

Hours before Musharraf's televised address, Pakistani police said they raided religious schools and mosques, arresting more than 300 suspected militants.

Since the attack on the Indian parliament, the nuclear-armed South Asian rivals have massed tens of thousands of troops along their border in the largest buildup since their last war in 1971.

The New Delhi government blamed the Parliament attack, which killed 14 people, including the five attackers, on Pakistan's spy agency and the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist groups. Pakistan and the two groups denied the charges.

Singh spoke after a meeting of Vajpayee's top Cabinet ministers and a subsequent briefing to representatives of all the parties represented in Parliament.

The main opposition agreed with the government's wait-and-see attitude and its rejection of any mediation.

``The speech of President Musharraf had some positive elements so far as he has promised action against terrorism. Much will depend on how these intentions will translate into action,'' said Manmohan Singh, deputy parliamentary leader of the opposition Congress party.

In his speech, Musharraf promised that ``no organization will be allowed to indulge in terrorism behind the garb of the Kashmiri cause. ... We will take strict action against any Pakistani who is involved in terrorism inside the country or abroad.''

Musharraf also announced a crackdown on religious extremists in his country who had supported Afghanistan (news - web sites)'s Taliban rulers and Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s al-Qaida movement.

Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) said Saturday that Musharraf took ``a bold and principled stand to set Pakistan squarely against terrorism and extremism'' both inside and outside the country.

India's government has demanded Pakistan stop Islamic militants based on its territory from helping a 12-year Kashmiri insurgency aimed at breaking the Muslim-majority area away from Hindu-majority India.

In Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu-Kashmir, an officer of the paramilitary Border Security Force said two Islamic militants armed with knives attacked the force's camp near Dal Lake in the center of the city on Sunday.

Desh Raj, deputy inspector general of the Border Security Force, said the attackers injured two troopers before being shot to death. Both attackers carried Dutch passports.

----

Pakistan says India fires as leader urges talks

Sunday January 13, 6:20 AM
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-83447.html

MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan - Indian troops opened fire into Pakistani-controlled Kashmir on Saturday as Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf finished a key address to the nation aimed at averting war with his giant neighbour.

Pakistani police said Indian forces opened fire on a string of Pakistani villages along a ceasefire line separating the Indian- and Pakistani-controlled parts of Kashmir, police said. There were no reports of casualties.

Indian and Pakistani forces have been locked in a tense standoff on their border since a December 13 attack on India's parliament in New Delhi that India blamed on Pakistan-based guerrillas battling Indian rule in disputed Kashmir.

Musharraf on Saturday ordered a fresh crackdown on Muslim militants and told India it was time to talk. But he also said his troops were ready to fight to the last drop of their blood.

The Saturday evening firing with small arms was into several villages in Kashmir's Kotli district and at one village in Bhimber district, police and officials said.

Pakistan-based Muslim rebels battling security forces in Indian-ruled Kashmir are at the centre of the standoff between the nuclear-capable neighbours.

There have been daily exchanges of fire across the border and dozens of people -- both soldiers and civilians -- have been killed and wounded on both sides of the frontier.

Musharraf said in his speech militants would not be allowed to use Pakistan as a base to export violence to India.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars since their independence from Britain in 1947, two of them over the divided Muslim-majority region of Kashmir.

-------- iran

A Story Of Iran's Quest for Power
A Scientist Details The Role of Russia

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 13, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34924-2002Jan12.html

MOSCOW -- The first time Vadim Vorobei went to Iran in 1996, he was amazed by the number of foreign missile scientists wandering openly through Tehran. For the most part, they were people like him: elderly representatives of the old Soviet technological elite impoverished by the collapse of communism and willing to sell their services to the highest bidder.

Although the Iranians made a show of keeping the scientists apart, said Vorobei, they frequently bumped into each other at hotels and restaurants. One day, he would spot a leading Russian missile guidance specialist; the next, a well-known missile engineer from Ukraine. All had been lured to Tehran on the pretext of giving lectures on rocket technology to Iranian university students.

From the U.S. government perspective, Vorobei and his friends are symbols of one of the most serious challenges of the post-Cold War era, the worldwide proliferation of ballistic missiles. In this view, Iran is a "rogue state" seeking weapons of mass destruction and sponsoring international terrorism. The prospect of such a country acquiring long-range missiles is the nightmare scenario underpinning President Bush's decision to push ahead with the deployment of a national missile defense system and withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia.

Seated in his office at the Moscow Aviation Institute, one of several Russian institutions under U.S. sanctions for proliferating missile technology, Vorobei insists that American fears are exaggerated. He claims he and other Russian missile scientists were brought to Iran in part to demonstrate to the rest of the world that Iran was making rapid strides toward becoming a major missile power that would soon be able to target the United States. In fact, he insisted, Iran's capabilities remain much more modest than that.

"It was a huge mess," recalled Vorobei, a department head at the institute, the alma mater of many of Russia's leading missile engineers, describing what he said was a five-year collaboration with Iran, from 1996 to 2000. "The Iranians took people who were needed and people who weren't needed. There was something artificial about it. They were trying to show that a lot of Russians were working for them and everybody else should be scared by it."

The threat has been taken seriously by the Bush administration, which used it to justify rapidly pushing ahead with the deployment of a missile defense system. A congressional commission headed by Donald H. Rumsfeld, now the defense secretary, predicted in July 1998 that Iran might be capable of causing "major destruction" to the United States "within five years."

The differing perceptions over what Iran has achieved, and how much outside assistance it is receiving, go to the heart of the missile defense debate in the United States. While few experts doubt that Iran is rapidly emerging as a regional missile power, opinions are divided over whether its programs pose a real threat to U.S. territory, as the Bush administration has suggested.

This is the first of two articles looking at different aspects of the worldwide missile threat, beginning with a detailed examination of the Iranian missile program and Russia's role as a proliferator of missile technology. A follow-up article tomorrow will look at the record of U.S. intelligence in keeping track of the threat from such developing countries as Iran and North Korea.

An Underground Railroad

Vorobei's activities confirm what Western analysts have long suspected and the Russian government has repeatedly denied -- the existence of an underground railroad of Russian scientists traveling to Iran to work on missile and nuclear weapons programs. In two lengthy interviews, Vorobei offered an unprecedented description of how Iranian officials recruited their Russian tutors, brought them to Iran and sought missile technology and know-how. But Vorobei's experiences also underscore the difficulties Iran has faced in developing long-range missiles.

Interviews with policymakers, missile scientists, and independent experts in a half-dozen countries suggest that the prospect of a ballistic missile attack on U.S. territory by a "rogue state" is in some ways less likely now than in the summer of 1998, when the Rumsfeld Commission issued its five-year warning. North Korea, the Third World country furthest along in missile development, has declared a testing moratorium. Iran has had trouble perfecting its top-of-the-line Shahab-3 missile, with a range of about 800 miles, and has shown little sign of embarking on a serious intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program.

"The Iranian program is not developing as quickly as the Iranians have claimed, and Israeli and American assessments expected," said Gerald M. Steinberg, a strategic issues expert at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He said that the Shahab-3 missile, when it is eventually deployed, will be capable of hitting Israel, but is hardly a threat to the United States, nearly 6,000 miles away.

"A missile remains the least likely delivery vehicle for a weapon of mass destruction," said Joseph Cirincione, director of the nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "The September 11th events have shown that people can inflict mass casualties on the U.S. with cutting knives and imagination. There are many cheaper, more reliable, but still very destructive means of attacking America that don't require the expense, technical sophistication and exposure that come with a ballistic missile."

A Symbol of Power

Ever since the United States and the Soviet Union deployed tens of thousands of nuclear-tipped missiles during the Cold War, the ballistic missile has become the classic symbol of a country's great-power aspirations. A ballistic missile is one that falls unassisted in a predetermined trajectory following its initial launch. Ballistic missiles are usually larger, and capable of flying longer distances, than cruise missiles, which are powered throughout their flight.

With the possible exception of Nazi Germany and the V-2, the precursor to all modern-day missile systems, no country has ever produced a missile entirely on its own. Both the United States and the Soviet Union were helped enormously by teams of German scientists and missile engineers, recruited or simply taken prisoner at the end of World War II. The Soviets helped the Chinese, who helped the North Koreans, who have helped the Iranians, Syrians and Libyans.

The Iranian Shahab-3 is closely modeled on the North Korean No Dong ballistic missile, which is itself a scaled-up version of the Soviet Scud, according to U.S. officials and independent experts. A liquid fuel missile designed by Soviet engineers in the late 1950s, the Scud originally had a range of less than 100 miles. Over the last three decades, the Scud has become the most widely proliferated missile in history. By scaling up Scuds, clustering them together, and stacking them on top of each other, engineers have been able to greatly extend the range of what remains a fairly primitive missile.

CIA analysts say that Iranian officials sought Russian assistance to build their own improved version of the No Dong, manufacturing their own sophisticated components rather than relying on systems imported from North Korea. Any assistance by Russia to the Iranian program would be a violation of its commitments under the 1987 Missile Technology Control Regime, an international agreement that restricts the sale of parts and expertise for any missile with a range of more than 300 kilometers, or 186 miles.

Just how much help Vorobei and his colleagues gave Iran is a matter of dispute. U.S. and Israeli experts say that Russian cooperation with Iran has been more extensive than Vorobei and his colleagues are willing to acknowledge. For example, they said they have evidence of Russian experts attending Iranian static engine tests, in which a missile engine is strapped to the ground and fired, prior to a full missile test.

Vorobei said the Russian contribution to the Iranian missile program has been limited by Iranian paranoia and secretiveness. "They wanted to receive information from us, but at the same time they were not willing to tell us everything they were doing," Vorobei said. "That made it difficult to help them."

For the most part, the Russian scientists who have traveled to Tehran appear to have been professors and academics like Vorobei rather than top-flight experts from missile design institutes, whose movements are much more tightly controlled by Russian security agencies.

"It's meat-and-potatoes stuff," said Steven Zaloga, a leading American expert on the Russian missile program. "These guys are useful at the level of basic research, not advanced development."

While Vorobei and other Russians concede that they helped Iran build up its general scientific base -- the first step toward a successful missile program -- they insist they stopped well short of transferring secret information banned by international agreement. "It is one thing to learn rocketry in theory, and quite another to move to actual production," said Yevgeny Mishelov, dean of the Moscow Aviation Institute's metallurgy department.

Vorobei said he doubted U.S. projections that Iran could obtain an intercontinental ballistic missile within five or even 10 years. "Their progress is very slow," said Vorobei. "In order to build missiles, you need a strong resource base. You need steel, aluminum, not to mention composite materials, a machine tool industry. Iran has very little of this."

As an insight into the difficulties that Iran has encountered in its missile program, Vorobei cites the attempt to produce jet vanes for the Shahab-3. Located at the bottom of the engine, the movable vanes help steer the missile and are an essential part of its guidance system.

Vorobei explained that the vanes must be coated with a heat-resistant material to protect against super-hot gases from the engine exhaust. He said Iran was unable to acquire either reinforced carbon-carbon or tungsten, two materials often used to coat jet vanes, so they used graphite, a poor substitute. While graphite can be used for jet vanes -- Germany used it for that purpose during World War II for its V-2 missile -- it tends to crack under pressure.

"They created an engine, but not a proper guidance system," Vorobei said, pointing to the failure of two out of three tests of the Shahab-3. "They don't have any real metallurgical industry of their own. Their only hope is to steal something from neighboring countries, but they can't steal everything."

By 1998, Vorobei said, there were signs that Iran was beginning to get "disillusioned" with the Russian involvement, and instituted a large-scale leadership shake-up in Sanam, the government agency responsible for recruiting dozens of Russian experts for work on the Shahab-3 and other programs.

Transfers Overstated

Prior to the publication of the Rumsfeld Commission report in 1998, CIA analysts testified that it would take Iran at least 10 or 15 years to develop an ICBM, even with maximum cooperation from the Russian government. "Ten years is when the Russians come in, build the plant, operate the plant, and build the missiles," the agency's top missile expert, David Osias, testified in 1996. Osias is now a senior analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency.

While there has been leakage of missile technology from Russia to Iran, it has not been on the scale that Osias and others predicted would be necessary for Iran to develop an ICBM within 10 years. A detailed analysis of all allegations of missile component transfer between Russia and Iran over the past decade suggests that transfers have been sporadic, low-level, and largely confined to dual-use materials that can be used for missile construction rather than entire missile systems, or even sub-systems such as engines or guidance packages.

Most if not all of the transfers have involved private companies, possibly with the complicity of well-placed Russian government officials. The most concrete allegations of Russian assistance to the Iranian missile program concern the 1997-98 period when the Clinton administration imposed sanctions on 10 Russian companies for cooperating with Iran. There have been no new sanctions on Russian companies since 1998, despite claims by top CIA officials that Russian transfers of missile technology and expertise to Iran remain "substantial."

U.S.-Russia Distrust

"Our American partners have not presented us with concrete facts [of proliferation]," said Sergei Yekimov, the Kremlin's chief enforcer of export controls. "Their allegations are usually based on emotions and suspicions rather than corroborated evidence."

U.S. officials said they have provided some information about alleged missile technology transfers to the Russian government, but refuse to go into greater detail for fear of compromising intelligence sources and methods. They said that Russian authorities often have appeared more interested in tracking down the source of the Western intelligence information than in cracking down on proliferators.

"It seems to me there has been a drop-off in the more egregious types of assistance," said Robert Gallucci, the Clinton administration's special envoy on nonproliferation issues. "This could mean that we did a good job. . .or it could mean that the character of assistance has moved to different areas that are harder to detect, and harder to control."

There is little doubt that Iran made a serious effort, beginning in the early 1990s, to acquire Russian missile technology. According to U.S. and Israeli officials, items sought by Iran have included turbopumps, used to pump fuel and oxygen into the combustion chamber; specialty steels to construct a lighter airframe, to reduce the missile's weight and extend its range; wind tunnels, to test the aerodynamics of missile parts; ablative materials, to protect the warhead from extreme heat; and furnaces to produce graphite and carbon-carbon, high grade ablatives.

How many of these items were actually delivered is another matter, however. At least two 1997 contracts for turbopumps and a gas furnace were canceled following U.S. complaints, according to U.S. and Russian officials.

Sometimes, intelligence information is misleading. The Austrian government, acting on tips from the CIA and Israeli intelligence, intercepted two tons of basalt fiber as it was being loaded onto an Iranair flight bound for Vienna from Tehran. The shipper was the Russian Grafit Research Institute. According to the CIA, the basalt fiber was a heat-resistant material that could be used to coat missile warheads.

After analyzing the fiber and impounding it for nearly a year, the Austrians concluded that the U.S. claim was "not plausible," and returned the shipment to Russia. U.S. officials continued insisting that the fiber could have been used as an insulating material for missiles.

"Intelligence information can sometimes be very good, but sometimes I truly wonder how they come up with such information," said Helmut Krehlik, head of the export control department of the Austrian Ministry of Trade, who investigated the basalt fiber shipment.

Accumulating evidence against proliferators is not analogous to being in "a court of law," countered Uzi Arad, a former director of intelligence for the Israeli Mossad, who investigated Russian arms sales to Iran in the mid-1990s. "We have evidence that is sufficient to convince ourselves. We are not obligated to prove anything to the Russians. We do not act according to due process and rules of evidence in this business."

U.S. officials say they are at least as concerned about the exchange of know-how as the sale of technology. "The nature of proliferation has been changing over the last decade," says Robert Einhorn, senior adviser to the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the State Department official in charge of counter-proliferation from 1992 until last year.

"We used to think of proliferation as selling a missile system or building an enrichment plant," he said. "Today, it is more likely to mean exchanging know-how over a cup of coffee, a Russian specialist getting work with an Iranian who has been specially briefed to ask him questions about solving a particular problem. It is software rather than hardware."

North Korea's Role

There is less doubt about North Korean assistance to Iran. The relationship dates to 1985 when Iran's former president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, signed a $500 million agreement with Pyongyang for the delivery of North Korean missiles based on Soviet Scud technology.

Since then, according to U.S. intelligence officials, North Korean assistance to Iran has ranged from entire missile systems to missile components and engines to transporter-launchers for its short-range Shahab-1 and Shahab-2 missiles. In return, Iran has shipped hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil to the energy-starved Asian nation.

U.S. officials depict the Shahab-3 as an Iranian version of the North Korean No Dong. In addition to Iran, the CIA believes that North Korea also sold the No Dong to Pakistan, which renamed the missile the "Ghauri." These missiles are all "brothers and cousins" of the No Dong missile, said Robert Walpole, the CIA's national intelligence officer for strategic programs.

Unlike Pakistan, which merely repainted the fuselage of the No Dong, Iran attempted to independently produce the main components of the missile and improve on the North Korean original. Iranian officials have complained about the low quality of North Korean missile components, and the sometimes exorbitant prices charged by Pyongyang for its services.

"The Persians were indignant with the North Koreans," said Vorobei. "They complained that the Koreans were selling their technology very expensively. The Iranians would take it to pieces, and then reassemble it."

Engine Failure

While Iran has succeeded in independently producing some of the components for the Shahab-3 missile, it also has experienced significant setbacks. The biggest, according to U.S., Israeli, and Russian officials, was its apparent inability to perfect its own version of the Shahab-3 engine that it sought to build, rather than relying on the original North Korean engine.

So far, there have been three flight tests of the Shahab-3; in July 1998, February 2000, and September 2000. The first and third tests ended in failure, apparently due to problems with the domestically produced engines, according to U.S. and Israeli experts. The second test, in February 2000, appears to have been relatively successful, but only because Iran replaced its own engine with an engine produced in North Korea.

The experts said that the new engine appeared to be one of a batch of a dozen missile engines that were detected by U.S. spy satellites in November 1999 being loaded onto an Iranian cargo plane at an airport near the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. "You don't buy a dozen engines unless you are in deep trouble," said an Israeli government expert.

Despite the setbacks, most experts agree that Iran will perfect and eventually deploy the Shahab-3 missile, enabling it to reach targets in Israel and the eastern Mediterranean.

The big question is whether Iran will attempt to build a new generation of missiles capable of traveling much longer distances. Evidence that Tehran is interested in longer range missiles rests mainly on statements by Iranian officials referring to a Shahab-4 and Shahab-5, as follow-ups to the Shahab-3.

Recent statements from Iranian officials, along with evidence from Iranian missile tests, suggest that Iran is now shifting its emphasis from long-range liquid fuel missiles, such as the Shahab, to short-range solid-fuel missiles. This would parallel Iran's overall threat analysis, which highlights regional threats from countries such as Iraq and Israel, as well as U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf, over a potential long-range threat from the United States or Europe.

"There is a big difference between Iranians trying to cover the region, and developing a system that will allow them to attack the U.S.," said Gary Samore, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and former White House senior director for nonproliferation for the Clinton administration. "I don't think the Iranians have yet made a fundamental decision about developing an ICBM capability."

Other analysts say that, while Iran's long-range missile programs may have faltered recently, the country is systematically laying the foundation to become a world-class missile power. Iran is proceeding in a much more structured way than North Korea, which is more willing to take risks and short-cuts, according to Clyde Walker, director of the Defense Department's Missile and Space Intelligence Center in Huntsville, Ala.

"Iran went into this business because they got clobbered by Iraq [in the 1980-88 war]," he said. "They are laying down the infrastructure [and] will continue until they have world-class systems."

---

Collapse of Soviet Union Proved Boon to Iranian Missile Program

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 13, 2002; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38267-2002Jan13?language=printer

At the very time that Russian weapons designers found themselves adrift following the collapse of communism in the early 1990s, Iran was desperately in search of technological know-how to become a major missile power.

As a member of the Soviet Union's technical elite, Vadim Vorobei enjoyed a wide number of privileges under communism, including paid vacations, a heavily subsidized apartment, access to special stores, free medical care and a dacha. When the Communist system fell apart, all that disappeared. Suddenly, almost overnight, he and thousands of other highly-trained missile engineers found themselves pitched from the ranks of the well-off into the ranks of the destitute.

"Everything collapsed," recalled Vorobei, whose salary as head of the faculty of engine production at the Moscow Aviation Institute, one of Russia's leading rocketry schools, is just $90 a month. "Our only hope was abroad. Iran, Pakistan, Guinea. Anybody who was interested in us."

Iranian students began showing up at the Moscow Aviation Institute in the mid-1990s, at a time when the institute was desperate to raise money to compensate for reduced state subsidies. By 1996, there were 16 Iranian undergraduate students studying engineering and rocketry, along with several postgraduates in more specialized fields such as aerodynamics.

The postgraduate students soon began cultivating the Russian professors, and invited them to Tehran to give lectures. Vorobei said that he was among an initial group of five Russian missile experts who traveled to Tehran in 1996. Eventually, dozens of Russian missile scientists went to Iran, including specialists in guidance systems, metallurgy, and aerodynamics. The visits were kept secret and Russia publicly denied that its scientists were helping Iran.

While the pay was meager by Western standards -- between $50 and $100 a lecture plus expenses -- it was much more than the missile scientists could earn in Russia.

A powerfully built man in his late sixties, Vorobei said he traveled to Iran about a dozen times between 1996 and 2000, often in the company of an even older friend, Vassily Loginov. They would usually go for a week or two at a time, sometimes staying in the Iranian Foreign Ministry guesthouse, sometimes in hotels.

At first, Vorobei's role was limited to giving lectures at a technical college in Tehran. He is an expert in the use of composite materials in rocket production, and has co-authored a university textbook on the subject. After the lectures, the Iranians would pepper him with questions about different aspects of missile production. Sometimes, they would arrive with blueprints of a missile part, and ask whether it had been designed "in a good or a bad way."

"I would make suggestions to them," he recalled.

Russian professors willing to cooperate more extensively with Iran were offered more lucrative work, sometimes earning as much as $100,000 a contract, according to Vorobei. He and Loginov, a specialist in turbo engines, worked with the Iranian Energy Ministry on several projects, such as designing high-tech joints, methods of producing turbine-based machines, and a study of various types of springs.

While the Iranians did their best to be hospitable, Vorobei said he never felt at home in Tehran, and would have much preferred to be working with Americans or Europeans. Like most Russians, he chafed against the stringent alcohol restrictions. Some scientists tried to smuggle vodka into the country, only to see it confiscated at the airport.

"It was depressing. There was nothing to do in our free time," he complained, describing a limited television diet of politics on one channel, clerics on the second channel, and sports on the third.

He suspected early on that both the U.S. and Israeli intelligence services were breaking into his computers and tapping his telephone conversations. "As soon as we went to Tehran, they found out straight away." U.S. and Israeli officials confirm that they were familiar with Vorobei's activities in Iran.

When Vorobei first began traveling to Tehran in 1996, he faced few obstacles. Indeed, he is at pains to point out that he went with the approval of his superiors. Passports were arranged officially through the Foreign Ministry and the state security service, the FSB.

According to Yevgenia Albats, a prominent Moscow journalist who has studied Russian missile proliferation, FSB officials routinely took commissions from Iranian procurement agents in return for facilitating the travel arrangements of Russian experts. Some Western intelligence officials believe this indicated high-level Kremlin approval for missile cooperation with Iran; others take a more benign view, arguing that it reflected the anything-goes atmosphere of the Yeltsin years, when even FSB agents could be bought.

It was not until 1998 that Vorobei began getting different signals from Russian authorities, in response to vociferous complaints from U.S. and Israeli officials. According to Moscow Aviation Institute's director, Alexander Matveyenko, the Russian security services began complaining about Vorobei's activities. "The Americans were putting pressure on them, and they were putting pressure on us," he said.

A row broke out within the institute after the United States canceled $1 million in research contracts because of the Iranian connection. The professors who had been receiving U.S. grants blamed Vorobei and Loginov for their troubles. Matveyenko sided with the anti-Iranian group.

Vorobei and his supporters sought to disguise their activities by establishing a private business outside the institute. The business concluded an agreement with the Iranian Ministry of Energy, which U.S. officials said has long been used as a front for missile procurement efforts by Tehran. "Officially, we stopped work [with Iran] but in fact we continued," says Vorobei.

U.S. and Israeli intelligence soon heard of the new arrangement, and insisted that it too be halted. Finally, in the summer of 2000, Matveyenko called Vorobei to his office and gave him an ultimatum: Stop working for Iran or cut off all ties with the institute. Reluctantly, Vorobei complied. He said the Iranians were so offended that they refused to pay him what they already owed him.

In addition to prohibiting professors from traveling to Iran, Matveyenko also stopped Iranian students from taking courses at his institute. The last six Iranians -- out of a total of 29 -- graduated from the institute last year. Despite these steps, U.S. sanctions against the institute are still in force. "There is a program for imposing sanctions, but not for removing them," Matveyenko complained.

-------- israel

[Israel, India and Turkey - all with nuclear weapons on their soil. Chilling. et]

The new Triple Alliance

By Martin Walker Chief International Correspondent
1/13/2002
UPI
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=13012002-102158-9032r

WASHINGTON, Jan. 13 -- No treaties have been signed, and few specific details of the military intelligence agreements have been made public. But the conviction is growing in diplomatic circles where attention must be paid to such developments that the world is witnessing the emergence of a new Triple Alliance in Eurasia.

Israel, India and Turkey always had important interests in common, and Israel and the Turkish military (as opposed to the Turkish state) have been cooperating closely for the past five years and more. The Israeli Air Force uses Turkey's far larger airspace for training and their pilots -- like the two navies -- exercise together.

Israeli Special Forces have taken part in Turkey's regular "incursions" into the Kurdish territories of Northern Iraq, and now Israel is seeking American approval to manufacture the joint U.S.-Israeli Arrow 2 anti-missile missile in Turkey.

But the events of Sept. 11 and the war in Afghanistan have taken the strategic closeness to an entirely new level by bringing India into the equation. India keenly wants to join the Arrow 2 consortium, desperate to acquire a missile that could offer some prospect of destroying Pakistan's own nuclear missiles (acquired from North Korea and China) in mid-flight. This week's highly successful visit of Israel's foreign minister Shimon Peres to India, the third such meeting in less than a year, was simply the most visible sign of the new relationships.

The two countries now have an intelligence-sharing agreement that includes Israeli access to the results from India's own new reconnaissance satellite. Launched in October, and Israeli technicians are helping India upgrade some of its obsolescent military hardware from the sights and rangefinders on tank guns to secure military communications.

Most important of all is the agreement that Israel will sell 3 Phalcon Airborne Warning and Command aircraft, originally intended for China until the United States vetoed the deal, to India in a billion-dollar deal that will palpably shift the balance of military power in Asia. Reckoned to be as advanced as or better than the American AWACS aircraft, the Phalcon would allow the Indian Air Force to control a series of air battles all along the 1400-mile frontier with Pakistan.

(Washington nervously asked Israel last week to "maintain a low profile" on the Phalcon sale in light of current tensions in the subcontinent, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported Thursday.)

The three countries of Israel, India and Turkey share a great deal in common. They are all regional superpowers, with highly regarded armed forces in dangerous neighborhoods. All three have large Islamic populations that aren't going away and all three are increasingly worried by the growth of Islamic fundamentalism. All three nations embrace modernization and secular societies, and all three are hugely dependent on energy imports, although they encircle the great energy basins of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian.

They also have some enemies in common, as Israel's Shimon Peres pointed out in his trip to India, warning his Indian counterpart Jaswan Singh of the danger of Iran, which Peres called "the center of world terrorism," becoming a nuclear power.

At the same time, during talks with Pakistani officials in Tehran, Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Sadeq Kharrazi stressed that both countries "reject the presence of the Zionist regime in the region - Iran is concerned about Israeli activities in the Indian subcontinent."

"If it is true Teheran is worried about my visit, that is a good thing," Peres told Israel Army Radio. "Until now, Teheran has been involved in terror and has pretended to be innocent. We know Teheran is supplying Hezbollah and other terror organizations with money and arms."

"If India seeks our help to fight terrorism, we will gladly do it. If in any small way Israel can help, our cooperation is there," Peres said, adding that he saw India as "Israel's best friend in the region, an open society and a democracy."

"I think that at the end of it all, we aspire to be the Israel in South Asia, and nothing more," complains Prakash Karat, a member of the executive committee (known as the Politburo) of India's Congress party, the opposition to the government of premier Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

The Congress party, whose decades in office during the Cold War positioned India as a leader of the Non-Aligned Group, kept close ties with the Soviet Union and India remains dependent on Russia for much of its military hardware. The BJP coalition government, by contrast, is reforming the economy along free market lines and becoming much closer to the U.S.

The emerging Triple Alliance is thus of far more than regional importance, linking together three pro-Western and powerful states in the unstable Middle East and Central Asia. Because Turkey is a member of NATO and Israel is also a close ally, whose security depends heavily on American support, the Triple Alliance also extends America's influence and reach in a region that contains the bulk of the world's energy resources and most of its security headaches.

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

Turning Arms Into Energy, if Not Into Much Cash

New York Times
January 13, 2002
By DANIEL GROSS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/13/business/yourmoney/13USEC.html

When it went public in July 1998, the United States Enrichment Corporation was a bright light in the nuclear energy industry.

