------- Index of Articles
NUCLEAR
China Slams U.S. President Over 'Evil Axis' Speech
DU and terrorists
IAEA Mission Bringing Nuclear Devices to Tbilisi
Ridge Opposes Federal Nuke Guards
Security of Nuclear Neighbor at Issue
Strategic Odd Couple
Bored With Bin Laden?
'There Is No Doubt in My Mind. Not One Doubt.'
Fort White House
MILITARY
Bush to Propose Sustained Rises in Military Spending
Warriors rearm for second attack
For Some Soldiers, Relief Duty Instead of War
Death Toll in Nigerian Blasts Grows to at Least 1,000
British arms sales to Africa soar
Al Qaeda's Southeast Asian Reach
European Security Leaders Alarmed by Bush's Stance
Iranian Minister Responds to Bush
Rumsfeld Rips Iran on Afghanistan
War on Terror Should Not Include Iraq, Russia Tells U.S.
Saudi: We May Not Support Iraq Attack
Women volunteer for attacks
Israel Attacks Naval Base; Crowds Rally for Arafat
Danger Looms in Collecting a War's Explosive Residue
Robertson says NATO still relevant but work to do
We Will Do The Fighting
Innocent Muslims killed as Bush allies 'crusade'
Arab TV disowns Osama interview
US eyes Russian base in Vietnam, starts talks with former foe Hanoi
POLICE / PRISONERS
Prisoners of War defined
At Camp X-Ray, a Thawing In the Animosity and Fear
Romania, Italy team up in bid to bust Mafia ring
Inmates, Families Housed Together in Unusual Experiment
ENERGY AND OTHER
Economic Forum Shifts Its Focus to New Dangers
An Elite Cast Debates Poverty
ACTIVISTS
Economic forum draws festive protest
36 Are Arrested, but Demonstrations Remain Peaceful
Big Bang
Thousands Mark N.Ireland's 'Bloody Sunday'
Seven Arrested at Devonport
Clergy court prison over nuclear base
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- china
China Slams U.S. President Over 'Evil Axis' Speech
February 3, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-china-usa.html
BEIJING (Reuters) - China said Sunday President Bush's comments calling North Korea, Iran and Iraq an ``axis of evil'' suggested the United States was preparing the ground for widening its ``war on terrorism.''
A strongly worded commentary, carried by the official Xinhua news agency less than three weeks before a planned Bush trip to Beijing to meet Chinese President Jiang Zemin, said no such axis existed between the three Asian nations.
``No small number of people suspect that by labeling Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an 'axis of evil' the United States seeks to prepare public opinion for possible strikes against those countries under the banner of anti-terrorism,'' the article said.
Bush, who launched the U.S. ``war on terror'' after the September 11 attacks on America, called the three states an ''axis of evil'' in his State of the Union address last Tuesday and accused them of trying to develop weapons of mass destruction.
U.S. military action in the wake of the September 11 hijacked airliner attacks on Washington and New York, which left more than 3,000 people dead, has focused on Afghanistan.
The United States launched airstrikes against Afghanistan's then ruling Taliban regime after it refused to hand over Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden, who the United States accuses of being the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks.
Rhetoric concerning states which the United States considers sponsors of terrorism has heated up since the September 11 attacks and speculation has grown over what will be the next U.S. move in its drive to stamp out groups it considers terrorists.
China has backed the U.S.-led ``war on terror,'' but maintains ties with Iran, Iraq and North Korea, whom Washington considers ``rogue states'' that sponsor terrorism.
The United States has accused Iraq and North Korea of violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and interfering with monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Sunday's commentary said using the term ``axis of evil'' gave the wrong impression the three countries had formed an alliance.
``Using the word 'axis' makes people think of the powerful military alliance formed by fascist Germany, Italy and Japan, which turned the world upside down with their atrocities.''
It said Iran, Iraq and North Korea did have a few things in common in that they all differ with the United States on policy and value systems, and that all three of them had unfriendly relations with the world's mightiest military power.
Last week, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman berated Bush for his use of such strong language in international diplomacy and said all countries should be treated equally.
``The Chinese side does not advocate using this kind of language in international relations,'' Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan told a news conference.
-------- depleted uranium
DU and terrorists
From: Piotr Bein [mailto:piotr.bein@imag.net]
Sent: February 3, 2002 10:38 PM
Letters to the Editor
The Daily Telegraph By email
Sir,
In DT of 27 December, 2001, nuclear technologist Peter Wilson consoles us not to worry about bin Laden's depleted uranium (DU), which is mostly uranium 238.
Many have already died and thousands of UK veterans suffer from Gulf War and Balkan syndromes that, beside other causes, include internal contamination with DU pulverized in battles where uranium bullets burn through armour. Official reports that "disappeared", and industry safety guides specify the risks. DU metal ignites at 500 degree Celsius, creating tiny particles of DU oxides that poison and irradiate once inside the body. Toxicity is immediate and could be fatal from large doses. Radioactivity may cause cancer and death a year or more after contamination, even if just a few DU microparticles get stuck in vital organs. Evidence started with Hiroshima cases that were suppressed by the US authorities. UK radiological research on DU health effects is a world leader.
