------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
China frets over Indo-U.S. ties
China Sees Interests Tied to U.S.
Australian lawyers protest over treatment of refugees
Marines Patrol Norfolk Shipyard
Safety violations shut Dutch nuclear reactor
Pakistan Denies Missile Aid Claims
Sharon held talks with top Palestinian officials
N. Korea Hints at Military Boost
Powell Offers Reassurance to South Korea
Russian prime minister says no proof against "axis of evil"
Nuclear lab bans wireless messaging
Pataki Urges Reassessment of Safety Plan
SEPT. 11 VICTIMS GETTING HELP, SO WHY NOT PIKETON WORKERS?
Demonizing US Enemies
"All options" open against Iran, Iraq and North Korea: Bush

MILITARY
U.S. Allies Express War Reservations
Villagers Add to Reports of Raids Gone Astray
3,000 U.S. Troops Training in Kenya
Nigeria on edge as experts disarm bombs in Lagos
India, Russia to sign deal on defence cooperation
Growth of Aghan force OK with Britain
Former intelligence chief says Chavez backed Colombian rebels
Israeli intelligence misled Bush on Iran
Russia Optimistic About Deal with Iraq
Iraqi oil exports to US surged in 2001
Israeli choppers rocket Palestinian naval police station in Gaza
Israeli Helicopters Strike Gaza
Reservists Balk at Occupation, Roiling Israel
Crisis looms for Sharon
World defence heads meet in shadow of September 11
NATO Officials Get Tour Of Tampa, Florida
Pakistan's grace under pressure
A Lone Qaeda Fighter Sets Off U.S. Alarm on Nuclear Plants
News channels at war
Defense Is Priority in Bush Budget
1's and 0's Replacing Bullets in U.S. Arsenal

ENERGY AND OTHER
Stem Cells Are Made From Embryo

ACTIVISTS
Brazil Summit Paints Grim Picture
Small Zurich protest despite World Forum's move to New York
Australians Decry Immigration Rules



-------- NUCLEAR

-------- asia

China frets over Indo-U.S. ties

By Brahma Chellaney
SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES
February 2, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020202-3834586.htm

NEW DELHI - At a time of growing U.S.-Indian strategic engagement, Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji's unusually conciliatory tone during his visit to India last month reflected Beijing's hope to decelerate that process by emphasizing areas of potential Sino-Indian cooperation.

China is suddenly signaling its intent to be more responsive to Indian concerns in an effort to dissuade New Delhi from building a close military relationship with the United States. Its overtures to India come as the Asian strategic landscape is being rapidly transformed after September 11 - to China's disadvantage.

By spearheading the anti-terrorism campaign, the United States has strengthened its strategic role from Central Asia to Southeast Asia. It is setting up long-term military bases in Kyrgystan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan; it intends to stay strategically engaged in Pakistan; and it has returned to the Philippines with its special forces.

The fast-changing strategic scene not only undercuts Chinese ambitions to dominate Asia, but also puts greater pressure on the country's Leninist rulers as the triumvirate of Jiang Zemin, Li Peng and Zhu Rongji prepares to retire one by one by the end of next year. Mr. Jiang, however, is expected to continue as head of China's most powerful institution, the Central Military Commission.

Despite their heavy strategic investments in Pakistan, the Chinese now find themselves supplanted there by the Americans. Such has been the cost to China of the Pakistan military's alliance with Islamic fundamentalists.

America's new military presence in Pakistan and formidable leverage over President Pervez Musharraf's regime have even complicated China's construction of a Pakistani naval base at Gwadar. The Gwadar base and Chinese radar facilities and other naval equipment on islands off the Burmese coast have been part of China's strategy to position itself along the sea lanes from the Arabian Sea to the disputed Spratlys (which consists of several hundred islands, reefs and sea mountains) and control traffic between the Indian and Pacific oceans.

Given the altered landscape and its fear of encirclement, the last thing Beijing wants are U.S.-India military ties. But it is likely to reap what it has sowed. Just as its proliferation at home and abroad pushed India to go overtly nuclear, China is driving New Delhi closer to the United States by seeking pre-eminence in Asia through balance-of-power politics. It uses Pakistan against India, and North Korea against Japan.

Just as September 11 helped institute new norms and priorities in international relations, the Dec. 13 suicide attack on the Indian Parliament by five Pakistanis has given birth to a new tenet guiding Indian foreign policy: Deeds, not words.

Although this principle was fashioned in relation to Pakistan, India also needs to apply it to China. The latter's India-related actions have always spoken louder than its words. It was in keeping with that tradition that after quietly rushing jet fighters and other weapon systems to shore up Pakistani defenses in the current face-off on the subcontinent, Mr. Zhu declared in New Delhi that "China has never viewed India as a threat, nor do we believe India will regard China as a threat."

A down-to-earth, result-oriented approach toward China is necessary because Beijing is a skilled practitioner of classical balance-of-power politics. Since the end of the Cold War, Beijing has also been employing nationalism as a unifying and power-enhancing force to vigorously assert its rights.

In history, virulent nationalism has been the cause of both the rise and fall of empires. Hemming in India from three sides - Pakistan, Tibet and Burma - is one of the ways China has sought to impose limits on the capabilities of its potential rival. it makes no secret of its desire to dominate Asia by forestalling the rise of any competitor.

While seeking a multipolar world, China aspires for a unipolar Asia, with itself as the sole pole.

Despite its strategy to publicly simulate amity with India while privately working to tie it down south of the Himalayas, Beijing's saccharine talk gives way to snarls whenever New Delhi has asserted its rights, including by conducting the 1974 and 1998 nuclear tests. Few Indians can forget Chinese ultimatums to India in the 1965 and 1971 wars with Pakistan, and the 1999 Chinese military forays across the Line of Control in Ladakh, Kashmir, while the Kargil conflict was raging between the Indian military and Pakistani invaders on Buddhist Ladakh's opposite flank.

In recent years, nothing has better exposed Beijing's true attitude than President Jiang's dig at India in a private conversation with French President Jacques Chirac in late 1999. Referring to Chinese military forays earlier that year to test Indian preparedness, Mr. Jiang mockingly told Mr. Chirac: "Each time we tested them by sending patrols across, the Indian soldiers reacted by putting their hands up." Mr. Jiang raised his own hands up to drive home the point to Mr. Chirac, who was aghast.

The Chinese president did not stop there. Blaming the 1962 Himalayan war on Indian "aggression," Mr. Jiang warned: "If India were to attack China again, we will crush it." He then squeezed his hands together to stress the word "crush."

The wide gap between what the Chinese Communists say publicly and what they mean in actuality is obvious when one compares those leaked remarks with Mr. Jiang's public statements on India, or with Mr. Zhu's recent soothing declarations on Indian soil.

In the 1950s, the covert Chinese encroachment on Indian territories occurred under Beijing's comforting lullabies that the Indians and Chinese were "brothers."

Yet, sweet talk, however feigned, has its benefits: China can sell missiles to Pakistan while at the same time access the best India can offer - high-tech software - as Mr. Zhu did by inviting the top Indian information-technology firm, Infosys, to set up shop in Shanghai.

During his Indian tour, Mr. Zhu stressed the broad principles shared by the two nations on international trade, environment, labor and other developing-world issues. But he deliberately avoided making any reference to the bilateral problems or to China's continuing military transfers to Pakistan and Burma.

India and China are together home to one-third of the human race, but their relations are characterized by deep distrust. After more than two decades of continuous border negotiations, the two countries still lack a defined line of control - the only neighbors in the world without a mutually recognized or understood frontier. Official Chinese maps even now show three Indian states outside India.

Since Beijing annexed Tibet in 1950 and brought its forces to the border with India, the divide in the Indian debate on China has been between those who believe that New Delhi should proceed on the basis of Beijing's word, and those who caution that policy be founded on Chinese actions.

That remains the dividing line between the quixotic and pragmatic schools of thought on China. Mr. Zhu's placating tone was partly intended to influence the internal debate in India, especially on strategic cooperation with Washington.

India, however, can persuade Beijing to focus on engagement without containment if it insists on deeds, not words. China should know that its protestations of friendship have to be measured against its actions.

New Delhi's evolving Asia policy reflects the need to build an arc of strategic partnerships with China's key neighbors, and with the United States, to help neutralize the continuing Chinese military assistance and activity around India.

•Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is a regular contributor to The Washington Times.

----

China Sees Interests Tied to U.S.
Change Made Clear In Wake of Sept. 11

By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, February 2, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11444-2002Feb1?language=printer

BEIJING, Feb. 1 -- A well-known Chinese scholar made a simple but controversial point recently: The United States is not China's enemy now, and probably never will be. A central reason, the scholar said in a closed address to government officials, is the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and at the Pentagon.

Many officials and analysts in both countries believed only a few months ago that relations between the world's most powerful country and its most populous one were heading toward confrontation. Among other things, they cited China's resolve to unify with Taiwan and its emergence as a power ready to challenge or replace U.S. influence in East Asia. But as President Bush prepares for his second visit to China in five months, relations between the countries, as viewed from Beijing, have started to resemble the "constructive strategic partnership" that the Clinton administration tried to achieve.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the scholar told his audience, China was faced with a simple choice: the United States or Osama bin Laden. The scholar, who did not want his name cited because his comments were supposed to be confidential, said that while some Chinese intellectuals and officials reacted gleefully to the attacks, President Jiang Zemin and his followers realized China's interests lay with Washington.

"We chose the United States," he said. And the United States was forced to shelve its worries about a future "China threat," at least for the time being, and focus on current foes in Afghanistan, he said.

As a result, Chinese intelligence cooperation with the United States has resumed after being nearly dormant since the Cold War and the de facto Washington-Beijing alliance against the Soviet Union. Western sources say that while this has not been critical to Washington's success in Afghanistan, the Chinese, in two publicized meetings and subsequent undisclosed ones, have handed over useful material on Islamic radicals.

Overtly, China has backed the U.S. war in Afghanistan and recently pledged $150 million for Afghanistan's reconstruction. And a Western diplomat said Beijing is also considering participating in the U.N. mission that likely will join the British-led peacekeeping troops now in Kabul.

China's response to the ring of military encampments that the United States has established in Central Asia and the Philippines has been restrained, as has its view of a new Japanese law authorizing military participation in the war. This attitude is unprecedented because the conservative Chinese view of the post-Sept. 11 world would not see the United States as a partner -- and in China, the conservative views usually win.

But such views are not holding sway these days in Beijing. Jiang is angling for a visit to Bush's ranch in Crawford, Tex., as a sign of U.S.-Chinese friendship. China has muted its once-fiery response to the decision of the Bush administration to tear up the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia. And China's recent moves toward Taiwan have been conciliatory.

On Jan. 24, China's top foreign policy official, Deputy Prime Minister Qian Qichen, released the most welcoming statement ever toward members of Taiwan's ruling party, which has backed independence from China. Qian also did not specifically threaten Taiwan with attack, another softening of Beijing's tone.

However, enormous problems remain between Beijing and Washington. Top among them are human rights and U.S. allegations that China continues to proliferate weapons of mass destruction.

The State Department, for instance, on Jan. 24 slapped two-year trade sanctions on two Chinese companies, Liyang Chemical Equipment Co. and China Machinery and Electric Equipment Import and Export Company, and an individual identified as Q.C. Chen, under a 2001 law meant to stop Iran from developing weapons of mass destruction. On Jan. 21, the U.S. ambassador to China, Clark Randt, called on Beijing to do more to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction, calling it a "make-or-break issue" for China's relations with the United States.

But Sept. 11 nevertheless has provided the two countries with a "unique moment of strategic clarity in the relationship," and an opportunity to improve ties, according to James Mulvenon, a Chinese security specialist at Rand Corp. "Through cooperation we can build up a small supply of political capital that we can then spend down when the war on terrorism is over and the old ghosts reemerge," he said.

Chinese analysts and officials say, however, that more than Sept. 11 is behind China's shifting stance. For the past 100 years, Chinese foreign policy has been predicated, first, on the belief that China is a victim and, more recently, a Third World leader. But recent moves by the government, along with essays by influential advisers, indicate that a significant portion of China's foreign policy establishment is beginning to view China as an emerging power, closer to the United States and Europe than to the world's poor.

China has been helped along this road by three major developments: winning the bid for the 2008 Summer Olympics, accession to the World Trade Organization and its first berth ever in the men's World Cup soccer finals. China suddenly found itself welcome almost everywhere.

In addition, China's continued economic growth -- while Taiwan's economy has gone into a tailspin -- has convinced the leadership that its softer approach toward Taiwan is working. "We don't need to threaten Taiwan anymore," said a foreign policy official. "Our economy is our best weapon. We won't attack them. We will buy them. It's very Chinese."

Chinese scholars and foreign policy officials are also beginning to realize that not everything the United States does near China's borders is designed to hurt Beijing. Chinese are still naturally Sino-centric, as they have been for centuries, naming their country the "Middle Kingdom." But these days one hears less about plots.

In a rare interview, for instance, a senior strategist from the People's Liberation Army said he believes Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld does not want U.S. troops to remain in Central Asia for a long time. "Their presence there might even be good for our security," he added, a suggestion that would have been considered blasphemous before Sept. 11.

Another indication was a July 1 speech given by Jiang to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Communist Party. Jiang played down China's commitment to fighting against "hegemonism," the party's code word for U.S. dominance. What was necessary, he said, was to work more for "peace and development," more code words, but these meaning cooperation with the United States.

Jiang also stressed his willingness to welcome wealthy Chinese into the party. In that sense the party's foreign and domestic policies are on similar tracks. At home, the party is courting the rich, and the middle and entrepreneurial classes. Abroad, it is focusing on the world's wealthiest nations. The rhetoric of class struggle and Third World solidarity is muted.

The new outlook is far from unanimous, however. China's conservatives look at the new U.S. military relationships and air bases on China's periphery and see a threat. They see nascent Japanese militarism in Tokyo's dispatch of a destroyer to the Indian Ocean. They look at Moscow's improved ties with Washington and predict trouble for Beijing. And they see bad faith in Washington's continued commitment to selling weapons, including submarines, to Taiwan.

They also worry that the war in Afghanistan has shown that China's most serious foreign policy initiative in years, the Shanghai Cooperative Organization, which groups four Central Asian nations -- Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazahkstan -- Russia and China, pales in the face of the U.S. diplomatic juggernaut in that region.

"These developments give those people stronger evidence to argue that the war in Afghanistan is part of a plot, a strategic ploy, aimed at encircling China," said Chu Shulong, a security analyst at Tsinghua University. "The quick, clear support that Jiang Zemin gave to the United States was unprecedented. Never before had China endorsed U.S. military action against a Third World state. But we don't know what we got in return."

But in an essay that appeared before Sept. 11 and is still talked about, Ye Zicheng, an influential scholar at Beijing University, argued that China needs to start acting more like a responsible, rational country and drop the idea that Washington is always out to get it. "For Chinese diplomacy, the most important thing is to walk out of the shadow of the past 100 years of our diplomacy of humiliation and avoid either overreacting to offenses or hiding passively, and instead face the world like a big country," Ye wrote.

Ye took Chinese foreign policy to task for stressing China's relations with the Third World when it is the West that China really needs in order to modernize. He criticized China's view of the United States as a "hegemon" plotting to rule the world and questioned Beijing's policy of courting Moscow as a means to pressure Washington.