The company, a former government agency, had a monopoly on uranium enrichment in the United States and was responsible for carrying out a government policy to convert Russia's military uranium into commercial nuclear fuel. USEC, as the company is known, had annual sales of $1.4 billion, healthy profits and a promising future technology. It appeared to be an ambitious experiment in harnessing private sector energy to meet a public policy goal. "The beauty of the program is that it disarms former weapons of mass destruction, and it does it through a mechanism that only works if you have a market price," said Robert J. Moore, USEC's general counsel.

But while the company has turned swords into plowshares, it has had far less success spinning its common shares into gold.

In the last two years, it has mothballed one of its two uranium fuel plants, reduced its work force by 40 percent, halved its dividend and become embroiled in a bitter trade dispute with its chief European competitors. Its stock is at $7.16, about half the offering price of $14.25.

Now its prospects may hinge on an International Trade Commission ruling, due on Friday, on whether the company's European rivals sell uranium fuel in the United States at unfairly low prices.

USEC, based in Bethesda, Md., is not speculating publicly about the trade commission's decision. Henry Z. Shelton Jr., the chief financial officer, would say only that "having fair prices in the United States is very important to USEC's financial status, but also to our ability to make investments."

USEC occupies a unique niche in nuclear power, as a former federal agency owned by shareholders. Some critics say its problems show a failure to adjust from running a government bureaucracy that served a captive, regulated market to managing an independent company in an industry dominated by nimble, unregulated customers.

"They came into this clubby nuclear world and were very aggressive," said Matthew Bunn, assistant director of the science, technology, and public policy program at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "They have few friends."

USEC sells chemically "enriched" uranium, which the company produces domestically and buys from Russia, for use as fuel to nuclear power plants. It has dozens of customers in 10 countries, holds a 70 percent market share in Asia and about half the market in the United States, where 103 nuclear plants operate.

The company's origins lie in the end of the cold war in the early 1990's, when the federal government created the "Megatons to Megawatts" program that pays Russia cash for uranium fuel made from its dismantled nuclear warheads. USEC was designated as the government's sole executive agent, the exclusive buyer and marketer of the Russian uranium. Since 1995, it has paid Russia more than $2 billion for fuel derived from 130 metric tons of weapons-grade enriched uranium - enough to arm 5,600 warheads; USEC is obliged to buy fuel derived from a total of 500 metric tons by 2013.

As the bull market raged, USEC emerged as a prime candidate for privatization. In July 1998, the government raised $1.4 billion by selling shares. "We were enamored with the possibility that this was a company that possessed a vital link with government, which would certainly limit the downside risk," said David M. Schanzer, an analyst at Janney Montgomery Scott, which helped to underwrite the offering.

Within a year, the outlook darkened.

USEC had inherited long-term contracts with utility companies - pacts drafted in the 1980's, when uranium prices were high. As those contracts expired, newly deregulated utility companies like Exelon (news/quote) and Duke Energy (news/quote) sought cheaper fuel. They bought from two aggressive European companies - Urenco, owned by the British and Dutch governments and two German utilities, and the French-owned Eurodif. "The markets became more open and more competitive," said James P. Malone, vice president for nuclear fuel at Exelon.

The competition depressed the price of the fuel, measured in separative work units, or S.W.U.'s. The price went from $90 per S.W.U. in 1997 to $79 in 2000. USEC accused European competitors of illegally selling below cost in the United States, called dumping, and of benefiting unfairly from government subsidies. "The market price started to deteriorate substantially coincident with a substantial increase in the orders taken in the U.S. market by European suppliers," said Richard Cunningham, a lawyer at Steptoe & Johnson, who represents USEC. "This is the classic situation in which you find dumping."

The declining price was disastrous for USEC because it was locked into an agreement with Russia to buy 5.5 million S.W.U.'s of fuel - about half of the company's annual sales - at fixed prices that rose annually from a 1997 base.

The company also stumbled in betting on a promising laser technology to upgrade its plants, in Portsmouth, Ohio, and Paducah, Ky. The technology failed in commercial tests, and USEC abandoned it in June 1999, angering investors. "We were repeatedly informed that in fact this was going to be the next great technological development," said Mr. Schanzer at Janney Montgomery.

Struggling with excess capacity and credit ratings that had fallen to junk-bond level, USEC tried to close the Portsmouth plant. That move angered the plant workers' union and local politicians, and some called for the government to reassume control of the company. By the spring of 2001, USEC suspended uranium enrichment at Portsmouth, part of a bigger cut that reduced its staff, research and dividend.

The company also found its freedom constrained by government ties. It reached a tentative agreement with Russia on a new uranium price in May 2000 but approval was delayed by the Clinton and Bush administrations. Last Nov. 26, the Bush administration authorized negotiations for a new price agreement.

USEC's biggest problem, though, is foreign competition. In December 2000, the Commerce Department agreed to investigate the company's European rivals.

During the investigation, USEC showed that from June 2000 to June 2001, its North American market share plummeted to 47 percent from 73 percent and its world share to 29 percent from 35 percent. Revenue slumped to $1.14 billion in the fiscal year ended June 30, from $1.49 billion the previous year. Net income, excluding special items and inventory valuation, fell to $41.1 million from $109.1 million. Critics say the company should blame itself. "It has old technology and the highest costs in a market that is oversupplied," said Thomas L. Neff, a senior scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who came up with the Megatons to Megawatts idea but opposed the privatization of USEC.

The competitors' lawyers contend that the company still benefits unfairly from its former status as federal agency. "USEC is a huge beneficiary of subsidies received from the government of the United States," said David E. Birenbaum, a partner at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, who represents Urenco. "It has very low rent on its plants."

USEC won partial victories last May, July and December in Commerce Department rulings that Urenco and Eurodif were selling fuel at unfairly low prices. The department ordered a 34.16 percent duty on the French imports and 7.07 percent duty on the British. The International Trade Commission is scheduled to vote on Friday on whether those penalties are justified.

Although the Commerce Department rulings were preliminary, they helped to push up uranium prices to $105 per S.W.U. The company's stock, while still nowhere near its offering price, did rise 66 percent in 2001. Nonetheless, the company is not making much money at its basic business.

Some critics say there is a fundamental conflict between serving USEC's shareholders and carrying out the Megatons to Megawatts agreement. The company must sign a deal with Russia regardless of the market price of uranium, so "the Russians can take a much harder negotiating position,"said Dan M. Collier, senior vice president at NAC International, a nuclear energy consulting firm in Atlanta.

William H. Timbers, USEC's chief executive, said there was no conflict. "The early perceived `tension' between these two interests has dissolved to where the success of the national security deal is now integral to our commercial success," he said. "Critics said it couldn't be done but we did it."

-------- new york

Toxic in Tonawanda?
As state investigates, a neighborhood in fear

By T.J. PIGNATARO News Staff Reporter
1/13/2002
The Buffalo News - NORTHERN SUBURBS
From: df7332@aol.com

'This neighborhood is killing us. There's death all around us' Gwen Connette had bladder cancer.

Judith Fox survived breast cancer.

Rebecca Czerwinski has a thyroid condition and a list of other ills that force her to swallow a pile of medications every day.

The stories of these three families living on Dunlop Avenue in the Town of Tonawanda are only the beginning.

In the tight-knit neighborhood surrounding what once was a site for the Manhattan Project - which helped build the first nuclear bomb - people have often whispered that something just wasn't right.

But now, the state Department of Health has confirmed what many feared for a long time: Unusually high cancer rates in this post-World War II working-class community - with its own neighborhood school and even town golf course - surrounded by industrial properties just west of Military Road.

The cancer rates, the state found, are at least 10 percent higher than normal.

And with that, fear grows among those closest to the former Linde Plant, where radioactive uranium was processed during the 1940s as the first step toward developing nuclear bombs.

"This neighborhood is killing us," said Czerwinski, 55, of 117 Dunlop. "There's death all around us. None of this should be happening."

Czerwinski, who has lived in the area since 1964, doesn't have cancer. But she believes her neighborhood is responsible for her husband, Thomas', heart disease as well as her many ailments. They include a thyroid condition, autoimmune disease, osteoarthritis and deterioration of the lining of her ribs.

Czerwinski and others in this neighborhood say they recall that, as children, they used to fish golf balls out of a murky creek near the Linde site, or play in sandboxes at a nearby park containing what some now suspect was mercury.

"Most of the boys used to play in the creek," Czerwinski said. "I used to play in the park, in the sand. There was mercury there. I was probably 10 or 11 at the time."

Now the Czerwinskis, like some others in the community, say they just want "the hell out" of the only neighborhood they've known for four decades. They're moving to the quiet Adirondacks community of Lake Placid.

"I love my home," she said. "I have a beautiful home, but we live on a toxic dump. We have to get away."

State health officials last month announced results of a yearlong investigation into cancer incidences in two ZIP codes, 14150 and 14217, surrounding an industrial area of Tonawanda that includes the Linde plant.

The study of 21 types of cancer reported to the state between 1994 and 1998 found an overall cancer rate 10 percent higher than expected. But with some specific cancers, the rate was much higher.

Especially high cancer rates

Colorectal cancer, for example, was 25 percent higher than expected in males. Bladder cancer in women was 26 percent higher than expected. Breast cancer in women was 12.5 percent higher than expected. Thyroid cancer in women was 81 percent higher than expected.

Medical evidence has found that each of those four cancers can be associated with radiation exposure, according to the state Health Department.

However, the state has not made any connection between the higher-than-expected cancer rates and any environmental factors, said Claire T. Pospisil, a spokeswoman for the Health Department.

"This kind of study is not going to establish a cause, per se," said Pospisil.

And while residents are quick to point to the former Linde plant, company officials said they don't believe the plant is responsible. Four studies conducted on plant workers by the company between 1943 and 1999, and one last year by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, did not find any abnormal cancer rates associated with radiation, said Site Manager Dennis A. Conroy.

"None of these studies show an excess of cancers normally associated with radiation," Conroy said. "These studies were of people who were literally knee-deep in uranium ore seven days a week."

Given that, he said, it doesn't appear the plant is responsible for neighborhood illnesses.

Remediation of the Linde site began in 1995. About 75 percent of the contaminated soil, about 80,000 tons, has been removed and taken out of New York State, Conroy said.

The Linde site is now owned by Praxair, which produces industrial gases.

State plans more study

To learn more about the health situation in the Tonawanda neighborhood, the state has announced a follow-up study to further understand the higher-than-expected cancer levels.

The study will be more detailed than the last one, offering a 10-year look, and it will also focus on a smaller area. The exact boundaries of the new study have not been finalized, but the area immediately surrounding the Linde site is under consideration.

"At this point, we are proceeding with the next step of this study to look at a smaller area of this site over a longer time period to strengthen our findings," Pospisil said.

Residents - some of whom worked at the Linde plant - have long been skeptical of the clean bill of health the plant has issued itself through its worker studies. They welcome the Health Department studies.

"They are full of condensed applesauce. They are going to do everything to disprove their responsibility," Donald L. Finch said of the Linde studies. He lives half a mile from the plant, where he worked for 20 years before retiring in February 1994.

Finch, who had his cancerous prostate gland removed in 1988, is the person who spearheaded efforts to get the state to conduct a neighborhood health study.

Finch said he is glad the state's upcoming study will narrow the study area. Looking at the two broad ZIP codes, as was originally done, "dilutes the problem," Finch said.

Beyond that, there's a feeling among some residents that the state's study still isn't going far enough. Some would like the Health Department study to go beyond cancer and look into other diseases they said are plaguing their neighborhood.

Czerwinski, for example, has a noncancerous thyroid condition.

"It's not just cancer. This whole area is a myriad of disease," Czerwinski said. "I'd like to see some kind of a study for diseases other than cancer."

Ex-residents want study

In addition, former Tonawanda residents with health ailments are concerned that they are not included in the state study.

Among them is Gayle Parker, who lived in the industrial Sheridan Parkside neighborhood, about half a mile from the Linde plant, before moving to Phoenix in 1992. She lost her son in 1998 at age 42 to bone cancer. Her daughter, diagnosed with breast cancer in 1995, beat the disease.

"I just wonder how much the plants had to do with this," Parker said. "I can't specifically say where my kids played, but all I know was they were always in that area."

Former Tonawanda resident William A. Kish, who now lives in Florida, agreed.

"I am presently recuperating from surgery to remove a rather large, nonmalignant tumor from my brain," Kish said. "Having been raised on the other side of the golf course from Linde Air and having spent countless hours looking for golf balls in the creek that split the golf course from my parents' house - which is where the dumping took place - and also having spent many hours playing baseball at the old Linde ball field, I find it no surprise I became afflicted with this terrible malady."

Dunlop Ave. neighbors

Such concerns among people with serious illnesses are easy to find on the streets around the Linde plant, such as Dunlop Avenue.

Czerwinski said she has spent countless hours walking on Dunlop and nearby streets, even on Linde grounds, thinking that the exercise was good for her. Now she wonders if all that environmental exposure made her sick. And she wonders if the hours her husband, Thomas, spent as a child looking for golf balls in the creek near the Linde plant have anything to do with his heart problems.

Just across the street from the Czerwinskis, Gwen Connette, 67, says her son, Eddie, played in the same creek. She wonders if that's related to the noncancerous brain tumor he suffered. Connette herself is recovering from bladder cancer, having had a tumor removed in 2000.

"I hope this doesn't turn out to be another Love Canal," said Connette, a home health care nurse who has lived on Dunlop Avenue since 1957.

Not far down the road, Judith Fox, 58, who moved to 265 Dunlop in 1972, wasn't surprised by the recent Health Department finding.

Fox is a breast cancer survivor.

"Everybody here has always kidded about "not digging too deep in your back yard because you can't be sure what you might find,' " Fox said.

At 97 Dunlop, Irv and Alice Hils saw their daughter Cheryl die of breast cancer two years ago, at age 43.

Irv Hils believes his neighborhood and Western New York's pollution in general were "contributing factors" to his daughter's death as well as his wife's thyroid problems.

"You don't know really for sure. I think it probably had a lot to do with it, but you can't just say every cancer is caused by this," he said.

Still, residents say, they wonder. And they've been wondering more and more since learning about the Health Department study.

Eileen Nicosia, who has lived on Dunlop Avenue for five years, for example, thought about her daughter's heart defect after learning about the higher-than-normal cancer levels in her neighborhood.

Meghan was born with her heart on the wrong side of her chest. When the fetus was developing, doctors said, it read chromosomes backward. The girl is otherwise healthy, as are the family's two other children, Nicosia said.

But Nicosia remains worried, and said she's now nervous whenever her children play outside.

"If they found something green and goopy out in the back yard, you wouldn't know anything unless they came in covered with it," she said.

e-mail: tpignataro@buffnews.com

-------- us politics

Enron Also Courted Democrats
Chairman Pushed Firm's Agenda With Clinton White House

By Dan Morgan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 13, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37287-2002Jan12.html

Democrats are savoring the chance to use embattled Enron Corp.'s Republican ties to embarrass the Bush administration at upcoming congressional hearings. But Republicans might turn the tables, to some extent at least, because Enron has courted and supported prominent Democrats as well.

According to internal Enron documents and the recollections of former employees, Chairman Kenneth L. Lay had the ear of top Democrats in the 1980s and '90s. He and his colleagues used that access to promote the company's interests with the Clinton administration and key congressional Democrats.

In a White House meeting in August 1997, for example, Lay urged President Clinton and Vice President Gore to back a "market-based" approach to the problem of global warming -- a strategy that a later Enron memo makes clear would be "good for Enron stock."

The following February, Lay met with Energy Secretary Federico Peńa to urge White House action on electricity legislation favored by Enron. Peńa "suggested that President Clinton might be motivated [to act] by some key contacts from important constituents," according to another Enron memo.

Taking the cue, Lay, one of 25 business executives on Clinton's Council on Sustainable Development, wrote to the president the same day.

Lay and other Enron executives showed a clear preference for Republicans in their political giving. Lay personally gave GOP organizations $325,000 during the 2000 campaign. But the company itself was often more evenhanded.

The corporation contributed $532,000 in unregulated "soft money" to Democratic coffers during the 2000 election, only slightly less than the $623,000 that went to GOP groups, according to PoliticalMoneyLine, a Washington research group. Enron's political action committee also gave $10,000 to the New Democrat Network, which was co-founded by Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.). Lieberman, the Democratic vice presidential nominee that year, now chairs the Senate Government Affairs Committee, which is leading an inquiry into Enron's collapse.

Several senior Enron officials spent election night at Vice President Gore's headquarters in Nashville.

The Center for Responsive Politics estimates that Republicans received 73 percent of total donations from Enron, its executives and its employees over the past 12 years. Still, many of the congressional members soon to investigate Enron -- Democrats as well as Republicans -- have enjoyed the company's largess. Enron or its executives have given money to nearly half of all current House members, and to almost three-quarters of the senators, according to groups monitoring political donations.

The company backed Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) in his successful 1998 campaign to oust Republican Sen. Alfonse D'Amato. Schumer's views on electricity deregulation dovetailed closely with Enron's. Two years later Schumer, who has advocated deregulation as a way of reducing New York state's high power costs, co-authored a bill to restructure electricity markets along lines favored by Enron.

Enron also has supported Senate Energy Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), whose state is traversed by a major east-west Enron gas pipeline.

Former employees say Lay's friendships with other Democrats were based as much on rapport as pragmatism. This group includes former senator Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), whose brief 1992 presidential bid had Lay's backing, and Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), with whom Lay served on the Eli Lilly Co. board of directors in the 1990s.

He donated to the 1994 campaign of Texas Gov. Ann Richards, a Democrat, and served on her business council. And it was a Democrat, former treasury secretary Robert E. Rubin, who called a Treasury official last Nov. 8 to inquire about Enron's situation shortly before it collapsed.

As Enron transformed itself from an old-line gas pipeline company into an innovative, risk-taking trader of gas, electricity and more exotic derivatives in the early 1990s, it needed both Democrats and Republicans to help remove regulatory obstacles.

"Ken Lay would write letters and pick up the phone to call whoever was needed, and the party didn't matter that much," said one former employee.

In 1992, a Democratic-controlled Congress approved a major energy bill that set the stage for a new wholesale electricity marketplace. Trading companies such as Enron could use the transmission lines of regulated utility companies to sell blocs of electricity to private customers.

In 1994, the Washington-based Export-Import Bank approved a $302 million loan to promote Enron's investment in a power plant in Dabhol, India. According to a 1997 article in Time magazine, Clinton took a personal interest in the project, deputizing his chief of staff, Thomas "Mack" McLarty III, to monitor it. McLarty later became a paid adviser to Enron.

A McLarty aide explained yesterday that the White House involvement was part of a broader administration effort to help U.S. companies take advantage of new opportunities abroad.

In 1996, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, stocked with Clinton appointees, helped Enron with a series of orders that weakened the monopoly of nuclear and coal-burning utilities. In July of that year, Enron gave $100,000 to the Democratic Party. The Clinton administration's interest in an international agreement to combat global warming also dovetailed with Enron's business plans. Enron officials envisioned the company at the center of a new trading system, in which industries worldwide could buy and sell credits to emit carbon dioxide as part of a strategy to reduce greenhouse gases. Such a system would curtail the use of inefficient coal-fired power plants that emitted large amounts of carbon dioxide, while encouraging new investments in gas-fired plants and pipelines -- precisely Enron's line of business.

But the effort faced powerful opposition from automakers, oil companies and utilities. In early 1997 the Senate unanimously instructed the administration not to agree to any carbon-reducing strategy that would harm the U.S. economy.

On Aug. 4, 1997, Lay and seven other energy executives met with Clinton, Gore, Rubin and other top officials at the White House to discuss the U.S. position at the upcoming conference on global warming in Kyoto, Japan. Lay, in a memo to Enron employees, said there was broad consensus in favor of an emissions-trading system.

Enron officials later expressed elation at the results of the Kyoto conference. An internal memo said the Kyoto agreement, if implemented, would "do more to promote Enron's business than almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring the energy and natural gas industries in Europe and the United States."

At Lay's meeting with Peńa on Feb. 20, 1998, he spoke of restructuring the U.S. electricity market in ways that would benefit Enron. Lay pressed the administration to propose legislation that would assert federal authority over a national electricity market.

According to a company version of the meeting, Lay and Peńa agreed that a go-slow approach to deregulation, advocated by Senate Energy Committee Chairman Frank H. Murkowski (R-Alaska), was unacceptable. Peńa asked Enron officials to keep Energy Department staffers posted on developments in Congress, and solicited comments on the administration's draft of its Comprehensive National Energy Strategy, an Enron document said. Lay felt the draft was "headed in the right direction" except for a few points, the document said.

The 2000 presidential election posed a dilemma for the company, sources say. While Lay supported George W. Bush, some officials in Enron's Houston and Washington offices backed Gore and Lieberman. Lay personally contributed $325,000 in soft money to GOP campaign organizations that year, and gave no soft money to Democratic groups. After the election, Lay chipped in $100,000 to the Bush inaugural festivities.

On the eve of the 2000 election, Enron hired a Democratic official from the Treasury Department to run the company's Washington office. Sources say the move infuriated GOP House leaders, who retaliated by shutting Enron representatives out of several key strategy meetings on electricity legislation.

Hoping to return to the GOP's good graces, the company in April 2001 hired the Washington lobbying firm of Quinn & Gillespie. Its senior partner, Ed Gillespie, had been a top campaign adviser to the new president, Bush.

For the first half of the year, the firm collected $525,000 in fees from Enron, a hefty sum but well worth it, according to a former Enron employee.

"It was Eddie [Gillespie], not Ken Lay, who got us to people in the White House and Congress," the employee said.

Video - Bush on Enron http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/mmedia/apdaily/011002-4v.htm


-------- MILITARY

Nazi Saboteurs Captured! FDR Orders Secret Tribunal
1942 Precedent Invoked by Bush Against al Qaeda

By George Lardner Jr.
Sunday, January 13, 2002; Page W12
Washington Times
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16626-2002Jan8.html

The military tribunal had gone on for 18 days, and the judges worked through the weekend to reach their verdict. They sent it on Monday to the president, who determined the penalty. Six of the eight defendants were condemned to death -- the sentence the president had said he wanted even before the trial began -- while the other two received long prison sentences. To ensure there was no attempt to appeal, the eight accused and their lawyers were kept in the dark until the following Saturday morning, when Provost Marshal Gen. Albert L. Cox went from cell to cell accompanied by a chaplain. By then, their time was almost up. The executions began at one minute past noon; at 1:04 p.m. the last of the six was pronounced dead. They were buried secretly in a potter's field at Blue Plains in Southwest Washington three days later.

The defendants were would-be saboteurs sent by Nazi Germany, and their capture in June 1942 was one of the few high points early in a war that had started off badly for the United States. Their trial, as President Franklin Roosevelt ordered, was conducted in strict secrecy, with seven U.S. Army generals sitting as judge and jury, relying on evidence that would not have passed muster in a civilian court.This is the case that President Bush relied on most heavily for his November 13 order empowering him to create military tribunals for accused foreign terrorists and their collaborators and declaring 'not practicable . . . the principles of law and the rules of evidence generally recognized in the trial of criminal cases in the United States district courts.' Bush's order, citing a state of emergency he had proclaimed following September 11, was designed to provide swift military justice for al Qaeda members captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The order, as written, denied such defendants the right to judicial review from civilian courts. So it was in 1942, in the case known in Supreme Court records as Ex Parte Quirin.

The court's decision is widely deemed by legal scholars to be strained and evasively worded, and it left deep misgivings even among the justices who wrote it to justify six electrocutions that had already taken place. It is a case that stands as a classic example of what historian Robert Higgs has called the 'Crisis Constitution' overriding the 'Normal Constitution' in times of emergency, making the government's exercise of power more important than the protection of individual rights.

Had the courts tried to stand in the way, the president made clear he would have ignored them. 'I want one thing understood, Francis,' FDR told his attorney general, Francis Biddle, who served as lead prosecutor. 'I won't give them up . . . I won't hand them over to any United States marshal armed with a writ of habeas corpus. Understand?'

The case of the eight Nazi saboteurs is, as one chronicler, David J. Danelski, has written, 'a fascinating tale of intrigue, betrayal and propaganda,' not to mention a rush to judgment and then to the electric chair, a flag-waving plea for a unanimous stamp of approval by the Supreme Court and, not least, an FBI coverup that outlasted the war.

Adolf Hitler personally demanded that his military come up with a plan to demonstrate America's vulnerability and the reach of Nazi power. The German high command devised an ambitious two-year sabotage plan, to be run out of a commercial art shop in Chicago. The plot called for the destruction of key railroad installations, aluminum factories, power plants, bridges and canal locks, plus targets of opportunity, such as Jewish-owned department stores, that could create public panic.

The first man recruited for the mission was George John Dasch, 39, a German-born former waiter who had spent 19 years in the United States and spoke perfect American-style English. Dasch had returned to Germany in May 1941 and landed a comfortable job monitoring American news broadcasts. Dasch would later say that he soured on the Nazis soon after his return and vowed even before he left Germany to betray the sabotage plot.

Dasch was put in charge of a four-man team that landed ashore in Long Island. A second team put ashore near Jacksonville, Fla. The two teams were to join forces in Cincinnati on the Fourth of July and set to work. All eight had received new identities and a month's training in explosives and spycraft before being shipped off in two U-boats.

Dasch and his team arrived on the beach at Amagansett, N.Y., just after midnight on June 13. They were partly dressed in military uniforms, which they proceeded to bury, along with four crates of TNT, fuses, timing devices and pre-made bombs. While his men were changing, Dasch encountered John Cullen, an unarmed Coast Guardsman on foot patrol. Dasch told Cullen he was a fisherman who had run aground. When the patrolman insisted that Dasch come along to the Coast Guard station nearby, Dasch said he did not wish to kill him and instead offered him $260 to forget what he'd seen. Dasch told Cullen his fake name-George J. Davis. Cullen dashed off to the station, reported the encounter and turned in the money. By daybreak the Coast Guard had discovered the uniforms and the explosives, and it informed the FBI at 11 a.m. By then, however, the saboteurs were buying fresh clothes in Jamaica, Queens, on their way to Manhattan.

Once in New York City, the men paired off, and Dasch informed his partner, Ernest Peter Burger, a disillusioned former storm trooper, that he intended to turn in the group. Burger told Dasch he had suspected as much, and said he agreed with the plan. But when Dasch phoned the FBI's New York office on June 14 to pave the way for a meeting with J. Edgar Hoover, he was dismissed as a crackpot.

Unaware of that, Dasch took a train to Washington four days later, envisioning a meeting with Hoover and expecting to be treated as a hero. He checked into the Mayflower Hotel, called FBI headquarters on the morning of June 19, and waited triumphantly for the car that picked him up half an hour later.

Instead of seeing Hoover, he recounted in a 1959 book, he was treated skeptically and shuttled from office to office until he finally opened a briefcase he brought with him and dumped out a pile of $50 bills-more than $82,000-that had been given him as leader of the Long Island team. At that, Dasch remembered, one of his FBI interrogators told another agent: 'Lock that door, man. We've got something real here.'

'That's a lot of malarkey,' says Dasch's main FBI handler, Duane L. Traynor, now 91. Traynor, who was head of the FBI's sabotage unit, says he took Dasch seriously as soon as he saw him. The German had a silver streak down the middle of his hair, just as described by the Coast Guardsman who had encountered him on the beach the week before.

The FBI, Traynor says, also knew about the money before Dasch showed it to him on the second morning of his interrogation. Other agents had searched his hotel room at the Mayflower that first day while he and Traynor were talking.

Dasch's confession covered 254 typewritten, single-spaced pages, but it took the detection of invisible writing on a handkerchief he gave the FBI, and some help from Burger, to find the other men. By June 27, the FBI had rounded up all of them. All quickly signed confessions. In two cases, portions were dictated by FBI agents because, Hoover said in a 1945 memo, 'the defendants were not able to properly express themselves.'

That evening, Hoover hurried up to New York to announce their capture. He released brief biographies and photos of the Germans, a description of where and how they had landed, and a list of their objectives and the explosives they had brought with them. But Hoover credited only the FBI with their capture, omitting any mention of the Coast Guard or Dasch, leaving the impression that his sleuths had been waiting on the beaches in New York and Florida when the two teams landed.

'The country went wild,' Biddle wrote in his memoirs. '[I]t was generally concluded that a particularly brilliant FBI agent, probably attending the school in sabotage where the eight had been trained, had been able to get on the inside and make regular reports to America.'

Secretary of War Henry Stimson hit the roof, too, but not happily. Military intelligence had wanted to watch and wait until August when two more teams of saboteurs were expected to come ashore. Hoover's grandstanding ruined that plan.'I have never seen Stimson so furious,' recalls Washington attorney Lloyd N. Cutler, then a junior lawyer on the prosecution team. 'Hoover grabbed all the glory and made the announcement without telling Stimson.'