Part of a few hundred kg of DU ballast from a Boeing 747 that crashed near Amsterdam in 1992 burned. Dutch parliamentary inquiry could not exclude "that in specific circumstances, some individuals have inhaled that much respirable uranium oxide particles that a contamination has taken place." If each plane that rammed into WTC had 1.5 t of ballast made of DU (like Boeing 747s until early 1980s), the tragedy could be much greater.
Even though he handled a chunk of DU metal with bare hands against industry advise to wear gloves, I would not be happy at all to invite Mr. Wilson to breathe in a few puffs when it burned.
Located on the string of UK nuclear plants that regained fame after Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Halifax tracked radioactive effluent from Sellafield to the Arctic, Mr. Wilson is oblivious to the risks from the waste DU -- generated by his industry.
Given UK plans for growth of atomic energy production, I am extremely worried, if Mr. Wilson is a typical nuclear professional. The ignorance may prove more dangerous than terrorists.
Dr. Piotr Bein, PEng Vancouver, Canada
-------- russia
IAEA Mission Bringing Nuclear Devices to Tbilisi
February 3, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-nuclear-devices.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - The United Nations' nuclear watchdog agency said Sunday that it had recovered two highly radioactive nuclear objects that three woodsmen found in a remote Georgian forest late last year.
The discovery of the cylinders, evidently once used in a generator, in Georgia's breakaway Abkhazia region touched off international concern that terrorists might obtain nuclear material to make bombs.
``They have the devices and are expected to return late tonight to Tbilisi, where they will transfer them to a safe storage facility,'' said Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
About the size of a person's hand, the encased but unshielded canisters contain highly radioactive strontium-90.
The three Georgians who found and handled them are suffering from severe radiation sickness, one of them in critical condition. The IAEA sent a medical team to help treat them.
The agency said Friday that discarded radioactive sources have been found from time to time in Georgia over the past decade, and it believed many others remained ``lost, abandoned or otherwise outside of regulatory control.''
They also said that the IAEA was sending experts to Georgia this week to help tighten safety in the former Soviet republic.
Specialists from the United States, Russia, France and Germany would be among those meeting with Georgian authorities Thursday and Friday.
The Soviet Union, one of the world's five recognized nuclear powers, broke up in 1991 and nuclear materials once under its control have turned up in many of its former republics.
Abkhazia, which declared independence from Georgia in 1991, has remained outside the Georgian government's control and Georgian guerrillas regularly clash with the Abkhazian military.
IAEA experts reached the former Soviet republic in early January, but the recovery was delayed by bad weather that made the journey across Abkhazia's rough terrain impossible.
The agency said devices like those found were widely used in the former Soviet Union as heaters, power sources for remote communication systems and generators.
-------- terrorism
Ridge Opposes Federal Nuke Guards
February 3, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Nuclear.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge said Sunday that private security forces at nuclear power plants should not be replaced with federal guards, siding with federal regulators and the industry.
The federal role in guarding the nation's 103 nuclear reactors against terrorist attacks should be limited to setting standards about the level of security provided, Ridge said on NBC's ``Meet the Press.''
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission already certifies security plans at each plant, and tightened requirements after Sept. 11.
``There is a role here for the federal government,'' Ridge said. But, he added, ``those who own the nuclear power plants have to provide'' the security.
Legislation to federalize plant security guards was introduced by Democratic Sens. Harry Reid of Nevada, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and independent Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont.
Reid, chairman of the Senate subcommittee with authority over the NRC, said Friday he plans to continue to push the legislation.
But NRC Chairman Richard Meserve has said that regulators oppose such a move. The nuclear industry does, too, preferring greater authority for guards instead.
Nuclear reactor guards currently are armed, but many states restrict what weapons they may carry and whether they may use deadly force.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- maryland
Security of Nuclear Neighbor at Issue
Coast Guard to Meet Again on Gas Plant
By Raymond McCaffrey Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, February 3, 2002; Page SM01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12216-2002Feb2?language=printer
The Coast Guard will hold a conference in Solomons this month to assess the risk of allowing foreign tankers to deliver liquefied natural gas to the Cove Point plant on the Chesapeake Bay in southern Calvert County.
Officials with state and local agencies said they expect to send representatives to the two-day meeting, beginning Feb. 12, at which participants will discuss the implications of a plan by the Tulsa-based Williams Co. to reactivate the facility.
The meeting, which will be closed to the public, comes two months after the Coast Guard held a similar conference in Portsmouth, Va., to discuss security at the Cove Point plant and other liquefied natural gas facilities along the Eastern Seaboard.
"There wasn't enough time within that brief period there to address security concerns," Lt. Cmdr. Gordon A. Loebl said.
Calvert residents and Maryland lawmakers have raised concerns that allowing large foreign tankers into the Chesapeake Bay could open the door to a terrorist attack involving the nearby Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant. Despite those fears, in December the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission voted at a meeting in Washington to reaffirm an earlier decision to allow the Williams Co. to move forward with the $120 million project.
Following its initial approval of the plan, FERC agreed to take another look at it. That announcement on Nov. 9 came just two days after Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) publicly criticized the commission's original endorsement of the project a month after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
FERC's second review included a closed technical conference at which interested parties and regulatory agencies discussed national security issues raised after Sept. 11.