Ye also poked holes in China's emotional reaction to the bombing of its embassy in Belgrade by U.S. warplanes in 1999. "From the perspective of a big power, we've got to overcome emotions and deal with U.S.-China relations from the perspective of China's modernization, its domestic economic development, its security and its plan for unification," he said.

Specifically, he urged China to begin acting like a big power in East Asia and take a leadership role in establishing an Asian free-trade zone and security system modeled after the early days of the European Union. "We realize that China is going to be around for a long time and not go the way of the Soviet Union," he said. "We are more self-confident."

-------- australia

Australian lawyers protest over treatment of refugees

Saturday February 2, 1:51 PM
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020202/1/2eile.html

Six hundred lawyers, legal academics and law students lashed out at Australia's hardline stand on asylum seekers, calling for reforms in a newspaper advertisement.

The group, which included a number of prominent queens' counsel members, called on the government to change the policy of mandatory detention for all asylum seekers landing in Australian territory.

In a statement released simultaneously on Saturday, the lawyers said the government was keeping detainees in inhumane conditions that were contrary to international standards.

The advertisement asserted that human dignity was "not negotiable" and that the dehumanising of detainees diminished Australia as a civilised nation.

"We strongly protest about circumstances in which asylum seekers who come by boat to Australia, are automatically subjected to mandatory detention in isolated conditions pending finalisation of their application for refugee protection," it said.

"The circumstances of their detention, particularly in the desert at Woomera, are alienating, inhumane and contrary to the general international standards of treatment available in other countries."

The lawyers said all detainees, especially women and children, should be released into community accommodation pending finalisation of their visas.

They also urged the government to provide basic income support, health services and education for children.

The names were collected during a 40-hour period, and another advertisement is planned with more names, the lawyers said.

Seven others who contributed to the half-page advertisement in The Australian broadsheet newspaper chose to remain anonymous.

The protest followed a two-week hunger strike by more than 200 asylum seekers which ended at the notorious Woomera detention centre in the South Australian outback last week.

The lawyers' protest came on the back of a plea by Australian doctors on Friday for a review of mandatory detention of asylum seekers, claiming it was harmful to their physical and mental health.

Public Health Association of Australia (PHAA) president Dr Peter Sainsbury said Australia was acting in defiance of international conventions on health, particularly in regard to families and children.

"Detention centre conditions cruelly reinforce the traumatic culture that refugees have experienced before fleeing to what they hoped, perhaps vainly, was sanctuary in our country," he said in a statement.

"A tragic sequel of long-term harm is developing as a consequence of bad policy."

The PHAA also called for an independent review of health care and the option of free health care for asylum seekers through the national Medicare system.

However, there is no indication the government has any intention of easing its policies, which opinion polls consistently show to have the overwhelming support of Australian voters.

-------- business

[Add this to the taxpayers' costs of "leaders" doing business with Northrop Grumman's ilk. How much is that a year, again? et]

Marines Patrol Norfolk Shipyard

The Associated Press
Friday, February 1, 2002; 11:39 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11843-2002Feb1?language=printer

NORFOLK, Va. -- About 50 Marines will be stationed at the Northrop Grumman Newport News shipyard to help protect two nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, officials said Friday.

The yard is the nation's only builder of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, and it also builds nuclear submarines.

The Marines will provide enhanced security during work on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and USS Ronald Reagan, said Fred Lash, a spokesman for the Naval Sea Systems Command, which designs and procures ships and submarines. He did not know when they would start.

The shipyard is building the Reagan, which is expected to join the Navy's fleet in 2003. The Eisenhower arrived at the shipyard in May to begin a three-year overhaul and refueling.

Lash said he had no information on whether there had been a specific threat to the shipyard.

-------- europe

Safety violations shut Dutch nuclear reactor

04 February 02
New Scientist
Gaia Vince
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991879

Poor safety standards have forced a Dutch nuclear research facility to shut down its reactor from Friday 8 February. The decision follows pressure from the Dutch government and the European Union.

Jan Pronk, the Dutch environment minister "strongly advised" the temporary closure after government investigations concluded that safety procedures were not being implemented. "The whole culture regarding safety at the site needs a general shake-up," he said.

NRG, the private company that operates the reactor, announced on Monday that they would be temporarily shutting the facility for three days to carry out safety checks and improve safety procedures.

But Greenpeace's Jorsis Thijssen told New Scientist: "I think it is quite incredible that they think they will be able to change their safety culture in just three days."

Environmental activists have long campaigned for the reactor's closure and think the government should have acted sooner. "NRG have flouted their own rules, covered up safety lapses, including the emergency generator not working," claims Thijssen. "The company has proved it can't manage a nuclear facility."

Hairline crack

There has been a series of violations of safety procedures. But the focus on the plant intensified on Monday after it emerged publicly that a hairline crack in the reactor was wider than previously thought.

The existence of the crack had been known since 1985 but new measurements in August 2001 found it was wider. It is not known if the difference is because the crack has grown or due to new, more precise measuring techniques. NRG deny that the crack is a safety risk.

A spokesperson for the Ministry for the Environment said that there was "confusion over the legal status of the plant". He said Pronk could not legally shut the reactor, because although it was privately operated, it was owned by the EU's Joint Research Centre.

The 45MW, high flux reactor is mainly used for research and medical applications, such as the use of neutrons to irradiate brain tumours. It provides more than half of Europe's medical isotopes.

-------- india / pakistan

Pakistan Denies Missile Aid Claims

February 2, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-China-Missiles.html

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistan denied CIA allegations that China is helping its longtime ally develop advanced ballistic missiles.

``Our program is totally indigenous and there is no truth in the reports that China had supplied missile or missile technology to Pakistan,'' Foreign Office spokesman Aziz Ahmad Khan said at a news conference Saturday.

``Similar allegations had also been made in the past and were denied by Pakistan and China,'' he said.

In a semiannual unclassified report to the U.S. Congress, posted this week on the agency's Web site, the CIA said Chinese institutions provided ``significant assistance'' to Pakistan's missile program last year.

Concern over India and Pakistan's nuclear weapons programs -- both countries conducted tests in 1998 -- spurred Chinese interest in controlling the spread of missiles.

In November 2000, China promised the United States it would not sell nuclear missile technology abroad.

But the CIA report said China's interpretation of its arms control agreements with Washington remains ``very narrow.'' It said Pakistan is developing solid fuel short-range ballistic missiles with Chinese help.

Khan also reiterated an appeal for India to pull back its troops from their border. The nuclear rivals moved hundreds of thousands of soldiers to the border after a Dec. 13 attack on India's parliament that New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-based militant groups.

``The heavy mobilization of forces that the Indian government has done is still in place and we would like these forces to be withdrawn so that tension can be reduced and so that Pakistan can also move its forces, which have been put in defensive position,'' Khan said.

Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, will discuss the tensions with India, their long dispute over Kashmir and the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan with U.S. officials when he visits Washington late this month, Khan said.

-------- israel

Sharon held talks with top Palestinian officials

By Michele Gershberg
Saturday February 2, 3:41 AM
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-87355.html

JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon met three top Palestinian officials this week, his first face-to-face talks with the Palestinian leadership since his election a year ago, Israeli and Palestinian sources said.

Israeli commentators speculated the meeting with two architects of the landmark 1993 Oslo peace deal and an economic adviser to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat was aimed at opening a dialogue on ending 16 months of bloodshed including a recent wave of Palestinian suicide attacks.

A spokesman for Sharon declined to comment on what sources from both sides said were talks in Jerusalem on Wednesday with parliamentary speaker Ahmed Korei, Arafat's unofficial deputy Mahmoud Abbas and economic adviser Mohammed Rashid.

Israel Radio said Sharon asked them to convey a message to Arafat to end terrorism and made clear Israeli pressure on him would continue until he reined in militants behind attacks on Israelis.

Korei, who has held a series of meetings with dovish Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and Abbas are also known respectively as Abu Ala and Abu Mazen.

Abu Ala was one of the three Palestine Liberation Organisation representatives who met secretly with Israelis in Norway to hammer out the Oslo accords which paved the way for the first interim peace deal between the two sides in 1993.

Abu Mazen signed the peace deal on behalf of the PLO.

Both have been touted as possible successors to Arafat.

A senior Palestinian official confirmed that the meeting, ahead of Sharon's White House talks with U.S. President George W. Bush next week, had been held.

But he said he had no details of what was discussed. A spokesman for Sharon declined comment.

Israel has said it will keep Arafat confined to the West Bank town of Ramallah until he hands over the killers of an Israeli cabinet minister.

Arafat has been besieged by Israeli tanks in his office since December, following a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings.

The radio reported that in line with Sharon's refusal to resume peace talks while a Palestinian uprising against occupation rages, his discussions with the three men focused only on stopping violence.

But Israeli commentators said the meeting could be the first in a series and an attempt by Sharon to establish a direct line to Palestinian moderates who could help calm tensions.

"They are trying to lead (Arafat) perhaps towards a long-term interim agreement," Oded Granot, Arabic affairs correspondent for Israel's Channel One television, said in broadcast remarks.

ISRAEL NOT TO HARM ARAFAT

In an interview published on Friday, Sharon said he had no intention of harming Arafat after expressing regret that Israel did not kill the Palestinian leader in Beirut in 1982.

"Today we have no inclination to hurt Arafat personally," Sharon told Israel's Maariv newspaper. "It would harm Israel. We have no intention now to harm Arafat or to dismantle the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority."

Palestinian officials accuse Sharon of seeking to topple Arafat and the Authority as Israel attempts to quell the uprising.

In an interview in the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, Sharon said he planned to tell Bush at their talks on Thursday that Washington should ignore Arafat.

"Boycott him. Do not hold any contacts with him and do not send any delegations to him," Sharon said in describing his intended message for Bush.

Arafat has been criticised by the United States over an alleged attempt to smuggle Iranian arms into Gaza on a ship seized by Israel in the Red Sea last month. The Palestinian Authority has denied involvement with the arms ship.

Publication of the Sharon interviews coincided with an opinion poll that showed a sharp drop since early December in public support for him in the face of renewed violence.

At least 827 Palestinians and 249 Israelis have been killed since the uprising began.

The Maariv-MarketWatch poll showed 48 percent were happy with Sharon's overall performance while 43 percent were dissatisfied. Nine percent did not respond.

The findings, which indicated the largest erosion yet of public backing for the right-wing prime minister, compared with a 57 percent approval rating in Maariv's last poll in early December.

-------- korea

N. Korea Hints at Military Boost

By Sang-Hun Choe
Associated Press Writer
Saturday, February 2, 2002; 6:36 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12668-2002Feb2?language=printer

SEOUL, South Korea -- Three days after President Bush said North Korea was part of an "axis of evil," leader Kim Jong Il said his regime may increase the capabilities of the world's fifth-largest army to prevent an invasion.

While inspecting a unit of the communist state's 1.1-million strong People's Army on Friday, Kim said the military was "weathering out the raging wind raised by imperialists."

He also suggested his reclusive regime may increase its military capabilities in remarks carried by the official Korean Central News Agency, monitored in Seoul on Saturday. The agency did not clarify whether Kim mentioned Bush by name.

"No force on earth can overpower these great forces firmly determined not to allow any aggressors to dare invade the inviolable territory of our country but wipe them out to the last one at the risk of their lives," KCNA quoted Kim as saying.

"It is of weighty importance in increasing the combat capability of the whole army."

These were the first reported comments from Kim since Bush's State of the Union speech Tuesday. In the speech, Bush said North Korea, Iran and Iraq formed an "axis of evil."

Kim rules the reclusive, hunger-stricken North Korea as head of its National Defense Commission, which controls the military.

U.S. officials say North Korea is armed with long-range missiles and up to 5,000 tons of biochemical weapons - and possibly a few crude nuclear devices.

North Korea said Friday that Bush's "reckless strong-arm" remarks were "little short of declaring a war."

Bush said later Friday, "Make no mistake about it, if you threaten us with weapons of mass destruction, if you threaten our allies with weapons of mass destruction, we will do what it takes to protect our people."

Kim said the North Korean military is "demonstrating the heroic stamina of socialist Korea by weathering out the raging wind raised by imperialists with a violent revolutionary storm," KCNA said.

KCNA also charged in a separate dispatch Saturday that Bush designated North Korea as "the second target of anti-terrorism war" even though it had nothing to do with terrorism.

North Korea "is fully capable of fighting a war with the U.S. It should clearly know that the option to 'strike' is not its monopoly," KCNA said.

Since he took power following the 1994 death of his father Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il has adopted an "army first" policy, calling on the impoverished country to build up the backbone of his totalitarian rule.

Most of his reported public appearances are devoted to visits to military units.

During his Friday visit, Kim showed "paternal love" for the soldiers by giving them a "pair of binoculars, a machine-gun and an automatic rifle as gift and had a photograph taken with them," the agency said.

----

Powell Offers Reassurance to South Korea
U.S. Remains Willing to Hold Talks With North, Seoul Counterpart Is Told

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 2, 2002; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11298-2002Feb1?language=printer

Three days after President Bush declared North Korea part of an "axis of evil" developing weapons of mass destruction, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell tried to reassure South Korea yesterday that the United States remains willing to hold talks with the Stalinist government in Pyongyang.

In a meeting with his South Korean counterpart, Han Seung Soo, in New York, Powell sought to ease South Korean concerns that the president's remarks could destabilize the Korean peninsula, but he did not back away from Bush's assertion that North Korea poses a threat to international security, according to a State Department spokesman.

Powell said there would be no preconditions for talks and urged North Korea to remove troops and artillery from the fortified border with South Korea as a goodwill gesture, the official said.

President Bush said in Washington that the Pyongyang government should withdraw conventional weapons and halt arms exports. "We would be more than happy to enter a dialogue with them, if that be the case," Bush said.

Bush's strong words about North Korea in his State of the Union address Tuesday -- which came three weeks before he makes his first trip to South Korea -- surprised diplomats and Korea specialists and rattled a South Korean government committed to an opening to the North. In the speech, Bush charged that North Korea, along with Iraq and Iran, was seeking to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

"I'm coming to believe that the administration is not open to negotiation, which raises the question, what does one do about these problems if you don't even explore the diplomatic option," said Robert Gallucci, who negotiated a nuclear agreement with North Korea. "What I was surprised about was the 'axis' language and the willingness to make any diplomatic approach more problematic at this point."

The Bush administration has been drafting what national security adviser Condoleezza Rice this week called a "road map for reciprocal steps" with North Korea. Senior diplomats met in late January in Seoul with their South Korean and Japanese partners to design a policy, just days before Bush's State of the Union remarks.

On the day of Bush's address, some administration officials suggested that a resumption of negotiations with North Korea was on track. A former senior State Department official, briefed on Korean matters by a National Security Council staff member, left the White House satisfied that progress would be made by Washington, Tokyo and Seoul with Pyongyang. "I was shocked to hear what the president said about North Korea," this former official said.

Two days after the speech, when the "axis of evil" formulation was getting headlines around the world, Powell counseled his senior staff to say nothing that would take the edge off the president's remarks. "We'd gotten up in the morning to read the newspapers with everybody all over the place," one State Department official said. Powell "said the president of the United States gave a State of the Union address that we will support."