The arrest of the saboteurs triggered roundups of hundreds of German aliens said to be Nazi sympathizers, arrests of other spy suspects in neighborhoods 'densely populated with Germans,' involuntary sales of the assets of Axis-controlled companies, and the death of a German woman in New Jersey who suffered a cerebral hemorrhage as FBI agents questioned her and her husband in their Glassboro home. When it emerged that three of the accused saboteurs had worked as waiters in the United States before the war, the Justice Department ordered the dismissal of all German and Italian waiters, barbers, busboys, housemen and maids from Washington's hotels, restaurants and clubs-on the theory that they might hear too much from loose-lipped customers.

With the eight in custody, the next question was what to with them.In a memo to Stimson on June 28, Army Maj. Gen. George V. Strong of the military intelligence division proposed a military commission: 'The exigencies of the present situation appear to demand drastic action without too much deference to the technical rights which might be accorded, under the Constitution . . .'A civilian trial was quickly ruled out. After all, the men had not even begun their terror campaign when caught, so even the charge of attempted sabotage, which carried a 30-year maximum sentence, seemed unlikely to stick. Lawyers at the War Department concluded that if the saboteurs were tried in a civilian court, they could be convicted of 'only a two-year offense at most'-most likely conspiracy to commit a federal crime.

FDR told Biddle he was inclined to try the Nazis by court- martial because that would carry the death penalty, which he called 'almost obligatory.' But a court-martial would have required proof beyond a reasonable doubt, strict rules of evidence and a unanimous verdict. Biddle and his top troubleshooter on the case, Oscar Cox, had what they considered a better idea: a military commission with lesser standards.

Boris Bittker, a young lawyer assigned to the case and later a prominent Yale law professor, said the Justice Department's criminal division questioned the constitutionality and wisdom of a military trial when the civilian courts were open and functioning normally. Biddle and Cox, however, wanted to satisfy the president.'According to gossip in the corridors of the Justice Department, the White House hoped that the drama of a military trial would help to convince the public that we really were at war and to end the civilian complacency that prevailed even in 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor,' Bittker wrote in a 1997 law review article.

Acting as commander in chief, President Roosevelt opted for the commission. He issued an order on July 2, naming the judges, the prosecutors and even the defense lawyers, and allowing the admission of any evidence that would have 'probative value to a reasonable man.' Roosevelt told his secretary he hoped the verdict would be unanimous, but his order said a two-thirds vote would be sufficient.Ignoring provisions in the Articles of War requiring military review of such proceedings, Roosevelt concluded the order by directing that the trial record and verdicts be sent directly to him for final action. As Michal R. Belknap, a historian and constitutional law professor who has studied the case, points out, this guaranteed 'there would be no appeal except to the mercy of the commander in chief.'

The president also signed a proclamation prohibiting the accused from seeking any remedy in the courts of the United States, except as authorized by the attorney general or the secretary of war. Biddle told FDR this would have 'the same practical results' as suspending the writ of habeas corpus-a time-honored way of challenging one's detention enshrined in the Constitution-without actually taking such a controversial step. The proclamation was 'wretchedly drafted,' Belknap says.Cutler is convinced that the main reason for secrecy was to conceal the fact that 'the FBI hadn't done the real work in capturing the Nazis'-a fact Hoover fudged even in written communications with FDR. Not once in the three 'personal and confidential' memos he sent to FDR between June 16 and June 27 did Hoover mention that one of the saboteurs had turned himself in. In his June 27 memo to the president, the FBI director also falsified the date Dasch had been taken into FBI custody, making it seem as if the turncoat had been 'apprehended' after the other three Long Island saboteurs had been picked up. The public was given the same story.Dasch was bewildered when FBI agents told him on June 27 he would have to be prosecuted with the others in order to keep his part in the arrests secret. Secrecy was essential, the agents warned him, lest the Germans realize how porous the U.S. coastline was. There was another consideration as well: If Dasch fought the case, revealing his role, the FBI told him, the Nazis would wipe out his family.

Reluctantly, Dasch agreed to go along after the FBI men assured him he would get a presidential pardon once the case had died down, in three to six months. He was brought to New York and jailed with the others.

The trial began in Room 5235 of the Justice Department on July 8. Each morning, a heavily armed motorcade would interrupt rush-hour traffic, bringing the prisoners from their cells at the D.C. jail in two covered black vans. A carload of FBI agents would lead the procession. Two Army scout cars, each with two mounted machine guns and soldiers packing tommy guns, had their sights trained on the vans. An armed soldier stood on the rear platform of each van. In the evening, the same parade was staged in the reverse direction.

On the fifth floor of Justice, reporters assigned to the trial would keep watch from the press room where they could speculate in print on the comings and goings of unnamed witnesses. They weren't allowed inside.

Everyone in the courtroom, except the prisoners, was sworn to secrecy. Responding to complaints by Elmer Davis, newly appointed head of the Office of War Information, the president of the commission, Gen. Frank R. McCoy, relented only to the extent of issuing uninformative daily bulletins and one day allowing 12 reporters to enter the room to see the prisoners. They were all presentably dressed, in the civilian clothes they had bought for themselves, although The Washington Post's reporter took exception to one defendant's loud red-flowered tie and said he needed a shave.

The four charges against the Germans-Dasch, Burger, Herbert Hans Haupt, Richard Quirin, Heinrich Heinck, Edward Kerling, Werner Thiel and Hermann Neubauer-all carried the death penalty as violations of the laws of war. The men were accused of sneaking past 'the military and naval lines' of the United States in civilian dress for the purpose of committing sabotage, of 'relieving' enemies of the United States with arms, ammunition and other things and giving intelligence to those enemies, of 'lurking or acting as spies in or about' U.S. fortifications and encampments, and finally of conspiring with one another and the German Reich.

The defense team, led by Army Cols. Kenneth C. Royall and Cassius M. Dowell (Dasch had separate counsel), put up a stiff battle, but Cutler remembers how even 'perfectly valid' objections were batted down. Royall protested vigorously against the use of each defendant's confession against the others, calling it hearsay that would never be permitted in a civilian courtroom, but Biddle prevailed, emphasizing what he said was the 'practical way of arriving at the truth,' using evidence that would persuade 'reasonable men.'

It 'was pretty apparent in the beginning that the commission was against us,' recalled Royall, an accomplished trial lawyer from North Carolina who later became secretary of war under President Harry Truman, in an oral history. 'We thought of an old saying in Reconstruction Days: §Give the [Negro] a fair trial and hang him quick.' '

As lead prosecutor, Biddle offered a straightforward case. Despite their signed confessions, all eight pleaded not guilty in hopes of avoiding the death penalty. Biddle and his partner, Gen. Myron Cramer, the Army's judge advocate general, proceeded methodically, presenting witnesses who testified about the Nazis' arrival in the United States, the explosives they brought with them, the handkerchief with secret writing dramatically exposed by fumes of ammonium hydroxide, and the confessions.

Royall had one last card to play. He intended to go to the Supreme Court to contest Roosevelt's right to deny them access to the civil courts. As Army officers, he and Dowell knew they risked the ire of their commander in chief, and so they wrote the president on July 6, asking for authorization to challenge his order. FDR did not respond, leaving it for his secretary, Marvin McIntyre, to tell the two men to make up their own minds about their duty.

Royall and Dowell asked for a writ of habeas corpus in federal court here, and were turned down on July 28, as the trial was coming to a close. The next day the Supreme Court heard their appeal.

Justice Frank Murphy, who had just come back from military training as a lieutenant colonel, felt compelled to disqualify himself, but, as Eugene Rachlis wrote in a 1961 book, 'this did not prevent him . . . from placing a chair behind the heavy red curtains and eavesdropping on the entire proceedings.'

As counsel for the seven petitioners (Dasch's lawyer declined to take part), Royall began what would be one of the longest sessions in the Supreme Court's history by trying to poke holes in the government's case. He said the evidence had showed no overt act, nothing more than preparation to commit the act of sabotage; he argued that it was a stretch to call the Long Island beach a zone of active military operations because it was patrolled by an unarmed Coast Guardsman, and he maintained that the Articles of War called for tighter rules of evidence than FDR had prescribed for the commission. But above all, Royall emphasized that, under a Civil War precedent known as Ex Parte Milligan, anyone not in the armed services of the United States could not be tried by a military tribunal when civil courts were open and functioning.

The landmark 1866 decision involved a petition by Indianapolis civilian Lambden P. Milligan, who had been sentenced to hang by a military commission during the Civil War for plotting to assassinate the governor of Indiana, free Confederate prisoners held near Chicago and seize the federal arsenal at Rock Island, Ill. Because the civil courts had been open for business at the time, the Supreme Court pronounced his military trial and conviction unconstitutional and ordered him freed.'The Constitution,' the court declared in 1866, 'is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances.'

Biddle wrote in his memoirs that he knew the Milligan case would be 'troublesome.' He told the justices that Milligan was 'very bad law' and should be overturned as interfering with the president's wartime powers as commander in chief. Later, though, he argued that the court could decide the saboteurs' petition 'without touching a hair of the Milligan case.' Unlike the saboteurs, Milligan had never worn an enemy uniform, never left Indiana, and never crossed over into a theater of military operations. Biddle stumbled at one point, saying Milligan was 'clearly . . . an enemy,' but Justice Felix Frankfurter rescued him by observing that Milligan was not decided 'under the enemy concept.' Biddle promptly agreed.

When the justices gathered July 30 for a late-afternoon conference, some were troubled by one key issue: FDR's failure to provide for a military review of the tribunal's decision as required by the Articles of War. As David Danelski pointed out in a 1996 study in the Journal of Supreme Court History, Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone tried the next morning to resolve the question by proposing language saying that the president could still comply with 'the statutory requirements' in question and suggesting that he should do so. But other justices refused to go along, and the language was dropped.

Stone took just a few minutes to announce the hurried ruling. Despite the reservations of individual justices, the court was unanimous in upholding the president and the military commission.

The generals had already started hearing final arguments in Room 5235 that Friday, July 31. Judge Advocate General Cramer, in his closing argument, asked for guilty verdicts and the death sentence for all eight defendants, although he hinted that 'one or two' who had helped the prosecution might get off more lightly.After the commission reached its decision, it sent the verdict, along with 3,000 pages of trial transcript, on a military plane to Roosevelt in Hyde Park, N.Y. FDR was reported in the New York Times to have signed a bill that same day authorizing an 'appropriate medal of honor' for J. Edgar Hoover for his role in the case, but, in fact, Congress never passed such a measure. Hoover had to settle for a July 25 letter from the president extolling his 'leadership, foresight and direction.'

The executions, which took place on August 8, weren't the end of the story. Three months later, the Supreme Court finally issued its formal opinion, justifying its earlier decision.

The court's opinion showed how loath judges are to strike down wartime measures while a war is going on. It cut back sharply on the sweep of Milligan, saying that even though the civil courts were open and even though one of the German soldiers (Haupt) was a U.S. citizen, the defendants could nonetheless be properly tried and sentenced to death by a military tribunal. It did not matter, the court said, if the men had committed no illegal acts before they were arrested. They were 'enemy belligerents . . . unlawful combatants' who had violated the law of war when they passed through defense lines 'in civilian dress and with hostile purposes.'Stone, who wrote the opinion, spent more than six weeks on the task, which he later called 'a mortification of the flesh.' He ducked the issue of the presidential proclamation's validity by saying the court had already decided, on July 31, that the military commission had jurisdiction and so it now had 'no occasion to decide contentions of the parties which are unrelated to the authority of the Commission to act.'

'Stone's purpose,' Belknap wrote in his critique, 'was not to elucidate the law, but rather to justify as best he could a dubious decision. Stone realized Haupt should have been tried for treason in a civil court.'

There were other struggles for Stone and the other justices, particularly over the question of whether a military review by the judge advocate general was required under the Articles of War before the verdict went to the president.

Alarmed at the prospect of a divided court, Justice Frankfurter, normally a stickler for the rights of criminal defendants, exhorted his fellow justices to hang tough, even sending them a heated memo titled 'F.F.'s soliloquy' that attacked the saboteurs as 'damned scoundrels.'

The heart of the memo was an imaginary conversation in which Frankfurter lectured the defendants (six of whom were dead): 'You've done enough mischief already without leaving the seeds of a bitter conflict involving the President, the courts and Congress after your bodies will be rotting in lime . . . [T]he ground on which you stand-namely the proper construction of these Articles of War-exists only in your foolish fancy.'

Lawyer-historian Belknap says Frankfurter was 'openly hostile to the accused and manifestly unwilling to afford them procedural safeguards. He cared far more that these enemies be punished quickly than that they be tried fairly.'In the end, thanks largely to Frankfurter's pleas, the court came out with a unanimous opinion that papered over the division by saying that 'the particular Articles in question, rightly construed, do not foreclose the procedure prescribed by the President.'

In the months after the ruling, Frankfurter asked Frederick Bernays Wiener, a military law expert who had been a student of his, to take a look at it. Wiener eventually concluded that the court should have dealt with the president's 'flagrant disregard' of the Articles of War on July 31 by ordering the prisoners released in a set number of days 'unless it could be shown' that a military review would be undertaken.

Within the court itself, Ex Parte Quirin left unhappy memories that grew more pronounced as the war receded. Reminded of the German saboteurs during a 1953 discussion about convicted spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, even Frankfurter winced. That case, he said, was 'not a happy precedent.' Justice William Douglas said in 1962 that the case was a prime example of how 'extremely undesirable' it was to announce a decision without an opinion to back it up 'because once the search for grounds . . . is made, sometimes those grounds crumble.' Justice Hugo Black's law clerk, John P. Frank, was even more pointed in a 1958 book, saying that the court had simply 'allowed itself to be stampeded.''[I]f the judges are to run a court of law and not a butcher shop,' Frank wrote, 'the reasons for killing a man should be expressed before he is dead.'

As for Dasch and Burger, the surviving saboteurs, they were deported to Germany in 1948 after serving almost six years-a raw deal if each man, as retired FBI agent Traynor still believes, had decided on his own to foil the operation before leaving Germany.

After the war, Attorney General Thomas Clark made public a summary of the trial testimony, for the first time disclosing Dasch's role. But even then, Hoover managed to suppress the fact that Dasch had been offered a pardon if he pleaded guilty. 'Such statements, if given to the press, could certainly be used by anyone so desiring to discredit or embarrass the bureau,' Hoover told Clark in a November 1945 memo.

Dasch spent the rest of his life vainly seeking vindication. He started a wool business in Germany, but found himself a pariah in 1953 when Der Stern magazine published an article depicting him as a turncoat who had cost his comrades their lives. Reviled as a traitor in his homeland, Dasch spent years bouncing from job to job and trying to secure a pardon or at least a visa that would have allowed him to return to the United States. But Hoover, records show, had him pegged as a communist and blocked him at every turn. Dasch died in Germany in 1991.

George Lardner Jr. is a reporter on The Post's National staff. Staff writer Michael Dobbs and staff researcher Lynn Davis contributed to the article.

----

War Books
Tight lips, SEAL ordeals, Cold War skulduggery and other tales of battle.

Reviewed by Chris Bray
Sunday, January 13, 2002; Page BW09
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28740-2002Jan10?language=printer

Tricking Your Enemy

U.S. troops in Vietnam fought against a less-well-armed but agile enemy -- one that relied on evasion and deception, moving between underground hiding spaces and the simple camouflage of the population. Often this enemy's attacks were meant entirely to produce a reaction, which could then be exploited; reinforcements rushing to join a firefight would walk into an ambush that was larger than the initial attack.

Some of the methods that U.S. forces developed for fighting that enemy reflected a corresponding agility of thought and execution. One infantry battalion formed a 12-person special action force of Vietcong deserters and American soldiers, who dressed in black pajamas and carried AK-47 rifles on covert operations.

Ultimately, though, writes historian and former British infantry officer Jon Latimer in Deception in War (Overlook, $35), American military commanders vigorously resisted efforts to fight an unconventional war with unconventional tactics. Instead they relied on the application of overwhelming firepower, and ordered units using guerrilla tactics to take a more aggressive stance.

Wars are fought between cultures, and Latimer's skillful and sober book makes a strong argument that epistemology can represent another class of weapon. He adroitly reconstructs, for example, Stalin's contemptuous and unwavering insistence that Germany wasn't preparing to attack the Soviet Union -- even as 150 divisions moved into place to do precisely that, and the world screamed its warnings. So convinced was Stalin that the Germans would keep their side of the bargain, Latimer writes, that officers who suggested otherwise were liable to be arrested as provocateurs.

In detailed and well-chosen examples stretching from antiquity to the Gulf War, Latimer describes not only the steps undertaken to deceive military organizations throughout history but also the conditions of mind that allowed for the trickery to work. Thus it can be said, he writes, that all deception in war should be based not only on what the enemy himself believes but also on the hope that "the information an enemy requires to make decisions can be manipulated, if one understands the templates he is using."

Toxic Secrets

In Secrecy Wars (Brasseys, $27.50), political science professor Philip Melanson explores evasion and deception on another front, but there are incidental parallels in subject matter. Among the secret actions of the U.S. government during the Cold War, he writes, was the development of weaponized toxins such as tuberculosis, botulism and anthrax. But people within the Central Intelligence Agency's biological warfare program were so tight-lipped that they didn't even talk to many of their CIA colleagues. As a result, no one is quite sure where all the goodies ended up -- although some shellfish toxin were found in an old freezer. Melanson quotes Thomas Powers: "CIA people are cynical in most ways, but their belief in secrets is almost metaphysical."

Secrecy Wars is most interesting when Melanson explores these areas; otherwise it reads like pot luck. Here again are the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the U.S. military's use of its own troops as nuclear radiation guinea pigs -- mixed in with how-to stuff about such things as photocopying fees and protocols for filing Privacy Act requests.

Agencies require varying degrees of proof of your identity. For some, a copy of your driver's license is acceptable. There's also a funny riff at work in Melanson's account of covert operations: We learn, for example, that agents in J. Edgar Hoover's FBI filed grimly serious official reports on the singer Harry Belafonte: "[source deleted] viewed Belafonte's emceeing of the Johnny Carson show last night," reads one redacted FBI surveillance document. And "Belafonte has sufficient information of a blackmail nature on Bobby Kennedy that will result in Kennedy reacting as a puppet to Peking direction in the coming presidential campaign." With insight like that, it's no wonder we won the Cold War.

But Melanson remains stubbornly in awe of Big Brother. Describing an early-1970s CIA training program for local police, he laments law enforcement access to the James Bond world of the CIA's technical services lab, and warns that the program means cops were trained by the best. At least they were prepared to misplace their anthrax as they closely monitored the lounge-crooner fifth column.

The Approval of SEALS

Novelist and former Navy SEAL Dick Couch, meanwhile, tackles another national security topic with a combination of deep respect and unsentimental clarity in The Warrior Elite: The Forging of SEAL Class 228 (Crown, $24). Granted extraordinary access by the Navy, Couch returns as an observer to the SEAL training he completed nearly 35 years ago. What he finds is recognizably human; there's none of the chest-thumping or reflexive adulation that frequently shows up in accounts of military elites. Setting up his story with a description of SEALS in combat, Couch calmly writes deflating sentences such as: "Often, brave and well-trained young men do stupid things, especially when they've been shot."

And yet those brave young men remain enormously impressive. I suspect that every reader will walk away from this book with a representative story. For me, it's the one about Petty Officer Mark Williams. One of the requirements for completing the first of the three phases that make up SEAL training is a 50-meter underwater swim. Although Williams excelled at nearly every other task he undertook, he struggled in the water, completing the test but passing out as he touched the pool wall. Medical corpsmen pulled him out and restored him to consciousness. "Yeah, Williams, you passed the swim," an instructor told him. "Now get over there and start pushing 'em out for scaring us like that." Imagine an environment in which driving yourself to the point of unconsciousness rates push-ups and a chance at the next test.

But physical toughness isn't the whole story. As Couch introduces each new course instructor, he notes the man's credentials; many are both enlisted and college-educated, which the author reports to be a relatively common phenomenon in the SEAL community. The window Couch opens onto this particular military elite reveals some real surprises. Some trainees survive the course by relying on their teammates for help; others take leadership, give their energy to others and are claimed by injuries or exhaustion. With that equation, some men succeed and receive only qualified respect; some fail, and walk away with dignity.

"It's interesting for me to watch the different ways men leave Class 228," Couch writes. "For some, it's a curt nod from the shift chief and a simple formality for the shift [Officer in Command]. Others, like Yanez, are escorted from the field with honor. The instructors saw Yanez as a team player who played with pain. His classmates hate to see him go." That's not something you'd expect in a hyper-competitive environment, and it says a great deal about the character and reflectiveness of these men.

Couch has, in short, authored an exceptionally nuanced and insightful book. The Warrior Elite is a critical resource for readers who wish to understand the distinct culture of special warfare organizations.

The War We Knew

Ronald Drez, a historian and Stephen Ambrose acolyte, offers a series of firsthand accounts in Twenty-Five Yards of War: The Extraordinary Courage of Ordinary Men in World War II (Hyperion, $23.95). Most are at least interesting; a few are riveting. But the value of these tales rests in the stories themselves, not in Drez's handling of them. He is, for the most part, a less-than-graceful writer, and his selection of stories is uninspired. Descriptions of the Battle of Midway, the invasion of Normandy and the sinking of the USS Indianapolis don't exactly blaze new trails in the history of the Second World War. •

Chris Bray frequently reviews military books for Book World. He lives in Los Angeles.

-------- afghanistan

Kabul to seek recovery billions

From combined dispatches
January 13, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020113-24369786.htm

KABUL, Afghanistan - The interim government said yesterday the country needs $45 billion over the next decade to rebuild the nation, which has been shattered by 23 years of warfare.

That warfare continued yesterday with U.S. forces bombing suspected terrorist sites and scouring the mountains of eastern Afghanistan for signs of Osama bin Laden and his terrorist followers.

In Kabul, Interim Planning Minister Haji Mohammed Mohaqiq told Reuters news agency that the country needed at least $15 billion for immediate reconstruction and would present its proposals at a conference of more than 50 countries in Tokyo on Jan. 21 and 22.

Even more will be needed for the country's long-term needs.

"For the next 10 years we estimate that we need $45 billion," Mr. Mohaqiq said. That is about $1,800 for each of Afghanistan's estimated 25 million people.

The U.S. commitment to help rebuild Afghanistan was underlined Friday with an announcement that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell plans to visit Kabul soon.

Mr. Powell, the most senior U.S. official to visit Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban late last year, will hear Afghan leaders describe their needs for reconstruction and is expected to promise continued U.S. assistance.

In Washington, officials said searchers have found the bodies of five of the seven U.S.Marines killed last week in a plane crash in Pakistan and the bodies should arrive at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware today or tomorrow.

Investigators were at the crash site, looking for remains of the other two Marines and more clues into the cause of the crash, said Maj. Brad Lowell, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla.

About 100 Marines gathered for a memorial service for the seven soldiers in a bullet-pocked airport terminal near the southern Afghan city of Kandahar yesterday, their rocket launchers and M-16 assault rifles pointed at the floor as they sang "Amazing Grace."

The deaths will "strengthen our resolve to do everything we can to eradicate terrorism in the world," said Cmdr. Joseph Scordo, a chaplain with the Marine Corps.

Defense Department officials say they have no evidence that hostile fire brought down the plane.

More Army soldiers touched down at the Kandahar airport overnight, and officials said additional troops were expected in the days to come as part of a scheduled troop rotation.

Col. Frank Yiercinski of the 101st Airborne Division said at least 2,000 troops would be flown to Kandahar. While the approximately 3,000 Marines now holding the airport were primarily at the site to secure it, the U.S. Army would perform a "full spectrum" of operations during its open-ended stay, possibly including humanitarian assistance, he said.

In eastern Afghanistan, U.S. planes launched some of the fiercest raids yet around the city of Khost, the private Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) said, quoting witnesses from the Pakistani border town of Miranshah.

"The bombing on Saturday morning was very heavy. People living around Zhawar have vacated their houses," AIP said.

In the town of Khost itself, a small group of U.S. special forces declined an interview request from the Associated Press that was conveyed to the Americans by a heavily armed Afghan guard - one of dozens posted at the facility.

But Bacha Khan, the regional governor, said the strike force, consisting of about 20 men, had arrested four of his followers earlier in the day on suspicion of belonging either to al Qaeda or the Taliban.

He said the Americans were also looking for the killer of Sgt. 1st Class Nathan Chapman, a Green Beret killed Jan. 4 during an ambush near Khost, a few miles from the Pakistani border. He was the first U.S. serviceman killed by enemy fire in Afghanistan.

In southern Afghanistan, U.S. Marines and Afghan forces continued a sweep in the border town of Spin Boldak for the second day, seizing unauthorized weapons and searching religious schools and mosques for al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, witnesses said.

They said some persons were taken into custody for resisting the search.

----

AFGHANISTAN FORCE
United States Should Join Peacekeepers, Biden Says

New York Times
January 13, 2002
By MARK LANDLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/13/international/asia/13AFGH.html

KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan. 12 - After touring the shattered capital of Afghanistan and talking to its temporary leaders, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., said today that the United States should take part in a multinational military force to restore order to this country.

"I'm not talking about blue helmets," Mr. Biden said, referring to a United Nations-style peacekeeping mission. "I'm talking about a multilateral force with orders to shoot to kill. Absent that, I don't see any hope for this country."

Mr. Biden, Democrat of Delaware, is one of the highest-ranking Americans to visit Afghanistan since the United States routed the Taliban in a swift military campaign.

The chaos left by the fleeing Taliban, on top of 23 years of nearly constant war, was evident everywhere during Mr. Biden's trip. Top leaders have no electricity or phones in their offices, while the streets bristle with armed men of all descriptions.

Mr. Biden met the chairman of Afghanistan's interim administration, Hamid Karzai, as well as other top officials, and said they made a uniform plea: "We need security."

A senior Defense Department official said today that a small but steady stream of Army troops from the 101st Airborne Division had been arriving at the Kandahar airfield in advance of relieving the marines who first secured the airport. Between 150 and several hundred airborne troops have arrived, the official said, and the deployment will be moving into high gear between now and the end of the month.

While the United States has not decided what role, if any, to play in a multinational peacekeeping force, it has been reluctant to commit troops to operations other than those aimed at capturing Osama bin Laden and destroying his network, Al Qaeda.

American troops are not part of the British-led peacekeeping force that is patrolling the streets of Kabul. That force has 4,000 troops and a three-month mission. Turkey has offered to lead a new peacekeeping force after the current one leaves.

The Afghan government also desperately needs money, Mr. Biden said, noting that even some ranking officials lack desks, telephones and stationery.

As part of the Bonn agreement that set up an interim administration in Kabul, the United States and other nations pledged to deposit $20 million into a trust fund for the government. Because of bureaucratic snags, only $3 million has been deposited.

"This government needs a modest infusion of money within days, not weeks or months," Mr. Biden said.

But he added that he believed that more than $100 million would soon become available from assets of the Taliban government outside Afghanistan, which were frozen by the Bush administration.

Mr. Biden said he believed that the total cost of rebuilding the country might exceed $10 billion. He said the devastation he had seen in three days here exceeded that in Bosnia, Kosovo or other war-ravaged places he had visited in recent years.

Even with money and troops from abroad, he said he was skeptical of the ability of the government to exert control over the collection of feuding tribes that make up Afghanistan. "It is clear to me that it is unrealistic to expect Karzai to have control over the whole country," he said.

He expressed particular concern about the recent release of six former Taliban officials in southern Afghanistan, a decision made by the governor of Kandahar without consulting the government in Kabul. Among those freed was the former justice minister, Nuruddin Turabi, who is widely reviled here for his harsh edicts during the Taliban era.

Mr. Biden said he would have preferred that the Afghan authorities had notified American forces, who could have captured Mr. Turabi. He noted, however, that the United States was now aware of the former minister's whereabouts and was watching his movements.

"What would bother me is if, with the acquiescence of the central government, there was a deal made for the amnesty of senior Taliban officials," he said.

-------- africa

U.N. completes Sierra Leone disarmament

By Christo Johnson
Saturday January 12
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-83404.html

KAILAHUN, Sierra Leone - Eleven top rebel commanders have handed their guns to U.N. peacekeepers in Sierra Leone as a symbolic last step in disarmament to end one of Africa's most brutal wars.

Since May 2001, the biggest United Nations peacekeeping force in the field has disarmed more than 45,000 fighters from various factions to allow elections in the world's poorest country after more than a decade of bloodshed.

The ceremonial closure of the last disarmament camp took place in the diamond-rich eastern district of Kailahun late on Friday, near to where Revolutionary United Front rebels fired their first shots in March 1991.

Since then, the war has left up to 50,000 dead.

"All camps in the country under the control of UNAMSIL have been closed and we should all congratulate ourselves as peacekeepers for a job well done," said U.N. mission (UNAMSIL) field commander and Kenyan General Daniel Opande.

Turning to the rebel commanders he said "your task now as civilians is to sustain the peace you have now given your people, especially the children who have to go to school."