Issues still to be decided by the Coast Guard, despite FERC's approval, include whether to require moving buffers and Coast Guard escorts around the tankers when they move into the Chesapeake Bay, according to Loebl.
The Coast Guard has responded to concerns about importation of liquefied natural gas from officials elsewhere along the East Coast, even temporarily denying port entry to a tanker en route to a facility in the Boston area.
Williams Co. plans to reactivate the Cove Point offshore terminal, where the liquefied natural gas would be unloaded from tankers. Williams also wants to build a fifth onshore storage tank. Natural gas in a vapor form would be transported from the plant through a pipeline that runs 87 miles from Calvert to utilities in Prince George's, Charles, Fairfax and Loudoun counties.
The pier where the product is offloaded -- roughly a mile and a quarter offshore and connected to the plant by an underwater tunnel -- would be refurbished to handle tankers that typically are about 1,000 feet long, according to Calvert County officials.
Company officials have expressed hope that they can begin importing gas before July.
At a meeting last year, Calvert County Commissioners President David F. Hale (R-Owings) told FERC officials of local support for the plant, which when fully operational would become the county's second-highest taxpayer, behind Calvert Cliffs. However, on Nov. 13, Hale and the other Board of Commissioners members sent a letter to the FERC requesting a reevaluation in light of the need to prevent terrorism.
Neighbors of the plant in the Cove Point area had told FERC representatives about their worries long before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
-------- us politics
[To reply, mailto:OPED@washpost.com]
Strategic Odd Couple
By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, February 3, 2002; Page B07
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11733-2002Feb1?language=printer
President Bush has scrapped the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, put American troops into Central Asia along Russia's borders and signaled that the United States will push a vigorous new round of NATO expansion in November -- all in four months and all without provoking serious outcry from Moscow. Vladimir Putin's Russia is the bear that did not growl.
In the sharpest paradox of current global politics, the personal relationship between Putin and Bush seems stronger today than it was before Sept. 11. On that infamous day, the Russian president was the first foreign leader to reach Bush. He used Cold War emergency communications links -- the hot line -- to notify the White House that Russia was canceling military exercises immediately.
And Bush's subsequent decision to withdraw from the ABM Treaty to pursue unconstrained missile defense tests did not inflict the severe damage to U.S.-Russian relations foreseen by many in Europe and here. Bush and Putin moved much closer to a president-to-president agreement to extend the 1972 treaty for two additional years than has been previously disclosed.
Russian officials now feel they may have erred in not doing more to accommodate Bush's position on testing to win an extension for the treaty last November. One collateral gain for the Russians in keeping in place the treaty they see as the cornerstone of strategic stability might have been to strengthen Secretary of State Colin Powell's hand in the policy debates that rage around Bush now.
But in both their U.S. summit in November and the heads-up telephone call Bush made to Putin one week before his Dec. 13 ABM announcement, the Russian leader frankly told Bush that there would be no drama from Moscow. "It won't be the end of the relationship. But it will be a mistake," is the way one Russian official characterized Putin's consistent private message to Bush on ABM withdrawal through the fall of 2001.
Putin's restrained reaction vindicates the Bush team's hard-nosed judgment that they could build a new relationship with Russia that was not centered on arms control. "Bush has understood that Putin is committed to stabilizing Russia and has accepted him as a genuine partner," German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said on a visit to Washington, in which he did not voice earlier criticisms of U.S. missile defense plans.
Putin now faces grumbling over his conciliatory approach on missile defense, Central Asia and NATO from Russia's military and foreign affairs community. He has taken political arrows to the chest on strategic issues that boost Bush with his conservative base here. But there are now signs that the White House sees the huge political deficit Putin has been willing to run as ultimately unsustainable.
Unlike Boris Yeltsin, Putin does not cloak his actions in sentimentality or the passions of the moment. The former KGB lieutenant colonel is a cold, calculating customer willing to make a virtue of Russia's weakness for the time being. He rides piggyback on American power, which is being dramatically and expensively extended into unfamiliar corners of the world on Bush's watch.
But the Russian seemed to voice genuine shock and sympathy in his Sept. 11 hot line call to Bush, which was handled at the White House by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Rice quickly relayed Putin's message to an airborne Bush: While increasing the armed forces' general alert status, Putin said, he was ordering scheduled maneuvers canceled to avoid misunderstanding. The two leaders spoke directly, and emotionally, twice the following day, with Bush still voicing concern about possible attacks on the White House and his family, according to one account.
Even though it ultimately fell short, Bush's willingness to have his aides work with the Russians on a draft agreement for a two-year extension of the ABM Treaty has also been important in stabilizing the strategic dialogue between Washington and Moscow.
Deputy Foreign Minister Georgi Mamedov opened negotiations with Undersecretary of State John Bolton here last week on what both sides said was "a legally binding agreement" on strategic arms reductions that could be unveiled at the May 23 to 25 Bush-Putin summit in Russia. This is arms control by another name, and a timely tip of Bush's hat toward Putin. The Russian had rejected Bush's initial desire to proceed with informal "handshake" agreements on unilateral cuts rather than continue formal negotiations.
Bush is instinctive while Putin is cerebral. But each strikes the other as decisive, frank and stubborn in his politics. These are not bad qualities for a strategic Odd Couple who should now move rapidly and forcefully to cut and reshape nuclear arsenals that can still obliterate human destiny within a few minutes.