The official maintained that Bush's criticism of Pyongyang, which the president has renewed for three days since, could "galvanize people to say, 'This is important.' We'll meet anytime, anyplace, without preconditions, but they've refused so far."

This is the second time in a year that the White House has found itself under fire for its Korea policy. After the Clinton administration pursued negotiations that took Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright to North Korea, the Bush administration suspended high-level talks while it undertook a policy review.

In June, when the administration finished its review and sought talks on weapons programs and nuclear proliferation, it was North Korea that balked.

One Asia expert said the North Koreans "never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity," adding that South Korean President Kim Dae Jung's commitment to his "Sunshine Policy" opening to the North makes it harder for Bush to get tough with Pyongyang. Another Asia specialist said the president misfired this week at a time when the State Department felt it was nursing relations with South Korea back to solid ground.

"The president will clearly want to use this trip in February to provide greater clarity," said Kurt Campbell, a Pentagon official in the Clinton administration. "The biggest concern is our allies in Asia, Japan and South Korea, who I think were surprised by both the tone of this section of the speech and its substance."

In the last six months, North Korea has continued to buy raw materials and components for its ballistic missile production facilities, particularly through firms based in China, according to an unclassified CIA report to Congress made public Wednesday.

At the same time, the report said, "Pyongyang continued its attempts to procure technology worldwide that could have applications in its nuclear program." North Korea signed an agreement in 1994 under which it promised to end efforts to develop nuclear weapons, although U.S. intelligence has reported in the past that the country had enough plutonium for one or two bombs.

During the first half of 2001, according to the report, North Korea continued to export ballistic missile equipment to countries in the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa.

Staff writer Walter Pincus contributed to this report.

-------- russia

Russian prime minister says no proof against "axis of evil"

Saturday February 2, 2:44 AM
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020201/1/2edvb.html

Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov said he had seen no evidence supporting US President George W. Bush's charges of weapons proliferation against so-called "axis of evil" powers Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

"So far we don't have evidence of this," Kasyanov said following a White House meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney.

He said Moscow was behind efforts to strengthen cooperation with the United States in the interests of world security but suggested the two countries also work together "in verifying different potential dangers if any would come."

Bush in his State of the Union address of Tuesday and in subsequent speeches has railed against the three countries for allegedly seeking weapons of mass destruction that could fall into the hands of terrorists.

Kassyanov, asked directly whether Iran, Iraq and North Korea constituted a threat to world peace, said "that is what we would have to verify."

The prime minister, who travels to New York to take part in the World Economic Forum over the weekend, returns to Washington next week for a meeting with Bush.

On Thursday, he and US Secretary of State Colin Powell signed documents expanding an existing legal cooperation pact enhancing their ability to combat terrorism, drugs, human trafficking and cyber crime.

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


Nuclear lab bans wireless messaging

New Scientist
01 February 02
Will Knight
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991872

A major US nuclear weapons laboratory has banned the use of wireless computer networks that send messages between laptops. It fears that classified information could be captured by electronic eavesdroppers.

However, some experts say that wireless networks can be made safe without such drastic action.

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, based in California, investigates nuclear weapons and other sensitive defence technologies. Controllers of the laboratory's computer system last month banned staff from setting up wireless networks that allow laptops to work anywhere at the lab. They fear these networks could be infiltrated by an outsider who could overhear classified information.

"The very attributes that make wireless network communications attractive create serious security issues for protection of those networks and the information they transmit," said Ted Michels, principle deputy associate director for computation at the lab, writing to laboratory workers on January 18.

-------- new york

Pataki Urges Reassessment of Safety Plan

New York Times
February 2, 2002
By LISA W. FODERARO
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/02/nyregion/02NUKE.html

WHITE PLAINS, Feb. 1 - Gov. George E. Pataki called on the federal government today to reassess its guidelines for dealing with an emergency at the Indian Point nuclear power plant in Westchester County. He also announced that the state had asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for 1.2 million tablets of potassium iodide to protect residents from radiation-induced thyroid cancer.

The governor's actions, coming three days after President Bush highlighted the threat of terrorism to the nation's network of nuclear power plants in his State of the Union address, underscored the growing jitters of residents in Westchester and neighboring counties. Since Sept. 11, growing numbers of elected officials, environmentalists and parents have demanded that the plant be closed.

"I grew up in the shadow of Indian Point, I still live within the 10-mile zone and my kid goes to school within the 10-mile zone," Mr. Pataki said at a news conference here, referring to the federally mandated evacuation area. "The federal approval of the plan for Indian Point was put in place in 1996. It's six years later and since Sept. 11, everything has changed."

At the same time, however, Mr. Pataki seemed to be sending something of a mixed message in announcing that the state had approved the evacuation plans for Indian Point. Late Thursday, the State Emergency Management Office sent the Federal Emergency Management Agency its annual letter certifying the emergency plans of the four counties around Indian Point - a certification that critics have fought vigorously in recent days.

State officials were quick to point out that their responsibility was limited to determining whether each county had met the objectives set last year by the federal government for emergency preparedness. Still, critics blasted the state's approval of the plans.

"The guidelines are not inadequate," said Richard L. Brodsky, a Democratic state assemblyman who is the chairman of the committee on environmental conservation and has held several hearings on Indian Point's operations. "The plan is inadequate. Secretary Rumsfeld's announcement yesterday that terrorists were looking at nuclear facilities just makes it clear that we can't go on pretending that we have a workable evacuation plan when we don't."

Specifically, critics have faulted the evacuation plan for assuming that people who live beyond the 10- mile radius of Indian Point will not also flee the area, clogging roadways. In addition, the plan calls for first evacuating schoolchildren to shelters by bus before setting off sirens and notifying the public of a disaster to keep roads clear.

Critics contend that word will immediately get out, and parents will rush to their children anyway. And all the evacuation scenarios, Mr. Brodsky said, presume that officials will have five to eight hours of notice before radiation is released.

Alex Matthiessen, executive director of Riverkeeper, a nonprofit environmental group that has called for the plant to be shut down, said the governor's remarks did not reflect sufficient urgency. "A review of the standards is a longer process that needs to happen, but we have an evacuation plan right now which is wholly inadequate to protect our public health and safety," he said.

Governor Pataki said he had already spoken with Tom Ridge, who heads the Office of Homeland Security, about the need to review the emergency guidelines, as well as to Joe M. Allbaugh, the director of FEMA.

Gordon D. Johndroe, a spokesman for the Office of Homeland Security, said, "We will continue to make sure that our plans in response to any incident that may occur are updated and are as effective as they can be."

The state's request for 1.2 million tablets of potassium iodide follows the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's decision to set aside $800,000 over the next two years to provide the medicine to interested states on a first-come-first-served basis.

The tablets will eventually go to residents who live within the emergency zones around the Indian Point plant, as well as the Ginna and Nine Mile Point nuclear power plants in upstate New York. Dennis Michalski, a spokesman for the State Emergency Management Office, said there was no plan yet for how or when to disseminate the tablets, which protect the thyroid from absorbing radioactive iodine.

Flanked at the news conference by the Westchester county executive, Andrew J. Spano, a Democrat, and the Rockland county executive, C. Scott Vanderhoef, a Republican, Mr. Pataki said that four counties - Westchester, Rockland, Putnam and Orange - had recently "concluded that the plan was adequate" before he went on to say that that "was not good enough."

But Mr. Spano, who was one of many officials who questioned Indian Point's safety after an accident involving a steam generator tube two years ago, went further in casting doubt on the emergency plan. "It is still a good plan," he said, "but it has many difficulties based on what happened on Sept. 11."

And today, Representative Nita M. Lowey, a Democrat whose Congressional district includes Indian Point, weighed in with her own assessment, saying that the "continued operation of the plant posed an unacceptable risk" to the New York area. She called for the decommissioning of the plant, and suggested looking into some other form of energy production at the site.

-------- ohio

SEPT. 11 VICTIMS GETTING HELP, SO WHY NOT PIKETON WORKERS?

Saturday, February 2, 2002
EDITORIAL & COMMENT
http://libpub.dispatch.com/cgi-bin/documentv1?DBLIST=cd02&DOCNUM=5161&TERMV=339:10:349:7:356:9:

Allow me to introduce myself. I am a former electrician from the Department of Energy's Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio, which made nuclear-bomb uranium and reactor uranium.

I have been fighting for much- needed, job-related-illness compensation for workers and myself because of the department's operations that have harmed workers' health.

The terrorism of Sept. 11 was a tragedy to which Americans responded quickly with all appropriate aid. Congress rushed to compensate the families of the victims and the survivors with amounts in the $500,000 to $1.5 million range. It was great to see the support of this great nation.

In comparison, thousands of sick, disabled workers and survivors of the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense facilities have fought for decades for compensation that we may never see.

The Energy Department and the congressional process for the compensation bill only offered compensation for exposure to radiation, beryllium and silica and sidetracked chemical injuries suffered by gas-diffusion workers.

Many people who worked side- by-side with me have the right kind of cancers that qualify in the compensation bill, and some do not. We ask why we are being left out of this bill when we had the same exposures and our bodies reacted differently from those of our co-workers with cancer. We have many other types of problems that are related to toxic chemical exposures.

Some materials, such as uranium, pose a heavy-metal risk in addition to the radioactive risk. This is not necessarily a cancer risk but is a health risk that should be compensated.

The system is designed not to work. In the past, I was paid workers' compensation for my exposure, only to be taken off in 1987 because doctors were not paid to run a test. The Workers Compensation Bureau took the word of the company's doctors and doctors who review records and didn't run the test because the bureau wouldn't pay for the testing. My doctors did run the test.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health will estimate the radiation dose for workers applying for compensation under the federal portion of the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act. This task will be hampered by the poor quality of past radiation records and monitoring practices.

In 1999, the government came to Piketon and many other sites and said: We put you in harm's way, and now it is time that we take care of you. If that is true, why are there so many loopholes that affect the victims? There is a Special Exposure Cohort, which includes anyone who worked at least 250 days at one of the gaseous diffusion plant facilities and any employee who was exposed to underground nuclear testing at Amchitka, Alaska, before 1974.

For this group, it is presumed that radiation-related cancers are related to radiation exposure at work, and reconstruction of the received radiation dose is not needed. If this is so, what is the holdup for getting compensation for these victims?

All gas-diffusion workers have been exposed to the chemical called uranium hexafluoride, or UF6, that generates very toxic hydrogen fluoride gas from countless releases in the course of a day's work.

It is outrageous to these workers that Sept. 11 victims are considered worthy of $500,000 to $1.5 million, compared with the insulting $150,000 that Department of Energy workers might receive..

The staff of former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson visited Portsmouth and all department sites. They said: "We put you all in harm's way. We did not protect you. We lied to you, and still today, workers aren't safe. We exposed you to plutonium and other transuranics.''

Great lip service has been paid in the paper while our government tries to find ways to get around paying these brave workers who helped win the Cold War.

Nuclear workers need help. My heart goes out to the victims and families of the September attack, and may God bless them all.

Here in my own community, we have raised money and food to help compensate the families and we are very proud to support the victims.

It is now time for this great nation to also stand behind Cold War victims in similar fashion.

Vina K. Colley
McDermott

-------- us politics

Demonizing US Enemies

by Paul Clark
February 2, 2002
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/clark1.html

In an apparent attempt to prepare for action against Iran, President Bush in his State of the Union address declared, "Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people's hope for freedom." Someone at the State Department ought to inform Bush that Iranian President Khatami has twice been elected with an overwhelming majority.

Mohamad Khatami was first elected president in May of 1997 with 69 percent of the vote. He was subsequently reelected in June of 2001 with almost 22 million votes and more than 78% of the total. Iran has universal suffrage over the age of 15, and in the last election, more than two thirds of eligible voters participated.

After the June election the president of the European Union according to AFP declared his "deep satisfaction" at the Iranian people's "commitment to democracy" and issued a statement declaring: "This is a clear signal of Iranian voters for the strengthening of democracy, the establishment of the state of law and stronger guarantees for fundamental freedoms in their country." Any search of press reports from June of last year indicates that countries around the world expressed satisfaction that it was a fair and democratic election.

So what is Bush talking about?

We all know that truth is the first casualty in war, but this statement about the "unelected few repress[ing] the Iranian people" is almost absurd. The Iranian regime certainly is repressive by Western standards, and perhaps it is involved in terrorism, but it is not "unelected." A lot of people are unwilling to admit it, but democratic countries can be quite bad: after all, Hitler was elected.

The point is that statements such as Bush's "unelected few" comment are designed to try to rewrite political reality in order to demonize hostile states, and their leaders. Truth can never be allowed to get in the way of a propaganda campaign.

Perhaps Pakistani "President" Musharraf (whom Bush praised in his speech, but who is a military dictator who came to power in a coup) is a better leader than Khatami, who was overwhelmingly elected. Yet it is not exactly "politically correct" to point out that US allies include military dictators (Pakistan), Stalinist thugs (Tajikistan) and corrupt princes (Saudi Arabia), while US enemies include regimes which are more democratic than the US. A cynic might even point out that George Bush did not even win a majority of the popular vote, and wonder where Bush gets off criticizing Iranian leadership as "unelected."

More importantly, though, if Bush intends to attack Iran one would hope he would at least be honest with the American people. The Iranian regime to all appearances has the support of the vast majority of Iranians. In Afghanistan the US was intervening in a civil war in one of the poorest and most divided countries in the world. Iran and Iraq are hardly the same situation, as Bush seems to be trying to suggest. There is no doubt the US could defeat Iran in an all-out war effort, if it came to that; however, there is no resistance in Iran to do the dirty work (unless we perhaps count the Kurds, a tiny minority). That means that the US would need to intervene directly in Iran, with more than a mere handful of soldiers and a couple hundred aircraft.

Even if Bush does not intend to take any military action against Iran, he still ought to be honest with us.

The "War on Terrorism" is a dirty business and trying to recast it as some sort of noble crusade to "make the world safe for democracy," or "free captive people" would simply be a sham.

Paul Clark is is Executive Director of Young Americans for Freedom and former Director of Federation for American Afghan Action, which worked to get effective military aid to anti-Soviet resistance.

----

"All options" open against Iran, Iraq and North Korea: Bush

Saturday February 2, 2:46 AM
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020201/1/2edw7.html

President George W. Bush said "all options are on the table" with regard to so-called "axis of evil" states Iran, Iraq and North Korea and making "the United States and our allies more secure."

"All the three countries I mentioned are now on notice that we intend to take their development of weapons of mass destruction very seriously," Bush said as he welcomed Jordan's King Abdullah II to the White House on Friday.

"But having said that, all options are on the table as to how to make the United States and our allies more secure."

The Jordanian monarch said he supported Bush's position "tremendously."

"The president has been very articulate from the beginning of the 11th of September that there is a new world, there's new expectations of how countries are suppose to react, and those countries better make up their minds pretty quickly," Abdullah said.

"I endorse tremendously that view and that position."

The United States is not the only nation concerned about weapons of mass destruction in the three countries which Bush singled out as "an axis of evil," during an address to Congress three days ago.

"It's not just we. I'm talking about other nations that respect rule of law and freedom," Bush said.