The rebels earned a reputation for press-ganging children into their ranks and particular savagery in a war marked by brutality to civilians on all sides. A U.N. war crimes court is being set up to try ringleaders for the atrocities.

Charismatic RUF leader Foday Sankoh, who launched the war in the name of ending decades of corrupt government in the former British colony, has been detained since rebels defied a peace deal in May 2000 in the last major flare-up.

His detention, awaiting his expected trial by the war crimes tribunal, remains a sensitive issue. Some RUF members have said there will be no lasting peace for the country of more than five million until he is freed.

Other rebels will be allowed to take part in presidential and parliamentary elections set for the middle of this year through the political party they have created under peace agreements.

"Our final task is sustainable peace but this has to be achieved by the Sierra Leoneans themselves while we in our mission continue to give them the support," said Opande.

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United States to chair Sudan peace talks

World Scene
January 13, 2002
Combined dispatches and staff reports
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020113-10526940.htm

KHARTOUM, Sudan - The United States for the first time will mediate peace talks between the Sudanese government and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army, a presidential adviser said yesterday.

The talks will begin in Switzerland next week, Ghazi Salah el-Din Atabani said in a statement carried by the official Sudan News Agency.

The initiative could reflect increased interest in Washington in helping to end the war, in which more than 2 million people are estimated to have died in fighting and attendant famines.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told Congress last year he would make a priority of the Sudanese war. Washington has provided about $1.2 billion in humanitarian aid to southern Sudan since 1989.

Map of Sudan http://click.hotbot.com/director.asp?id=1&target=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Elonelyplanet%2Elycos%2Ecom%2Fafrica%2Fsudan%2Fmap%2Ehtml&partner=&attribute_type=&keys=Sudan&title=Maps&query=sudan

Sudanese government says U.S. will chair peace talks in Switzerland [ Latest News From Sudan At Sudan.Net ] http://www.sudan.net/news/posted/4176.html

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Sudanese Emigres Seek Peace
Southerners Hope to End Tribal Conflict as Step to National Reconciliation

By Lena H. Sun
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 13, 2002; Page C03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37246-2002Jan12.html

She lives in South Dakota, works for the Gateway computer company and is a mother of three. But like many members of the Sudanese diaspora living in the United States, Nyachuat Deng, 31, defines herself mostly in the context of her war-torn African country, and that is what brought her to the nation's capital yesterday.

Deng and about 60 other representatives from the two main tribes of southern Sudan are meeting at a Southeast Washington church, the first such gathering outside Sudan, for a two-day reconciliation conference aimed at adding momentum to peace efforts in their homeland.

Civil war has wracked Sudan, Africa's largest country, since its independence from Britain in 1956, except for a decade beginning in 1972. The war has claimed 2 million lives. It is being fought almost entirely in southern Sudan between the largely black, Christian and animistic peoples of that region and the ruling Arab and Muslim north.

Three years ago, a grass-roots effort led to a peace agreement between the two main tribes in the south, the Dinka and the Nuer, which had been fighting each other. The peace between them has held on the whole. But hostilities between the north and south continue,because much of the Nuer land has been targeted by the government for oil exploration.

The purpose of the meetings in Washington, according to organizers and participants, is to help resolve continuing differences between the two tribes and unite the south in order to negotiate a just peace with the ruling fundamentalist Islamic government.

Community organizers say the United States has the largest population, about 17,000, of southern Sudanese outside Sudan, with an estimated 65 percent being of the Nuer tribe. The largest groups live in the Midwest; the Washington area has a tiny community.

During welcoming remarks yesterday at the Church of the Brethren, speakers urged the men and women there to remember the power of a unified group. "You are the people who are going to stop this war," Fatima Garbang, a Nuer woman married to a Dinka, told the audience.

"What happens in the diaspora has an effect on our people in the south, and what happens to our people in the south has an effect on the diaspora," said Martin Mabil Kong, 29, a Washington hotel desk clerk who helped organize the meeting.

"If our political leaders are not going to do peace, we will do it from the grass roots," he said.

Participants such as Deng, who spends much of her time mentoring others in the Nuer community in Sioux Falls, said an important step is for tensions among Dinka and Nuer living in the United States to ease.

At the tiny Presbyterian church where Deng's husband, a Nuer, is a lay pastor, there are 35 southern Sudanese members. All are Nuer. The Dinka belong to a different Presbyterian church, she said.

The tensions are such that if a member of one tribe went to the home of a person from the other tribe for a meal, that person would be seen as betraying their own tribe and criticized for "eating together with somebody that could kill you," she said.

----

Sudanese leader meets Museveni; warns Somalia over militant groups

Sunday January 13
AFP
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020112/1/2and0.html

Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir held a joint press conference with his former rival President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, and made a new appeal to groups in Somalia to distance themselves from any extremist groups.

Beshir, speaking the day after he chaired a regional summit in Khartoum, said that he believed there were no terrorist camps in Somalia, but there could be "individual and tribal terrorists."

He said the summit, of the seven-nation Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), called upon the Somali government and factions to eliminate terrorism on their territory to avoid a US antiterrorist strike, which he said would "add to the suffering of the people of Somalia."

Museveni for his part said that his simple presence in Khartoum indicated that ties between his country and Sudan "are improving", though he declined to speak about his talks with Beshir on the matter.

The two countries have in the past been at odds over mutual accusations that each supports rebels on one another's territory. Uganda borders southern Sudan.

Museveni only said he discussed with the Sudanese leader the prospects for ending the civil war in southern Sudan and predicted: "this year, 2002, will be a year for peace."

"You need to be elastic and compromising in managing problems... Let us be flexible," said Museveni who stayed behind for a 24-hour state visit to Sudan after the IGAD summit ended on Friday.

On Somalia, Beshir told reporters that a proposal he had made on terrorism could not be approved by the IGAD leaders because they had divergent views on what constituted terrorism.

"In discussing our proposal, the leaders agreed that identification of terrorism differs from one country to another and that the issue should therefore be subjected to further discussion," he told reporters.

He said the matter would be examined by IGAD justice ministers and legal experts before the group's next summit in the Ugandan capital Kampala.

IGAD comprises Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda.

The Sudanese leader said any strike aimed at terrorists in Somalia "will certainly fall on civilians", adding that terrorist camps as such did not exist in the Horn of Africa country.

"According to our knowledge of Somalia, there are no terrorist camps but there may be individual and tribal terrorists," said Beshir, adding that this was why IGAD leaders asked the Somali parties to address the question by themselves so as to "distance Somalia from the danger."

He said the suffering in Somalia "has already been aggravated by the maritime siege and conditions have been worsened by a ban on fund transfers by Somali expatriates to their families at home", a reference to a US freeze on the assets of the Barakat banking company.

Museveni likened Africa to "a giant suffering from malnourishment," and said that although 11 times the size of India, the continent had a population of only 750 million who were mostly mired in poverty.

He said the economic situation in Africa had been much better in 1956 than at the present time, noting that the per capita income in his country in that year was equal to that of South Korea, while Nigeria was more prosperous than Malaysia that year.

Relations between Sudan and Uganda have recently begun to improve after years of acrimony centred on allegations that Uganda harboured and backed Sudanese rebels, and vice versa. Diplomatic ties were cut in April 1995.

However in recent months the two countries have exchanged diplomats at the level of charge d'affaires, and Beshir visited Uganda twice last year.

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[To reply, mailto:letters@washingtontimes.com]

Somalia's lethal magnetism

Austin Bay
January 13, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/20020113-89235607.htm

It would be rhetorically elegant - and a profoundly simpler diplomatic issue - if Somalia mimicked Julius Caesar's assessment of Gaul and merely split into three parts.

It doesn't. Anarchic Somalia is arguably the planet's foremost "failed state," with Afghanistan and the Congo as basket-case competitors. Find a sub-clan with a savvy leader, or a gang on a street corner, and you have what passes for governing structure in much of Mogadishu and its environs.

As Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz noted, Somalia attracts al Qaeda "precisely because the government is weak or nonexistent." American counterterror "options" there are limited, Mr. Wolfowitz added, since "by definition you don't have a government you can work with."

Thus, in the near term, the United States will work with Somali opposition factions such as the Somali Reconciliation and Restoration Council (SRRC). The clan leaders and warlords in the SRRC are, for the moment, lining up against the self-proclaimed (and al Qaeda-infected) "national government" in Mogadishu. U.S. intelligence and military coordination with such anti-Islamist groups offers a potentially effective means for quickly destroying al Qaeda cells and sympathizers in Somalia.

In the long term, however, America must do better than leave Somalia's "failed state" to recurrent chaos. We've learned, too painfully, that these hard, wretched corners can't be neglected. If the locals in these failed states were truly left to their own devices, that becomes one kind of problem - the kind more yielding to checkbooks and compassion. But Osama bin Laden has demonstrated that terrorists with money and guns don't ignore the hard corners. Bucks-up zealots spread their own brand of "imperialism," imposing their hate-filled "values" upon vulnerable and frightened people.

Which brings us back to Caesar and Gaul. Check the maps. There are indeed three Somalias. No, don't refer to a current atlas neatly portraying Somalia as a contiguous political entity enfolding the Horn of Africa, but examine those maps drawn by Somalis that reflect the fractured present and indicate possible geopolitical alternatives.

Somalilandnet.com (website of the Somaliland Republic) carves a separate nation out of northwestern Somalia, with borders strikingly similar to those of what was once called British Somaliland. Somaliland held a plebiscite in May 2001 to "ratify" its independence.

The Web site of the Somali National Educational Trust (snet.click2site.com) depicts Puntland. Remember the Land of Punt? Egyptian Queen Hapshetsut sent an expedition to Punt in the 15th century B.C. This 21st century A.D. "Puntland" is north of Mogadishu on the "elbow" of the Horn of Africa. Puntland claimed independence from "Mogadishu control" in 1998.

Would that these two fractal-states were free from threat and strife. They aren't. Trouble hit Puntland last August, and now two factions struggle for control. Though the Somaliland Republic depicts itself as a land of "democracy and the rule of law," that status is fragile. The two statelets are, however, more stable than Mogadishu. They also reflect (to some degree) the desire of their inhabitants to shake the anarchy that has plagued Somalia for a decade.

So "three Somalias" isn't quite as phony a notion as one. These nascent states may offer long-term possibilities for fostering a more stable Horn of Africa. The concept is to reinforce the "more stable" and then use them as a platform to spread stability.

Of course, reinforcing the more stable regions could lead to permanent separation and new borders.

But in Somalia's case, is that so bad? Every failed state has unique problems, which means no single policy can resolve them. The issue of bad borders, however - either as relics of colonialism or of longstanding antagonisms - crops up continually.

Drawing new boundaries in Africa has been anathema, where the problem is particularly acute. As bad as the borders are, most African leaders concluded the process of drawing new ones might unleash even more violence. Sticking with the old borders boxed in deadlier possibilities.

But the Congo's collapse and Somalia's terrorist-breeding anarchy demonstrate that the deadlier "what-ifs" are already among us.

Rooting out al Qaeda is Washington's immediate goal, but the problem of bad borders or phony states can no longer be ignored.

Should Somalia divide into three parts? Yes, if it means better borders. Perhaps there's a Nobel Prize for the secretary of state who sees in Somalia an opportunity to demonstrate it is possible to evolve more responsive and more stable political entities from the morass of a chronically flawed postcolonial state, and in doing so eliminate fertile territory for terrorists.

Austin Bay is a nationally syndicated columnist.

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Trainee reporter killed as Ugandan police fire on protesters

Sunday January 13
AFP
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020112/1/2ampj.html

A trainee journalist was shot dead and several people injured in Kampala when Ugandan police opened fire outside the offices of a political party which had tried to defy a ban on holding a rally.

The officer in charge of the operation outside the Uganda People's Congress (UPC) downtown headquarters in Uganda House, and two of his men, were quickly arrested after the shooting.

National police chief Major General Katumba Wamala blamed his officers for the incident, which he described as an "unfortunate happening."

The victim, a student at the Kampala School of Journalism and Mass Communications, died when police, who had initially fired warning shots into the air to disperse UPC demonstrators, lowered their rifles and fired around a dozen shots into the crowd.

The dead man appeared to have been shot from behind.

The incident took place at around 12:30 pm (0930 GMT) after police had enforced a ban on a rally the UPC had planned to hold at nearby Constitutional Square.

A few hundred UPC supporters then gathered outside Uganda House, waving banners and chanting party slogans.

Among those injured was a policeman shot in the leg by a colleague.

"It is a very, very unfortunate happening which was totally uncalled for and happened after a thorough briefing of the operation parameters of command," Wamala told reporters.

"Police take responsibility for these unfortunate happenings in which one is confirmed dead and five injured.

"The officers responsible for the shooting have been arrested and are to answer for their actions," he said.

Kampala Police Chief Ahmed Wafuba made good a promise to arrest the officers involved, announcing that Good Mwesigwa, a district commander in charge at Uganda House, had been taken into custody.

"There were instructions that nobody should go to the scene with firearms. When trouble started (Mwesigwa's) bodyguards started to shoot," he said. Two of Mwesigwa's men were also arrested.

Wamala said two policemen were wounded in the shooting. "They were supposed to use non-lethal weapons," he said.

Wafuba said the shooting followed an argument between UPC supporters and police.

"The crowd overpowered the police there, then Mwesigwa fell down. When his guards saw this, they started shooting," he said.

Earlier Saturday, Mwesigwa snatched a TV crew's camera, threw it to the ground and kicked it as journalists were filming the arrest of UPC acting leader James Rwanyarare and activist Night Kulabako. He also took the journalists into custody.

But Wamala said Rwanyarare and Kulabako were not formally under arrest and that they would soon be freed.

"We are just keeping them away from the public and they will be released," he said.

The two reporters from private channel WBS TV -- Archie Luyimbazi and Andrew Mugyema -- were freed after recording statements at the Central Police station.

They said police had beaten them.

----

Thirty-six die in royal power struggle in Nigeria

Sunday January 13
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020113/1/2ar0n.html

Thirty-six people died when militants clashed with palace guards in a southwestern town in Nigeria at the weekend, raising to almost 200 the numbers killed in communal violence in the country this month.

Twenty-five people died Saturday and 11 more died of their wounds overnight after members of a banned ethnic militant organisation, the Odua People Congress (OPC), fought guards of the traditional ruler of the town of Owo, in the latest turn in a dispute over control of the royal house, police and hospital workers told AFP.

"Eleven people injured in the clashes died this morning," a worker at the Federal Medical Centre in the town told AFP Sunday by telephone.

This added to the 25 who had died on Saturday, Ondo State Police Commissioner Paul Ochonu said.

"Twenty-five people had been killed as at last night when I was in Owo," Ochonu told AFP.

Nigeria, a country of more than 120 million people, is split between two major religions -- Islam and Christianity -- and divided into more than 250 ethnic and linguistic groups.

Over the years, the country has been repeatedly shaken by ethnic and communal violence.

The latest clash was between different factions of the Yoruba, the dominant ethnic group in southwest Nigeria and one of the three largest ethnic groups in the country.

In the traditional Yoruba system, a series of royal families govern different towns, the ruler of Owo being known as the 'Olowo' (or king) of Owo.

But the position of 'Olowo' has been disputed since the 1960s when the then king was deposed after falling out with the political ruler of the region, Obafemi Awolowo.

Since then, the descendants of the deposed 'Olowo' and the political heirs of Awolowo, today represented in part by the OPC, have been continuing their battles.

Saturday's bloody clash in Owo came just three weeks after the federal justice minister, Bola Ige, a prominent Yoruba leader, was murdered, on December 23, in what the federal government has linked to another local political feud.

Meanwhile, Nigeria is struggling with a seemingly unending series of outbursts of communal and ethnic violence.

In the past two weeks, alone, more than 50 people have died in fighting over the control of land in northeast Nigeria, and at least 100 people died in fighting over fishing rights in the centre of the country.

Estimates are that since the country returned to civilian rule in May 1999, more than 10,000 people have died in some form of communal, ethnic or religious violence.

In an editorial Sunday, the respected newspaper This Day called for President Olusegun Obasanjo's 31-month-old government to act against what it termed a "new wave of communal violence".

The newspaper decried what it called "a spate of communal conflicts with religious and ethnic undertones" and "political thuggery".

"There is a need to get to the roots of the crises. This has to be the plank of whatever security policy the government may be packaging," it said.

-------- arms sales

Tehran delivered US-built missiles to terrorists

January 13, 2002
AFP / Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0201/13/world/world6.html

Iran purchased US-built Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and turned them over to a Lebanese-based terrorist organisation, but the missiles proved defective, the New York Times has reported.

Citing classified intelligence reports, the newspaper said Iranian agents in Afghanistan made additional attempts to purchase the advanced, shoulder-fired weapons provided to the Lebanese-based terrorist organisation, the Islamic Jihad, but it was not known whether they were successful.

Stinger missiles are considered among the most lethal weapons in the US arsenal.

The classified documents obtained by the Times offer the first evidence that Iran had ever purchased the missiles, or that it had ever given them to terrorists considered willing to use them against American aircraft, the newspaper reported.

American analysts have long warned that terrorists might be able to get their hands on some of the missing Stinger missiles which the Central Intelligence Agency supplied to Afghan rebels in the 1980s when they were fighting the Soviet Army.

US officials fear terrorists could then use the weapons against American or Israeli aircraft, including passenger planes.

-------- biological weapons

Bush May Limit Germ Weapons Info

By SCOTT LINDLAW,
Associated Press Writer
Sunday January 13
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20020113/ts/us_germ_weapons_1.html

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration is considering whether to restrict distribution of government documents that describe how to make germ weapons, White House officials said Sunday.

U.S. stockpiles of offensive germ warfare agents were destroyed nearly three decades ago as part of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. But the government kept the blueprints for manufacturing such weapons, and continues to sell them.

``The administration is generally conscious of this issue,'' John H. Marburger III, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in a telephone interview Sunday. ``There are obviously people thinking about what to do about it.''

The administration is likely to take action on the matter, Marburger said, adding that he did not know what action would be taken nor when.

Homeland Security director Tom Ridge hinted that the administration is strongly considering placing new restrictions on the information.

``We are a very open society and we're very much an information society, and there are a lot of us that think that some of the information we share with the public probably should be restricted in some fashion,'' Ridge said on CNN's ``Late Edition.''

Marburger and other administration officials are ``looking to see what kind of information should be so easily available in the public domain,'' Ridge said. Members of Congress have also aired concerns about the issue, he said.

``We are open, we are trusting, but we have to be a little bit more careful and a little bit more vigilant,'' Ridge said. ``And we may have to take a look at these kinds of issues from a different perspective because of the tragedy of September 11 and the follow-on incidents that we've had to deal with.''

Several agencies are weighing the level of danger and possible action, Marburger said. A spokeswoman for the Defense Department said Sunday she could not comment, as did a White House spokesman. Representatives of the Justice Department (news - web sites) and the White House Office of Homeland Security did not return calls.

Marburger said he had not personally seen the documents on assembling such weapons. Among the questions is how dangerous they are, he said.

``It is clear that they are based on a picture of biology that's almost 50 years old,'' he said. ``It's not clear to me how useful they are.''

The New York Times first reported on the documents and the debate in Sunday editions, and said despite their age, the manuals contain information that could help produce the kind of anthrax powder infected at least 18 people and killed five in the United States last year.

According to the newspaper, federal agencies routinely sell the now-declassified documents to historians and researchers. The government provides more sensitive papers on the subject after Freedom of Information Act requests.

Dr. Harry G. Dangerfield, a retired Army colonel, is preparing a report for the military that will call for the reclassification of more than 200 reports that he told the newspaper are cookbooks for turning germs into weapons.

Any such move to reclassify the manuals would run into resistance from advocates of public access to government documents.

Moreover, an executive order signed by then-President Clinton (news - web sites) in 1995 bars reclassification, the Times said. The Bush administration is considering its own order allowing the documents to once again be kept from public view, it reported. Marburger said Sunday he did not know about any such move.

----

U.S. Selling Papers Showing How to Make Germ Weapons

New York Times
January 13, 2002
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/13/national/13GERM.html

Months into an expanded war on bioterrorism, the government is still making available to the public hundreds of formerly secret documents that tell how to turn dangerous germs into deadly weapons.

For $15, anyone can buy "Selection of Process for Freeze-Drying, Particle Size Reduction and Filling of Selected BW Agents," or germs for biological warfare. The 57-page report, dated 1952, includes plans for a pilot factory that could produce dried germs in powder form, designed to lodge in human lungs.

For years, experts have called such documents cookbooks for terrorists and condemned their public release. Now, with new urgency, scientists and military experts are campaigning to have the weapon reports locked away from public access. The Bush administration is considering such restrictions, said John H. Marburger III, the White House science adviser.

Experts warn that the documents, even though decades old, contain information that could help produce the kind of sophisticated anthrax powder that killed five people and traumatized the nation last fall.

"It's pretty scary stuff," said Raymond A. Zilinskas, a senior scientist at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, a private group that studies germ defenses. "There's a whole bunch of literature out there that's really cookbook."

One report obtained by Dr. Zilinskas from the government is "Development of `N' for Offensive Use in Biological Warfare." `N' was the code letter for Bacillus anthracis, the germ that causes anthrax. Another is "The Stability of Botulinum Toxin in Common Beverages." The germ-derived substance is the most poisonous known to science.

Such documents were written from 1943 to 1969 when the United States employed an army of scientists and engineers to research, develop and build a stockpile of germ weapons. Although Washington renounced germ warfare in 1969 and dismantled its arsenal, the government preserved the studies, recipes and blueprints on which the arms were based.

Hundreds of the documents have been declassified over the decades as part of an effort to make public the inner-workings of government. Today, federal agencies routinely sell the documents to historians and other researchers, mostly over the Internet and telephone. More sensitive but still unclassified reports are made available by mail after requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

Critics of the disclosure policy inside and outside the government now fear that the germ warfare documents, in the wrong hands, could speed the development of weapons meant to cripple the United States, and they want new precautions.

"We can't get it back," Dr. Zilinskas said of papers already released. "But we can prevent further leakage of this material to the general public."

Shortly before the terror attacks, Dr. Zilinskas and W. Seth Carus, a germ expert at the military's National Defense University, wrote a report on bioterrorism that called for a group of experts to review the old literature and see which reports should be reclassified, safeguarding them with new layers of federal secrecy.

But just the opposite has been under way at Fort Detrick, Md., home of the Army's old program to make germ weapons. Two years ago, in the Clinton administration, the military post was asked to examine what other secret and confidential reports should be declassified.

With new resolve since the anthrax attacks, that work has now shifted into reverse. In an interview, the military expert evaluating 3,500 documents at Fort Detrick said he became alarmed at those already available and is calling for new barriers.

"The problem is not declassification - it's reclassification," said the official, Harry G. Dangerfield, a medical doctor at Fort Detrick during the offensive germ program. Dr. Dangerfield now works for the Science Applications International Corporation, a military contractor conducting the Fort Detrick study.

"My major concern is the number of unclassified documents that need to be protected against F.O.I.A. requests," Dr. Dangerfield said, referring to the Freedom of Information Act. "They're locked up, but it doesn't do any good if people can write or call in and get them because of the law."

Dr. Dangerfield, a retired Army colonel, is preparing a report on the topic for Maj. Gen. John S. Parker, the Fort Detrick commander.

Dr. Dangerfield said in an interview that the report would call for the reclassification of more than 200 reports he characterized as how-to manuals for turning germs into weapons. His first examination of them, he said, "raised the hair on the back of my neck."

But advocates of public access to government information are wary of the new push. Steven Aftergood, a secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists, a private group in Washington, said that it could promote bad policy. "If these documents pose a threat, they should be controlled, if possible," Dr. Aftergood said. "But classification abuse is rampant in the government and authority to reclassify things could wreak havoc."

Ronald M. Atlas, president-elect of the American Society of Microbiology, the world's largest organization of germ professionals, based in Washington, echoed those concerns.

"Once the cat's out of the bag, can you ever really put it back?" Dr. Atlas asked. And even if new secrecy is possible, he said, it would be wise to exercise caution.

"I don't think how-to manuals should be out there," Dr. Atlas said. "But if it's information that has dual purposes and can protect public health, it should be released."

Experts say several factors contributed to the original declassification of the documents.

After the germ warfare program was ended in 1969, fewer scientists were available to help assess what declassifications might be appropriate. So federal bureaucrats over the years increasingly fell back on automatic declassification steps that encourage disclosure.

That trend quickened after the cold war when the Clinton administration urged that secrets throughout the government by divulged whenever possible, experts said.

Today, the germ reports declassified by military officials are made available to the public by the Defense Technical Information Center, at Fort Belvoir, Va. The center, the Pentagon's main repository of scientific and technical data. has a comprehensive Web site that helps identify old documents.

The military center provides many of its reports to an arm of the Commerce Department known as the National Technical Information Service, in Springfield, Va. From its Web site, the service sells the pilot- factory document and many others to the public.

For instance, "Screening Studies with Variola Virus," dated 1958, describes Army studies to explore the weapon potential of smallpox, a highly contagious illness that even without military aid managed to kill more people over the ages than any other disease.

Experts judge it problematic, if not impossible, to shield reports already declassified and made public. Mr. Aftergood, of the Federation of American Scientists, said the current executive order governing such issues, signed by President Clinton in 1995, bars reclassification. Mr. Aftergood added, however, that agencies could stop sales and try to limit disclosures to those documents that have to be obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Steven Garfinkel, who recently stepped down as director of the government's Information Security Oversight Office after 21 years, said protecting the unclassified documents under the current law "would be very difficult."

Because of such difficulties, Mr. Garfinkel added, the Bush administration is considering an executive order that would allow reclassification, which the government permitted from 1982 to 1995 but is barred under the Clinton order.

Dr. Marburger, the White House science adviser, said the issue was under high-level review. He added that he was personally concerned that terrorists might obtain potentially deadly information from the government but urged a cautious approach to the problem. "I'm not in favor of wholesale reclassification of documents, in general," Dr. Marburger said. "It's tricky."

Experts agree that reclassification might work fairly well for documents already declassified but not yet publicly disseminated, like some at Fort Detrick.

But Mr. Garfinkel added that, for documents already made public, reclassification might do more harm than good. "It could give visibility to information that would have been less noticed if left alone," he said.

Another potential snag, he said, is the likelihood of legitimate questions over whether the government still has anything close to a monopoly on information about making germ weapons. "I'm no expert," Mr. Garfinkel said, "but you hear that lots is available in undergraduate textbooks. It doesn't do us a lot of good to reclassify information that's available anyway in nongovernment hands. That's a real issue."

Dr. Zilinskas of the Monterey Institute disputed that. He said much of the information in the old documents is still dangerous and unknown even to experts in industry and academia.

"There's a huge gap between the basic science and the applications for weapons," he said.

----

Focus of U.S. Anthrax Probe Is Domestic - Ridge

By Jim Wolf
Reuters
Sunday January 13 5:33 PM ET
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20020113/ts/attack_anthrax_dc_2.html

WASHINGTON - The recent spate of potentially deadly anthrax mailings is being investigated chiefly as suspected U.S. domestic terrorism, not a foreign plot, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge said on Sunday.

``I believe the direction of the investigation has gone ... more toward internal, domestic terrorists than external,'' he said on the CNN program ``Late Edition.''

``I think our natural inclination was to look to external terrorists, but the primary direction of the investigation is turned inward,'' Ridge added. He said he himself initially suspected a link to the terror attacks on Sept. 11.

Mailed anthrax spores have killed five people in the United States since October, including a Florida photo editor, two Washington postal workers, a New York City hospital worker and an elderly Connecticut woman.

Ridge predicted foreign guerrillas would remain a threat even after the crushing of Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s al Qaeda network, prime suspect in the suicide airline hijacks that killed about 3,100 people.

``We will get Osama bin Laden and we will dismantle al Qaeda, but I'm afraid that there will be successor organizations, and we have to be prepared to deal with them,'' he said.

Ridge said Richard Reid, a 28-year-old Briton accused of trying to destroy a transatlantic flight by setting off explosives in his shoes last month, appeared to have been linked to a group, not acting on his own.

``He had some support,'' Ridge said. ``And time will tell if we can directly link him to a specific organization or not.''

``I believe they've made some connections'' to Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent who was the first man charged in connection with the Sept. 11 plot, Ridge said.

Responding to a New York Times report on the government's sale of documents on turning germs into weapons, Ridge suggested the Bush administration was moving toward curbing access to such materials.

``So that's a priority for us, and we're working on it,'' he said.

U.S. research on offensive germ warfare agents was ended in the late 1960s. But months into the declared U.S.-led war on terrorism, the government still makes available on the Internet hundreds of once-secret documents on building biological weapons.

-------- colombia

Colombian army poised to hunt rebels after talks fail

By Jason Webb
Sunday January 13
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-83459.html

BOGOTA, Colombia - Colombian troops and tanks were poised on Sunday to sweep into a Marxist rebel enclave after President Andres Pastrana threw out a FARC guerrilla blueprint to save peace talks.