----
Bored With Bin Laden?
By Richard Morin
Sunday, February 3, 2002; Page B05
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11815-2002Feb1?language=printer
How many Americans want Osama bin Laden -- to quote one pundit's formulation -- dead or dead?
Fewer and fewer.
Many Americans are now willing to declare victory in the war on terrorism even if bin Laden isn't killed or captured, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
The survey found that fewer than half -- 46 percent -- said it was necessary to round up bin Laden, dead or alive, down from 64 percent last month.
About half of those interviewed said the war would be successful even if the fate of bin Laden remains undetermined. U.S. officials say they aren't exactly sure where in the world the terrorist chief is, or even if he's still alive.
A total of 1,507 randomly selected adults were interviewed Jan. 24-27 for this survey.
----
'There Is No Doubt in My Mind. Not One Doubt.'
Sunday, February 3, 2002; Page A14
Excerpts from an interview with President Bush on Dec. 20, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14578-2002Feb2?language=printer
Osama bin Laden
How were you thinking about him before September 11th?
We also had been getting some intelligence hits throughout the summer, mainly focused overseas, by the way. And there have been a series of responses that we took to harden embassies and, but it was clear that bin Laden felt emboldened, and didn't feel threatened by the United States.
Did you want to have bin Laden killed before September 11th?
Well, I hadn't seen a plan to do that. I knew that we needed to, I think the appropriate word is, bring him to justice.
What was your state of mind?
Let me put it to you this way. I was not, there was a significant difference in my attitude after September the 11th. I was not on point, but I was . . . I knew he was a menace, and I knew he was a problem. I knew he was responsible, or we felt he was responsible, for the bombings that killed Americans. I was prepared to look at a plan that would be a thoughtful plan that would bring him to justice, and would have given the order to do that. I have no hesitancy about going after him. But I didn't feel that sense of urgency, and I, my blood was not nearly as boiling.
Had you, even before September 11th, fixed in your own mind that bin Laden equated with evil?
Yes, I had.
Because that word came up right away.
Well, that's true. I mean . . . here's a guy [who] says he's a Muslim and blows up Muslims and doesn't care in East Africa.
. . . I knew all along that we could not allow this to become anything other than good versus evil. And a lot of my language early on was painting the man for what he is. He's an evil man. He represents no religion, no ideology except for hate. I really view this man as a barbaric guy. I view him as one of the most cynical, corrupt-type individuals. Bold . . . very diabolical.
His Emotions Sept. 11
And Afterward
I ran through a series of emotions, needless to say. I was angry and I became sad later on in the week, as the tragedy sunk in. I cried at the Oval Office desk.
When did you cry at the Oval Office desk?
When I talked to [New York Mayor Rudolph] Giuliani and [New York Gov. George] Pataki and after it was over. They talked to me about what it was like, and I became, you know, I welled up with emotion. And, you know, presidents don't particularly like to cry in front of the American public, particularly in the Oval Office, but nevertheless I did. I really, my mood reflected the country in many ways. People in our country felt the same way I did. You know, we all felt the same way.
The Role of
The President
I had the responsibility to show resolve. I had to show the American people the resolve of a commander in chief that was going to do whatever it took to win. No yielding. No equivocation. No, you know, lawyering this thing to death, that we're after 'em. And that was not only for domestic, for the people at home to see. It was also vitally important for the rest of the world to watch.
These guys were watching my every move. And it's very important for them to come in this Oval Office, which they did, on a regular basis, and me look them in the eye and say, "You're either with us or you're against us." You know, "Mr. President, thank you for coming. Now, we know, inside your country, there's an al Qaeda cell, and either you can get 'em or we'll help you get 'em, but I want 'em got."
I understand the job of the president. And the job of the president is to lead a nation in a long and difficult struggle, and this is going to be a very long and difficult struggle. I mean, who knows -- I never dreamt that in 60 days' time we would have routed the Taliban, in a country that took Russia 10 years, or however long it took, to get out of. But this is just the beginning. That's what you've got to know.
I know it is hard for you to believe, but I have not doubted what we're doing. . . . You know, I regret loss of life, but I know it needed to be done. Let me tell you something. Flight 93 redefined sacrifice for me. And if a handful of people will drive an airplane into the ground to save either me, or the White House, or the Congress, you know, others in our country will make the sacrifice to save us down the road.
You know, I grieve for those who have lost life. On the other hand, there is no doubt in my mind we're doing the right thing. Not one doubt.
Why was it important for the United States to be the leader in an international coalition?
I had been around the world and had . . . witnessed a very interesting reaction to America and our place in the world these days. People respect us, but they like to tweak us. People respect America and they love our values, but they look for every excuse in the world to say that because we didn't do exactly what, you know, the international community wanted, we became unilateralist. In other words, I had a very interesting taste of what it would mean to be the president of a great country. There is a certain sense of jealousy, I guess is one way to describe it. And there's a kind of entangling agreements that would -- in many ways could diminish America's standing. And I refuse to accept that.