"I look forward to having this discussion with our friend, King Abdullah. He, obviously, has made a very clear statement about his understanding of what it takes to bring peace and order to the world."


-------- MILITARY

U.S. Allies Express War Reservations

February 2, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Germany-Defense-Conference.html

MUNICH, Germany (AP) -- U.S. allies in the war on terrorism expressed strong reservations Saturday about signals from Washington that the campaign could be expanded beyond those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks to include President Bush's ``axis of evil.''

With the Taliban and al-Qaida on the run in Afghanistan, President Bush issued a warning to Iran, Iraq and North Korea last week, calling them ``an axis of evil'' that turns on their development of weapons of mass destruction.

Facing direct questions and open skepticism from some of the United States' staunchest allies during an annual conference of defense officials and experts, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said the United States was not preparing imminent action.

``It is a leap from what the president said in the state of the union message to concluding any particular course of action,'' Wolfowitz told reporters after meeting with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov. ``We are a long way from decisions about what to do.''

But comments by European defense policy-makers at the 38th Munich conference, which has become an increasingly important forum for experts and officials to exchange views, show that Washington has a lot of convincing to do if it wants to broaden its war on terrorism.

Ivanov acknowledged that Iran, Iraq and North Korea -- and others -- pose a serious nonproliferation threat, but he disagreed with the ``axis of evil'' label.

``I don't have any data or information that would suggest the governments of those three countries support terrorism,'' Ivanov said. ``I have no grounds to support that.''

Russia has strongly supported the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, but Bush's warning about the three countries presents a major challenge to Moscow, which has strong ties to them.

Conservative German lawmaker Karl Franz Lamers appealed to Washington to keep its European allies informed of its planning and strategy. ``It cannot be that you decide and that we go along.''

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., singled out Iraq as the prime target for the campaign, saying, ``The next front is apparent and we should not shirk from acknowledging it.''

``A terrorist resides in Baghdad, with the resources of an entire state at his disposal ... and proud of a decade-long record of defying the international community's demands that he come clean on his programs to develop weapons of mass destruction,'' he said.

Reflecting a view common in Europe, British lawmaker Menzies Campbell expressed concern about the U.S. position on Iraq.

``Action against Iraq would require incontrovertible evidence,'' he said, adding that the common policy on Iraq since U.N. weapons inspectors withdrew in 1998 has been one of containment. ``Why should we abandon that policy unless there has been clear evidence it has failed?''

Retired German Gen. Klaus Naumann questioned whether military action against Iraq could be considered without the kind of broad international support enjoyed by the Afghan campaign.

Several American defense experts said the United States is prepared to act unilaterally.

``Never has the United States been more unified, never has it been more purposeful, never has it been more willing, if necessary, to act alone,'' said Richard Perle, a senior Republican foreign policy adviser and former State Department official. ``If we have to choose between protecting ourselves against terrorism and a long list of friends and allies, we will protect ourselves against terrorism.''

Europeans acknowledged that their countries cannot keep up with the United States' military ambitions. If Washington unilaterally takes military action in the future, it will be because of Europe's ``lack of capability,'' Naumann said.

Wolfowitz told the conference NATO needs ``new capabilities'' to help the Cold War alliance counter the new threat of terrorism, while European officials bemoaned the continent's low defense spending compared to the United States.

Answering European concerns that Iran's moderate impulses should be acknowledged, McCain said Tehran had been implicated in the recent seizure of weapons bound for the Palestinian territories. ``If they had succeeded in supplying those weapons, there would have been a blood bath,'' he said.

-------- afghanistan

CIVILIANS
Villagers Add to Reports of Raids Gone Astray

New York Times
February 2, 2002
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/02/international/asia/02RAID.html

ZANI KHEL, Afghanistan, Jan. 28 - When allied soldiers arrived by helicopter in the dead of night last week to seize him and three other family members for questioning, a villager named Serajuddin may well have thought he was the most blighted man in Afghanistan.

His violent detention came weeks after an American airstrike hit his home, killing 20 people, including his wife and 9 young grandchildren.

Mr. Serajuddin's story appears to offer an example of the harm to noncombatants that has been caused by the American-led military campaign, much of which has been concentrated in this remote, arid region 150 miles south of Kabul.

An American commander in this region confirmed Mr. Serajuddin's arrest on Jan. 21 to a local Afghan leader, and said he continues to be held by the American military, although his release is under review.

Because of several reported incidents like these, Afghan villagers accuse American bombers and Special Operations troops of being careless in their choice of targets. Afghans claim that more than 150 civilians have been killed in recent weeks in this region, which includes the Zhawara caves south of Khost, a primary focus of American bombing and other operations.

There is no way to achieve an accurate reckoning of the number of civilian casualties from the American operation. The country remains a swirling pool of rumors. In addition, it is difficult to assess the effects of the American operation accurately because of the way that it has been conducted, mostly by high- altitude bombing and lightning raids by Special Operations troops.

But accounts of errors have become increasingly insistent. This week, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander of operations in Afghanistan, ordered an inquiry into an American Special Forces assault this month on what was believed to be a compound used by Taliban forces in the southern town of Oruzgan. Residents there have said several people were killed in error and the United States may have been misled by false information from one of two rival factions in the town.

Afghan authorities in Kandahar said on Tuesday that they were pressing the United States military about 27 people detained in that raid, and they hoped that some would be released in the next few days.

A common theme in the reports is that the American airstrikes and ground raids sometimes produce unwanted outcomes because they are often based on information that relies at least partly on local Afghan factions with scores to settle among each other.

"Obviously, it is war and it isn't going to be risk-free," said Col. Rick Thomas, a spokesman for the United States Central Command in Tampa, Fla. "We try to mitigate collateral damage, but it is going to occur."

He added that American commanders require multiple sources of intelligence on a particular target before it is attacked. "We've been very deliberate to use various sources of intelligence to confirm what we believe to be ground truth," Colonel Thomas said.

As for Mr. Serajuddin's fate, Colonel Thomas said he was not familiar with specific details about the raid on the Afghan man's compound last week. But another senior military official said that although the raid was based on intelligence gathered by American sources, the commando operation was carried out by forces from another unidentified country. He also suggested that Mr. Serajuddin may already have been released.

The origin of Mr. Serajuddin's problems appears to go back to Nov. 16. It was then, relatives say, that he and his family gave shelter to Jalaluddin Haqqani, the commander of Taliban forces in the southern provinces of Afghanistan who was fleeing from Kabul. Mr. Serajuddin's family and neighbors insist he did not know the commander, who was high on the list of America's most wanted men in Afghanistan, and his act was merely hospitality.

Just hours after the commander arrived at his family compound, two bombs destroyed Mr. Serajuddin's home and an adjacent guesthouse. Among the 20 people killed were his wife, Fatima, 3 grandsons and 6 granddaughters, relatives said.

Civilians have died in six different American-led attacks near here since Nov. 15, the villagers say. They include the bombing of a mosque in Khost on Nov. 16, just hours before the airstrike on Mr. Serajuddin's home. American military officials have confirmed that the mosque was hit by an errant bomb intended to hit a building belonging to Mr. Haqqani. On Dec. 21, a convoy of travellers on a country road was hit by an American airstrike.

Villagers and relatives of Mr. Serajuddin said that the only survivors of the American bomb that hit his compound in November were Mr. Serajuddin himself and Mr. Haqqani, the Taliban commander. After the attack, Mr. Haqqani fled with an injured shoulder, and remains at large today.

Last week misfortune struck Mr. Serajuddin again, when six helicopters arrived with commandos who smashed their way through steel gates into his battered compound.

"I don't know what is our sin," said Hajji Ajab Gul, Mr. Serajuddin's 75-year-old cousin.

The commandos burst into an undamaged building and seized seven men and boys asleep there, including Mr. Gul. He said the commandos bound their hands with plastic ties before searching the house, breaking open storage cupboards, then leaving again with Mr. Serajuddin, who is about 50, and three male relatives.

He said the commandos were accompanied by an Afghan interpreter who spoke Dari, the language of the Tajik people who predominate in northeastern Afghanistan. While one commando pointed his rifle at each of the men and boys, Mr. Gul said, another tied their hands.

"I'm angry," Mr. Gul said, as he recounted the events. "We are very poor people. Our expectation of the U.S.A. is that they will not bother us, in the way that the Soviets did when they were here. We need help from America, not banditry like this."

In November, after the bombing, Mr. Serajuddin told relatives and neighbors that he knew Mr. Haqqani by reputation only. He never had any association with the Taliban or Al Qaeda, he said, and agreed to take Mr. Haqqani into his compound only because of a Pashtun tribal tradition.

In Mr. Serajuddin's case, Wazir Khan Zadran, the brother of a local warlord, said he believed that a rival warlord with close ties to the Americans, Zakim Khan, may have deliberately misled the soldiers so as to make trouble for the Zadran clan, to which Mr. Serajuddin belongs.

"I told them they made a big mistake, thinking that Serajuddin was a big friend of Jalaluddin Haqqani," Mr. Zadran said of his conversation with American officers at the airport in Khost, where about 100 American commandos are camped. "I told them, `You have chosen the wrong friends in Khost, and they have been giving you the wrong information. Serajuddin is no more a friend of the Taliban or Al Qaeda than you are.' "

There may be relief for Mr. Serajuddin, however. Mr. Zadran said he has been told by American officers that Mr. Serajuddin and his three relatives had been flown 250 miles to Kandahar International Airport, where suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda men are being detained before some are flown on to the Guantánamo base in Cuba.

The officers in Khost said they would raise the case of Mr. Serajuddin and his family members with the American commanders based at the Kandahar airport. The American officer in charge at Khost, known locally as "General John," told Mr. Zadran that he thought that Mr. Serajuddin might be released and flown back to his village this week, like a number of other local men who have been seized in similar helicopter raids have been in the past month.

Attempts to reach the American commanders at the airport in Khost for their version of the raid were blocked by soldiers loyal to Pacha Khan Zadran, Wazir Khan Zadran's older brother, who said the Americans had given instructions that no reporters were allowed near the airport.

Mr. Zadran's heavily armed troops compete with Zakim Khan's followers for control of every street in Khost and also for the favor the American forces, a crucial factor in the scramble for power that is under way in every region of Afghanistan after the Taliban's collapse.

The Americans have distributed money, uniforms and in some cases weapons and ammunition to local militia commanders thought likely to help in hunting members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. That has raised fears among Afghans of a new civil war if the tensions among the warlords get out of hand.

-------- africa

3,000 U.S. Troops Training in Kenya

February 2, 2002 7:57 am EST
Reuters
http://www.iwon.com/home/news/news_article_static/0,11746,206649|top|02-02-2002::08:03|reuters,00.html

NAIROBI - Three thousand U.S. troops were due to begin a joint military exercise with Kenya in the east African country's coastal region this weekend, a U.S. embassy spokesman said on Saturday.

The exercise, known as "Edged Mallet," had been planned since before the Sept. 11 attacks rekindled Washington's interest in the region as a whole and Kenya's neighbor Somalia in particular.

"They've been wanting to do something like this along the beach for a number of years, and they started planning it late last spring," said a spokesman for the U.S. embassy in the Kenyan capital Nairobi.

The United States fears the lack of central authority in Somalia could make it an ideal haven for extremists and has launched a series of intelligence operations in the region to assess whether to target Somalia in its war on terror.

The embassy spokesman said that "Edged Mallet" predated Washington's increased interest in Somalia and was part of an ongoing series of U.S.-Kenya military activities designed to help the two countries work together more efficiently.

Three U.S. ships, including an amphibious assault craft, will be involved in the exercise, which is due to last several weeks.

Kenyan ground forces will join about 1,000 Marines coming ashore for maneuvers in coastal military exercise grounds.

Parts of the event will involve wargames-style training with small arms, while others will include humanitarian training such as building bridges or providing medical services, the spokesman said.

The start of "Edged Mallet" follows news last week that Germany wants to station navy planes in Mombasa, Kenya's chief port, to monitor shipping in the Indian Ocean as part of its contribution to the U.S.-led war on terror.

----

Nigeria on edge as experts disarm bombs in Lagos

By Tume Ahemba
Saturday February 2, 2:08 AM
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-87343.html

LAGOS - Thunderous explosions as military experts detonated unexploded bombs on Friday at a Lagos barracks where an armoury fire caused over 600 deaths triggered fresh unease in historically coup-prone Nigeria.

The West African country's worst disaster for years has sparked open discontent among junior ranks at the barracks. A sudden police strike in Lagos and other cities added to a growing climate of uncertainty in Africa's most populous nation.

"There was a small stampede when explosions were heard," said a witness near the Ikeja cantonment, where the army sealed off the barracks.

Relief workers are struggling to feed soldiers and their families who are among thousands of homeless people camped near the bomb-shattered ruins of about half the barracks.

Army spokesman Colonel Felix Chukwuma said foreign munitions experts flown into the country were helping the army to neutralise unexploded munitions in the most strategic barracks in southern Nigeria, located in a residential area.

"In view of this operation the military cantonment and its environs are restricted to people except those bringing relief materials," he said. Such aid would be received at the gate.

The measure would effectively black out from public view increasingly vocal and potentially inflammatory protests from rank-and-file soldiers accusing officers of diverting aid.

A group of human rights lawyers said on Friday they suspected sabotage was behind Sunday's barracks blast. The army declined to comment directly, saying an inquiry was under way.

Meanwhile, anxious parents in Lagos kept up a desperate search for children missing since the blast in a region where child slavery and the killing of youngsters for witchcraft rituals are far from unknown.

SOLDIERS VOICE DISCONTENT

President Olusegun Obasanjo, facing charges of insensitivity after the blasts, sent Information Minister Jerry Gana, a senior cabinet member, to ease tensions at the barracks on Friday.

"There is a problem in this country. We are very much aggrieved and anything can happen because soldiers are not happy," said one soldier of 15 years service who did not want to be named. "Senior officers have been relocated but not us."

Nigerian newspapers reported that an unsigned letter was circulating, warning of "violent revolution" if authorities did not address other complaints of security forces, who feel neglected since the end of army rule in 1999.

Nigeria has been caught in its worst cycle of violence for 30 years and is on a countdown to general elections next year in which President Olusegun Obasanjo, a former military ruler, is expected to stand.

Past eruptions of military tempers have had disastrous consequences for Africa's most populous nation, which suffered years of coups and decline under corrupt army regimes that allowed civilian rule to return only in 1999.

Homeless soldiers and their families pelted Vice-President Atiku Abubakar's car with bottles on Thursday when he tried to address them on a condolence visit to the site of Sunday's inferno of exploding bombs, rockets and shells.

"A task force has been approved for the renovation of the barracks, so these people will soon have accommodation," said Gana, whose delegation arrived with bags of rice and bundles of naira notes to distribute to victims.

A police strike, Nigeria's first since independence in 1960, spread to Lagos and the nearby city of Ibadan on Friday, a day after it started suddenly in Calabar in the extreme southeast.

A police headquarters spokesman in the interior capital Abuja said police, who had no union, had circulated a list of their grievances, mostly over pay and conditions.

Banks closed hurriedly in Lagos, a chaotic and crime-ridden city -- Africa's biggest -- as fear of anarchy spread.