In a toughly worded midnight address to the nation on Saturday, Pastrana told the rebels they had until 9:30 p.m. on Monday (0230 GMT on Tuesday) to quit the towns of their Switzerland-sized demilitarised zone in the country's south.

After that, the army will move in.

Pastrana's uncompromising response to the FARC proposal seemed to finally bury three years of frustrating peace talks that have done little to slow the slaughter in a war that has lasted 38 years and claimed 40,000 lives in the past decade.

Thousands of troops and tanks have massed near the enclave in preparation for the long-planned strike on the rebel stronghold. The military says the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia -- known by the Spanish initials FARC -- has used the swathe of cattle country and jungle as a massive prison for kidnapping victims and a base for a drug-trafficking business.

Pastrana told the rebels that the only chance they have of avoiding a military offensive as of Monday would be a clearer response to government demands that they directly discuss a cease-fire and an end to hostilities and kidnapping.

"Colombians want effective results… only a clear public declaration (from the FARC) to this effect will stop the clock," he said, calling the rebel proposal "not satisfactory for the government or the president."

Just hours before Pastrana spoke, the FARC rushed Pastrana an eleventh-hour blueprint they hoped would save talks.

PEACE PROPOSAL WAS "WHAT FARC WAS ABLE TO DO"

On Thursday, Pastrana had given United Nations envoy James LeMoyne 48 hours to meet the FARC and hammer out a proposal to resurrect peace negotiations -- which had been paralysed for three months by rebel demands that the government relax security restrictions around their territory.

Just minutes after the deadline expired, weary rebel commanders said they had sent a 14-point proposal to Pastrana.

LeMoyne, tired but hopeful on Saturday night after the meetings in the dusty hamlet of Los Pozos, had said the draft document "reflected what the FARC was able to do."

On the key issue of border security controls, the rebels had suggested referring disputes over roadblocks outside their enclave to a special commission.

But Pastrana contemptuously dismissed this as another way of stretching out talks to avoid real progress.

"No more time-wasting, no more excuses. Colombians want real results which allow negotiations to proceed without armed confrontation," he said.

The 47-year old president has devoted his term in office to striking a deal with the 17,000-strong FARC, Latin America's oldest and most powerful insurgency. He granted them demilitarised zone in late 1998 as a safe haven for talks.

Now Pastrana faces stepping down in August with his chief political ambition unrealised.

Colombia also faces a possible upsurge in rebel violence just as it prepares for presidential elections in May.

CIVILIANS FEAR PARAMILITARY REPRISALS

The 120,000 mainly poor people who have lived under FARC rule will now be fearing for their lives. Many local residents said they would flee the region if negotiations collapsed to escape possible retaliation from the army and outlawed right-wing paramilitary fighters.

The fear that the paramilitaries, who killed hundreds of civilians in 2001, will see them as guerrilla sympathisers.

Sectors of the military not only fail to hunt down the paramilitaries but actually cooperate with them, according to human rights groups.

The government has promised to guarantee the safety of the civilian inhabitants of the demilitarised zone.

Pastrana renewed the life of the demilitarised zone nine times despite growing public cynicism about the peace process and criticism from political rivals for his failure to extract rebel concessions. Talks have slumped into crisis many times, and late last year came close to breaking point when FARC guerrillas kidnapped and killed Pastrana's popular former Culture Minister Consuelo Araujonoguera.

The United States, which has given Colombia more than $1 billion in mainly military aid for the anti-cocaine "Plan Colombia", calls the FARC "terrorists" and had promised support for Pastrana's decision on talks.

If the army retakes the FARC-held land, the rebels are expected to surrender their handful of scruffy towns and disappear into thick jungle to wage irregular war.

Most FARC members always have been based outside the zone.

-------- drug war

[The drug war hasn't stopped; the media just stopped writing about it. Fear buys a lot more writers than Logic. Be sure to see the second article in this section. et]

Remember the Drug War?
A Casualty of Terrorism You Haven't Heard Much About

By Dennis Jett
Sunday, January 13, 2002; Page B04
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A34806-2002Jan12?language=printer

When the Bush administration tires of patting itself on the back for the successful war in Afghanistan it might consider the war it is losing -- the one on drugs.

Following the terrorism of Sept. 11, Washington's attention -- and much of our military and other assets -- were shifted to address the threat posed by terrorism.More than half the Coast Guard's anti-drug efforts were redirected to guard harbors and oil refineries. While this improved our defenses against new acts of terrorism, it lowered them when it comes to drugs. Cocaine seizures by the Coast Guard are down 66 percent from a year ago.

The war on terrorism is like the war on drugs in at least two ways. In neither struggle will there ever be a final victory. Yet in both cases, the damage that would result from failing to combat the problem would be far worse than the cost of waging a struggle without end. Whatever qualms people have about the drug war, we must strive for effective, not random, enforcement. And unless we decide to legalize drugs, we cannot abandon that enforcement effort.

Clearly efforts against terrorism must be given top priority for the time being. There is, however, at least one measure againstillegal drug trafficking that can be taken immediately, that has worked in the past and that does not require many resources: the resumption of our support of drug interdiction flights in Peru and Colombia.

These flights were suspended last April after a Peruvian Air Force fighter jet shot down a civilian floatplane with five Americans onboard. The incident resulted in the wounding of the pilot, and the death of a missionary and her infant daughter. A CIA aircraft had tracked the missionary plane, thought it might be a drug flight, and guided the Peruvian fighter to it. Procedure should have been followed to identify the aircraft, determine its purpose and, if it appeared to be carrying narcotics, to force it to land.

The incident exposed a hidden part of the U.S. war on drugs. In the past when warnings were ignored, planes were fired upon. In the past seven years, 38 trafficking aircraft were shot or forced down (many of those while I was serving as U.S. ambassador to Peru) and a dozen more seized on the ground. The CIA aircraft were necessary to help the fighter intercept the suspect planes.

The State Department conducted an assessment of the tragedy and issued its report last August. It revealed that the CIA aircraft was late and ineffective in alerting the Peruvian fighter that this could be an innocent flight. It also noted that the Peruvian commander, who was ultimately responsible, had rushed and fired on a plane that did not fit the usual profile of a drug flight.

Should such mistakes, however tragic, be allowed to end efforts to interdict drug flights? When noncombatants are killed in Afghanistan, no one suggests halting the war until our military operations can be made foolproof. When police confrontations with young black men result in unarmed, and at times completely innocent, individuals being killed, there are protests and sometimes charges brought. But no one recommends yanking all cops off their beats until the verdict is in.

The Bush administration has been dallying over whether to resume the drug interdiction flights. Asked more than two months ago whether the flights would be restarted, a State Department spokesman said the findings of the August report were still being reviewed. While obviously distracted by events on other war front, the administration also seems paralyzed by fear of new congressional criticism. Our elected representatives can indignantly castigate ever-unpopular State Department and CIA bureaucrats, and know they have not lost a vote. And for most Americans, the threat posed by drugs is no more urgent than the threat of terrorism before Sept. 11.

The administration's procrastination may also stem from the fact that most of the drugs from Peru are going to Brazil and Europe. But even if the drugs go elsewhere, that does not mean they should cease to be an American concern. Cocaine consumption in Brazil has reached such proportions that the country has become the world's second-largest market for the drug. Local attempts to deal with the situation have not been particularly vigorous or effective.

And what about the stability of Peru and the struggle against the narco-terrorists in Colombia? In a recent interview, the drug czar for Peru, Ricardo Vega Llona, said Peru was no longer winning its war on drugs. This would be a setback for U.S. policy. When I was ambassador to Peru from 1996 to 1999, about half of the 500 people atour embassy devoted all or most of their time to helping Peru combat drug trafficking. I flew many times over the Andes to coca-growing areas to look at the situationthere.

To understand the consequences of Peru losing its struggle, one only has to look as far as Colombia. There the government withdrew its forces from a chunk of territory the size of Switzerland and handed the area over to narco-terrorists. Through this and other gestures, the Colombian government hoped it could negotiate with the narco-terrorists and persuade them to give up the hundreds of millions of dollars they make each year from drugs, extortion and kidnapping. In return the government offered the guerrillas the opportunity to vote and run in an election they would lose. Given the weakness of his military, his police and his society, Colombian President Andres Pastrana had little choice but to hope such a hopeless strategy would work. It didn't. Last week Pastrana gave the drug-trafficking guerrillas 48 hours to get out of the area. It's not clear what he can do if they don't.

A policy of no stick and small carrots will not deter the drug traffickers. From my experience in Peru, it was clear that incentives for growing legal crops were important, but that strong enforcement measures were also required.

Peru's disgraced former president, Alberto Fujimori, who has found asylum in Japan, understood this. While he did much to undermine Peru's democracy, he also kept the drug lords and the terrorists from connecting and taking over large parts of his country. A key element of his strategy was the interdiction of flights. As a result, the area under coca cultivation in Peru fell from 115,00 hectares in 1995 to 34,000 in 2000. Since the suspension of the interdiction flights, however, prices paid by drug lords to coca farmers and production has undoubtedly risen in response. It would be ironic if Peru won its struggle to return to democracy only to lose the struggle against drugs.

The loss of innocent lives is always a tragedy, whether it is a missionary in Peru or a family in Afghanistan. But where there is a need for military action or aggressive law enforcement, there are guns and there will be victims of friendly fire. That may be unfortunate, but it does not mean the war is not worth fighting.

Dennis Jett, former U.S. ambassador to Peru and Mozambique, is dean of the International Center at the University of Florida.

----

[Logic: "The drug war makes no sense." et]

Hemp-Food Firms Fight U.S. Ban, Deny Marijuana Link

By Caroline E. Mayer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 13, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37475-2002Jan12?language=printer

Healthy Hemp Sprouted Bread. Hemp Plus Granola. Hempzel Pretzels. Hempseed Energy Bars. Hemp Chips. Hempsi Hempmylk.

Those products, now beginning to appear on store shelves, contain what is being promoted as the latest nutritional wonder -- one rich in protein, vitamin E and two essential fatty acids.

But federal drug officials have a radically different view of the hemp seeds and hemp oil that are being added to ice cream, candy, salad oil, waffles and beer. To the Drug Enforcement Administration, hemp and marijuana come from the same plant, so one is as illegal as the other.

Food manufacturers say their products contain little, if any, of the hallucinogen found in marijuana -- certainly no more than the amount of opiate found in a poppy-seed bagel. Nonetheless, the DEA has ordered any food containing hemp off store shelves by early next month. Soaps, cosmetics and clothes made with hemp may still be sold unless and until there is evidence that the hemp in such products can be absorbed by the body.

The DEA's order, issued Oct. 9, is the latest twist in an ongoing battle between drug-control advocates and a growing number of farmers, entrepreneurs and drug-reform advocates such as "Cheers" actor Woody Harrelson who want to legalize industrial hemp.

The amount of food products containing hemp is small, accounting for only about $5 million in sales a year, with most products sold in health-food stores. Locally, hemp products can be found at Fresh Fields/Whole Foods, Yes Organic Market, My Organic Market and Takoma Park/Silver Spring Food Co-op.

Hemp-food makers note that soy foods, considered a fringe food for health enthusiasts only a few years ago, have become mainstream, sold in widely different forms such as soy milk and tofu turkey. In 2001, sales of soy food products totaled more than $3.3 billion, according to the Maine consulting firm Soyatech.

It is no wonder then, that the hemp industry is fighting the DEA order, which takes effect Feb. 6.

The Hemp Industries Association, which represents product manufacturers and Canadian exporters of hemp seed, has asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to issue a stay pending a ruling on its petition to overturn the DEA's order. A decision on the stay is expected any day.

Meanwhile, the largest exporter of hemp seed to the United States (it is illegal to grow industrial hemp in most of this country), Kenex Ltd. of Canada, is to notify Washington tomorrow that it intends, under the North America Free Trade Agreement, to seek compensation of at least $20 million as a result of the DEA's action.

"The level of THC [tetrahydrocannabinol, the hallucinogenic substance found in marijuana] in hemp seeds is minuscule," said John W. Roulac, founder and president of Nutiva, whose California company sells hemp bars, chips and cans of shelled hemp seeds.

Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), said the DEA's decision "is the kind of thing that undermines the credibility of the so-called war on drugs. There is no basis for the complete prohibition. The amount of THC in these food products are so infinitesimally small -- are addicts are going to carry around barrels of pretzels? . . . This is from the same administration that says it's okay to have more arsenic in water than it is to have hemp in cereal."

DEA officials say the issue is simple: The ban is required by law. "Many Americans do not know that hemp and marijuana are both parts of the same plant and that hemp cannot be produced without producing marijuana," DEA Administrator Asa Hutchinson said in a statement announcing the ban.

Under the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, the DEA said, it has no choice but to ban food with hemp seed.

In that law Congress "expressly stated . . . that 'any material, compound, mixture, or preparation which contains any quantity of THC' is a . . . controlled substance" that is illegal, according to the Federal Register notice announcing the ban.

Will Glaspy, a DEA spokesman, said that although poppy seeds may contain trace amounts of opiates, they are allowed in food because Congress specifically exempted them from substance-abuse laws.

Glaspy said the DEA had been considering the issue for about a year before the announcement. "The fact of the matter is we are here to enforce the laws of the U.S. Yes, there are other matters going on in the rest of the world, but the American public expects us to continue our duties," he said.

The Family Research Council, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to promote and protect marriage and family, pushed for the ban. In a paper written in December 2000, the council's vice president of policy, Robert L. Maginnis, said "hemp has become a stalking horse for the drug legalization movement."

Maginnis contends that hemp-food products can produce a false positive on drug tests, which the hemp-food industry disputes. Even so, both sides acknowledge that some Americans have been able to successfully fight some positive drug tests by saying they had eaten hemp products.

At issue in the dispute over hemp foods is the difference between marijuana and industrial hemp. According to the DEA, "hemp and marijuana are actually separate parts of the species of plant known as the cannabis. . . . The marijuana portions of the cannabis plant include the flowering tops (buds), the leaves and the resin of the cannabis plant. The remainder of the plant -- stalks and sterilized seeds -- is what some people refer to as hemp."

The Family Research Council and industry officials agree there is a key difference. Industrial hemp generally has less than 1 percent THC, while marijuana plants can have as much as 30 percent.

"The difference between the two plants is like the difference between field corn and sweet corn -- it's the same species but different varieties," said David Bronner, chairman of the hemp industry association's food and oil committee.

Over the past few years, hemp products have become increasingly popular, with its annual sales now about $25 million. Clothing and body products such as soap and cosmetics account for most of the sales.

Food is becoming the fastest-growing segment, as Roulac's sales show: In 1999 his company sold $211,000 of hemp-food products. Last year, sales surpassed $445,000. Meanwhile, sales of Hemp Plus Granola, made by Nature's Path, has grown by more than 30 percent a year.

Sales have been spurred by the discovery -- and promotion -- of hemp's nutritional value. The packaging on Healthy Hemp Sprouted Bread claims, "This amazing shelled hemp seed is one of the most nutritious plant foods available with a rich source of protein, dietary fiber, minerals, vitamin E, iron and a near-perfect composition of the essential fatty acids, Omega 3 and 6."

Cynthia Sass, a registered dietitian at the University of South Florida and a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, said hemp seed has some "positive nutritional values; it's a good source of essential fatty acids that we can't produce ourselves and need to consume. It's also high in protein." However, she noted, there are other ways to obtain the same nutrients -- fish and flax seed for the fatty acids and soybeans for the protein.

As a result of the DEA's announcement, Harrelson said his plans to bring a hemp-milk product to market has been interrupted. "Why proceed when we think we're going to be thrown in jail?" he said in a telephone interview.

Harrelson and other hemp proponents note that this is not the first time the DEA has tried to block the sale of hemp products. In August 1999, U.S. Customs officials, on the advice of the DEA, seized a shipment of hemp birdseed from Canada because it contained traces of THC. The shipment was released two months later.

As a result, makers of nonfood hemp products are worried about what the DEA might do next. That is one reason why Bronner is leading the fight against the food ban -- even though his company, Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps, does not make a food product.

The DEA did not rule out that possibility in its Federal Register notice: "DEA will assume (unless and until it receives evidence to the contrary) that most personal care products do not cause THC to enter the human body and therefore are exempted."

-------- iraq

[Scary. "Were we to flinch," the world would heave a great sigh of relief. More than enough has been spent of time, money, lives, and the environment to show how tough and resolved the US is. et]

Phase II and Iraq

By Henry A. Kissinger
Sunday, January 13, 2002
Los Angeles Times Syndicate International
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34680-2002Jan12.html

Message Board (share your views): http://forums.delphi.com/wpeditorials/start

As military operations in Afghanistan wind down, it is well to keep in mind President Bush's injunction that they are only the first battles of a long war.

An important step has been taken toward the goals of breaking the nexus between governments and the terrorist groups they support or tolerate, discrediting Islamic fundamentalism so that moderates in the Islamic world can reclaim their religion from the fanatics, and placing the fight against terrorism in the context of the geopolitical threat of Saddam Hussein's Iraq to regional stability and to American friends and interests in the region. But much more needs to be done.

Were we to flinch, the success in Afghanistan would be interpreted in time as taking on the weakest and most remote of the terrorist centers while we recoiled from unraveling terrorism in countries more central to the problem.

Three interrelated courses of action are available:

(a) To rely primarily on diplomacy and coalition-building on the theory that the fate of the Taliban will teach the appropriate lessons.

(b) To insist on a number of specific corrective steps in countries with known training camps or terrorist headquarters, such as Somalia or Yemen, or those engaged in dangerous programs to develop weapons of mass destruction, such as Iraq, and to take military action if these steps are rejected.

(c) To focus on the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq in order to change the regional dynamics by showing America's determination to defend regional stability, its interests and its friends. (This would also send a strong message to other rogue states.)

Sole reliance on diplomacy is the preferred course of some members of the coalition, which claim that the remaining tasks can be accomplished by consultation and the cooperation of intelligence and security services around the world. But to rely solely on diplomacy would be to repeat the mistake with which the United States hamstrung itself in every war of the past half-century. Because it treated military operations and diplomacy as separate and sequential, the United States stopped military operations in Korea as soon as our adversaries moved to the conference table; it ended the bombing of North Vietnam as an entrance price to the Paris talks; it stopped military operations in the Gulf after the Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait.

In each case, the ending of military pressure produced diplomatic stalemate. The Korean armistice negotiations consumed two years, during which America suffered as many casualties as in the entire combat phase; an even more intractable stalemate developed in the Vietnam negotiations; and in the Persian Gulf, Saddam Hussein used the Republican Guard divisions preserved by the armistice to restore control over his territory and to dismantle systematically the inspection provisions of the armistice agreement.

Anti-terrorism policy is empty if it is not backed by the threat of force. Intellectual opponents of military action as well as its likely targets will procrastinate or agree to token or symbolic remedies only. Ironically, governments on whose territory terrorists are tolerated will find it especially difficult to cooperate unless the consequences of failing to do so are made more risky than their tacit bargain with the terrorists.

Phase II of the anti-terrorism campaign must therefore involve a specific set of demands geared to a precise timetable supported by credible coercive power. These should be put forward as soon as possible as a framework. And time is of the essence. Phase II must begin while the memory of the attack on the United States is still vivid and American-deployed forces are available to back up the diplomacy.

Nor should Phase II be confused with the pacification of Afghanistan. The American strategic objective was to destroy the terrorist network; that has been largely accomplished. Pacification of the entire country of Afghanistan has never been achieved by foreigners and cannot be the objective of the American military effort. The United States should be generous with economic and development assistance. But the strategic goal of Phase II should be the destruction of the global terrorist network, to prevent its reappearance in Afghanistan, but not to be drawn into Afghan civil strife.

Somalia and Yemen are often mentioned as possible targets for a Phase II campaign. That decision should depend on the ability to identify targets against which local governments are able to act and on the suitability of American forces to accomplish this task if the local governments can't or won't. And given these limitations, the United States will have to decide whether action against them is strategically productive.

All this raises the unavoidable challenge Iraq poses. The issue is not whether Iraq was involved in the terrorist attack on the United States. The challenge of Iraq is essentially geopolitical. Iraq's policy is implacably hostile to the United States and to certain neighboring countries. It possesses growing stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, which Saddam Hussein has used in the war against Iran and on his own population. It is working to develop a nuclear capability. Hussein breached his commitment to the United Nations by evicting the international inspectors he had accepted on his territory as part of the armistice agreement ending the Gulf War. There is no possibility of a negotiation between Washington and Baghdad and no basis for trusting Iraq's promises to the international community.

If these capabilities remain intact, they could in time be used for terrorist goals or by Saddam Hussein in the midst of some new regional or international upheaval. And if his regime survives both the Gulf War and the anti-terrorism campaign, this fact alone will elevate him to a potentially overwhelming menace.

From a long-range point of view, the greatest opportunity of Phase II is to return Iraq to a responsible role in the region. Were Iraq governed by a group representing no threat to its neighbors and willing to abandon its weapons of mass destruction, the stability of the region would be immeasurably enhanced. The remaining regimes flirting with terrorist fundamentalism or acquiescing in its exactions would be driven to shut down their support of terrorism.

At a minimum, we should insist on a U.N. inspection system to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, with an unlimited right of inspection and freedom of movement for the inspectors. But no such system exists on paper, and the effort to install it might be identical with that required to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Above all, given the ease of producing biological and chemical weapons, inspection must be extremely intrusive, and experience shows that no inspection can withstand indefinitely the opposition of a determined host government.

But if the overthrow of Saddam Hussein is to be seriously considered, three prerequisites must be met: (a) development of a military plan that is quick and decisive, (b) some prior agreement on what kind of structure is to replace Hussein and (c) the support or acquiescence of key countries needed for implementation of the military plan.

A military operation against Saddam Hussein cannot be long and drawn out. If it is, the battle may turn into a struggle of Islam against the West. It would also enable Hussein to try to involve Israel by launching attacks on it -- perhaps using chemical and biological weapons -- in the process sowing confusion within the Muslim world. A long war extending to six months and beyond would also make it more difficult to keep allies and countries such as Russia and China from dissociating formally from what they are unlikely to join but even more unlikely to oppose.

Before proceeding to confrontation with Iraq, the Bush administration will therefore wish to examine with great care the military strategy implied. Forces of the magnitude of the Gulf War of a decade ago are unlikely to be needed. At the same time, it would be dangerous to rely on a combination of U.S. air power and indigenous opposition forces alone. To be sure, the contemporary precision weaponry was not available in the existing quantities during the Gulf War. And the no-fly zones will make Iraqi reinforcements difficult. They could be strengthened by being turned into no-movement zones proscribing the movement of particular categories of weapons.

Still, we cannot stake American national security entirely, or even largely, on local opposition forces that do not yet exist and whose combat capabilities are untested. Perhaps Iraqi forces would collapse at the first confrontation, as some argue. But the likelihood of this happening is greatly increased if it is clear American military power stands in overwhelming force immediately behind the local forces.

A second prerequisite for a military campaign against Iraq is to define the political outcome. Local opposition would in all likelihood be sustained by the Kurdish minority in the north and the Shiite minority in the south. But if we are to enlist the Sunni majority, which now dominates Iraq, in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, we need to make clear that Iraq's disintegration is not the goal of American policy. This is all the more important because a military operation in Iraq would require the support of Turkey and the acquiescence of Saudi Arabia. Neither is likely to cooperate if they foresee an independent Kurdish state in the north and a Shiite republic in the south as the probable outcome. A Kurdish state would inflame the Kurdish minority in Turkey and a Shiite state in the south would threaten the Dhahran region in Saudi Arabia, and might give Iran a new base to seek to dominate the gulf region. A federal structure for a unified Iraq would be a way to deal with this issue.

Creating an appropriate coalition for such an effort and finding bases for the necessary American deployment will be difficult. Phase II is likely to separate those members of the coalition that joined so as to have veto over American actions from those that are willing to pursue an implacable strategy. Nevertheless, the skillful diplomacy that shaped the first phase of the anti-terrorism campaign would have much to build on. Saddam Hussein has no friends in the gulf region. Britain will not easily abandon the pivotal role, based on its special relationship with the United States, that it has earned for itself in the evolution of the crisis. Nor will Germany move into active opposition to the United States -- especially in an election year. The same is true of Russia, China and Japan. A determined American policy thus has more latitude than is generally assumed.

But it will be far more difficult than Phase I. Local resistance -- especially in Iraq -- will be more determined and ruthless. Domestic opposition will mount in many countries. American public opinion will be crucial in sustaining such a course. It will need to be shaped by the same kind of decisive and subtle leadership by which President Bush unified the country for the first phase of the crisis.

The writer, a former secretary of state, is president of Kissinger Associates, an international consulting firm.

-------- israel / palestine

Israeli army slammed at home and abroad for Gaza mass house demolitions

Sunday January 13
AFP
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020113/1/2aqhz.html

Israeli Labour ministers and the European Union criticised the army's destruction of Palestinian houses which left 500 people homeless, as US remarks that Israel's military latest operations were "defensive" sparked an angry response in the Arab world.

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Science and Culture Minister Matan Vilnai both voiced concern at the army's destruction of some 50 Palestinian houses in the Gaza town of Rafah on Thursday, which left up to 600 people homeless, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

The army said the houses near the border with Egypt had been used for smuggling for weapons and for firing on Israeli border posts.

The army also ripped up the runway at the nearby Gaza international airport and shelled Gaza harbour Saturday, setting several boats ablaze and destroying a fuel dump, Palestinian security sources said.

The Israeli military said in a statement that the shelling destroyed two boats, one of which was the Palestinian naval vessel, the Gindalla.

The attacks came a week after Israel commandos seized a ship carrying 50 tonnes of weapons which it said were destined for the Palestinian Authority.

They also followed a deadly raid by Islamic radicals into southern Israel from Gaza which killed four Israeli soliders, as well as the two attackers from the militant group Hamas, which had said last month it would heed Yasser Arafat's call for a truce.

One of the attackers was said to be a member of the navy police.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell said the Israeli operations were "defensive" and in response to arms smuggling which Israel said was linked to its arch-enemy, Iran.

Vilnai, a former general who once commanded Israeli forces in the region, told army radio the army should have used a less indiscriminate response than bulldozing dozens of houses.

"They should have used some commonsense, gone about it another way and given the families caravans to live in instead of the demolished houses," he said.

Vilnai also expressed concern at the damage to Israel's image by the worst destruction of Palestinian houses by the military in one day since the Palestinian uprising broke out more than 15 months ago.

Peres for his part demanded "clear explanations" on the operation, which the army claimed had destroyed 22 uninhabited buildings. Witnesses said around 50 were flattened, leaving hundreds without shelter in the middle of winter.

Without questioning the grounds, Peres said Israel could not be insensitive to the plight of Palestinian civilians.

Zeev Schiff, military analyst for the daily Haaretz, lashed out at "an act of undisguised ruthlessness, a military act devoid of humanitarian and diplomatic logic, based on simplistic and over-generalized operational considerations."

It reflected shamefully on the Israeli army and on all Israelis, he said.

Other commentators in the daily said the operation was almost certainly illegal and could be classed as a war crime.

The latest Israeli actions also drew criticism from the European Union's new acting presidency, Spain.

Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Pique told the Arabic daily Al-Hayat before heading off on a Middle East tour Monday: "These acts cannot be justified in any way and cannot be included in the anti-terror struggle."

----

Israel Attacks Palestinian Naval Base in Gaza

By Ibrahim Barzak
Associated Press
Sunday, January 13, 2002; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37230-2002Jan12?language=printer

GAZA CITY, Jan. 12 -- Israel fired missiles at a Palestinian naval base here today in the fourth day of reprisals for an alleged weapons-smuggling operation. It also disputed a Palestinian claim that two suspects in the case have been detained.

One of the men is not even in the Palestinian-controlled areas, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office said.

The Palestinians said Israel's attacks, including the razing of homes and the demolition of the runway of Gaza International Airport, were inflaming an already tense situation.

"This is not the way to bring the peace process back on track," said Ahmed Qureia, the speaker of the Palestinian parliament.

In today's attack on Gaza City's harbor, Israeli navy boats fired missiles at a Palestinian naval base, destroying a small patrol boat and setting fuel tanks on fire. Divers also blew a large hole in the Jandala, a vessel sometimes used by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

The Israeli military said the base was targeted because Palestinian naval police officers were involved in smuggling the arms and in an attack on Wednesday that killed four Israeli soldiers.

Last week Israel intercepted a boat carrying 50 tons of weapons from Iran, which the vessel's Palestinian captain said were destined for the Gaza Strip. Israel has said Arafat and his Palestinian Authority were behind the shipment of arms, which included rockets, explosives and antitank missiles forbidden under Israeli-Palestinian accords.

Palestinians have come under intense Israeli and U.S. pressure to explain the suspected smuggling and punish anyone involved, but they have denied any ties to the shipment.