And so I come to the perspective that in order for people to follow a very difficult and long assignment, America must lead and must be resolute, and must not waver. They don't know me. Look, I'm the toxic Texan, right? In these people's minds. I'm the new guy. They don't know who I am. The imagery must be just unbelievable. I occasionally get glimpses of what they think, the editorial pages think, in the European press. They don't know, they don't know whether or not America is the soft -- they've got the big soft underbelly. We're kind of rich and flaccid, they don't know. They don't know what I'm like. Nor does the nation, by the way, understand what it's like to have a commander in chief tested under fire like this. No one knew.
The Future
I don't want to put timetables on this, but we are going to be in Afghanistan, in my judgment, throughout next summer. . . . We are now in a different phase of this war, where we're, [Gen.] Tommy Franks says, [in] the hunt-'em-down phase. And we're going to seek -- and he said, you know he said something yesterday, very interesting. He said it's like a baseball game. There's going to be a lot of kind of down moments with some high, high drama. And that's what it's going to be like.
And I know that, and I'm not in any hurry, by the way, and nor was I in any hurry once we figured out what the strategy was. I was going to hurry to get a strategy. I wanted the military to move as quickly as possible. It became clear the military wasn't. But . . . right off from the get-go, I said I want, I want to be as fierce and tough as possible. Because I understand this, that when we complete the mission in Afghanistan, one of the things -- there's some comment from this -- is that I've always viewed this as an opportunity, beyond Afghanistan. This is an opportunity to shake terror loose where it might exist. And I knew full well that if America was firm and tough and resolute . . . and one of the quotes in there is [that] we will shake terror loose in places like Syria, and perhaps Iran. And who knows, Iraq. But I mean that.
Iraq Well, I mean, look, Iraq is still on my mind, obviously, and I think, I think it's on everybody's mind in this administration.
Goals of the War
On Terrorism
What is the definition of success? We're used to wars where you take territory and you win. And I would argue, and one of the things you're going to find out, just as an aside, is there will be a lot of people in the world ready to declare victory and quit after Afghanistan, and we're not going to let 'em do that. At least I'm not going to do that.
. . . I will tell you, I haven't decided if I'm going to do it today or not, but we are going to be hunting these guys for -- again, I hate to put a time on it, because I don't know. Sure enough, if I say six months from now, it will be 16 months from now. But we will have a robust operation going there until we round them up, one at a time.
I made up my mind early that we were at war and we were going to win it. One of the things we need to talk about, of course, is, you know, what is the definition of "win it."
My attitude is that "win it" means when people can know that we can sleep safely, knowing that America won't be under attack by people who don't fear us and/or our coalition. That we rout terror wherever it exists.
His Team of Advisers
I don't know if you remember, but right after I got elected, I said that I hope there is good discussions, you know. People said: Your Cabinet, what do you expect? I said I expect there to be good, honest butting of heads . . .
Yes, I expect [Defense Secretary] Don Rumsfeld to express himself. I expect [Secretary of State] Colin Powell to feel comfortable. I expect the vice president to play an integral part. All these people have had their say. And so part of my instincts were part of this, but the truth of the matter is, I respect the team of people around me. And they've got full say, and I listen to it, and then decide.
I don't have any outside advisers on this. . . . I have no outside advice . . . anybody who says they're an outside adviser of this administration on this particular matter is not telling the truth. The advisers on this . . . I mean, first of all, in the initial phase of this war, I never left the compound. And nor did anybody come in the compound. I was, you talk about one guy in a bubble.
. . . The true advice I receive is from our war council. And they probably get all kinds of advice and maybe they pass it on from somebody. But I didn't call around, asking what the heck do you think we ought to do.
Laura Bush
She never said, you know: Why have you got me into this? She never questioned our safety. A couple of times the Secret Service tried to get me to move out of the residence, which I would not do.
Once I got back here I said, I'm here. And she never questioned that. She never created any sense of alarm in our household, which was great. I mean . . . she was very comforting. The way you see her or think about her in public is the way she is in private. She's, you know, calm. She'd occasionally admonish me for getting a little too, you know, in her mind, overboard on, you know, "dead or alive." . . . She thought I could have [been] a little more diplomatic or phrased it differently. But . . . that was just me coming out there.
In all of this, who gave you the best advice, the most useful advice?
Laura.
The most useful advice?
My wife. No.
It would be a tribute, if it were true.
Yeah, put that in there. [It would] help me out.
----
Fort White House
Security is a poor excuse for a president closing his doors to an open society.
Sunday, February 3, 2002; Page B08
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11680-2002Feb1?language=printer
Largely forgotten in the wake of Sept. 11 is what happened Sept. 5, when President and Mrs. George W. Bush hosted their first state dinner. The evening was capped with a fireworks display kept secret from the public until the last minute because the White House feared citizens would gather to watch and deemed that "a security concern." Although taxpayers were sent the six-figure tab, they were prevented from enjoying the show.
This is important because it demonstrates that the Bushes' willingness to co-opt public festivities as private entertainment predates the terrorists' attacks. So when they refuse to let the people who pay for lavish White House Christmas decorations see them; when they restrict the National Christmas tree lighting ceremony to invited guests and let the public view only from a guarded pen; as they bar from the White House all tourists except photogenic schoolchildren, it is fair to recall their prewar preference for keeping the unbidden at bay.