Parents of children missing since the fire were distraught. Aid workers said on Friday they estimated some 700 to 800 people overall remained unaccounted for in Lagos.

"We've got two children left in our care and we've got a register of 386 missing and that figure is likely to reduce rather than increase," said Bob Storey, representative of the International Federation of Red Cross Societies.

He expected another 40 names would be removed from the list at the end of the day of parents who are no longer coming to check for their children and are assumed to have found them.

-------- asia

India, Russia to sign deal on defence cooperation

PTI
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 02, 2002
Times of India
http://www1.timesofindia.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=1913297228

NEW DELHI: Heralding a new phase in bilateral ties, India and Russia will sign a protocol next week on defence cooperation with the two sides likely to discuss sale of aircraft carrier 'Admiral Gorshkov' and 'TU-22' long-range surveillance aircraft and joint production of a 70-seater transport plane.

The two sides will also hold parleys on Russian initiative of trilateral cooperation with China on terrorism, energy security, science and technology and other issues during the visits of Russian Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov and Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, a senior external affairs ministry official said on Saturday.

Moscow has indicated that the deal on the aircraft carrier is expected to be signed by April 1.

Ivanov, who arrives on Sunday from Japan a two-day visit and proceeds from here to Kabul, will carry a message from Russian President Vladimir Putin to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

The US presence in Central Asia is also expected to figure in the parleys.

The focus of his visit during which he would have wide-ranging talks with External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh would be reconstruction efforts in war-ravaged Afghanistan, Indo-Pak relations and its future and expectations besides the international situation, the official said.

On India's entry into the Shanghai Corporation Organisation (SCO) for which Pakistan has formally applied for membership, he said New Delhi will await a consensus among member states including Russia and China before taking a decision on it.

-------- britain

Growth of Aghan force OK with Britain

By David R. Sands
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
February 2, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020202-52163110.htm

Britain has no objection to expanding the international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan, but enormous practical hurdles remain before such a force can be approved, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said yesterday.

Meeting with a small group of reporters at the end of a brief Washington visit, Mr. Straw said the future of the U.N.-authorized force, currently headed by Britain, was a major topic of discussion in his private meetings with top U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.

Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai pressed in meetings this week in Washington, London and the United Nations for a broader mandate for the force, which is limited to the region around the capital of Kabul.

With reports of fresh fighting between rival warlords in eastern Afghanistan that killed an estimated 61 persons the past two days, Mr. Karzai has pressed for a bigger international security force that could deploy to Mazar-e-Sharif, Kandahar and other major Afghan cities.

"It's a demand of the Afghan people as a measure of commitment by the international community, as a symbol of their commitment to Afghanistan to stay on," Mr. Karzai said after meeting British Prime Minister Tony Blair in London on Thursday.

Mr. Straw said, "In no sense should we restrict [the international force] to Kabul, if the conditions are right."

"I don't discern any issues of principle involved here, but there are practical problems to consider," he added.

The U.N. Security Council mandate would have to be modified to expand the 5,000-troop force and authorize deployment to other areas. Other issues include which countries would supply the troops, how they would be housed and supplied, and under what rules of engagement they would operate.

Britain will soon relinquish military control of the international force, with Turkey considered the leading candidate to assume command.

The United States provides logistical and transportation support, but no troops, to the international force. Mr. Straw said he expects the U.S. role to remain the same even if an expanded mandate is approved.

The foreign minister said the uproar in Britain over the U.S. treatment of captives from the Afghan campaign at the naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has largely subsided. Three British nationals are among the more than 150 detainess currently at the site.

Based on visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross and by an official British government delegation, "a lot of those who had concerns on the subject are now reassured," Mr. Straw said.

He sidestepped questions about President Bush's pointed State of the Union address Tuesday night, in particular Mr. Bush's warning that Iran, Iraq and North Korea constituted an "Axis of evil" that must be dealt with.

Britain has opened an embassy in North Korea, and Mr. Straw himself made a path-breaking visit to Tehran in September.

He said he agreed with Mr. Powell's assessment that the Iranian regime had been very helpful in several respects since the September 11 attacks but that anti-Western conservative elements in the regime and Iran's backing of Middle East terrorist groups and an active weapons program remained major concerns.

Asked whether the president's characterization of the three regimes as evil should affect policy decisions or efforts to engage the three countries, Mr. Straw replied, "I don't think it should make any difference. Why should it?"

Administration officials have said the president's blunt words were meant in part for U.S. allies and powers such as China and Russia, both of which have had extensive contacts with all three regimes. But Mr. Straw said he was not pressed during his visit to scale back Britain's contacts with either Pyongyang or Tehran.

-------- colombia

Former intelligence chief says Chavez backed Colombian rebels

Saturday February 2, 4:17 AM
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020201/1/2eeeh.html

Venezuela's former intelligence chief denounced President Hugo Chavez for his alleged support for Marxist guerrillas seeking to topple the government of neighbouring Colombia.

Colonel Jesus Urdaneta, a former friend and military colleague of Chavez, said he had received orders from Chavez to help the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Latin America's oldest and largest insurgency.

"He always backed the guerrillas and said they were not enemies of Venezuela. But for us patriots who opposed him, his views were treachery to his own country," Urdaneta told Colombia's Radio Caracol network.

He said he possessed documentary proof showing the government offering money, fuel, and others forms of support to the rebels. On one occasion Chavez offered 300,000 dollars to the rebels but Urdaneta said he managed to stop the transfer.

He also alleged that Chavez was well-informed of clandestine military contacts between rebel forces and the Venezuelan military.

"I have a lot of proof about that," he said.

The 16,500-strong FARC have been fighting the government of Colombia for more than 30 years and are engaged in preliminary negotiations with the government for a ceasefire by April 7.

However, a recent upsurge in violence prompted Colombian President Andes Pastrana to cancel a trip to New York to attend the World Economic Forum.

Colombia has launched an investigation into allegations that surfaced earlier this week that Venezuela was providing assistance to the rebels.

The allegations emerged with the publication Wednesday by a Caracas daily El Universal of a document dated August 10, 1999 and signed by Ramon Rodriguez Chacin, Chavez's special envoy to Colombia's rebels, detailing an agreement to provide medical and other support for the FARC.

Rodriguez Chacin, who on Thursday was sworn in as Venezuela's Minister of Justice and of the Interior, denied having signed the document.

Also Wednesday, four opposition journalists released a video dated July 7, 2000, which purports to show a meeting of Venezuelan military officials with the commander of the FARC's 33rd Front, Ruben Zamora.

On Thursday, Colombian Air Force commander Hector Velasco said a Venezuelan plane was intercepted over Colombian airspace with a cargo of ammunition for the rebels.

-------- iran

Israeli intelligence misled Bush on Iran

By Paul Michaud,
February 2, 2002
Dawn
http://www.dawn.com/2002/02/02/int12.htm

PARIS: Sources in the French Secret Services say they have an explanation why President George W. Bush decided at the last minute to add Iran to his "axis of evil," which originally was to include only Iraq.

North Korea was apparently added "for good measure," say the sources, for Bush does not apparently want to give the impression that his crusade is waged exclusively against Islam or the Middle East.

As for Iran, the French sources say that Israel, on the eve of the forthcoming visit to Washington of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, has provided intelligence to Bush according to which, firstly, Osama bin Laden is presently very much alive and well, and that he is being kept "under the heavy protection" of Iranian security forces in northwestern Iran, not far from its border with Iraq.

The other "revelation" made by the Israelis to President Bush and his entourage would indicate that the other major figure on America's "wanted" list, Mulla Omar, has also made his way to Iran, and that he was exfiltrated to the northwestern part of the country, from Afghanistan, where he was until now in hiding.

The operation, according to the intelligence provided to Washington by the Israelis, say the French sources, took place on Tuesday (Jan 29). Bush made his announcement of the US decision to undertake its new anti-terrorist campaign against Iran, Iraq and North Korea the following day, Wednesday, Jan 30.

Both men, according to intelligence provided by the Israelis to Washington, and to certain of their contacts in France, were spirited to Iran by the special security forces of Ayatollah Khamenai, the spiritual guide of the Iranian revolution, a man who happens to be a bete noire to President Bush, just as he had been to his father, the elder George Bush.

It is certainly to Israel's advantage that Iran become the target of a US anti-terrorism campaign, as not only does Iran support the Hezbollah, but also the country does possess nuclear devices, also the missiles capable of carrying the devices to Israel or, for that matter, any other country in the region.

What flusters French strategists about the US decision to place Iran in its line of fire is that relations between Iran and the West, the United States and France included, had become warmer in recent months, indeed that Tehran had been one of the first countries in the world to condemn the Sept 11 attack on the World Trade Center. More recently, Washington had gone so far as to congratulate Iran on its "constructive role" in the creation of a new Afghan state, notably during preparatory meetings held in Bonn on reconstruction of Afghanistan.

And, if Iran seemed so ready to involve itself in the pacification of Afghanistan, it was for a number of pressing reasons, among them the return to Afghanistan of the 2.5 million Afghan refugees present on its soil.

The cost of maintaining the refugees on its territory was proving incredibly onerous to Iran, say French sources privy with the matter, specially as the West, which encouraged the action, never came through with much of the financial and technical support that had been promised.

Another reason why Iran had welcomed an end to the Afghan conflict and the arrival in power of a credible government was the possibility of at last putting an end to a war which, over 20 years, had cost it the lives of some 4,000 militarymen, also the expense of the construction and maintenance of special fortifications along its joint border with Afghanistan.

As the French sources put it, Iran has had absolutely no interest in continuing any of the terrorist activities cited by Bush in his "evil axis" speech of Wednesday.

Indeed, they say, Iran has made a number of decisions going back to last year which it hoped would be read positively by Washington in hopes that the two countries could turn a leaf on a relationship that turned sour in 1979 with the return to Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini, who had until then been in exile in France, and above all the kidnapping the following year of diplomats at the US embassy in Tehran - an event that not only brought about the defeat, in 1980, of president Jimmy Carter, but also the arrival in power the following January of president Ronald Reagan and his new vice president, George Bush senior.

-------- iraq

Russia Optimistic About Deal with Iraq

February 2, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-forum-russia-iraq.html

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Russia said on Saturday it was optimistic about the prospects for an agreement with Iraq that would allow U.N. arms monitors back into the country and clear the way for decade-old sanctions to be lifted.

``There are some signals and reasons to believe that we come, through the political arena, to the appropriate solution,'' Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov told the World Economic Forum.

``Everyone should have patience,'' he added.

Kasyanov, speaking only days after President Bush said Iraq was part of an ``axis of evil'' with Iran and North Korea, underlined Russia's strenuous opposition to any extension of the U.S.-led campaign against terrorism to Iraq.

``We don't believe that there is evidence that would (justify) this action,'' Kasyanov said. He added that Moscow was ready to discuss any such evidence should the United States produce it.

The United States and Russia are due to hold talks next week on the possible introduction of ``smart sanctions'' aimed at speeding Iraq's access to food and medicines while upholding an arms embargo.

Under the U.N. ``oil-for-food'' program, Iraq may sell oil and use the proceeds to buy food and other supplies. Russia, which had long held out against smart sanctions, agreed in December to consider them within six months.

----

Iraqi oil exports to US surged in 2001

Feb 2
AFP
http://www.zawya.com/Story.cfm?id=658061866&Section=Main&page=Home&channel=All%20Arab%20News&objectid=2A17E941-F5E0-11D4-867D00D0B74A0D7C

NICOSIA, - Iraq's oil exports to the United States surged during 2001 under the United Nations programme despite political antagonism, the Middle East Economic Survey (MEES) reports.

Exports of the two main Iraqi crudes, Basrah Light and Kirkuk, rose substantially over 2000, the Cyprus-based industry newsletter says in its February 4 edition.

For Basrah Light, 79 percent of liftings went to North America in 2001 compared with 58 percent in the previous year, MEES said. And 31 percent of Kirkuk liftings were exported to the United States compared with just four percent in 2000.

MEES noted that Iraqi oil exports to the Far East fell in 2001, but gave no explanation.

Iraq exported an average 1.7 million barrels of oil per day in 2001 under the UN oil-for-food scheme set up in 1996 to soften the impact of UN sanctions imposed on Baghdad for invading Kuwait in 1990.

It allows Baghdad to export crude oil under strict UN supervision and to use part of the revenue to import food, medicine and other necessities.

-------- israel / palestine

Israeli choppers rocket Palestinian naval police station in Gaza

Saturday February 2, 1:45 PM
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020202/1/2eii7.html

Israeli helicopter gunships rocketed a Palestinian naval police headquarters in the Gaza Strip town of Deir Al Balah following a Palestinian attack on a nearby army outpost, Palestinian security sources said.

No injuries were reported in the attack early Saturday which severely damaged the naval police building, security sources said.

The Israeli attack was in response to Palestinian militant activity in the area, including mortar fire on a nearby Israeli army post and an attack on an outpost guarding the Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom, an army statement said.

"In response to mortar fire near Erez junction and terror attacks near Kfar Darom, the army attacked a naval police headquarters in Deir Al Balah in the Gaza Strip," the statement said.

Israeli tanks earlier stormed Palestinian-controlled territory near the Gaza Strip town, and seriously injured four Palestinians with light machinegun bullets, Palestinian security and hospital sources said.

The Israeli army said tanks were sent into the area to hunt down Palestinian militants who opened fire and threw grenades at an army post near the Kfar Darom settlement.

An Israeli soldier was slightly wounded in the Palestinian attack, the army said.

Meanwhile, mortar bombs were fired at an Israeli outpost at the nearby Erez junction, but no injuries were reported.

Earlier, Israeli tanks opened fire with heavy machineguns on the Khan Yunis refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip Friday, wounding one man and damaging several houses, hospital sources and witnesses said.

The man was treated by medics after receiving wounds to his hand when bullets flew through his home as the machinegun fire lightly damaged three homes in the camp, the sources said.

The Israeli army said it knew nothing of the incident.

----

Israeli Helicopters Strike Gaza

By Jamie Tarabay
Associated Press Writer
Saturday, February 2, 2002; 10:01 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13057-2002Feb2?language=printer

JERUSALEM -- Israeli helicopters fired missiles at a Palestinian naval base in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, in what the army said was retaliation for mortars and gunfire directed at a Jewish settlement and military outpost.

Also, thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank rallied in support of Yasser Arafat, who has been confined to the West Bank town of Ramallah for the past two months.

And in the latest high-level meeting between the two sides, Palestinian parliamentary speaker Ahmed Qureia met Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres in New York on Friday, Palestinian officials said on condition of anonymity.

Qureia was one of three senior Palestinian officials who held secret talks with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Wednesday, a Palestinian source said. It was Sharon's first meeting with a top-level Palestinian delegation since he became prime minister a year ago.

However, Israel has declined to comment, and there have no signs of any breakthroughs to end the current round of Mideast fighting, now in its 17th month.

Arafat, speaking to reporters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, said the two sides were holding talks on both security and political issues. "I have given my directions to continue with these meetings," he said.

Palestinians said they stressed to Sharon the importance of political dialogue alongside security discussions and called for removal of tanks and an easing of the Israeli military blockade of Palestinian towns and villages.

"The meetings have only started and have to be translated into measures on the ground," said Arafat aide, Nabil Aburdeneh. He said that Sharon requested the meeting.