The Palestinian Authority said two men were detained for questioning in connection with the alleged smuggling operation: Fuad Shubaki, who Israel says authorized payments for the ship, and Adel Mughrabi, who was in charge of weapons purchases. A third official, Fathi Razim, deputy commander of the Palestinian navy, is believed to be in Jordan, Palestinian security officials said.

The Palestinian Authority said the suspects were detained based on information received from international sources.

However, Sharon's office said Mughrabi was not in the Palestinian areas and Shubaki was in the West Bank town of Ramallah, but not in detention.

"The Palestinians have had a revolving door policy," said Israeli spokesman Arie Mekel. "They used this gimmick of arrests over and over again, and then the people were found to be on the streets."

Since Wednesday, Israeli bulldozers have torn up the runway of the Gaza airport and, according to the United Nations, have destroyed 54 homes in the Rafah refugee camp, leaving 511 people homeless. The commander of Israeli forces in Gaza disputed those assertions, saying that 21 buildings were destroyed.

"These are houses that for three months have been empty," Maj. Gen. Doron Almog said on Israeli television. "They are houses from where Israeli soldiers were fired on. In the last three months five bombs have been detonated from those houses."

-------- japan

Japan considers revising defence forces law

Sunday January 13
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-83523.html

TOKYO - Japan's Defence Agency is looking into revising its self-defence forces law to allow a better response to incidents such as that with a mystery ship last month, Japanese media said on Sunday.

Questions have arisen about Japan's handling of the December 22 incident in which an unknown ship, suspected of being from North Korea, exchanged gunfire with Japanese patrol boats and eventually sank.

Kyodo news agency quoted Defence Agency sources as saying the agency had begun considering revising the 1954 law governing self-defence forces to allow Maritime Self-Defence Force (MSDF) ships to respond to emergencies without a prior request from the coast guard, as is now required.

Defence Agency officials were not available for comment.

It took 10 hours for MSDF ships to reach the site of the incident, by which time the unidentified ship had already sunk.

The coast guard had hesitated to ask the MSDF to send ships because it believed it could catch up with the ship, while the MSDF was concerned it would be criticised if it launched any ships before receiving a formal request from the coast guard, Kyodo quoted the sources as saying.

North Korea has strongly denied any links with the ship, and has accused Japan of mounting a smear campaign.

The revision of the law would include a "standby order" for the MSDF, which will authorise it to launch its ships at its own discretion so that it can respond promptly when unidentified ships intrude into Japanese waters, the sources said.

If preparations were completed in time, the law could be submitted to parliament as early as the session that starts on January 21, Kyodo quoted the sources as saying.

Under Japan's post-war constitution, the military is tightly restricted and allowed to act only in self-defence.

The self-defence law allows the military to take over patrolling Japanese waters and stopping suspicious vessels from the coast guard.

This was allowed for the first time in March 1999, when two suspected North Korean ships fled from Japanese territorial waters after MSDF vessels fired warning shots.

At that time, the MSDF was called into action after the coast guard was unable to keep up with the two ships.

-------- pakistan

Pakistan grabs more activists and yearns for peace

By Robert Birsel
Sunday January 13
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-83541.html

ISLAMABAD - Armed police raided homes and sealed offices of banned Islamic militant groups on Sunday as Pakistan watched to see if the crackdown ordered by its president would appease India and calm a tense standoff on their border.

Police with assault rifles burst into homes and offices of sectarian and pro-Kashmiri militants into the dawn on Sunday, picking up more than 250 people and sealing offices after President Pervez Musharraf announced a ban on five groups on Saturday.

In his historic address to the nation, Musharraf said sectarian violence must end and Pakistan could not be used as a springboard for militant attacks in other countries.

Pakistani newspapers welcomed the clampdown on Islamic militancy but said they were not sure if the president's words were enough to avert war with India.

Tension between nuclear rivals Pakistan and India stands at a 15-year high, with about one million troops facing each other across the border following a bloody December 13 attack on the Indian parliament which New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-based Kashmiri separatists.

There have been daily clashes along the border and dozens of people -- civilians and soldiers -- have been killed or wounded. Tens of thousands of villagers have fled their homes.

Intermittent small-arms fire rattled across the border in the Sialkot area in Pakistan's Punjab throughout Sunday, a witness said. There were no reports of firing in disputed Kashmir, scene of some of the fiercest exchanges in recent days.

"WE WILL FIGHT"

In his address, Musharraf said Pakistan would never abandon its support for what it calls the legitimate struggle for self-determination by the mostly Muslim people of Kashmir.

But at the same time he banned the two Kashmiri rebel groups blamed by India for the parliament attack -- Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Scores of leaders and activists from the two groups have been detained in Pakistan over the past month.

A Lashkar spokesman said that during the night some 20 group members were picked up in Lahore, capital of Punjab province, several in Islamabad and 15 in Karachi. Group offices were sealed, he said.

But the group would not abandon its fight against Indian forces in the disputed and divided Himalayan region of Kashmir, said spokesman Abdullah Sayyaf.

"We will fight!, If the Indians have the guts, let them stop us in Kashmir," he said.

Police in Punjab province said 200 offices of the Sipah-e-Sahaba and Tehrik-e-Jafria groups and 137 of the two banned Kashmiri groups had been shut down. At least 188 people were detained in the late Saturday and early Sunday raids.

In the city of Bhawalpur, where the Jaish-e-Mohammad Kashmiri group had its headquarters, police blocked off the street where the group's detained leader, Maulana Masood Azhar, has a house.

Some of the neighbours were happy about the crackdown.

"The government should have done this much earlier," said resident Mohammad Razzaq. He said armed Jaish activists used to intimidate residents over petty issues.

But one Jaish supporter whose two sons were picked up in the sweep said the government was bowing to U.S. pressure.

"This has been dictated by the U.S. to weaken the spirit of Islam in Pakistan," said Hafiz Mohammad Ilyas. He said police raided his home 20 minutes after Musharraf's speech finished and took away his two sons who returned from Kashmir a month ago.

VOLATILE PORT STAYS CALM

In the volatile port city of Karachi, armoured vehicles mounted with machineguns were posted outside commercial and government buildings and at some of the offices of the banned groups to prevent a violent backlash.

Some 70 activists from all the banned groups were picked up in Sindh, which has long been a hotbed of Islamic militancy. A day earlier, police netted some 300 suspected militants in nationwide pre-emptive strikes before Musharraf's speech.

"We have sealed most of the offices of Sipah-e-Sahaba and Tehrik-e-Jafria in Sindh province… like elsewhere in the country," said a Sindh police spokesman.

The two groups have been blamed for waves of sectarian killings, bombings and shootings in Pakistan in recent years. Musharraf said in the past year alone 400 people had been killed in sectarian violence and it had to stop.

He banned those groups, and a fifth that had sent fighters from the lawless tribal areas bordering Afghanistan to join the Taliban against the United States.

Armed police and paramilitary rangers patrolled the main streets of Pakistan's commercial hub but there was no sign of a feared backlash to the clampdown.

All was quiet at one of the city's main Islamic schools, or madrassas, which face new restrictions under Musharraf's tough measures to transform his country into a modern Islamic state.

Pakistani newspapers said Musharraf had gone as far as he could go in addressing India's complaints and the international community must now help defuse the standoff between the nuclear-armed rivals, newspapers said.

"(Musharraf) has sent the message in the strongest words that Pakistan would no longer tolerate violence or harbour terrorism in the name of religion," said The News on Sunday.

The Nation said Musharraf's speech may not be enough to avert the threat of war: "That it probably has not done, in the sense of satisfying unending Indian demands," it said.

----

Pakistan arrests 800 militants

January 13, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/12012002-111422-1499r.htm

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Jan. 13 (UPI) -- Authorities in Pakistan have arrested more than 800 religious activists during the last 24 hours, officials said Sunday.

The move coincides with President Pervez Musharraf's televised address Saturday evening in which he announced a ban on four religious parties and warned others to shun extremism.

About 300 people were arrested in the southern port city of Karachi, 350 from the southern Sindh province, 100 from the northwest frontier province and 86 from the central Punjab province, officials said.

"As soon as the president concluded his speech, we began shutting down the offices of various militant groups and arresting their activists," a spokesman for the Central Police Office told journalists in Karachi.

Responding to an Indian demand, Musharraf ordered Saturday to disband two Kashmiri militant groups called Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed. He also disbanded two sectarian groups, Sipah-e-Sahaba of majority Sunni and Tehrik-e-Jafria of minority Shiite Muslim sects.

India blames Lashkar and Jaish for attacking the parliament building in New Delhi on Dec. 13 and demanded Pakistan disband the groups.

New Delhi also has presented a list of 20 militants it wants extradited for committing terrorist acts against India. Musharraf rejected the demand, saying he would be willing to try and punish them in Pakistan if New Delhi provided evidence against them.

Both the governments have moved thousands of troops along their border and deployed nuclear-capable missiles against each other after the Dec. 13 attack.

U.S. President George W. Bush and other world leaders have urged both India and Pakistan to show restraint and resolve their differences through talks.

Musharraf's action has been appreciated around the world as a step that would go a long way in controlling religious extremism in Pakistan and in improving India, Pakistan relations.

"There is no place for extremism in Pakistan anymore. Mosques are for worship, not politics," Musharraf declared.

----

The Rogue to Fear Most Is the One Following Orders

New York Times
January 13, 2002
By DOUGLAS FRANTZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/13/weekinreview/13FRAN.html

IN 1999, Pakistan's civilian prime minister sent the head of its intelligence agency on a secret trip to the United States. He listened as Clinton administration officials urged Pakistan to withdraw its support for the Taliban. Equally important, he had instructions to tell the Americans that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif suspected that the Pakistani army chief of staff was plotting a coup against him.

As the intelligence director traveled from office to office in Washington, he was trailed by a spy - a man within his own agency whose real loyalties were to the generals Mr. Sharif feared. The spy's job was to keep an eye on his boss, the director general of Inter-Services Intelligence, and report back to the military leaders who held the real power in Pakistan and controlled the spy agency itself. Within a month, Mr. Sharif was ousted and the army chief of staff, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, had taken his place.

The story, told by former Pakistani and American officials, hints at what can happen when intelligence officials become more powerful than their governments - the emergence of an independent agency able to overturn government policies or the government itself. It also demonstrates the precariousness of General Musharraf's position today as he, even more than his predecessors, comes under American and British pressure to abandon policies and allies that the spy agency and his fellow generals have backed over the years. As prime minister, he has vowed, as he did again last night, to curb Islamic extremism and terrorist groups, but a critical question remains: Do his military and intelligence officers support those goals?

So General Musharraf must navigate a treacherous course, and a misstep could bring calamity. India and Pakistan, nuclear powers prone to brinksmanship, are at the edge of war. India charges that Pakistan and its intelligence agency support Kashmiri militants, including two groups that India accuses of attacking its Parliament on Dec. 13. Meanwhile, even as troops mass on both sides in disputed Kashmir, Al Qaeda leaders are slipping away across Pakistan's western frontier.

The stakes for the United States are enormous. Averting an India-Pakistan war and catching Al Qaeda's leaders are critical to the success of America's war on terrorism. And achieving both goals depends in large measure on General Musharraf: Can he force the intelligence agency to renounce its activities in Kashmir without provoking another coup?

The relationship between intelligence agencies and the governments they serve is often murky; by definition, spies operate in the shadows, and even in open societies their exploits are often designed to let governments deny connection to them. In countries like Pakistan, where military and intelligence officers exert power independent of civilian authority, these agencies routinely flout the law and pursue their own interests.

Looked at one way, intelligence agencies can seem impossible for the state to control. Looked at another way, their independence also allows the state or military to play a double game, espousing one policy while secretly undermining it through the actions of a supposed "rogue" organization.

In the case of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, the agency's actions have generally been carried out at the instruction of the military leadership, which has usually been too strong to be overruled by civilian governments. The agency's top officers come from the armed forces; the director general is always a senior general. So the agency operates as an arm of the military leadership, no matter who is running the government, even one of its own.

General Musharraf is a career military officer, but he must beware of antagonizing hard-liners among his colleagues, particularly when it comes to the perception that he might be abandoning a popular national cause like ending Indian control over part of Kashmir. The Pakistani leader knows the role that the spy agency and its friends in the military played in his rise. And he knows he serves at their pleasure.

"The I.S.I. started out as an important arm of Pakistani national security, but it ended up defining national security in its own terms," said Husain Haqqani, a political analyst in Islamabad and a former Pakistani government minister. "Whenever a covert agency is allowed to define the national interest, it ends up with more power than intended."

The result is that the agency is not so much a rogue outfit as one that has enormous independence from the political leadership, though the army chiefs and political leaders sometimes find it convenient to use the rogue pretense to maintain deniability.

Deniability brings its own risks. After years of publicly denying intelligence activities to which they have covertly given a green light, a state's leaders can find it much harder to rein in such an agency when the world changes, as it has done for Pakistan since Sept. 11. Simply put, they get used to doing things their own way.

General Musharraf now faces a trap created by the culture of deniability, which has also made it easier for India to demonize Pakistan's spy agency - depicting it as the omnipresent evil hand behind every dastardly act. Can General Musharraf control his spies and deliver what President Bush and the Indians demand? Or is he playing a double game - exaggerating how hard it would be to rein them in, in order to maintain his hold on power or extract a higher price from Washington for his cooperation?

IN fact, General Musharraf faces substantial risks - perhaps to his life - if he is serious about regaining control of the agency. He has already angered key figures there by ending Pakistan's support for the Taliban after Sept. 11. Now he is trying to wean his spymasters from their support of militant groups fighting in Kashmir, an issue even dearer to their hearts.

There are unpleasant precedents from other countries that allow policies to be made in the shadows. For instance, a chief difficulty for Washington in dealing with Iran has been not being able to know who is really accountable when its surrogates take hostages or stage terror attacks. In an odd parallel, President Ronald Reagan was tarnished, during the Iran-Contra scandal, when elements of his own national security and intelligence community were said to have acted independently (certainly they acted outside the view of Congress) to trade arms for hostages and funnel money to Nicaraguan rebels.

IN Peru, former President Alberto Fujimori paid a high price for the shady dealings and human rights crimes attributed to his spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, but there too deniability clouds the real story. As he rose to power, Mr. Fujimori got considerable help from Mr. Montesinos, and for many years it was difficult to tell who owed his job to whom.

And in the Middle East today, Yasir Arafat's motives have been brought into question by his unclear relationship with violent forces among the Palestinians. In trying to assess his real intentions, President Bush, echoing the Israeli leadership, has fallen back on a harsh standard: Results are what count, not promises or even deeds that can be quickly reversed.

In South Asia, with the stakes so high, Indians are now suggesting that such a standard should also be applied to General Musharraf, even as he tries to close down Inter-Service Intelligence's powerful Kashmir and Afghan divisions.

Under pressure from the United States after Sept. 11, General Musharraf took the first steps to control the agency when he replaced its pro-Taliban director general with a moderate who was loyal to him, Lt. Gen. Ehsan ul-Haq. His mission, originally to end support for the Taliban, expanded after the attack on India's Parliament in December, when General Musharraf reluctantly agreed to try to reduce the agency's Kashmir operations too.

Some Pakistani intelligence officials argued that the Parliament attack was not approved by the agency, but had been carried out by groups that the agency had backed. The intent, these officials said, was to force hard-liners within Pakistan's military to stop General Musharraf from dismantling the Kashmir cell.

Whether that twisting plot comes from Islamabad or from an imagination like John le Carré's, no one imagines that General Musharraf and his new intelligence chief have yet ridded the spy agency of its pro-Kashmir elements or pro-Taliban "jihadis." Their inroads are simply too deep.

"What is important now," said Jessica Stern, an expert on religious terrorism who lectures at Harvard's Kennedy School, "is not whether the I.S.I. as a whole is a rogue agency, but whether there are rogue pockets within the agency that Musharraf cannot control."

In other words, the fate of the corner of the world where Osama bin Laden hides from Americans while two nuclear neighbors face off could well depend on whether a spy agency that may or may not be a rogue is now infected by rogues within itself. And by whether the officials who were there at the rogue's birth can, or will, bring all of it into line with what the government says is its policy.

--------

Pakistani Militants Vow Violence

January 13, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-India.html

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- President Pervez Musharraf's pledge to crack down on terrorism has failed to persuade India to ease the tense military standoff, and Kashmiri militants vowed on Sunday more attacks against Indian rule in the contested territory.

India welcomed Musharraf's promise to prevent Pakistan from being used as a base for terrorism and to ban five Islamic extremist groups. Two of the groups have been accused by India of the Dec. 13 attack on the Indian parliament in which 14 people were killed.

More than 1,000 people, mostly from the five groups, were rounded up during a crackdown that began just before Musharraf's speech was broadcast Saturday, Interior Ministry official Tasneem Noorani said.

Police also raided the offices of at least two Kashmiri groups not covered by the ban, according to members of the organizations. At least 80 people from those organizations -- al-Badr Mujahedeen and Harkat-ul Mujahedeen -- were arrested.

``The government is targeting (militant) groups at the behest of America and India,'' said Mustaq Askari, an al-Badr spokesman. ``But any crackdown or restrictions won't hurt our struggle. Our Kashmiri jihad will continue.''

In New Delhi, Indian External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh welcomed the ban on the two extremist groups blamed for the parliament attack -- Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba. However, Singh told reporters India was ``looking forward to full implementation of this measure'' so that members of the groups do not continue their activities under other names.

``There would be a similar need to address other organizations targeting India, as also the parent organizations that spawned them,'' Singh said.

Meantime, India will maintain its forces along the Pakistani border, where a million heavily armed and nuclear capable troops from the two nations face one another in their largest buildup since the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war.

``The mobilization remains as it is,'' Indian Defense Ministry spokesman S.K. Bandopadhyay said in New Delhi. ``We will keep the situation under observation. Whether it will ease or not is something to be seen over the next few days. Whatever (Musharraf) has said, he has to act on.''

President Bush telephoned Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee on Sunday to urge them to continue peace efforts.

India blames Pakistan for fueling the 12-year revolt against Indian rule in Jammu and Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority state. The Himalayan territory was divided between Pakistan and India when they became independent of Britain in 1947.

Pakistan maintains it provides only moral support to separatists. ``Kashmir runs in our blood,'' Musharraf said Saturday. ``No Pakistani can break links with Kashmir.''

The latest confrontation began Oct. 1 when a suicide bombing at the legislature building in Indian Kashmir killed 40 people. Jaish-e-Mohammed claimed responsibility and then denied involvement two days later.

Tensions escalated on Dec. 13, when five armed gunmen stormed the Indian Parliament complex and opened fire. The five were killed, after having shot dead nine Indians. India claims the five assailants were Pakistani nationals working for Pakistani intelligence. Pakistan denied any role.

Musharraf's ban on extremist groups does not extend to all Kashmiri guerrilla organizations. More than a dozen are allied in an umbrella organization, the United Jihad Council.

On Sunday, the council chairman, Sayed Salahuddin, said the ``armed freedom struggle'' would continue because the groups are indigenous and can operate without Pakistani support, a claim India rejects.

India's measured response appeared to reflect the difficulties it faces in the confrontation, which has brought the region to the brink of war at a time when the United States and its allies, including Pakistan, are trying to destroy Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network in Afghanistan.

Pakistan, which borders Afghanistan, is a key Muslim ally in the war against terrorism. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who will visit the region this week, hailed Musharraf's ``bold and principled stand,'' saying the basis now exists ``for the resolution of tensions between India and Pakistan through diplomatic and peaceful means.''

However, Musharraf refused to back down on Pakistan's ``moral and diplomatic'' support for Kashmiri aspirations for self-determination. He also refused to hand over Pakistani nationals sought by India on terrorist charges, although he agreed to try them here if there is compelling evidence.

India's government, meanwhile, cannot afford to be seen as backing down in the face of international pressure while Pakistan remains firm in its support for Kashmiri self-determination.

``India was expecting much more and hoping that Pakistan would change its policy on Kashmir as it did on Afghanistan,'' retired Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, former chief of the Pakistani army, told The Associated Press. ``But that has not happened, which is a great disappointment for India. India tried to intimidate Pakistan by amassing troops at the border to force Pakistan to change its stand on Kashmir and get the whole Kashmir freedom movement as terrorism.''

-------- propaganda wars

White House seeks graduated terrorism alerts

By August Gribbin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
January 13, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020113-5300438.htm

The Bush administration is preparing to adopt a military-style system of terrorist alerts for the public instead of repeating general "terrorist threat advisories" like the one now in effect.

The White House Office of Homeland Security has requested state and local governments and federal security specialists to help develop an alert process similar to a system the Department of Defense uses that indicates the level of a threat's seriousness and dictates the appropriate response to each level.

The security office's action comes in response to growing public irritation with the series of amorphous alarms that began in October and, in the opinion of many, has put the government in the position of "crying wolf."

Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for Tom Ridge, the office's director, said that Mr. Ridge "has directed his staff - in concert with other federal agencies - to develop a system similar to Defcon that will help local law enforcement officials determine where to deploy resources when they go to certain threat levels." Defcon is the Defense Department's acronym for the Defense Readiness Conditions system

"The OHS is working on it now," Mr. Johndroe said, adding it will be developed "in the not-distant future."

"Going to a Defcon system will look spiffy. But, when it comes down to it, the move might just provide finer resolution to meaninglessness," said Matthew Baker, chief analyst for Strafor, a prestigious private intelligence agency based in Austin, Texas.

Mr. Baker explained that a graduated system of alarms "will serve the main function of avoiding public exhaustion. You want people to be alert, but not to wear out with one tier of threat. So you come out with five or six. Then the public can take a one-day breather."

Alerts are necessary, the analyst insisted, because they keep the terrorists guessing about what we know or don't know. Importantly, they are "a powerful deterrent" and can disrupt planned attacks. But, he added, there is no clear intelligence on terrorist activities.

Evaluations are based on false rumors that the terrorists are "masters" at spreading, on "shadow alarms" generated by the alerts themselves and on various true but unspecific reports. In Mr. Baker's view, the admitted vagueness on which the alerts are based robs them of real meaning that the public can act on.

Many agree. The lack of specificity brought complaints when on Oct. 11 the FBI warned of attacks inside the United States or abroad in the next few days. Then 18 days later, the FBI called a high alert because of a general attack threat. And early last month, Mr. Ridge ordered a return to high alert because of an increased number of threat reports. The FBI later extended the high alert to March 11.

None of the alerts gave information about targets or types of possible attack.

Among others, state and local officials began complaining that keeping police and rescue teams in a state of alert was costing inordinate amounts of money, creating fatigue and needlessly alarming the decreasing number of people who put any credence in the alarms.

Mayor Patrick McCory of Charlotte, N.C., is just one who has written to Mr. Ridge asking for change. He said, "We need a phased-in approach regarding the severity of each alert so we can allocate resources and can make the public understand the seriousness of the situation."

It is not yet clear how a system similar to the military's will do that or if it can defuse the resulting skepticism when there are warnings but no apparent danger.

After all, Defcon describes a progressive system of combat "postures." The system is primarily used by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and commanders of unified commands, and it requires that the seriousness of confirmed threats be evaluated and categorized.

Defcon 5, for example, describes "normal peacetime readiness" and Defcon 1 demands "maximum force readiness."

In addition there are two levels of national emergencies called Emercons. A "Defense Emergency" describes a verified, major attack upon U.S. forces overseas, allied forces anywhere or "an overt attack of any type made upon the United States." An "Air Defense Emergency" indicates that an aircraft or missile attack against the continental United States, Canada, or U.S. installations in Greenland is "probable, imminent, or is taking place."

The military prescribes the appropriate actions to take when any of the seven conditions is declared. The homeland security alert system being formulated will also indicate how federal authorities and state and local security teams should respond to each level of threat.

-------- russia / chechnya

Three Russian Officers to Face Trial For Friendly Fire Deaths in Chechnya

Associated Press
Sunday, January 13, 2002; Page A28
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37244-2002Jan12?language=printer

MOSCOW, Jan. 12 -- Three officers will be tried for negligence in the March 2000 deaths of 22 Russian police troops in Chechnya by friendly fire, a blood bath that Russian officials publicly blamed on rebels, a newspaper reported today.

The charges were filed last January but have been kept secret, Izvestia reported. It said the trial will begin Monday in a Moscow regional court and will be closed to the public and the media.

The Russian prosecutor general's office confirmed that the case exists but referred all further questions to the court, which did not answer telephone calls.

A riot police unit from Sergiyev Posad, 20 miles from Moscow, had just arrived in Grozny, the Chechen capital, when it came under fire from machine guns and grenades on March 2, 2000. Officials said 22 troops were killed and 30 wounded in a battle that lasted four hours.

At the time, a rebel commander claimed credit for the killings, and for many Russians, the casualties added to the conviction that the Kremlin's war in Chechnya was justified by the conduct of separatist rebels in the southern breakaway region.

However, Izvestia reported that the attack was the result of a miscommunication among Russian forces who did not know the new troops were arriving. It said they were inadvertently attacked by Russian police troops.

Izvestia said it obtained a report on the investigation in which Russian Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov said the top officer charged in the case, Maj. Gen. Boris Fadeyev, failed to follow proper procedure in arranging the troops' arrival. The report said Fadeyev would be the first general tried for a friendly fire incident in Chechnya.

-------- space

Base uses space to guide war

By Janene Scully / Staff Writer
Santa Maria Times,
Jan. 13, 2002
http://www.santamariatimes.com/display/inn_news/news01.txt

VANDENBERG AFB -- Before American warplanes drop bombs over Afghanistan or ground troops take a step, or ships sail toward enemy territory, space forces here have already laid the groundwork.

Inside a three-story building at Vandenberg Air Force Base sits an oversized room with multiple computers, a bank of video monitors, several telephones and a television tuned to CNN. It could be any room, if it weren't behind multiple security doors, each requiring a clearance to enter through.

It's called the Aerospace Operations Center, a dry name for what its boss calls the "heart and soul" of getting information from space to military forces.

From here, crews direct satellites -- weather, communication, warning, intelligence and navigation -- that help the U.S. military position troops around the world.

"It's a command-and-control center," said Maj. Gen. William R. Looney, 14th Air Force commander. "The way you command and control is an understanding, an appreciation and an awareness of information. What the AOC is, is a place for all this information to funnel in."

Or as an AOC staffer says, "We bring space to the war fighter."

With a crew of six, the AOC operates around the clock, keeping in contact with space units located in about 40 locations and 13 time zones, made even busier by Operation Enduring Freedom.

"It's a high ops tempo," said Looney.

The morning of Sept. 11, the AOC crew had the television on, with the sound down.

"Almost from the instant (the planes struck) the phones were ringing off the hook," said Maj. Kenneth Allison, operations officer.

The value of space, and capabilities satellites provide, came of age during Operation Desert Storm. Since then, the Air Force has positioned itself to exploit what space can do to help on the Earth's battlefields.

That includes forming the AOC in 1997, first in a temporary room and later as a round-the-clock operation keeping a finger on the pulse of space forces. The room has secure and unsecure communication lines along with software that allows the crews to track information about various satellites and systems available to war fighters.

"The challenge of both our AOC, and the one they have right now in Saudia Arabia at Prince Sultan Air Base that is kind of orchestrating this, is to integrate all of this magnificent capability we possess so that we maximize and optimize the efficiency of what it is we can bring to bear," said Looney.

Fighter jets and bomber aircraft have flown multiple sorties over Afghanistan, dropping dozens of weapons with great success destroying targets, he noted

"The only way we could have done that with the number of sorties we've flown, and with dropping only the numbers of bombs we've dropped, is through the navigation and timing capabilities that are provided by the Global Positioning System we have," said Looney.

Military commanders communicate directly in real time through satellite communication systems, such as the highly sophisticated Milstar system launching Tuesday from Florida.

Weather satellites, such as the one slated for launch Feb. 1 from Vandenberg Air Force Base, tell if it's a good time to strike or if laser bombs should be withheld in favor of satellite-guided bombs that aren't bothered by weather, Looney said.

"We provided intelligence -- real time and some not real time, but not that old -- that is able to give significant indications of the enemy's intent or even more importantly how successful we've been in damaging the things we've gone after or destroying," said Looney.

Staff writer Janene Scully can be reached at (805) 739-2214 or by e-mail at jscully@pulitzer.net.

-------- syria

Syria, US cooperate against terror despite strained relations

Sunday January 13
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020113/1/2aqlk.html

Syria and the United States are cooperating in the war against terror despite their strained relations, US former assistant secretary of state Edward Djerejian said here.

"I think there is some very serious interaction between the United States and Damascus after September 11, in terms of what can be done between the two countries to cooperate on the campaign against global terrorism," he said.

"I think that cooperation is continuing as we speak," added Djerejian, who also served as ambassador to Syria and Israel, speaking to journalists a day after he met Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Djerejian is visiting Syria as the director of the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, in Houston, Texas.

He said US congressional delegations which started visiting Damascus this month were an indicator of the "very serious dialogue on how" Syria and the United States "can both work together to combat terrorism."