Bush defends such extreme precaution by saying he is acting on the advice of the Secret Service, which is like a principal saying, "On the advice of students, we will no longer assign homework." Of course the Secret Service wants the White House closed, along with the streets around it and the skies above. The more isolated the president, the easier their job. That is an inadequate reason for the White House doors to close on an open society.
Tourists in the White House pose a nonexistent threat statistically. Tens of millions have passed through the state rooms for 200 years without incident. Moreover, the risk was greater before Sept. 11, when terrorists were operating freely. Now, thousands of them are under arrest, their network is disrupted and Americans are on alert.
The argument that old rules don't apply because the world became new on Sept. 11 is specious. Terrorists using airplanes as bombs is novel, but it's merely a new twist on an old story. It was a new world when the hoplites learned to charge in formation. Life changed forever with the invention of gunpowder and TNT and the H-bomb and germ warfare. History is, in large part, the story of aggression's innovation. Truncating freedom cannot stop or turn back hostility's advancement.
Among the people understanding that is Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.), who grew impatient last fall with Bush's wavering on reopening Reagan National Airport and announced that he would introduce legislation requiring the airport to reopen if the president did not issue such an order. Similarly, Congress should intervene if the Bushes won't reopen the White House to tourists -- and without pointless impediments.
Requiring, for instance, that every prospective visitor submit a Social Security number beforehand for a background check would do nothing but create a time-consuming hassle for law-abiding Americans: Foreigners can't be tracked through Social Security numbers, and criminals use bogus ID.
More to the point, additional measures are unnecessary because the system already in place works: No president has ever been harmed inside the White House. The water and air are constantly tested for impurities and poisons. Activity in and around the building is monitored by hidden microphones and cameras, ground sensors, infrared detectors, metal detectors, Geiger counters, Secret Service agents, uniformed officers, sharpshooters, bomb-sniffing dogs and more.
Shutting Americans out of the White House is a stunning presidential rebuke, particularly in light of recent events. In 1994, when a gunman began firing at the White House from Pennsylvania Avenue, he wasn't subdued by the Secret Service but by three citizens. Tragedy was averted in December when Americans on a flight from Paris overpowered a terrorist trying to ignite explosives in his shoes. The U.S. Capitol may well be standing today not because of Jersey barriers or metal detectors or armed guards but because Americans aboard an airplane bound to destroy it died thwarting that mission.
In his inaugural address, Bush pledged to make "the determined choice of trust over cynicism." Americans have proven worthy of that. President, heed thyself.
-- Melanie Scarborough is a former editorial writer for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
-------- MILITARY
Bush to Propose Sustained Rises in Military Spending
Pentagon Budget Would Reach Level of Reagan Years by 2007
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 3, 2002; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14942-2002Feb2?language=printer
The defense budget that President Bush plans to present to Congress this week envisions not just a substantial short-term boost in 2003 but also a sustained five-year increase of $120 billion that would lift military spending to levels not seen in two decades.
The proposal, part of the $2.13 trillion federal budget that Bush is scheduled to unveil on Monday, would increase the Pentagon's account from $331 billion this year to $379 billion in 2003. By 2007, Bush wants to raise military spending to $451 billion -- nearly the same peak level, adjusted for inflation, that President Ronald Reagan grew the Pentagon budget to in 1985.
The plan, according to documents distributed to Congress last week and reported by some news organizations yesterday, seeks relatively little shake-up in the big-ticket weapons programs and conventional-force structure that the administration came into office vowing to streamline.
But it does promise a significant expansion in intelligence-gathering capabilities, Special Forces equipment and protective measures that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld says are needed to combat terrorists and battle unconventional adversaries in the 21st century.
With Congress and the public rallying behind the administration's declared war on terrorism, the Pentagon is betting that lawmakers from both parties will support a renewed surge in military spending, even as federal deficits return. Preliminary indications from Capitol Hill yesterday suggested bipartisan backing.
"The president is proposing a very substantial and dramatic buildup, and he'll get largely what he's asking for," said Senate Budget Committee Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.). "That's the history of how Congress responds when the country is in conflict."
One part of Bush's plan likely to prompt controversy, Conrad added, is a request for a $10 billion contingency fund to cover whatever military operations might come up. Defense officials regard that sum as conservative, given that the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan has been costing the Pentagon more than $1 billion a month. But Conrad noted that lawmakers historically have been reluctant to authorize military funds for no defined purpose.
Even with the proposed increase, Pentagon spending would amount to a far lower percentage of the nation's gross domestic product than under Reagan -- a projected 3.3 percent in 2003 compared to 6 percent in the mid-1980s.
Top Pentagon officials also appear to have imposed some limits, resisting appeals from each military branch for increases in troop strength. They have taken action against some underperforming development programs, canceling 18 Army projects and the Navy's short-range, anti-missile system; restructuring plans for a satellite missile-tracking system -- known as Space Based Infrared System-Low -- and deferring some military construction projects. These and other moves are credited with saving $9.3 billion in 2003.
But Bush's plan calls for continuing the most controversial and most costly new weapons programs, including the Air Force's F-22 fighter jet, the Navy's upgraded F/A-18 fighter jet and the Joint Strike Fighter. It would keep alive the new V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft and Comanche reconnaissance helicopter, although restructuring both troubled programs.