Sharon held the talks though he has been extremely critical of Arafat and the Palestinian leadership recently. In an interview this week with an Israeli newspaper, Sharon expressed regret for not 'liquidating' Arafat when Israeli forces besieged Arafat and his PLO fighters in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1982. Sharon was Israel's defense minister at the time.

Sharon also said he would press President Bush to cut ties with Arafat, and cease sending envoys to meet with the Palestinian leader.

Before daybreak Saturday, Israeli helicopters fired missiles at a Palestinian naval base near Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip. No one was injured in the attack, which Israel said was in reprisal for mortar shells fired at a military outpost and an explosive detonated along the perimeter fence of the nearby Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom.

Several hours later, more than 2,000 Palestinians demonstrated in Gaza City, shouting pro-Arafat slogans and carrying a mock coffin marked for Sharon.

"To the garbage dump of history," the coffin read on one side.

At a rally in the West Bank town of Nablus, organized by Arafat's Fatah movement, Arafat was able to address the crowd by telephone.

"Peace and security will never be achieved in this region by Israel through siege, occupation and settlements, but by the full withdrawal from our lands," Arafat said. His voice was played to the crowd over a loudspeaker.

"The occupation has to end for there to be peace between us and them, for our children and their children, I promise you our precious blood will not be wasted," he said.

Also Saturday, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a radical faction in the Palestine Liberation Organization, announced it was rescinding its contacts and activities with the PLO in protest over the continued detention of its leader, Ahmed Saadat.

Saadat was arrested several weeks ago by the Palestinian Authority for questioning over the killing last year of an Israeli cabinet minister. The PFLP claimed responsibility for the shooting.

Sharon's meeting Wednesday with Qureia, Arafat deputy Mahmoud Abbas and economic adviser Khaled Salam took place at Sharon's residence in west Jerusalem on Wednesday night, with Arafat's approval, a Palestinian official said on condition of anonymity.

The meeting went for three hours and also present were Sharon's son Omri - a past emissary to Arafat - and an official from the Israeli Defense Ministry.

Arafat remains at his government compound in Ramallah in the West Bank. He has been unable to leave the city for the past two months, and Israeli tanks are now stationed less than 100 yards from his headquarters.

The tanks moved in after attacks on Israeli civilians by Palestinian militants for which Israel has held Arafat responsible.

----

Reservists Balk at Occupation, Roiling Israel

New York Times
February 2, 2002
By JOEL GREENBERG
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/02/international/middleeast/02RESE.html

JERUSALEM, Feb. 1 - More than 100 Israeli Army reservists signed a statement published today saying they would refuse to continue serving in the West Bank and Gaza Strip because Israel's policies there involved "dominating, expelling, starving and humiliating an entire people."

The statement, by combat officers and soldiers, amounted to the largest organized refusal by reservists to serve in the West Bank and Gaza in the last 16 months of violence.

A week ago, 52 reservists began the campaign of defiance with the statement in the newspaper Haaretz. But their number has now almost doubled, to 102, and a national debate about their stand is in full swing.

The campaign has so unsettled the military command that the army's chief of staff suggested today that the objectors were inciting rebellion. The officer, Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz, said on Army Radio that he suspected political motives rather than moral concerns were behind the dissent. "If there is someone who is organizing a campaign on an ideological basis," he said, "in my eyes this is more than refusal to serve. This is incitement to rebellion. There is no act more serious than that."

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon warned in a newspaper interview, "It will be the beginning of the end of democracy if soldiers don't carry out the decisions of the elected government."

Protests by army reservists after Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which Mr. Sharon, as defense minister, took all the way to Beirut, are widely considered to have contributed to a subsequent military pullback to southern Lebanon, from which Israel withdrew two years ago.

The declaration today in Haaretz by the dissenting reservists said: "The price of occupation is the loss of the Israel Defense Forces' semblance of humanity and the corruption of all of Israeli society."

It continued: "We will no longer fight beyond the Green Line with the aim of dominating, expelling, starving and humiliating an entire people." The Green Line is the pre-1967 boundary between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

It remains to be seen whether the organizers will meet their goal of collecting 500 signatures and forming a critical mass of resisters that could force a change in government policy. But the prospect that more may join their campaign has prompted a swift response from the army, which has increasingly relied on reservists to back up regular conscripts in the ongoing fighting in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

After completing three years of compulsory military service, many Israeli men under 45 continue to serve about a month a year of reserve duty. Since the uprising began, reservists are much more likely to find themselves going on patrols in the occupied areas and guarding Jewish settlements.

The military does not release manpower numbers for security reasons, and therefore it is not known exactly how many reservists there are, or how many are serving at any one time. Although the number of objectors is small, their stand has drawn strong responses from a wide segment of the public.

General Mofaz said that the resisters should be suspended from their posts and could be permanently relieved of their command duties. He said that senior officers would decide what disciplinary action to take.

The commanding officer of the two reserve lieutenants who drafted the petition, David Zonshein, 28, a software engineer, and Yaniv Itzkovitch, 26, a university teaching assistant, said that he had already suspended them from his paratroop battalion.

"An officer who decides which mission he will perform and which he will not is in my view an officer morally unfit to command," Lt. Col. Yaron Appel, the battalion commander, said in a radio interview.

Reservists ready to serve in the West Bank and Gaza Strip published their own petitions today. One petition called the resisters' declaration "dangerous and antidemocratic," and another asserted that such actions "undermine the basic principle of the rule of law and the state's very ability to defend itself."

Since the start of the current Palestinian uprising in September 2000, at least 400 Israelis, mostly reservists, have refused service in the Israeli-occupied territories, and in most cases they were quietly released from duty, according to a resisters' group, Yesh Gvul, which means, There is a Limit.

About 40 have been summoned to disciplinary hearings and jailed for up to 28 days, the group said. It is not known what punishment the reservists protesting now might face.

The reservists' public declaration has set off heated debate over the limits of civil disobedience and about the legality and morality of the army's methods in fighting the Palestinian uprising.

With the credibility and moral authority that combat veterans command in Israel, the signers of the petition, many of whom served in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, have taken the debate to a new level. Organizers declined interviews with the foreign news media to avoid accusations of stoking international criticism of Israel.

But in interviews in Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's most widely circulated newspaper, they reported incidents during their service in which they said that soldiers had fired at Palestinians who did not endanger them, including stone-throwing boys as far as 100 yards away.

Their accounts have not been disputed by the army, and General Mofaz said the reported incidents would be investigated.

Ariel Shatil, 32, said that in the Gaza Strip last September, his squad was supposed to fire heavy machine guns at a Palestinian town in response to mortar fire. "The gunfire penetrates thin walls and windows, and that kills people, and you don't know who you're killing," he said. Mr. Zonshein said that in an area where he served, houses and orchards were bulldozed in response to Palestinian gunfire.

"We all have limits," he said. "You can be the best officer," and "suddenly you're required to do things that you can't be asked to do: to shoot at people, stop ambulances, destroy houses when no one knows who lives in them."

The resisters reject a contention by some Israelis that, by doing reserve duty in the occupied territories, they can work from inside the army to ensure that it behaves humanely.

"You can't be both an occupier and moral," said Mr. Itzkovitch, who said he had done combat service in Lebanon and the occupied territories. "Zionism is not occupation."

----

Crisis looms for Sharon
More army reservists refuse to serve

Graham Usher
Saturday February 2, 2002
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Distribution/Redirect_Artifact/0,4678,0-643685,00.html

The public consensus that the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has marshalled behind his policies cracked yesterday. Polls showed him receiving his lowest public approval rating in months, and 50 more combat reservist officers added their names to a petition calling on soldiers to refuse to serve in the occupied territories.

There are now 104 signatories to the petition, which is the most serious domestic challenge to his policies on the Palestinians since he came to power one year ago.

"We will not take part in the war for the peace of the settlements," said the petition, originally published in the press on January 25. "We will not fight beyond the Green Line [Israel's 1967 border with the West Bank] in order to rule, expel, destroy, blockade, assassinate, starve and humiliate an entire people."

The protest has rattled Mr Sharon and the army, which was swift to attribute "political" rather than moral motives to its conscientious objectors.

"This is incitement to rebellion," the army's chief of staff, Shaul Mofaz, said yesterday.

Four petitioners have been suspended from officer duties; the others are to face disciplinary measures, the army said. The punishments follow prison terms imposed on 49 reservists for refusing to serve in the occupied territories since the intifada erupted 16 months ago.

The difference with the latest protest is its public character, and the sympathetic hearing it has received.

Even the former head of the Shin Bet intelligence service, Ami Ayalon, told Israeli television that he felt "a lot of empathy for the reserve officers" when they were asked to execute "blatantly illegal" orders.

"As far as I'm concerned, too few soldiers are refusing such orders. To shoot an unarmed youth is a blatantly illegal order. I am very worried by the number of Palestinian children shot in the last year."

The protest also resonates with the predominant public mood of despair in Israel at the continuing violent confrontation with the Palestinians.

This has seen Mr Sharon's popularity ratings drop from 57% in December to 48%, the daily newspaper Maariv said.

Writing in Israel's Yediot Aharonot newspaper last week, the columnist Nahum Barnea said the latest Palestinian attack in west Jerusalem had made people more pessimistic about Mr Sharon. "They knew their prime minister was no better than they were: neither they nor he have an answer."

Avraham Burg, the Labour Speaker of the Israeli parliament, insisted this week that he would address the Palestinian parliament in Ramallah, despite Mr Sharon's campaign to ostracise the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat.

"The occupation corrupts, or, more accurately, the occupation has already corrupted," Mr Burg told the knesset.

· Ariel Sharon held secret talks with three senior members of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's inner circle this week, the first such meeting since he became prime minister, a Palestinian official said.

Despite his recent tough public statements, he met on Wedneday with Mr Arafat's deputy, Mahmoud Abbas, the parliament's speaker, Ahmed Qureia, and a Palestinian economic adviser, Khaled Salam, the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said. Mr Sharon's adviser, Raanan Gissin, declined to comment. AP, Jerusalem

-------- nato

World defence heads meet in shadow of September 11

By John Chalmers
Saturday February 2, 2:05 AM
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-87270.html

MUNICH, Germany - Defence policy makers from around the world gathered in the German city of Munich on Friday against a backdrop of fright over terrorism and doubts about NATO's relevance to the new security challenges.

The Bavarian capital, fearing violence around an event that has come to provide an annual snapshot of global military thinking, banned pacifist protest rallies this week. Many shops were boarded up and police checked cars entering the city.

But the streets were calm as the first of some 250 delegates -- among them 38 ministers, including U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov -- arrived for the two-day meeting.

However, the September 11 attacks on the United States -- and not peace protests -- looked likely to cast the longest shadow on this year's strategic brainstorming.

Russia's Ivanov was one of the few to touch on the threat of international terrorism at last year's conference, which was dominated by talk about Washington's missile defence ambitions.

Presciently pinpointing Afghanistan as a bridgehead for global terrorism, Ivanov warned that the "threatening breath" of this "monster" could soon be felt well beyond Central Asia.

NATO MUST ADAPT

Now, reflecting the post-September 11 agenda, this year's conference will open on Saturday with sessions on the impact of terrorism and wind up with a discussion on NATO's future.

The 19-nation North Atlantic alliance invoked a mutual defence clause in its founding treaty after September's suicide hijack attacks on New York and Washington.

But many saw that as a symbolic gesture when the United States went to war almost alone in Afghanistan, rekindling the post-Cold War debate about NATO's relevance now that its original European adversary, the Soviet Union, is no more.

The conference's organiser, Horst Teltschik, said NATO was becoming a "two-class society with the U.S. as the lead power".

"Does that mean that in future we will divide work up so the Americans fight, while the Europeans pay?" he asked.

EUROPE FALLING BEHIND

NATO Secretary General George Robertson defended the alliance on Friday in a Financial Times article headlined "NATO still matters". But he too has expressed alarm recently over the yawning capability gap between the United States and its allies.

Branding Europe a "military pygmy", Robertson called on European governments last week to spend more on defence to stop a U.S. move towards unilateralism.

Underlining Europe's faltering steps towards enhancing military capability, another deadline was missed this week for a transport aircraft project due to budgetary wrangles in Germany.

Germany said on Friday that the eight nations taking part in the European Aerospace company EADS-led project had extended the deadline for signing the launch order contract until March 31.

The Munich meeting comes amid mounting speculation about the next stage of the U.S. war on global terrorism after President George W. Bush accused Iraq of supporting terrorism and being part of an "axis of evil" alongside Iran and North Korea.

That could be a source of tension, particularly with Russia, which insists that Washington's campaign against terrorism in Afghanistan must not extended to other countries.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar said on Friday that he was hoping to meet Indian National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra on the sidelines of the Munich conference.

But in New Delhi Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee rejected calls by Pakistan for talks to end the dangerous military stand-off between the nuclear-capable rivals.

"They keep saying the leaders of the two countries should meet," Vajpayee said. "Meet for what? Do we meet for discussing the weather or some business?"

-------

NATO Officials Get Tour Of Tampa, Florida

by SHANNON BEHNKEN sbehnken@tampatrib.com
Feb 2, 2002
The Tampa Tribune
http://tampatrib.com/nationworldnews/MGAI6K817XC.html

TAMPA - Forty-five NATO officials from 13 countries toured Tampa on Friday for briefings at MacDill Air Force Base's Central Command and Special Operations Command facilities.

The members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Parliamentary Assembly's Defense and Security Committee will report back to NATO their opinions on the United States' response to terrorism.

The group concluded its visit with a boat tour of the Port of Tampa. They drank soda and discussed what their report would say and what the next step should be in the war against terrorism.

Several committee members said they were ``amazed and impressed´´ with MacDill and the briefings.

``We are proud of them,´´ said Tahir Kose, head of the Turkish delegation of the NATO-PA. ``They are very well trained. We had very high level briefings with the generals, and I liked what I heard.´´

President Bush's State of the Union address was a hot topic. The president lumped Iran and North Korea with Iraq as members of an ``axis of evil´´ that support terrorism and seek to acquire and spread weapons of mass destruction.

``I usually listen to those speeches and read between the lines,´´ said David Price, vice chairman of the defense for Canada. ``This speech didn´t have the lines. It was very clear.´´

Claude Bachand, another parliament member from Canada, said he can understand the president's position.

``This war has to go on,´´ he said. ``The American people were attacked very severely on 9-11, and they had to react. Doing it with the coalition was the right way to do it.

``These terrorists are arming themselves with terrible weapons. We can´t just wait for them to act with them.´´

But, some members warned, the United States must gather proof of terrorism before it goes after other countries or it will not have NATO's support.

``The proofs are shown in Afghanistan,´´ Kose said. The United States ``must, of course, show proofs for the other countries before [it] will get our support.´´ Kose said that it is important that the United States help Afghanistan establish a serious government.

``During the time Turkey had problems with terrorists, the U.S. understood Turkey very well and offered their support,´´ he said. ``I feel that Turkey should do the same for the U.S. now.´´

The boat ride was followed by an evening reception hosted by U.S. Reps. Jim Davis, D- Tampa, and Michael Bilirakis, R-Palm Harbor, the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce and the Tampa Port Authority.