Two such delegations had talks a few days ago with Assad, and two more are expected in the coming days, one led by Representative Saxby Chambliss, chairman of the House subcommittee on terrorism and homeland security, and the other by the House Democrat leader Richard Gephardt.

US ambassador to the United Nations John Negroponte is also due in Damascus next Sunday, three weeks after Syria took up its seat in the UN Security Council on January 1.

"There have been different levels of cooperation from different countries, (..) the approach to combatting global terrorism takes many facets, from political cooperation, to military cooperation, to intelligence cooperation," Djerejian said, refusing to specify the level at which Syria was engaged.

Syria figures on a US State Department list of countries which allegedly support terrorism because of its backing for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, as well as Lebanon's Shiite Muslim fundamentalist Hezbollah.

Damascus, which joined the worldwide condemnation of the anti-US attacks in September, has formally refused to take measures against those organisations, saying they are resistance movements fighting Israel's occupation of Arab land.

Syria accuses in turn the United States of alignment with Israel, a charge that Djerejian categorically rejected in his meeting with the press.

"Obviously the parties themselves have to demonstrate the necessary political will for peace, because no one can do anything if that political will is not there on the part of both the Arabs and the Israelis," he said.

However, he shared the Syrian official viewpoint that the struggle against terror must also tackle its root causes.

"In terms of the strategy against global terrorism, in my view, it has to incorporate diplomacy, it has to incorporate conflict resolution, such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, the conflict in Kashmir," he said.

Djerejian said he agreed with Assad that the Baker Insitute think-tank should initiate a program of non-governmental exchanges to discuss issues including terrorism, the Middle East, the Arab-Israeli conflict and Iraq.

"We will be hosting meetings in the Baker Institute and here in Syria. It is an excellent initiative in order to get to a position whereby Syria and the United States can have the opportunity of these exchanges to understand each other better," he said.

-------- us

Fighting for oil
The U.S. is determined to dominate the world's richest new source

By ERIC MARGOLIS Contributing Foreign Editor
January 13, 2002
Toronto Sun
http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/margolis.html

NEW YORK -- Partisans of President George Bush's jihad against Islamic opponents have been crowing that the quick military victory in Afghanistan showed that America's power is irresistible. War can indeed be waged with almost no U.S. casualties. The old Afghan hands who cautioned against plunging into Afghanistan were dead wrong, gleefully chorus right-wing hawks.

Hardly any of them have ever been to Afghanistan or neighbouring regions. All past invaders, beginning with Alexander's Macedonians, found it extremely easy to get into Afghanistan - and exceptionally painful to get out. That is the point this column has been making since early October.

It took the Soviet Army exactly two days in late 1979 to occupy Afghanistan, and 10 years to extricate itself. It has taken the United States - admittedly much further away - five weeks to scatter a force of medieval tribesmen and occupy southern Afghanistan. This time around, Russia occupied the north through its proxy forces in two weeks.

Though most North Americans believe the Afghan war is over, in fact we are only seeing the beginning of what augurs to be a long, confused, murky struggle in this strategic but chaotic nation. The growing American military presence in Afghanistan means its garrison troops are likely to become embroiled in lethal Afghan tribal politics and face a low but persistent number of casualties from skirmish and accidents - just what happened to the Soviet garrison in the 1980s.

Right now, the U.S. has bought temporary loyalty from tribal chiefs, but this situation could quickly change as Afghans chafe under the growing American presence and resent being ordered about by foreigners. Canadian troops in Afghanistan will face the same threats.

One thing is clear: the United States is inexorably getting drawn deeper and deeper into South and Central Asia. Empires expand through war or trade. The American Empire - which this column has long called the American Raj - has in recent weeks made a decisive move to the east. Just as the U.S. used the 1991 Gulf War to force its Arab clients to permit stationing of permanent U.S. garrisons in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, so the U.S. is now using the so-called war on terrorism and the hunt for Osama bin Laden to expand its military influence into South/Central Asia.

The reason is both simple and complex: oil. Washington is determined to dominate the world's richest new source of oil, Central Asia's Caspian Basin, over which sit the former Soviet states of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgystan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. Well before Sept. 11, the U.S. already had special forces operating in Kyrgystan and Uzbekistan. Last spring, Osama bin Laden advised the unworldly Taliban regime to turn down a low bid from the U.S. oil firm Unocal to build a pipeline to export Central Asian oil - awarding it instead to a rival Argentine firm. The U.S. cut off discreet financial aid to Taliban and began updating contingency plans to invade Afghanistan and install a compliant regime. Events of Sept. 11 facilitated this decision.

The U.S. is now establishing permanent military bases near Kandahar, where units of its elite 101st Airborne Div. will replace Marines as a semi-permanent garrison. Three other permanent U.S. bases are being prepared. Three more are operational in Pakistan. All these new bases will be linked to and supplied by much larger U.S. military bases in Arabia and the Gulf. Washington will use the same formula as in its Mideast oil Raj: keep friendly dictatorial regimes in power and crush their internal opponents in exchange for military bases, large arms purchases and cheap oil.

The Bush administration, egged on by the big oil lobby, is determined to dominate the Caspian Basin gold rush. However, U.S. military forces are already stretched extremely thin; involvement in Central Asia will strain them severely and require a higher defence budget. The U.S. already spends over $30 billion annually to base troops in Arabia and the Gulf - from which the U.S. gets only 7% of its oil.

Russia is already manoeuvering against the U.S. in Central Asia and Afghanistan. China is watching the arrival of U.S. troops on its highly sensitive western borders and the new U.S./Indian strategic alliance with mounting concern. These are dangerous waters, in a part of the world the U.S. little knows.

The U.S. charge into remote Central Asia, led by a president who calls Pakistanis "Pakis," looks increasingly like a case of imperial overreach - a bridge too far even for the world's sole superpower.

Eric can be reached by e-mail at margolis@foreigncorrespondent.com. Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com.

----

Pentagon warns of war lasting six years

By David Wastell in Washington
13/01/2002
http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$MO5SHXQAAECK5QFIQMGSFF4AVCBQWIV0?xml=/news/2002/01/13/wtal213.xml&sSheet=/news/2002/01/13/ixnewstop.html

AMERICAN military chiefs believe that the global war against terrorism will last at least six years.

Pentagon officials are being advised to draw up budgets and plans to buy new equipment on the assumption that the struggle against al-Qa'eda and other international terrorist groups will endure until 2008, and perhaps even longer.

Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, has won President Bush's backing for a sharp increase in military spending.

Extra money will be allocated for more of the weapons that have proved useful in Afghanistan, such as unmanned surveillance and attack aircraft.

The increased spending will continue whether or not Osama bin Laden is found soon.

It follows signs that the Pentagon is wearying of the intense public interest in the hunt for the al-Qa'eda leader, and Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader.

John McCain, a senator and former chairman of the armed services committee, said on his return from a trip to the Afghan region that he felt frustrated that bin Laden was still at large.

He added, however: "He's on the run now. I think he's a threat so long as he's alive, but it's a far different scenario than the one where he had sanctuary and was able to operate with a financial network and a network of terrorists throughout the world."

After four weeks in which the Pentagon and the media were constantly on tenterhooks for the imminent capture of bin Laden, a change of tack ordered by Mr Rumsfeld has become evident.

Officials say that they will no longer even hint at where they think he might be.

There have also been reports of clashes between the Pentagon and the CIA over the quality of intelligence emanating from Afghanistan.

Some military officials feared there was a "missed opportunity" when the Pentagon ordered US Central Command to rely on local Afghan forces rather than US troops to try to intercept and capture bin Laden after the assault on al-Qa'eda's Tora Bora mountain hideouts.

Not only did bin Laden apparently escape, but so have a series of Taliban leaders over the past two weeks, almost certainly including Mullah Omar, raising questions about the competence or possible corruption of the Afghan forces.

Although no politician is yet prepared to risk publicly differing with Mr Bush over the administration's handling of the war, some advisers fear that public patience over the failure to catch bin Laden will evaporate if the hunt drags on too long - or if there is a fresh terrorist attack on the US.

----

Second phase of U.S. war on terror focuses on Somalia, Philippines, Yemen

By Warren P. Strobel and Tom Infield
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Sunday, January 13, 2002
http://www.krwashington.com/content/krwashington/2002/01/13/washington/BC_ATTACKS_GLOBALTERRORISM_ADV13_WA_foreign_nation.htm

WASHINGTON - American combat troops began arriving in the Philippines this week, the vanguard of a significantly expanded U.S. program to train the Filipino military to fight radical Islamic groups linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.

Thousands of miles away, on the waters of the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, 10 U.S. Navy ships and vessels from allied nations are blocking potential escape routes for bin Laden and his top aides. The National Security Agency has intensified electronic surveillance of those routes, a senior U.S. official said, reflecting fears that the terrorist mastermind could flee to Africa or East Asia.

In Singapore, authorities announced they have rolled up an al-Qaida cell that, using fake passports and tons of explosive chemicals, was preparing to strike the U.S. Embassy, Navy ships and other American, Israeli and Australian targets. Detailed plans for the attacks, including surveillance videotapes of the targets, were found by U.S. troops in an al-Qaida leader's abandoned house in Afghanistan.

The second phase of President Bush's war on terrorism has quietly begun, even before military operations in Afghanistan are complete, according to U.S. military, diplomatic and intelligence officials. Most of the officials disclosed U.S. war aims only on condition of anonymity.

The goals of this second phase appear to be two: tracking al-Qaida leaders across borders and rooting out related terrorist groups in nations as far flung as Somalia, Sudan, Indonesia, Yemen and the Philippines.

The tools vary widely, from unmanned spy drones and U.S. Special Forces personnel, to diplomatic pressure and the treasure trove of intelligence being unearthed daily from former al-Qaida sites in Afghanistan.

Phase Two will bear little resemblance to the war in Afghanistan, said one senior Bush administration official.

"It's not like a concerted campaign," the official said, but rather a series of lower-profile actions and operations worldwide.

While U.S. military force carried the day in Afghanistan, elsewhere the United States is pressing local governments to go after terrorists within their borders. If they don't, the United States has threatened to take action itself.

Authorities in Sudan, Yemen, Malaysia and the Philippines have all, to one degree or another and with U.S. assistance, arrested suspected terrorists or gone after indigenous radical groups.

"We hope these (governments) change behavior on their own," said Daniel Goure, a national security expert at the Lexington Institute, a public-policy study center based in Arlington, Va. "Some will change; some won't. The ones that won't will get clobbered."

No decisions on new targets of unilateral military action will be made until it is clear which governments are cooperating, the senior U.S. official said.

But he and others said Somalia is a possible target precisely because it has no central government that can exert authority over the entire country. Somalia "is very much on the radar screen," the official said.

The impoverished, lawless country on the Horn of Africa is the headquarters of a radical Islamic group with links to al-Qaida, Al-Ittihad al Islami. Some Bush officials fear that Somalia could serve as a base for bin Laden's group to reconstitute itself.

The CIA is operating unmanned reconnaissance aircraft over Somalia in an attempt to monitor suspected al-Qaida camps, and the U.S. government is prepared to launch airstrikes against targets in Somalia if activity is confirmed. CIA officers are meeting with Somali tribal leaders, offering cash, food and other inducements in return for spotting and handing over bin Laden aides fleeing Afghanistan, two U.S. officials said.

But so far, reconnaissance photos and other intelligence show the camps, at Ras Kamboni and elsewhere, deserted, one official said.

One U.S. Special Forces officer said bin Laden is more likely to seek safe haven with Muslim groups advocating independence in Russia's Chechnya province or western China. U.S. military action is unlikely against large countries with nuclear weapons of their own.

Somalia also offers a cautionary tale for the U.S. military. When the humanitarian mission begun by Bush's father in 1992 turned into the hunt for a warlord, disaster followed. Eighteen U.S. Army Rangers and Special Forces personnel were killed in a two-day battle in October 1993, a story told in the new movie, "Black Hawk Down."

A U.S. diplomat noted that several of Somalia's neighbors would be eager to grab pieces of the country under the guise of aiding the U.S. anti-terrorism effort. The United States has "plenty of reasons not to be rash," he said.

Spurring the Phase Two effort is the vast quantity of al-Qaida documents, computers and videotapes that U.S. military and CIA operatives have found at abandoned camps and offices throughout Afghanistan.

The U.S. government now has in its possession "scores" of computers, "unbelievable" numbers of documents and more videotapes than have been made public, said a top intelligence official.

The planned attack in Singapore was only one of several that have been disrupted worldwide because of information found in Afghanistan, the official said. He declined to elaborate.

As Phase Two progresses, Bush will pose increasingly harder tests for countries such as Sudan and Yemen that have harbored terrorists before, said a veteran U.S. diplomat.

The president's message is, "OK, you've done pretty well so far. But let's keep going," said the diplomat, who has long experience in counterterrorism.

The prevailing sentiment is to allow nations such as Sudan, where bin Laden lived from 1991 to 1996, to begin with a clean slate, the diplomat said. The United States "has drawn the line at what you're doing now and what you're doing in the future, not what you've done in the past," he said.

In Sudan, U.S. authorities believe the regime is generally cooperating. But there have been disputes over suspected terrorists that the United States wants Sudan to expel, and more are likely, U.S. officials said.

In Yemen, the government has announced plans to deport some 80 foreign students from an Islamic fundamentalist institute. Last month, Yemeni special forces clashed with tribesman in remote areas suspected of harboring al-Qaida members.

In the Philippines, the government has welcomed American aid but until recently resisted Washington's requests for U.S. troops to accompany Filipino troops in any fighting against terrorists. The Philippine military's chief of staff recently announced that U.S. troops would be allowed in the field, although they will not engage in combat.

The U.S. force, expected to number several hundred troops with helicopters, is a significant expansion of an ongoing U.S. counter-terrorism training program, State and Defense department officials said.


-------- POLICE / PRISONERS

Terror-training videos found in al Qaeda camp

["'This is a procedure that is used in the United States all the time.... Certainly [al Qaeda members] have been following our tactics. They've had access to our manuals.'"]

By Richard Ehrlich
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
January 13, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020113-69304476.htm

MIR BACHEH KOWT, Afghanistan - Al Qaeda videotapes captured after the fall of the Taliban last year show the terrorist organization training followers from across the Muslim world in sophisticated techniques for assassinating, kidnapping and bombing their enemies.

Many of the techniques appear to have been borrowed from U.S., British and Israeli commando forces, according to the former Green Beret soldier who is now in possession of the tapes.

The ex-soldier, who has served for the past three months as an adviser to the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance but declined to allow his name to be used, provided a tour of the al Qaeda training compound where the tapes were made in this town 15 miles north of the capital, Kabul.

"Look over here. You see the round bullet holes? This is where they had targets," the adviser said, wandering through several rooms where men in the videos had fired weapons during training.

Other features of the compound are clearly identifiable on the videos, which are being offered to American television networks for broadcast. A U.S. Defense Department spokesman confirmed the identity of the former Green Beret and said he was aware of the tapes.

In several scenes, the videos show armed men disguised as janitors or golfers learning how to murder and seize hostages.

Dozens of men of various races and ethnic origins fire Kalashnikov assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades while yelling and shoving others who pretend to be hostages.

In some scenes, an instructor uses drawings of cars, streets and gunmen to teach his charges how to attack a motorcade.

"Arabic interpreters and also Afghans who viewed the tapes were able to identify the different dialects, and we know for a fact there were Kuwaiti, Iranian, Iraqi and Libyan guys here," the former Green Beret said.

"We were also able to spot some North Africans. We are guessing that they are Somalian. They look Somalian."

The American adviser said several techniques seen in the videos appear to be cribbed from Western security forces.

He pointed out a scene in which a man dressed as a janitor enters a building through a parking garage carrying a duffel bag with concealed weapons, then sets to work sweeping the floor in an upstairs hallway.

"When the hostage thing started, he pulled out a handgun," the adviser said, suddenly drawing his own black pistol to re-enact the scene.

"This is a procedure that is used in the United States all the time.

"The FBI, the Secret Service and U.S. marshals will go into a place, put a guy in as a janitor, put a guy in as a maintenance man and smuggle the weapon in with his maintenance equipment," he said.

"Certainly [al Qaeda members] have been following our tactics. They've had access to our manuals.

"The guys controlling the hostages with their handguns, their shooting techniques are a composite of Israeli, British and U.S."

One scene shows assassins disguised as golfers on the camp's dirt field, with their weapons hidden in white golf bags.

When a lookout signals by teeing off, the guerrillas open fire with assault rifles and a rocket-propelled grenade, obliterating a group of dignitaries depicted by a cluster of targets.

Other tapes show nervous men in camouflage outfits being taught to leap with ropes from the roof of the compound's two-story main building and to jump through open windows.

In a session on how to negotiate with authorities, the trainees threaten to shoot a hostage and throw him off the roof.

The American adviser, who said the original Hi-8 video tapes "are destined to go to a U.S. intelligence agency," said it was clear that the videos were not intended to be shown publicly.

While most of the principal trainees have their faces hidden by balaclavas, the camera occasionally pans to show other guerrillas watching with faces uncovered. A few of the men appear to be Caucasian, perhaps from Chechnya.

Also found in the compound - which is now controlled by Afghan security forces - were U.S.-made mortar shells, still in their packing tubes, and Russian-made claymore mines.

One building was littered with metal tips that had been pried off of machine-gun bullets, presumably so the powder could be used for some other purpose.

The former training camp was originally a school set amid pine trees in this village in the Shomali Valley just north of Kabul, where the decisive battle for the capital was fought.

This area was tightly controlled by the Taliban until the regime fled Kabul on Nov. 13.

"Some Northern Alliance commando forces found this base," the adviser said. "The commander had escaped shortly before, along with all the terrorists."

He said the Northern Alliance forces found the tapes along with a video player and the camera that was used during a search of the commander's house on Nov. 16.

It is not clear when the videos were made. However, there is heavy snow visible on the distant mountains, suggesting it was made last winter or in the early spring.

----

Captives find tight security in Cuba

By Tony Winton
ASSOCIATED PRESS
January 13, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020113-75946379.htm

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL STATION, Cuba - Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners were allowed an exercise walk yesterday - with their hands bound and a U.S. soldier on each side - and given medical exams on their first full day under tight security at this U.S. military outpost, officials said.

The head of security at Camp X-Ray, the base's detention area, said he was confident in the "layered" security measures, with backup guards in place for the 20 prisoners, considered some of the toughest of the fighters captured in Afghanistan.

"This was sort of our test run. It went extremely well," Army Col. Terry Carrico told reporters. "There's going to be no break out. I'm very confident."

The 20 are the first of hundreds of al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners expected to be brought from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, on the eastern tip of Cuba. Here they will face intense interrogation, especially concerning the whereabouts of terror suspect Osama bin Laden. Officials have not said when the next group of prisoners will be brought here.

The prisoners' identities have not been released. The British Foreign Office said it had been informed by the Americans that a British citizen was among the 20 prisoners. British officials were trying to determine who he is.

Saying the fighters have shown they're willing to kill themselves and their captors, the U.S. military has clamped down with heavy security. In November, a prison mutiny in northern Afghanistan took three days to put down, left as many as 450 fighters dead and cost the life of a CIA agent.

The captives were being detained outside the view of reporters in a camp behind coils of barbed wire, guarded by heavily armed military police.

After their arrival Friday afternoon, the group's first night in Cuba "was peaceful," Col. Carrico said.

There was some conversation among prisoners, and he said he saw several put their "mats down on the deck and pray" before going to sleep. "They were very fatigued."

They slept under the glare of halogen floodlights in individual outdoor cells made of chain-link fence - measures aimed at keeping them visible to their guards. It rained overnight, but the prisoners were sheltered by their cells' metal roofs, Col. Carrico said.

Yesterday, the prisoners were to be given meals and showers and allowed to walk around outside their cells. But during the exercise walk, all were to have their hands bound and a military police guard on each of their sides, Col. Carrico said.

Camp medics were also examining the prisoners. Col. Carrico said some arrived wearing surgical masks after initial tests suggested the presence of tuberculosis. Those prisoners were to undergo chest X-rays to confirm whether they were infected, he said.

Each prisoner will be given a Koran as a "comfort item" if he doesn't have one, Col. Carrico said. Each also receives two bath towels - one for a prayer mat and the other for showering - a washcloth, toothpaste, toothbrush, soap and shampoo.

An Air Force C-141 cargo plane touched down with the prisoners Friday afternoon. The shackled men were led off the plane and into buses by more than 50 marines.

Several detainees appeared to struggle with the marines, and two were forced to their knees on the tarmac before being allowed to stand again and walk to the buses. At least one prisoner had been sedated on the flight from Afghanistan.

The buses took the men to a ferry, which carried them across Guantanamo Bay to Camp X-Ray.

The camp has room for 100 prisoners now and soon could house 220. A more permanent site under construction is expected to house up to 2,000.

Amid worries by some human rights groups that the heavy security measures violate the prisoners' rights and that U.S. officials plan military tribunals for the prisoners with lowered standards of due process, the Red Cross and other groups are to monitor conditions.

U.S. officials insist conditions do not violate human rights.

The United States is reserving the right to try al Qaeda and Taliban captives on its own terms and is not calling them "prisoners of war," a designation that would invoke the Geneva Convention.

The Guantanamo base is one of America's oldest overseas outposts. The U.S. military first seized Guantanamo Bay in 1898 during the Spanish-American War.

----

Hard time: Aging behind bars

By Liz Sidoti
ASSOCIATED PRESS
January 13, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020113-8667310.htm

NELSONVILLE, Ohio - Not many inmates were older than 55 when Robert Hershberger first went to prison as a teen-ager in 1945 for breaking into a store to steal cigarettes and money.

Now Hershberger, 74, who is serving a life sentence at the Hocking Correctional Facility for killing his second wife almost 30 years ago, is part of a growing population of older inmates nationwide.

"Whooo-ee, I seen a lot of change, and that's a big one," said Hershberger, who wears bifocals and has deep facial creases, a shuffling walk and short, cropped white hair. He occasionally winces from aches and pains.

"Oh heck, all that goes with old age. And, boy, am I old."

As prisoners age, the likelihood they will commit another crime upon release plummets, while taxpayers' cost of caring for them soars. But if they are paroled, not many services exist to help them adjust to life on the outside.

In 2000, more than 44,200 older offenders - generally defined as 55 and older - were in state and federal prisons, compared with about 19,160 a decade ago and roughly 6,500 in 1979, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

In the past three decades, however, older offenders have continued to make up about 3 percent of all inmates because the entire prison population also has grown.

The nation's oldest inmates - those older than 65 - numbered about 15,880 when the 2000 Census was taken, still less than 1 percent of the nearly 2 million prisoners.

The numbers reflect an aging population, but also are unintended consequences of the "get-tough-on-crime" era when more people were sent to prison under stricter sentencing laws and parole requirements.

"The intention was not to have people get old in prison, but that's exactly what's happening and it's happening fast," said Cynthia Massie Mara, a health care policy professor at Pennsylvania State University.

Many analysts predict that within the next few decades, the 55-and-older age group will make up a much larger part of prison populations nationwide. In prison, 55 is older than on the outside, because criminals tend to age prematurely from poor diet, drugs, alcohol and lack of medical care before being locked up.

The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction predicts that by 2025, a quarter of its population will be older offenders. They currently make up nearly 10 percent of the state's 44,700 inmates.

A surge, analysts say, would force corrections officials to change how they care for these inmates and lawmakers to re-examine sentencing and parole laws.

"States and federal facilities that ignore this problem now are going to get to a crisis point where they need to do something," said Jonathan Turley, director of the Project for Older Prisoners at George Washington University.

Some inmates older than 55 have been incarcerated since committing crimes in their youth. Others have been in and out of prison for decades. But most older inmates are first-time offenders, said Herbert A. Rosefield Jr., a corrections consultant working with the National Institute of Corrections and the American Correctional Association.

Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based organization to reform criminal-justice policies, said courts do not have much discretion in sentencing anymore.

In the past, first-time criminals who were old or ill were sentenced to shorter prison terms or diversion programs.

"Judges and juries very rarely take age and health into account now. In many cases, they can't," said Joann Morton, a criminal-justice professor at the University of South Carolina.

Betty Tewell, a 75-year-old prison librarian who is just over 5 feet tall with long white hair and large round glasses, went to prison at age 68 for killing her son-in-law in 1995. She testified during her murder trial that he abused her while she was living with her daughter's family.

"Up until then, I hadn't even had a traffic ticket," the grandmother said while in her semiprivate room at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville, where she is serving a life sentence.

"I was old when I got here," Tewell said, with a soft smile, her eyes filling with tears.

In the Kentucky State Reformatory, Creed Warren, 90, who can hardly hear, has served half of a 20-year prison sentence for rape and said he may die behind bars.

"It's just up to God. If He wants to keep me in here until the end, there's nothing I can do," Warren said, his speech labored and his voice raspy as he talked about his six living children. "They have a place for me to stay when I get out. If I get out."

The National Criminal Justice Commission estimates that confining and caring for such inmates costs taxpayers $69,000 a year per inmate, mostly because of medical costs. That's three times the roughly $22,000 it costs to lock up younger offenders.

The National Center on Institutions and Alternatives found in 1998 that more than half of all older offenders committed nonviolent offenses.

"We're certainly not advocating taking every one over the age of 55, putting them on a bus and dropping them on a street corner," said Barry Holeman, director of research and public policy for the Washington-based organization. "But we're allocating a large, large amount of resources for a group that doesn't need to be incarcerated."

Many victims would vehemently disagree, said Nancy Ruhe-Munch, executive director of the Cincinnati-based national advocacy group Parents of Murdered Children.

"So the inmates are old and they're elderly and someone needs to take care of them. But some of these families are old and elderly and in many cases the one person who would take care of them is dead or hurt," Mrs. Ruhe-Munch said. "They were promised truth in sentencing, so if an inmate [is sentenced to] life in prison, survivors believe they should be in for life."

That's why Hershberger, who is serving a life sentence for murdering his second wife, doesn't believe that he will be released when he is up for parole for the fourth time in March.

"Certainly I want to get out, but it will shock the heck out of me if they do let me go," Hershberger said as he shuffled through the prison halls cheerily heckling prison officials who call him "Hershey."

In 1987, former prosecutor Ronald Collins wrote the parole board saying Hershberger committed a "vicious cold-blooded murder" and never should be released.

Mr. Collins said recently that he still believes Hershberger should serve his full life sentence.

"We've got to remember Beatrice Hershberger here and she had a right to live, too," Mr. Collins said. "The offense committed against her was final. She doesn't get to get out. He shouldn't either."

--------

Clashes few at supremacist rally

January 13, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020113-70579560.htm

YORK, Pa. (AP) - Witnesses reported minor confrontations in the streets yesterday as police kept hundreds of demonstrators at bay during a rally by white supremacists in a city still feeling the effects of deadly race riots more than 30 years ago.

Matthew Hale, leader of the white supremacist group World Church of the Creator, spoke to about 70 supporters inside the Martin Memorial Library while police officers in riot gear, some on horseback, separated shouting groups of his supporters and anti-racist protesters.

"We seek the advancement of white people, our people, without any apologies, any compromise, any groveling before anybody," Mr. Hale told supporters and spectators inside the library.

Marion Kinard, 31, of York, said he attended the speech with his two sons, 4 and 6, to teach them about racism. "I want my children to know that they're teaching it to their children," said Mr. Kinard, who is black.

Witnesses reported seeing car windows broken and minor confrontations in the streets throughout the afternoon. Witnesses reported a clash between the two sides before Mr. Hale arrived, although police did not confirm it.

State, city and federal authorities provided security, including blocking off several streets around the library where Mr. Hale made his speech. They also frisked people in the crowd for weapons.

At least two people were taken into custody outside the library, but police would not promptly comment about charges.

After his speech, Mr. Hale was whisked away in an unmarked police van.

Mr. Hale was supported by Rob Griffin, 27, who said he heads the Peabody, Mass., chapter of the World Church of the Creator. He said he wasn't afraid of the protesters and didn't mind all the police.

Most Hale supporters attending the speech did not wish to give their full names or hometowns.

Mr. Hale's group has been accused of helping hone the racist beliefs of a man who went on a shooting rampage in 1999. The gunman, Benjamin Smith, killed two people and wounded nine in Illinois and Indiana before taking his own life. All the victims were Jewish, black or Asian.

Two Hale appearances in Illinois in 2000 ended in violence, with people arrested after each melee.

York was the scene of riots in July 1969 after a black teen-ager was wounded by a white man. A police officer was killed on the second night of the violence while he rode in an armored car. Four days later, a black woman was slain by shots fired from a white mob as she and her family drove to a grocery store.

Earlier this year, nine white men - including Mayor Charlie Robertson - were charged with the murder of the black woman. Two black men were arrested in October and accused of killing the police officer. Mr. Robertson dropped a re-election bid and is awaiting trial.

Mr. Hale has said he picked York, a racially mixed town of 41,000 in south-central Pennsylvania, for his appearance because of its high profile in race relations and because Pennsylvania has been a hotbed of racial division.