In all, Bush wants $68.7 billion for buying weapons and other equipment in 2003, more than 10 percent above the $61 billion in this year's military procurement budget. By 2007, Bush is proposing to boost procurement to $99 billion.
Reflecting the Pentagon's heightened dependence on information systems and more flexible combat capabilities, the proposed budget would accelerate development of such pilotless drones as the Predator and Global Hawk used in Afghanistan, and it would develop other unmanned aerial vehicles intended to operate as combat aircraft. It would spend $3.3 billion to speed collection and transmission of intelligence information to troops in the field and $1.3 billion to expand communications.
The Special Operations Command would receive a boost as well in the form of anti-missile sensors and jammers, and AC-130U gunships. Bush's plan sets aside $1 billion to convert four of 18 Trident submarines from carrying nuclear weapons to firing conventional cruise missiles and inserting Special Forces teams in covert operations abroad.
The Pentagon's research and development budget would rise almost 10 percent above this year's level, to $54 billion. A big chunk of that -- $7.8 billion -- would go for missile defense research and testing, a figure unchanged from the current year, with another $815 million for development of a surveillance satellite system known as Space Based Infrared System-High.
-------- afghanistan
Warriors rearm for second attack
By Laura King
ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 3, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020203-2392106.htm
KABUL, Afghanistan - After burying their dead, tribal fighters with fresh stocks of guns and ammunition prepared yesterday for a second assault on an eastern Afghan provincial capital, where fighting this past week killed at least 61 persons.
Warlord Bacha Khan's last attempt to take Gardez ended with his fighters retreating to the hills after two days of bloody fighting last week. But they planned to attack the dilapidated town again today, having been rearmed with 10 truckloads of weapons and ammunition, Mr. Khan's brother, Wazir Khan, told the Associated Press.
"They killed 11 of our people, we buried them, and tomorrow we will begin fighting again," he said by telephone.
Continued unrest here and elsewhere has led many Afghans to conclude they need a larger international peacekeeping force capable of operating nationwide and not simply in Kabul, the capital.
Terrified families huddled in basements or fled the town during the fighting on Wednesday and Thursday in which Mr. Khan's forces fired mortars from two hilltops. Fighters loyal to the Gardez town council, or shura, mounted their defense from an old hill fort in the town center.
Mr. Khan needs Gardez, the capital of Paktia province, to assert his authority as the region's governor. But Gardez tribal leaders, who claim Mr. Khan is a smuggler and tyrant, reject his governorship and have appealed to the interim Afghan government for a replacement.
A U.S. Marine spokesman, 1st Lt. James Jarvis, yesterday defended the U.S. military decision not to intervene in the fighting. Townspeople had expressed disappointment that U.S. aircraft flying above and special forces troops operating from an old fort nearby had not come to their aid.
"We believe this is an Afghan situation, and they are certainly free to govern themselves," said Lt. Jarvis, based at the U.S.-run airfield at the southern city of Kandahar. "It's not something any of the forces at Kandahar would be involved in."
Both sides in Gardez said yesterday that government mediators who had been dispatched to broker a solution had not contacted them.
Haji Saifullah, leader of the Gardez council that opposes Mr. Khan, said there was no fighting yesterday and that they did not want combat to resume.
"We do not plan any fighting," he said.
Without a national army, the interim government of Hamid Karzai has little power to force peace on squabbling regional warlords.
Mr. Karzai used his high-profile visits to Washington and London last week to push for a stronger international security force in his country, with a mandate to patrol outside the capital. But he was unable to win any pledge that the peacekeeping force would be significantly enlarged or its deployment expanded. Mr. Karzai returned to Kabul yesterday.
In New York, Afghan Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah endorsed a suggestion Friday that the force be increased from 5,000 to about 20,000 and spread to major regional centers, including Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif, Jalalabad and Kandahar.
"I think that will provide enough assurances ... about maintaining the stability throughout the country," Mr. Abdullah said.
Germany has committed up to 1,200 troops to the U.N.-sponsored force. But German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping said in an interview released yesterday that Germany would "overstretch" its military if it took over leadership of the force from Britain. Mr. Karzai has urged Germany to step in when Britain hands over command of the force in March.
"At present, we would overstretch the army," the Welt am Sonntag newspaper quoted Mr. Scharping as saying. "Our forces are committed in the Balkans, in the fight against international terrorism and in Afghanistan."
----
For Some Soldiers, Relief Duty Instead of War
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 3, 2002; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15117-2002Feb2?language=printer
BAMIAN, Afghanistan -- They introduced themselves as Mike and Tony. Mike had a pistol strapped to his thigh and Tony carried an automatic weapon. They acknowledged they were with U.S. Special Forces but said they were doing "humanitarian work" with the leader of the Bamian area, Karim Khalili.
The two were on a cold plateau high in the Koh-e Baba mountains, looking out over a provincial center filled with donkeys, dust and young boys and men with guns. Across the valley are the remains of the two giant Buddhas destroyed last year by the Taliban.
The soldiers would not discuss how many Americans are in this distant place, the center of Afghanistan's Hazara ethnic community. There was fighting in the Bamian area in the early days of the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda, but Khalili and others said those forces fled and the area is now peaceful. The Special Forces soldiers agreed.