The committee members were scheduled to leave Tampa this morning. But when they saw the Gasparilla boat docked at the port, several decided to stay another day.

``I warned them that they´ll hear guns blazing in the morning,´´ Davis said. ``And not to think we´re under attack.´´

Reporter Shannon Behnken can be reached at (813) 259-7146.

-------- pakistan

Pakistan's grace under pressure

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
February 2, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20020202-79387848.htm#7

I understand that there is considerable doubt in many people's minds about the sincerity of Pakistan's leadership since the tragic events of the September 11 attacks ("Flattering Musharraf," Letters, Jan. 26). But those who remember President Pervez Musharraf's first addresses to the nation in October 1999 know that his Jan. 12 speech was a continuation of the theme of remaking Pakistan in the vision of its founding father Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

In Jinnah's maiden speech to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan in 1947, he advocated democracy, tolerance, social welfare and inclusive pluralism. Mr. Musharraf's goals are the same.

A progressive social revolution is in the making in Pakistan. The banning of extremist parties, increased number of seats for women in the legislature, the ending of the discriminatory separate electorates, the holding of local elections on time and the announcement of general elections this October are but a few examples.

The events of September 11 were a catalyst - not the cause - of the changes in Pakistan's polices. They provided an environment in which the Pakistani leadership could reverse the trend of the past 25 years, in which the sovereignty of the state had eroded and extremist elements had encroached on the country's political space.

Before September 11, Pakistan abided by the numerous U.N. resolutions imposing sanctions upon the Taliban government. After September 11, it continued that policy, albeit with renewed vigor.

Pakistan matched words with actions, choosing what was right and therefore more difficult. Today, Pakistan faces economic losses, the threat of instability and the nightmare of a two-front threat. Nonetheless, Pakistan has shown grace under pressure, maintaining a steady course in the face of innumerable challenges and threats.

LUBNA GHANI
Fairfax

-------- propaganda wars

A Lone Qaeda Fighter Sets Off U.S. Alarm on Nuclear Plants

Eric Pianin and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Service
Saturday, February 2, 2002
http://www.iht.com/articles/46842.htm

WASHINGTON The federal authorities recently issued a chilling new warning that terrorists may be developing a plan to crash a hijacked commercial airplane into a nuclear power plant, but it was based on interviews with a single Qaeda fighter who was taken into U.S. custody during fighting in Afghanistan two months ago.

A Jan. 23 advisory from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to the 103 nuclear power plants in the United States said that three terrorists loose in the country were trying to recruit non-Arabs for a mission to fly an aircraft into a nuclear plant to be chosen by the team.

In the event the plane was intercepted by military aircraft, the advisory said, the hijacked aircraft would be diverted to crash into the nearest tall building. Officials of the FBI and the White House Office of Homeland Security confirmed the details of the advisory, but cautioned that the authorities were not able to corroborate the claims and were not sure of the Qaeda man's credibility.

"You can't prove that it didn't have any basis," a senior law enforcement official said. "But everything we checked came up empty, and none of it could be corroborated in any way."

A commission spokeswoman, Beth Hayden, declined to discuss in any detail her agency's decision to issue the latest security warning - the 20th issued to nuclear power plant operators since the Sept. 11 attacks. Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the director of domestic security, Tom Ridge, stressed that the threat described in the advisory was uncorroborated and did not indicate a specific time or target.

He characterized the warning as primarily a reminder to power plant operators and others "that we cannot let our guard down."

Since Sept. 11, the FBI and Mr. Ridge's office have issued three general national alerts. The most recent one, issued Dec. 3 during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, will expire March 11, after the Winter Olympics are concluded in Salt Lake City.

----

News channels at war:
Al-Jazeera accused of hiding Bin Laden

Oliver Burkeman in New York
Saturday February 2, 2002
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,643737,00.html

An interview in which Osama bin Laden justifies the killing of innocent people and warns the west it is facing "an unbearable hell" was suppressed by the Arabic-language satellite broadcaster al-Jazeera, executives at the US news channel CNN alleged yesterday.

The hour-long interview, in which the al-Qaida leader says "freedom and human rights in America are doomed", was recorded by al-Jazeera in October but only broadcast by CNN on Thursday.

Al-Jazeera said it had withheld the interview because it did not want to be seen as a mouthpiece for Bin Laden.

The Arabic broadcaster's director-general, Mohammed Jassim al-Ali, said it would "sever its relationship with CNN and... take the necessary action to punish the organisations and individuals who stole this video and distributed it illegally."

CNN said the interview had been circulating in intelligence circles for some weeks. It said the US government had had a copy and that Tony Blair had quoted from the interview in a speech to the House of Commons in November.

The footage, shot against a now-familiar canvas backdrop, shows Bin Laden wearing combat fatigues with a submachine-gun close at hand. He tells al-Jazeera's Kabul correspondent that "the battle has moved inside America". He dodges questions about his responsibility for the September 11 attacks, but says they were justified.

"America has made many accusations against us and many other Muslims around the world," Bin Laden says. "Its charge that we are carrying out acts of terrorism is unwarranted... If inciting people to do that is terrorism, and if killing those who kill our sons is terrorism, then let history be witness that we are terrorists.

"The battle has moved to inside America... We will work to continue this battle, God permitting, until victory or until we meet God."

The US government, he said, "will lead the American people, and the west in general, into an unbearable hell and a choking life."

He avoided the question of whether he was behind the anthrax attacks in the US. "These diseases are a punishment from God and a response to oppressed mothers' prayers in Lebanon and Palestine," he said.

Al-Jazeera sources said the interview was recorded on October 21, two weeks into the US bombing campaign in Afghanistan. It may prove to have been Bin Laden's last.

"We decided under the circumstances at that time that airing the interview would have strengthened the belief that we are a mouthpiece for Bin Laden," an anonymous al-Jazeera journalist told Reuters. "The interview was not that newsworthy. It was full of preaching and looked like a Friday sermon."

But Bin Laden also uses the interview to attack the Gulf state of Qatar, where al-Jazeera is based, for supporting the war on terrorism, raising the suspicion that the channel did not want to upset its host state which has, by the standards of Arab governments, been indulgent towards its relatively free debate.

Al-Jazeera said CNN had had the tape in its possession for two months. The US broadcaster did not address that charge, but said in a statement that an affiliation agreement allowed it to use "any and all footage owned or controlled by Al-Jazeera".

CNN's chief news executive, Eason Jordan, said the interview left important questions for al-Jazeera. "Among them, why was the interview not ever televised? Why did al-Jazeera initially deny the existence of the tape? And what other tape doesal-Jazeera have, or did it have, that had never been acknowledged or televised?" he said.

The station's director general responded: "Al-Jazeera does not feel it is obligated to explain its position and its reasoning of why it chose not to air the interview. Al-Jazeera would have expected CNN to use its judgment and respect its special relationship with al-Jazeera by not airing material that al-Jazeera itself chose not to broadcast."

-------- us

Defense Is Priority in Bush Budget

By Alan Fram
Associated Press Writer
Saturday, February 2, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13157-2002Feb2?language=printer

WASHINGTON -- President Bush's new Pentagon budget assigns $9.4 billion to battle terrorism while boosting funds for buying weapons and providing better pay and benefits for the troops, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The papers provide the first detailed look at Bush's $379.3 billion Defense Department request for the 2003 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. He will send his overall $2.13 trillion budget to Congress on Monday.

Spurred by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Bush and administration officials have said defense, domestic security and the economy will be the spending plan's top three priorities, with many other programs enduring cuts or much smaller rates of growth.

"The budget fulfills President Bush's pledge to win the war against terrorism, defend America and its people, improve quality of life for our men and women in uniform and accelerate a bold transformation of the U.S. military to counter 21st century threats," one document says.

The budget calls for an increase of $45 billion, or 13.5 percent, over this year's Defense Department total. Bush announced a $48 billion increase last week, but the budget documents use the smaller figure because of bookkeeping changes involving some retirement costs.

Bush envisions the Pentagon's budget growing gradually to $451.4 billion in 2007, according to the documents. When past years' defense budgets are adjusted for inflation, the biggest ever was under President Reagan in 1985, $451.8 billion.

Overall, the documents say, Bush would spend $396.1 billion for defense next year. The extra $16.8 billion is for defense programs outside the Pentagon, mostly the Energy Department's nuclear weapons budget.

Along with the rest of his budget, Bush's defense proposal will be considered by Congress in coming months. But with a war against terror under way and troops in Afghanistan, lawmakers of both parties are sure to support healthy defense increases this year, even as deficits return.

"We support every penny that's necessary to fight terrorism at home and abroad," said Thomas Kahn, Democratic staff director of the House Budget Committee.

Even so, some congressional officials have privately criticized Bush's proposed increase as providing less than the numbers would make it appear.

They say that after taking into account inflation, improvements to the ailing military health-care system and a $10 billion contingency fund that Bush is proposing to cover military operations, little is left to strengthen war-fighting capabilities.

According to the documents, Bush's proposal includes $3 billion for counterterrorism programs, force protection and domestic security; $1.2 billion to continue combat air patrols over the United States; and extra money for communications, munitions and other items.

The president also wants $68.7 billion for buying weapons and other equipment, up from the roughly $60 billion spent this year.

The budget also requests $53.9 billion for research and development, nearly 10 percent above this year's total.

It includes $7.8 billion for national missile defense research and testing procurement, plus $815 million for development of space-based sensors that can detect missile launches. That is about equal to this year's amount.

The documents say Bush also is proposing:

-A 4.1 percent increase in basic military pay, with possible additional raises for some officers. Troops got a 5 percent raise this year.

-A cut in troops' out-of-pocket costs for private housing, from 11.3 percent to 7.5 percent.

-Extra spending for costs of training and for the increased operations the services have performed since additional troops were deployed after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The budget documents also claim about $9 billion in savings from unspecified "management improvements" and changes in acquisition procedures.

In other details obtained by the AP, Bush's budget will propose:

-A $1 billion increase, to $11.35 billion, for grants to states for school districts that have many low-income students. Bolstering the Title I education program was one focus of the school-improvement bill Congress passed last year.

-$8.5 billion in grants to states for education for handicapped children, $1 billion more than was provided this year.

----

1's and 0's Replacing Bullets in U.S. Arsenal
Success in Afghanistan Propels Shift to Equipping Forces With Digital Arms

By Vernon Loeb and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, February 2, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11471-2002Feb1?language=printer

FORT LEWIS, Wash. -- Out on an Army firing range, in a conversation punctuated by machine-gun bursts, Staff Sgt. Michael Land describes how he and his soldiers are preparing to engage and destroy the enemy using an even deadlier weapon: digital information.

The most obvious difference between his unit -- a new rapid-deployment infantry brigade -- and conventional ones isn't that their armored vehicles are propelled by wheels instead of tank tracks. Rather, Land said, it "is all the information we're being given" by computers that pull in data from satellites, drone aircraft and intelligence analysts far from the front lines.

When even the infantry -- long characterized as "grunts" and "mud soldiers" -- is focused on moving digits, it is clear a major shift is underway in the way the U.S. military fights. What the Afghanistan conflict has brought home to the armed forces is how much the new way of war is built around an unprecedented dependence on information.

In Afghanistan, the Pentagon has relied on a global umbrella of new information systems, ranging from satellites far overhead to surveillance drones circling the battlefield to Special Forces troops with laser designators on the ground, to find targets, transmit information about them and then attack. Just as important was a communications network that permitted gigabytes of information to rocket from Afghanistan to U.S. commanders in Saudi Arabia, on ships at sea and even as far as Tampa, where the man responsible for the campaign, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, spent most of the war at Central Command headquarters.

The military's new dependence on information systems was driven home Thursday by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in a speech aimed at refocusing the Pentagon's efforts to change the military to better counter the threats of the 21st century. In robust defense of President Bush's proposed $48 billion increase in military spending next year, Rumsfeld called for more funding for intelligence and more attention to unpiloted aircraft and other sophisticated reconnaissance systems.

"We need to find new ways to deter new adversaries," Rumsfeld said. "We need to make the leap into the information age, which is the critical foundation of our transformation efforts."

To be sure, the U.S. military -- despite all its technological prowess -- has yet to find Osama bin Laden. But the military's success in routing the Taliban regime that sheltered the al Qaeda leader has emboldened those at the Pentagon who favor reshaping the armed forces around more sophisticated information and weapons systems.

The Bush administration came into office vowing to make major changes in the structure of the military by eliminating some of the large, hulking forces designed for fighting a ground war in Europe and replacing them with smaller, more flexible units capable of being deployed on short notice to anywhere on the globe.

The initiative stalled last summer. Rumsfeld ordered dozens of studies, which led to months of contentious reviews but ultimately produced no major changes in the size and shape of the military. By Sept. 10, the widespread view in the Pentagon was that defense reform was mired in bureaucratic infighting and doomed to fail.

All that changed when terrorists piloted hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing more than 3,100. The attack and the war on terrorism sparked an outpouring of support for the military on Capitol Hill.

One problem Rumsfeld confronted last year was that the Joint Chiefs of Staff feared he would pay for his priorities by cutting back spending on their priorities, such as weapons and the number of active-duty troops. But the new defense budget to be unveiled Monday contains almost $380 billion, Pentagon officials say, and should be enough to pay for almost everyone's priorities.

With more than a billion dollars a day available, said William Schneider Jr., head of the Defense Science Board and a confidant of Rumsfeld, the course of reform should flow much more smoothly. "The environment is much more positive now," he said.

This shift has huge implications for the future shape and organization of the large parts of the military. The part of the Army that is built around tanks and artillery pieces faces renewed questions about relevancy. The Air Force, having heavily used long-range bombers in the Afghan war, may be pressed to explain why it isn't building new bombers and instead is buying more short-range fighters. Across the board, the ability to move information rapidly is radically reducing the number of troops and aircraft the military needs to deploy to fight.

Bandwidth, Not Bombs

The early success of the Afghan war, in which long-range bombers were directed to targets by handfuls of U.S. Special Forces spotters on the ground, confirmed what a lot of people already suspected, said Edward C. "Pete" Aldridge Jr., undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics. "In the war itself, what has changed is a real strong appreciation of the value of ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] and the real-time value of being able to target rapidly," Aldridge said.

There is talk at the Pentagon that the computer and other information systems may elbow aside weaponry as the central component in war. Ask a general or admiral for thoughts about the Afghan campaign and they are more likely to talk about "bandwidth" than bombs. In the air, on land and at sea, the American approach to combat increasingly focuses on how to get information, move it and act on it quickly.

Indeed, retired Navy Vice Adm. Arthur K. Cebrowski, director of the new Office of Force Transformation, said the overarching change occurring in the military is a transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age.

It used to be that mass meant military strength. Now, in an age of 24-hour battlefield surveillance and instantaneous targeting, mass just makes a military unit easier to find and hit.

"There is no doubt about it -- that is the fundamental transition, and all other elements of transformation are subordinate to it," Cebrowski said.

The increasing reliance on precision bombs means fewer bombers are needed. But it also requires more information about the location of their targets. All told, the Air Force has operated fewer than two dozen bombers in the Afghan war, said Air Force Secretary James G. Roche. "You don't need so many bombers, because they carry so many bombs and each one is so accurate," he said.