The library conference room was reserved in November by Michael Cook, of nearby Wrightsville and director of the World Church's York-area chapter, who told the library that his "church" would be meeting there, officials said.

Only this month did library officials found out that the church was actually a white supremacist group. Library officials concluded that canceling the event would not hold up to a legal challenge.

Former City Councilman Ray Crenshaw, who is black, stayed a few blocks from the library and said he tried to ignore the demonstrations. "I'm trying my best to act as if it's not happening because it's a disgrace," said Mr. Crenshaw, a write-in candidate for mayor in the election last November.

----

Pursuing the pros who pick pockets

January 13, 2002
By Denise Barnes
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/metro/20020113-79798516.htm

A pickpocket specialist with the Washington Metro Transit Police Department says it may take a thief to catch a thief, but cops who are trained to think like crooks can do just as well: They can learn to snag pickpockets who find their prey in crowded places.

Whether it's the Metro Center station at rush hour, FedEx Field, or the Pentagon City Mall, any place that attracts large crowds is a pickpocket's paradise. These smooth operators glide away with roughly $1 billion a year in other people's hard-earned cash and - in the latest twist - their identity.

"Every seven minutes a pocket is picked," said Metro Detective Cedric A. Mitchell, an expert when it comes to "the game" - that's what pickpockets call the work they do.

Det. Mitchell, 42, has studied the pickpocket's personality for the past 10 years. He knows the pros like a book - they have huge egos and they love to talk about the game. Since 1993, he has worked in the Metro Transit Police Criminal Investigation Division, where he is the primary investigator for all robbery-pickpocket cases. His job isn't for everyone; just as not everybody is cut out to be a homicide detective, or a coroner, the same applies for a pickpocket detective.

It is a job that requires patience to stand on a station platform for hours on end without one's powers of observation weakening. It also requires taking a lot of train rides. During the course of his work day, Det. Mitchell has spotted pickpockets at work even with uniformed officers standing nearby. The officers don't see a thing because they haven't been trained in the art of spotting the pickpocket, the detective points out.

Det. Mitchell will tell the officer and let justice take its course - unless he has spotted the crime on his own turf, in which case the game is over and he will make the collar.

"Pickpocketing is a nonviolent crime which goes unnoticed, yet it is a felony. Still, it's a crime nobody talks about. Pickpockets know rapes, robberies and homicides receive major attention from law enforcement officials. Minor crimes don't get nearly the same attention. Even if they are convicted, they don't serve a lot of time," Det. Mitchell said.

To educate local law enforcement officials so they can in turn educate the public, Det. Mitchell offers a class called "The Art of the Game" for law enforcement and security personnel. The class is the only nationally recognized course of its kind in the country.

Earlier this month, Det. Mitchell and his team demonstrated for Metro police officers and seven other police departments in the region the various ploys pickpockets use to ply their trade. Another class is scheduled for the spring, he said.

"One of the many things officers learn is that the pickpocket theft can occur almost anywhere to anybody - on busy street corners, in grocery stores, at malls, movie houses, airports, stadiums. As unbelievable as it may seem, people have been pickpocketed at church," he said.

And, there are all kinds of pickpockets, he said. There are "lush workers" - the pickpocket who preys on the drunks. And "john workers" who rob people in public bathrooms.

However, Det. Mitchell says, "pickpockets have morals - there is honor among thieves. They don't snitch on one another, and for the most part, they don't pickpocket black people. That's the rule. They look for Caucasians and Asians because they have the money and the credit." A pickpocket who steals an identity, for example, can cash in on a $250,000 home equity loan the victim may qualify for.

To stay on top of his game, Det. Mitchell treats the pickpocket with respect after he has apprehended his perpetrator. Pickpockets are intelligent people who take great pride in what they do for a living - it's that big ego again.

"I always treat them with respect. I kill them with kindness. I get calls and Christmas cards from pickpockets," he said.

It's a mind game.

"Pickpockets consider themselves to be like surgeons. They play it out in their minds before the crime [is] committed. They have the gift of gab - in most instances, when they are caught, it's by the victim - not the police," he said. Then, the pickpocket makes up some excuse for having bumped into the intended victim and carries on a short conversation, using the "gift of gab".

Det. Mitchell, who has been featured on "Good Morning America," said Americans believe in good and the good in people. But, he adds, since September 11, we have seen that we are vulnerable.

That's why he thinks now is the ideal time to get the word out to fellow law enforcement officials. The Prince George's County resident said he hopes to take "The Art of the Game" to the nation.

He said the public is generally an easy mark. "People are easily distracted and we're not a society that pays attention. This crime plays on our weaknesses," Det. Mitchell said.

In a demonstration for a reporter from The Washington Times, Det. Mitchell and members of his team showed the ease with which pockets can be picked at the bustling Metro Center station in Northwest.

A woman dressed in a mink coat played the "mark," or victim, who is waiting for the subway to arrive. Her shoulder bag hangs at her hip and she's not paying attention to what's going on around her.

Det. Mitchell played the "cannon," the pickpocket who is considered the cream of the crop in the hierarchy of pickpockets. A train stops at the platform. Commuters and tourists exit in a jumble. Det. Mitchell picks her wallet.

The woman in mink didn't even know she had been touched. It happens that fast.

----

Worship Event for Released Offenders

METRO In Brief
THE DISTRICT
Sunday, January 13, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37241-2002Jan12?language=printer

The D.C. Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency will join District clergy today in hosting a Day of Re-Entry Worship at houses of worship throughout the city.

The federal agency, which supervises offenders on probation, parole and supervised release as well as pretrial defendants, is encouraging congregations to support released offenders returning to their communities from prison.

-------- death penalty

'Legal Lynching' by Jesse L. Jackson Sr., Jesse L. Jackson Jr. and Bruce Shapiro

Reviewed by Jennifer Wynn
Sunday, January 13, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28754-2002Jan10?language=printer

LEGAL LYNCHING - The Death Penalty And America's FutureBy Jesse L. Jackson Sr., Jesse L. Jackson Jr. and Bruce ShapiroNew Press. 174 pp. $22.95

THE LAST FACE YOU'LL EVER SEEThe Private Life of The American Death PenaltyBy Ivan SolotaroffHarperCollins. 232 pp. $25

Extreme Measures

Despite the building wave of anti-death penalty sentiment and growing media attention paid to the wrongly convicted, shabbily defended and racially skewed composition of death-row inhabitants, many Americans remain committed to the death penalty. Legal Lynching and The Last Face You'll Ever See might well convince even the staunchest supporters that America's machinery of death has run its course. Since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, 86 "factually innocent individuals have been released from death rows around the country," write father-and-son co-authors Jesse Jackson Sr. and Jr. in their wrenching polemic, Legal Lynching. "This amounts to one complete exoneration for every eight executions." The Jacksons build a persuasive case for enacting a moratorium on the death penalty, a "national time-out" from state-sanctioned killing so that we can examine the facts from a more clear-headed perspective.

In making their case, the Jacksons (aided by Bruce Shapiro, legal correspondent for the Nation) interweave empirical research and true-life examples of justice gone wrong. The resulting portrait is chilling -- a mockery of the Supreme Court's holding that the standard for imposing the death penalty should be one of "super due process." Indeed, "the most comprehensive review of modern death sentencing," conducted by researchers at Columbia University, shows that "68 percent of all death penalty cases reviewed [between 1973 and 1995] were overturned due to serious constitutional errors." Such errors are largely the result of "lousy lawyering" -- usually carried out by underpaid, unqualified public defenders and the judges who tolerate them.

The authors note that in Texas, "where sleeping-lawyer capital cases are a bona fide trend," a 72-year-old lawyer slept through "virtually the entire trial" of his death-penalty defendant. His explanation to the judge? "It's boring." As the Jacksons point out, "the death penalty is imposed not for the worst crime but for the worst lawyer."

Equally compelling are accounts of law-and-order death-penalty supporters who do an about-face when confronted with the truth. When former attorney general (and death-penalty supporter) Janet Reno looked into the fairness of the federal death penalty, she was "deeply shaken." She commissioned a U.S. Department of Justice study that revealed that 80 percent of all federal death-penalty charges referred by prosecutors are against African Americans or Hispanics, and that "white defendants are twice as likely as blacks and Hispanics to escape capital charges through plea agreements."

Despite these grim statistics and America's status as the sole Western industrialized democracy that supports the death penalty, glimmers of hope exist. In 2000, Illinois's Republican Gov. George Ryan imposed a moratorium on executions after 13 innocent people were released from death row during a period in which the state had executed 12 people. Journalism students at Northwestern University took up the cause of Anthony Porter, a man with an IQ "barely above 50" who, after 12 years on death row and within two days of execution, was found innocent and released. Coauthor Jackson Jr., a congressman, has sponsored the National Death Penalty Moratorium Act, a bill outlined in this book. The intellectual clarity of Legal Lynching and the profound moral questions it raises deserve a wide audience and demand a political response.

Delving deeper inside the machinery of death is The Last Face You'll Ever See, a gruesome account of execution that should come with a warning: Do not read this book on a full stomach or in a public place (your groans will attract stares). In his attempt to understand America's devotion to the death penalty, journalist Ivan Solotaroff spent five years interviewing executioners, examining the culture of the condemned and speaking with prosecutors who fight to keep people dying. A particularly horrific passage captures the glee with which prosecutors Jim Williams and Ronnie Boddenheimer of the New Orleans DA's office speak about winning death sentences. Boddenheimer, "a short, roughly groomed man who looks like a Dockers ad gone wrong," says he enjoys taunting defendants at pretrial hearings with sounds of the electric chair. "Bzzzzzz," he mimics at the author. When Solotaroff asks if he'd have trouble pulling the switch himself, Boddenheimer responds: "I'd pull the switch and eat spaghetti," he says, then leans toward Solotaroff for a final "Bzzzzzz."

The bulk of the book is spent inside Mississippi's Parchman State Penitentiary, with special attention to the death house, its eerie gas chamber, and the career of Donald Hocutt, one of the state's executioners. Not surprisingly, the once gung-ho correction colonel is an emotional and physical wreck at the end of his 20-year career, plagued by fits of paranoia and nightmares of "gassing a man in the chamber."

No wonder. Hocutt's last victim, Leo Edwards, took 14 minutes to die. Cyanide poisoning, the author reports, causes a "man . . . to strangle on his own breath. . . . Large patches of skin, deprived of oxygen, temporarily take on a purplish tinge . . . the eyes bulge and the pupils fix and dilate in an unnatural way." At the moment they are declared dead, the condemned often will "suddenly jerk their heads back, stiffen, open their eyes, and begin belching, farting, or gasping, seemingly returning to consciousness in a state of deep asphyxiation and florid hallucination as the battle continues -- often another four to eight minutes."

It wasn't until 1998 that Mississippi did away with its gas chamber. Although Solotaroff avoids taking sides in the death-penalty debate, he relentlessly questions the utility, morality and consequences of state-sanctioned killing. The portraits that emerge -- of mentally retarded convicts sharing their last meal with their captors or sobbing in their cells, the coming-unglued of tough-as-nails men like Hocutt and the final words of Connie Ray Evans to Warden Donald Cabana ("From one Christian to another, I love you.") before Cabana gives the orders to kill him -- will leave all but the most alienated readers sickened and enraged. •

Jennifer Wynn is author of "Inside Rikers: Stories from the World's Largest Penal Colony" and director of the Prison Visiting Project at the Correctional Association of New York.

-------- terrorism

Car Bomb in Basque Region Injures 2

Associated Press
Sunday, January 13, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37243-2002Jan12?language=printer

BILBAO, Spain, Jan. 12 -- A car bomb exploded on a downtown street in this Basque city today, wounding two people who were hit by flying shards of glass, police said. They said an anonymous caller claimed the Basque separatist group ETA was responsible.

The mid-afternoon blast shattered windows in several buildings and sent a plume of black smoke into the air. Police had evacuated the area after a caller phoned in a warning to a newspaper and claimed ETA planted the bomb, but they were unable to find it before it exploded.

Television footage showed police frantically waving people away from a busy area of banks and shops minutes before a red Renault exploded in flames. The security chief and interior minister for the Basque region, Javier Balza, said the car had been stolen this morning and was loaded with as much as 44 pounds of dynamite.

"It was a powerful explosion; I could see rubble and bricks falling from the buildings and people were running away," said Covadonga Badiola, 34, who was shopping downtown. "This is just the evidence that ETA is not going to stop with its killings."

ETA has claimed responsibility or been blamed for more than 800 killings since the early 1960s, when it began its violent campaign to carve an independent Basque homeland out of land straddling northern Spain and southwestern France.


-------- OTHER

-------- environment

Court halts EPA bid to shift hazardous waste official

January 13, 2002
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020113-93422744.htm

A federal judge Friday temporarily halted a Bush administration plan to reshuffle the office of the Environmental Protection Agency's hazardous waste ombudsman.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard W. Roberts issued a temporary restraining order against the government until a full hearing on the matter can be scheduled. The order remains in effect until Feb. 26.

Robert Martin, who handles citizen complaints for the agency on waste and Superfund matters, has asked the court to block EPA Administrator Christie Whitman from moving the ombudsman's office to the EPA's Inspector General's Office.

Mr. Martin contends the move would weaken his independence within the agency. He said in court papers the agency planned the change because he has been an outspoken critic of corporations' influence in Superfund cases, large environmental cleanups that involve the worst types of hazardous waste.

EPA spokesman Joe Martyak denied the agency was trying to weaken Mr. Martin's role. "I am confident, on the merits, the court will find the claims unfounded," the spokesman said.

A General Accounting Office report suggested moving the ombudsman, Mr. Martyak said, and "the ombudsman himself stated in that report that he thought he should be moved out of the Office of Solid Waste."

-------- human rights

Why We Must Feed the Hands That Could Bite Us

By Jared Diamond
Sunday, January 13, 2002; Page B01
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A34805-2002Jan12?language=printer

As the theme for the last volume of his history of World War II, Winston Churchill wrote: "How the great democracies triumphed, and so were able to resume the follies which had so nearly cost them their life."

A half century later, Churchill's words have regained uncanny relevance. While today's greatest democracy, the United States -- along with its loose coalition of allies -- routed the Taliban from Afghanistan extraordinarily quickly, we have not won the war on terrorism. Our focus now should be on what we can do to avoid lapsing into victors' follies. And that means combating the forces of poverty and hopelessness on which international terrorism feeds, in Afghanistan and elsewhere. I would single out three strategies -- providing basic health care, supporting family planning and addressing such widespread environmental problems as deforestation -- that, even in crude economic terms, would cost the United States far less than another Sept. 11.

I'm not suggesting that we can eliminate terrorism by alleviating such societal problems overseas. The planners and immediate agents of terror were fanatics who will continue to try toharm us as long as we are rich, powerful and supporters of Israel. But those few active terrorists depended on many more people, including desperate populations who have tolerated, harbored and even taken part in terrorist activities. When people can't solve their own problems, they strike out irrationally, seeking foreign scapegoats, or collapsing in civil war over limited resources. By bettering conditions overseas, we can reduce chronic future threats to ourselves.

There's a simple logic to this line of thinking, based on a sweeping change in the way the world has worked over the last half century. In the past, we have often portrayed foreign aid in the grand tradition ofnoblesse oblige -- as noble help to others. And while that's still true, foreign aid more than ever represents self-interested help. That's because the increasing efficiency of worldwide communications and transport (aka globalization) isn't just a matter of "us" being able to send "them" good things. It has also become easier for "them" to send "us" bad things.

If a dozen years ago you had asked an ecologist uninterested in politics to name the countries with the most fragile environments, the most urgent public health problems and the most severe overpopulation (measured against available resources), the answer would have included Afghanistan, Burundi, Haiti, Iraq, Nepal, Rwanda, Somalia, Yugoslavia and Zimbabwe. The close match between that list and the list of the world's political hot spots today is no accident. In contrast, countries with well-maintained environments and modest populations, such as Belize, Bhutan and Norway, are no danger to us.

The first area in which a modest amount of American money can produce a big payoff is in public health. High infant mortality and short adult lifespans resulting from preventable diseases such as malaria, AIDS, cholera and parasitic infections are a major cause of poverty -- and paralyze whole economies in multiple ways. First, they sap the productivity of workers, who are often sick and die young; second, they stimulate high birth rates, because parents expect many of their children to die. The result is that much of the population is too young to work and women can't join the workforce because they are busy raising children. All those things make countries unattractive to investors. The biggest economic success stories of recent decades have been Hong Kong, Mauritius, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan, all of which invested heavily in public health and saw their GNPs rocket as child mortality and family size plunged and as worker lifespans lengthened.

But many other countries with similar public health problems lack the money and scientific know-how to solve them. Compared with our own economic losses from Sept. 11 (about $100 billion in domestic losses and a further $1 billion per month to wage war in Afghanistan), it would be cheap for us to fund clean water supplies (decreasing the transmission of water-borne diseases); to provide medicines for treatable diseases; to fund more grants for U.S. biomedical research into vaccines for tropical diseases such as malaria and cholera; and to stimulate vaccine and drug development in pharmaceutical companies by guaranteeing to buy effective medicines. At present, companies lack incentives to invest in diseases whose victims live mostly in poor countries. Nor does our government invest adequately in research on malaria, the world's leading infectious disease (with 400 million new cases per year), because few of those stricken are Americans. Our annual spending on malaria research is less than the cost of a few days of war in Afghanistan.

A second area of big payoff for small investment is in family planning. The world population explosion is paradoxically steepest in the poorest countries, which already have more people than the country's resources can support. This is a disaster in the short term, as noted above, because it removes mothers from the workforce and increases the ratio of non-working children to working adults. It also spells disaster in the long run, because more people competing for a fixed or shrinking resource pie is a recipe for civil war, as has already happened in Rwanda and Burundi, Africa's most densely populated nations.

Among the minority of Americans opposed to funding family planning overseas, there is a widespread misconception that people in overpopulated developing countries really want large families -- and that we have no right to tell them to have fewer children. In my experience of working in Third World nations, nothing could be further from the truth. Their citizens experience every day the disastrous consequences of large families. They are frustrated to know that the means to limit family size exist but are unavailable or unaffordable. In the most remote village that I visited in Indonesia, a government poster explained the various techniques existing for birth control, but none of them was available in the village. My best friend there -- a man of 22 -- explained to me his frustration: "I have eight children," he said, "and I'm already short of money to buy them clothes and schoolbooks." It would be simple and cheap for the U.S. government to subsidize family planning methods and education through local government agencies and non-governmental organizations.

The third area I would target for foreign aid involves worldwide environmental problems, including biodiversity losses, climate change, deforestation, depleted energy sources,overfishing, pollution, salinization, soil erosion and limited fresh water supplies. To take just one example, deforestation reduces soil fertility and water quality, causes erosion and deprives local people of free timber and other forest products. While these environmental issues are pressing even in the United States, their consequences are more immediately threatening in other countries with more fragile environments.

Here, too, Americans suffer from a widespread misconception -- that Third World landowners want to log their own forests, and that we have no right to stop them. Actually, localpeople, including many I've come to know, are well aware of the value of their forests and hate to lose them. They are forced, tricked or seduced by logging companies, their own national governments and their own desperate need for money into signing logging leases. But they see no alternative to selling their only marketable asset. The long list of solutions that the United States could support includes: promoting conservation leases (payment for land that is left unlogged); refusing import licenses and domestic logging permits for timber that is harvested without replanting; restricting importation of products from deforested land, such as tropical palm oil; and pressuring the World Bank, for which the United States provides much of the funding, not to make loans for projects that involve extensive deforestation.

All three of these areas illustrate a general theme: the need for our government to pursue long-term crisis-prevention policies, instead of simply responding as crises arise. Unfortunately, such an approach is not considered urgent. Today, and every previous day for years, 100 more acres are being overgrazed in Afghanistan, 100 more acres are deforested in Nepal, and 100 more people are contracting AIDS or malaria in Zimbabwe. Yet these are the slow processes that eventually explode into $100 billion crises.

In our daily personal lives and business lives, we don't commit that folly of focusing only on crisis management. Of course we fixed the toilet that broke in our house this morning, but we also buy life insurance and draw up wills to solve problems that our children will face many decades from now. Our government needs more of that thinking. In public health as in the health of us as individuals, it is cheaper and more efficacious to practice a lifestyle that prevents disease than to wait to go to the emergency room when we finally get really sick. Unless we do so on a global level, we shall, like so many other victorious nations in the past, be doomed to repeat the victors' follies.

Jared Diamond, a professor of physiology and public health at UCLA, is the author of "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" (Norton).


-------- activists

PROVOKE PEACE! JOIN THE VIGIL IN KARACHI! Send expressions of Solidarity
DEMONSTRATION! PROTEST! VIGIL FOR PEACE! Karachi, jan 18, 5.00 pm, QA mazar

From: "Beena Sarwar" <bsarwar@khi.comsats.net.pk>
Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2002

Dear friends,

We are doctors, teachers, lawyers, journalists, IT specialists, political, labour, women's rights and human rights' activists, housewives, senior citizens, members of non-government organisations, and above all, concerned citizens, parents, sisters and brothers, and children.

After the Lahore Rangers' attack on the peace march to Wagah border on Dec 31 and the Karachi police's disruption of the peace demonstration on Monday Jan 7, it has become even more imperative to exercise our right to assemble in peaceful protest.

We demand:

- that India and Pakistan resolve their differences through peaceful dialogue and withdraw forces from the border.

- that whatever action is taken against the police functionaries, as promised by DIG Karachi in his apology to us, be made public.

- a clarification of government policy: on the one hand its on site functionaries are allowed to disrupt peace activism, while on the other hand it stresses its desire for peace with India.

PROTEST! DEMONSTRATE! JOIN HANDS FOR PEACE! Date: Jan 18 Time: 5.00 pm Venue: Quaid-e-Azam's Mazar, MA Jinnah Road crossing (gate opening to Shahra-e-Qaideen), Karachi.

Action:

We will form a line that will keep extending as people join us.

We will collect signatures for peace on white banners.

We will light candles and place them on the railing around the Mazar.

WEAR WHITE, BRING A CANDLE. If you cannot come yourself, please inform those who can.

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They Refused to Fight, Even in the 'Good War'

New York Times
January 13, 2002
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/13/arts/television/13FREE.html

EARLY in a new documentary about World War II, American soldiers push through the Normandy surf under German fire. This scene stands even a half-century later as the signal image of the generation that defeated Hitler and Hirohito. From the commemoration of D-Day's 50th anniversary in 1994 to its cinematic rendering in "Saving Private Ryan" to its prominence in books by Studs Terkel, Stephen Ambrose and Tom Brokaw, the storming of Omaha and Utah beaches has come to typify valor in pursuit of justice.

As the familiar events appear in this particular film, however, the off-screen voice of a retired special-education teacher named Asa Watkins tells a less known story. While 16 million Americans served in the military during World War II, Mr. Watkins counted himself among 42,000 conscientious objectors who refused to take arms. "Sometimes I think those of us who believe in nonviolence believe ourselves to be a separate breed," he said, "and we are wondering if somehow or other we are not fully human beings."

Mr. Watkins's words, with their combination of belief and alienation, exemplify the spirit of a film that is dissident both by design and by coincidence. "The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It," which closely follows the experiences of 10 conscientious objectors, runs counter to both the groundswell of gratitude for World War II veterans and the popularity of the present war against terrorism. Even as the majority of PBS affiliates show the documentary Tuesday at 10 p.m., the public-television system in Maryland has indefinitely postponed it in deference to the American troops in Afghanistan.

"Our original title was `Against the Tide,' " said Rick Tejeda-Flores, 57, who produced, wrote and directed the film with Judith Ehrlich. "We have this mythology about World War II, which is that everyone in the country was going happily in the same direction. To find this small group in the opposite direction - that's drama. We felt a lot of sympathy for the stand these men had taken. The question was, could we make a convincing case for it, or would we look foolish?"

The documentary calls the conscientious objectors "heroes" and dubs their resistance "this American story." To that end, it traces the tradition of pacifism in the United States from the Revolutionary War to the cold war. It emphasizes the contribution that pacifists made to World War II, whether as noncombatants serving in the military or as home-front volunteers for experiments on disease and starvation. And it portrays their lasting influence in the civil- rights and anti-apartheid movements.

"This film is about the bravery required to live a life based on conscience," said Ms. Ehrlich, 53. "These men made a tremendous and positive impact on American society, and they did it with the power of love. It is harder to tell the story of these quiet heroes than the guys with the guns. But it seemed worth the effort to try."

That effort had its roots in a time and place more renowned for dissidence: 1965 in Berkeley, Calif., where Mr. Tejeda-Flores decided to apply for conscientious-objector status amid the escalating war in Vietnam. An art student adorned with beads and shoulder-length hair, he met a draft-resistance counselor who was graying and wore a business suit. The man, it turned out, was a Quaker who had refused to serve in World War II.

Over the next decade - as Mr. Tejeda- Flores received his draft deferment, worked on the staff of César Chávez's United Farm Workers and studied filmmaking - he reflected on the paradox of the encounter. "Growing up in the Vietnam generation, we always put World War II in a different category," he recalled. "Our position on Vietnam was that it was an unjust war. One of the trick questions the draft board used was `What would you do about Hitler?' Yet here was someone who believed in pacifism in general."

Ms. Ehrlich similarly separated her activism against the Vietnam War and nuclear arms from her supportive feelings about World War II, which she associated with her father's naval service and the Allied liberation of the concentration camps. A teacher and curriculum developer, she began making audio and film documentaries in the 1980's, largely on topics like Nicaragua under the Sandinistas. Then, in 1990, she met the wife of a World War II pacifist, who recounted her husband's virtual internment in a Civilian Public Service camp. That anecdote, in turn, stirred Ms. Ehrlich's childhood memory of watching a "Young Dr. Kildare" film as her mother mentioned that the star, Lew Ayres, had been a conscientious objector in World War II.

Suddenly intrigued, Ms. Ehrlich started work on a series for National Public Radio about pacifism in American history. Her research turned up several of the men who eventually figured prominently in "The Good War and Those Who Fought It," and introduced her as well to their range of motivations and experiences. Stephen Cary, whose nonviolence was rooted in his Quaker faith, had adamantly wanted to prove his worth to wartime America through alternative public service. Bill Sutherland, an African-American affected by the example of Mohandas Gandhi, said that "totalitarianism" first needed to be defeated in the Jim Crow South. David Dellinger went to jail rather than even register with the Selective Service. Lew Ayres served as a combat medic.

Mr. Tejeda-Flores, an acquaintance of Ms. Ehrlich's, admired the radio series when it was broadcast in 1991. He believed "it could be great television," too, he said, especially if the focus was narrowed to World War II, "the worst-case scenario for pacifism."

In the mid-1990's the pair started to seek financing. A total of $50,000 came in from state arts agencies in California, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and New York, followed by grants of $300,000 from the Independent Television Service, a branch of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that supports programming for underserved audiences, and $150,000 from the MacArthur Foundation. Ultimately, the documentary also attracted donations of $1,000 from Joan Baez, whose former husband, David Harris, was a draft resister, and $5,000 from Martin Sheen's San Carlos Foundation.

The money allowed Ms. Ehrlich and Mr. Tejeda-Flores to undertake a national search for subjects and visual material. They sent letters to all 6,000 surviving residents of the public-service camps. They visited archives maintained by the "peace churches" - Quaker, Mennonite, Brethren. Through the children of a former warden of the federal penitentiary in Danbury, Conn., they located home movies of a softball game at the prison, which would end up illustrating David Dellinger's recollection of a draft resister being released from solitary confinement to pitch in a championship game.

The film reveals how deeply the conscientious objectors were viewed as pariahs. Lew Ayres's movies were banned from more than 100 theaters. A store near one of the public-service camps bore a window declaring, "No Skunks." One of the so-called "Union 8," students at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan who refused to register for the draft, received this letter: "I have never been more shocked and amazed in my life as when I read about the rebellion you are leading in your school against the draft. You and your followers are a disgrace, not only to your school and calling but to America as well. I am ashamed that my country has produced such men, if you can be called men."

The events of Sept. 11 brought such passions to the fore again. By that date, Ms. Ehrlich and Mr. Tejeda-Flores had been finished with the documentary for a year and were awaiting word from PBS of a broadcast date. To their relief, the network did not renege. But the Maryland public- television system, which has about 850,000 viewers monthly and includes much of suburban Washington, refused to schedule the film. "It's a well-crafted show," said Zvi Shoubin, a vice president of the system. "I have no problem with the production. But when the program was announced, it coincided with the advent of ground-force activity in Afghanistan by U.S. troops. We felt that the timing was such that it would be better if we held off telecasting."

An epilogue of sorts, that decision has given Ms. Ehrlich and Mr. Tejeda-Flores a keener sense of what their film's characters went through decades ago. "We'd puzzled over this issue of what happened to this country after Pearl Harbor," Mr. Tejeda- Flores said. "How does a country respond when it's attacked? How can public opinion so suddenly change? Now we started seeing all these parallels. People raising opposing voices and being branded traitors. I guess I would've been happy had the film been less relevant."


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