The ability to gather information remotely and transmit it instantly around the world means fewer troops need to be deployed and that military staffs and experts can operate in a headquarters thousands of miles away. That means the United States can wage war less obtrusively. The Pentagon has deployed just a few thousand troops at bases in Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and about 4,000 troops in Afghanistan.

Pentagon officials said Rumsfeld's approach to his transformation agenda will be different than the contentious path he took last year. Instead of raising the prospect of radical surgery on the military, they said, the emphasis will be on continuous but gradual change.

"The way you need to do it is incrementally," Schneider said. "That's much more the way the commercial sector does it."

Drones Here to Stay

In the first half of January, an official "Lessons Learned" panel traveled to Afghanistan to figure out what in the U.S. arsenal worked, what did not, and why. Those results are still being compiled, but officials said some lessons already have emerged.

The star in the air campaign has been the lethal drone aircraft, or Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle (UCAV), as the military calls it. More than any other innovation, the use of a Predator reconnaissance drone to launch Hellfire missiles is likely to be what the Afghan war is remembered for.

The surprise is who was doing the shooting: the Central Intelligence Agency, not the Air Force. The CIA borrowed the Predator from the Air Force, which had been experimenting with arming the plane, and used it aggressively in Afghanistan, firing dozens of missiles at Taliban and al Qaeda leaders.

In October, just days before the war began, the National Defense University issued a technical and policy assessment of lethal drones. "An operational UCAV capability is not expected to be available to U.S. field and fleet commanders for 10 years," it concluded.

Now, with the war not yet over, there is new consensus that the armed drone is here to stay. Never again is the United States likely to go to war flying only piloted aircraft. Aldridge predicted the next generation of the lethal drones will carry larger payloads of bombs and sensors. "That's the right thing to do," he said.

Keeping the Innovators

At its core, even a warrior drone is a matter of processing heaps of information. The key to operating one is being able to move enough data quickly so that it can be flown and operated by a controller hundreds or thousands of miles away. Information also promises to be the organizing principle around which personnel policies change.

A small but vocal group of change-minded officers argues that the armed forces must revamp a half-century-old personnel system that transfers people every couple of years, encourages generalists and seems to discourage innovative thinking.

Indeed, a study on how to transform the military done by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments for the Pentagon recommended the military keep innovators in place longer. It also said service chiefs should be picked from areas likely to grow in importance, such as submarines and space operations.

The study was especially critical of the Air Force, particularly its leadership structure. The Air Force increasingly is being used for long-range airstrikes, but of the service's 17 top officers, only one has a significant background in bombers, while 10 are fighter pilots, it said. Personnel choices lead to procurement choices, argued the study's author, the center's director of strategic studies, Michael Vickers. While the Afghan war has shown the need for long-range bombers, he noted, the Air Force continues to focus its acquisition energy on buying short-range aircraft such as the F-22 and the Joint Strike Fighter.

The Air Force is already adapting on some fronts. In a symbolic acknowledgment of the emerging role played by information as a weapon in and of itself, the Air Force has given its new advanced command-and-control center a weapon-like name, the "Falconer."

"When you go back and look at the lessons identified and the technologies identified from Enduring Freedom" -- the military's formal name for the war on terrorists in Afghanistan -- "you will see some wonderful capabilities that we had not demonstrated before in the ability to kill targets faster," said Air Force Maj. Gen. Robert F. Behler, who heads the Aerospace Command and Control and Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Center at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Va.

The Air Force hopes the center will help integrate the information gathered by satellites in space, reconnaissance aircraft over the battlefield and sensors on the ground to help commanders make decisions more quickly.

Each of those information "platforms" would play a special role that makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts. For example, said Behler, a targeting sequence might begin when a satellite detected a radio transmission. The satellite would automatically notify a Joint Stars airborne radar system that keeps track of vehicles moving on a battlefield. Joint Stars would find the transmitting vehicle and order a Predator drone aircraft to move in and take video images of it.

"What we're trying to do is have digits talk to each other, the ones and zeros talking machine language," Behler said. "You find it and fix it, track it and target it, and just before you engage it, you have a human break point that says, 'Okay, that's a good target and all the rules of engagement are played into it.' "

In Afghanistan, the Predator fed real-time targeting video directly to AC-130 gunships, which were then able to attack targets. CIA operatives using armed Predators achieved the U.S. military's long-standing goal of reducing the time from "sensor to shooter" to almost zero.

Where Battle Is Fought

Ultimately, what Behler is doing at the Falconer command-and-control center in Virginia is not that different from the Army experiment with the new brigade in Washington state.

Here at Fort Lewis, Capt. J.C. Glicks's infantry company is part of the Army's effort to be light enough to deploy overseas quickly but strong enough to survive once it gets to the fight. To achieve this balance, the new unit has a far different organization than past infantry brigades. It has its own military intelligence, signal and medical detachments, not usually part of a traditional Army brigade.

More strikingly, it possesses a unit not seen before in the Army: A "Reconnaissance, Surveillance and Target Acquisition Squadron" designed to acquire information and feed it to other units in the brigade. To help it acquire the information, the squadron will fly its own air force of four unmanned armed vehicles.

One of the biggest training challenges facing the new Army unit is learning how to surf the wave of incoming information, rather than drown in it. So, for days at a time, commanders and troops from the unit hunker down before rows of computer screens to learn how to understand and use the battlefield information flow.

"This is where the battle is fought, so to speak," Lt. Col. Kevin McClung said. "The key in all this is information dominance -- and we have more information about ourselves and the enemy, which will make us more lethal when we fight."

There is concern, however, that the ability of computers and machines to collect information exceeds soldiers' ability to process it. "We can provide so much information to you here it will really slow down your decision process," Behler warned.

As the tense exercises in the Fort Lewis simulation center indicate, the military's emphasis on information also creates new vulnerabilities. Growing dependence on information -- and the machines that gather it -- means it is likely that future adversaries will attack the information networks, Cebrowski said. He said the military should prepare for attacks on reconnaissance planes, on satellites and their ground terminals, and on the communications systems that link them.

"This is the information age," said the career naval aviator. "The battle is over the source of power."

Ricks reported from Washington.


-------- OTHER

-------- genetics

Stem Cells Are Made From Embryo

February 2, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Stem-Cells.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Researchers seeking alternate ways to clone tissue for medical purposes have created a monkey embryo without the use of sperm to make stem cells that then turned into heart, brain and other specialized material.

Dr. Michael West, who heads Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass., said he and his colleagues used chemicals to cause a monkey egg to turn into an embryo, a process called parthenogenesis, and then extracted stem cells from that embryo to make the specialized tissues.

``These were fully developed cells that could have been used medically,'' he said.

Advanced Cell Technology announced in November that it had cloned a human embryo that was allowed to grow to six cells.

West said although the new study used only monkey eggs, it demonstrates that it may be possible to make human embryonic stem cells through parthenogenesis. Other experts, however, said such a technique would have a medical application limited only to women of reproductive age and would not benefit males.

A report on the study appears Friday in the journal Science.

West said he believes that making embryos through parthenogenesis may bypass ethical objections raised by many toward therapeutic cloning -- a technique aimed at making specialized cells to treat ailing hearts, diseased brains or to cure diseases such as diabetes.

In contrast to reproductive cloning, which could produce a whole person, therapeutic cloning involves growing embryos for only a few days in order to produce specialized cells for medical treatment of a specific patient.

However, President Bush and some members of Congress are opposed to all forms of human cloning. A bill to ban all human cloning has passed the House and the Senate is expected to take up the issue this year. The National Academy of Sciences, in a recent report, opposed reproductive cloning, which would make a whole person, but said therapeutic cloning, which would make only special cells, has a potential in medicine.

West said the study using monkey cells mimicked parthenogenesis that occurs in nature, though it is not considered a normal process.

``Parthenogenesis occurs naturally in some women, forming a mass of cells from an egg in the ovary,'' he said. This group of cells is called a teratoma, a benign mass that may contain fully developed cells, said West. Teratomas form on the ovary and are usually removed surgically.

In the study, West and his team exposed 77 monkey eggs to chemicals that can cause the eggs to develop into embryos.

``The chemicals cause the egg to believe it has contacted a sperm'' and to change into an embryo, said West.

Twenty-eight of the 77 eggs started developing into embryos, but only four reached an advanced pre-implantation stage called a blastocyst. From these, the researchers were able to extract successfully a single group of embryonic stem cells. The cells, which the researchers called Cyno-1, had a full complement of genes, all from the female monkey that produced the egg.

In normal reproduction, an embryo gets half of its genes from the mother and half from the father.

The researchers used chemicals to prompt the stem cells to change into highly specialized cells, including beating heart cells, muscle cells and brain cells.

When the stem cells were injected into immune-deficient mice, they developed teratomas that contained a number of different specialized cells, including neurons that make dopamine, the brain chemical lacking in Parkinson's disease patients, West said.

Dr. John Gearhart, a Johns Hopkins University stem cell researcher, said that producing stem cells through parthenogenesis has already been done in mice.

``This shows that you can do the same thing in a non-human primate,'' Gearhart said.

He said using parthenogenesis to make stem cells ``would have a very limited medical use.'' Such stem cells, he said, could be used only in the women who produced the eggs. Otherwise, the cells would be rejected. As a result, Gearhart said the medical use of the technique would be limited to women of reproductive age.


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Brazil Summit Paints Grim Picture

By Tony Smith
Associated Press Writer
Saturday, February 2, 2002; 3:22 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12314-2002Feb2?language=printer

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil -- Wars over energy, wars over water, wars over who's rich and who's poor. Participants at the second World Social Forum paint a grim picture of the future in a world dominated by global capitalism.

Just as in New York, where leading international politicians, business executives and thinkers are meeting at the World Economic Forum, the counter summit here is trying to come to grips with how the Sept. 11 terror attacks have changed the world.

But there was no agreement here Friday that the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan was right, or even justifiable.

"The world is marching toward terrorism on one side and war on the other," said Oded Grajew, one of the Social Forum's organizers.

"Terrorism spawns more terrorism. War spawns more war," he said. "Today we have already fought over oil; tomorrow it will be for water, then for food."

Grajew claimed that every day 30,000 children younger than 5 die of avoidable causes around the world.

"That's seven World Trade Centers a day and nobody puts it on the front page," he said. "The day they do, I'll know the world is saved."

The world will be far from safe unless economic globalization is reined in, more pessimistic participants said.

Keynote speaker Noam Chomsky opened a series of workshops called "a world without war is possible," which aim to present solutions for conflicts in the Middle East, Colombia and Spain's Basque region.

The radical MIT linguist outlined a bleak view of the future.

Arguing that unfettered global capitalism is concentrating the world's wealth in increasingly fewer hands, he predicted the governments of the rich, industrialized North, and particularly the United States, could one day use "weapons of instant mass destruction, targeting the growing masses of have-nots that globalization is expected to produce."

Chomsky said he was most concerned by U.S. plans to "militarize space" under President Bush's missile defense system.

He called the initiative "a serious threat to survival."

"We can be confident there will be a world without war - or there won't be a world, or at least a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria or beetles," Chomsky said.

His doomsday prediction resonated with a crowd of about 5,000 activists who crammed into three auditoriums and a lobby at Porto Alegre's Catholic University to hear him speak.

"I think he's right," said Carmen Carady, a Brazilian in the crowd. "He should know best about what America wants to do; he's from there."

Chomsky and others contend Bush is using world outrage at the Sept. 11 attacks to push through economic policies that further the interests of global business.

"Sept. 11, independently of what we think of it, has been used as a pretext for a new ... offensive," said Hector de la Cueva of Mexico's Continental Social Alliance. "This offensive is to impose a new world order based, of course, on free trade."

Many activists worry that the U.S. and European governments and corporations are trying to expand the powers of the World Trade Organization and impose new free-trade agreements that will benefit rich nations to the detriment of poor countries.

"That means more harsh market discipline for the poor and a nanny state for the rich," said Chomsky. "Capital has priority and people are just incidental."

----

Small Zurich protest despite World Forum's move to New York

Saturday February 2, 8:53 PM
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-87433.html

ZURICH - About 600 people staged what one Zurich resident described as a "very Swiss" demonstration against the World Economic Forum despite the fact that the event is being held outside of Switzerland for the first time.

Swiss police said on Saturday they had arrested about 40 people for holding a demonstration without a permit, disturbance of the peace, property damage, violence and for threatening police officials.

They said demonstrators damaged buildings, cars, and one of Zurich's city trams on Friday night, but that the protests against the annual gathering of the global political and financial elite paled in comparison with previous years.

Street riots broke out in the Swiss financial capital of Zurich last year after police cordoned off the nearby ski resort of Davos about 100 km (62.14 miles) to the southeast, where the event has been held since it began 32 years ago.

This year the gathering is being held in New York in a gesture of solidarity with the U.S. city scarred by the September 11 attacks on America.

One Zurich resident, a British fund manager who declined to be identified, described Friday's demonstrations as very Swiss.

"They were wearing ski masks but they were very careful not to knock over signs," he said.

----

Australians Decry Immigration Rules

By Emma Tinkler
Associated Press Writer
Saturday, February 2, 2002; 7:26 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12751-2002Feb2?language=printer

SYDNEY, Australia -- Thousands of people took to the streets of three capital cities Saturday to voice their disapproval of the Australian government's treatment of asylum seekers at detention centers.

Also, 600 lawyers, law scholars and students publicly condemned the government's policy of locking up asylum seekers in a Saturday advertisement in a national newspaper.

Some 3,500 people - including refugee activists, Aboriginal and religious leaders, politicians and unionists - spilled onto the streets of Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, demonstrating peacefully while calling for the closure of detention centers and the release of detainees.

Sydney protest organizer Roberto Jorquera from the Free the Refugees Campaign said the level of public outrage over the government's current policy was a sign that it had to change quickly.

About 3,000 illegal immigrants, mainly from Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and southern Asia, are detained in five camps across Australia.

In the half-page notice in The Australian, the lawyers asked the government to "change its unyielding stance" of placing in detention centers all asylum seekers who come to Australia by boat seeking refugee status.

"We strongly protest about circumstances in which asylum seekers who come by boat to Australia, are automatically subjected to mandatory detention in isolated conditions pending finalization of their applications for refugee protection," the advertisement said.

"The circumstances of their detention ... are alienating, inhumane and contrary to the general international standards of treatment available in other countries."

The group - which said it comprised people of all political persuasions - asked Prime Minister John Howard's government and other political parties to support the immediate release of all detainees while their asylum applications are considered.

They also said detainees should be given income support and access to health services and education for children.

"Human dignity for asylum seekers is not negotiable and must be upheld," the advertisement said. "Their dehumanizing treatment diminishes us all as a civilized society."

Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock, who is in Papua New Guinea to inspect refugee processing centers, defended the government's policy.

"Mandatory detention operates in Australia because people who may not have any asylum claim will simply disappear if you leave them at large," he said in Port Moresby.

The advertisement comes after 249 mostly Afghan asylum seekers at an Outback detention center on Wednesday ended a two-week hunger strike protesting conditions at the camp and the lengthy asylum claim process, which can take up to three years.

The detainees at Woomera, a former missile testing base in the desert some 1,120 miles west of Sydney, abandoned their protest after government negotiators convinced them their applications for asylum in Australia would be processed.


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