"What we do is receive humanitarian aid that comes in here, and coordinate its distribution with Khalili and his people," said Mike. "The aid comes in by air, and we secure the airfield. Then we turn it over to Khalili."
Most of the supplies are parachuted in, the men said. But two U.S. helicopters also arrive daily at the airstrip, according to local residents. The U.S. soldiers said it was a sign that the local situation had stabilized that they could even come out from behind their barbed-wire compound to talk. Until now, they were ordered to say nothing about their work.
U.S. ground troops arrived relatively late to the Hazarajat, as the Hazara homeland is called. Khalili still complains that American soldiers did not arrive here until well after the U.S. military began helping the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance forces elsewhere in Afghanistan. At the time, administration officials expressed concern that Iranians were in the Hazara area and did not want to risk putting U.S. soldiers into potential conflict with them. The Hazaras, like most Iranians, are Shiite Muslims, and the two have had close relations in the past.
Khalili said 18 Americans eventually worked with his forces in the fight against the Taliban, planning and targeting airstrikes, but said those men were replaced by the current U.S. forces. Khalili said he had no problem with the Americans staying as long as they want and said they could bring in whatever forces are required.
"I am told there is still concern in Washington about Iranians being around Bamian," Khalili said. "But the U.S. military has found the safest place in Afghanistan in the Hazarajat. Our relations are with the Americans, not with the Iranians."
Khalili is the head of the Hizb-e-Wahdat party, the largest Hazara organization in Afghanistan, and is a major force in the interim administration headed by Hamid Karzai in Kabul. Several of his deputies run important ministries, and he says he is regularly consulted by top officials, including Karzai.
In town, the presence of the Americans is endlessly fascinating to residents, and the source of numerous rumors. Some say the Americans are here to provide food and medical help, while others say they have handed out military uniforms and have supplied 2,000 assault rifles.
Khalili, who said he meets regularly with the Americans to "discuss many things," said that the Americans are now in Bamian to provide food and humanitarian aid -- helping to rebuild a health clinic and planning to help rebuild some roads. The Americans were surprised to hear that, although they did say additional humanitarian help was planned.
Humanitarian assistance is increasingly the rationale given for the continued U.S. military presence in various forward posts in Afghanistan, which is a growing concern of relief groups. International aid organizations in Kabul say such work by U.S. and other foreign military forces is blurring the line between military and humanitarian work, which they say is confusing to Afghans and potentially dangerous to relief workers. In Bamian, for example, the U.S. military outpost is guarded by Khalili's forces, while the growing number of international relief groups in the area have no similar protection.
The Hazara region, about 100 miles northwest of Kabul, is one of the poorest in Afghanistan and was particularly devastated during the fighting against the Taliban, who considered Shiites not to be true Muslims. The Hazara, believed to be descendants of Genghis Khan's soldiers, have Asian features, which set them apart and has resulted in continued discrimination. They also have a reputation as fierce fighters.
The area also has been hard hit by a three-year drought, and U.S. and U.N. aid officials frequently pointed to it as the region most likely to face starvation this winter. Khalili said he is now less concerned about starvation: "There is no fear that many people will die because they have nothing to eat." There are reports, however, that some people living in high mountain valleys in the region are having a very difficult time.
Taliban forces, seeking to avenge Hazara attacks, burned all the homes in certain areas in Bamian. The main bazaar in Bamian, below the Buddha statues, is only now being rebuilt in a new location after it was destroyed. International human rights groups report that the Hazara town of Yakolang, 50 miles west of Bamian through the high mountains, was the scene of a Taliban massacre. Khalili said that the U.S. forces would help build a health clinic in Yakolang.
While the Special Forces men outside the compound in Bamian stressed their humanitarian work, they indicated they had also been in other places around Bamian province and acknowledged they had been trained for other tasks. Asked if it made sense for Special Forces to be doing humanitarian work, one of the men smiled and replied, "You answered your own question."
-------- africa
Death Toll in Nigerian Blasts Grows to at Least 1,000
By Glenn McKenzie
Associated Press
Sunday, February 3, 2002; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14851-2002Feb2?language=printer
LAGOS, Nigeria, Feb. 2 -- A week after massive explosions ripped through Lagos, officials today revealed the extent of the disaster: More than 1,000 people, mainly children, died.
The new death toll -- which exceeds the previous estimate by 400 -- was announced as the Nigerian Red Cross suspended its aid operations after military officials ordered the organization to hand over its relief supplies.
Home Affairs Commissioner Musiliu Obanikoro said the casualty count came after rescue efforts uncovered more bodies from a canal where hundreds of victims, many of them women and children, had fled in panic and drowned.
Obanikoro, speaking on a private Lagos radio station, said the search for victims was tapering off.
Thousands fled Sunday night after a chain of explosions lasting for hours erupted at an army base in the northern Ikeja neighborhood in Nigeria's commercial capital. The blasts propelled shells and flaming debris for miles. Officials are still investigating the cause of the explosions.
Families of the victims have directed their anger at Nigeria's military for storing munitions in a heavily populated area. The army has promised to investigate, but many political leaders blame the military and are calling for an independent inquiry.
Nigerian authorities were planning a mass burial, possibly for Monday or Tuesday, for many of the unclaimed bodies. Dozens of decomposing corpses could be seen today at the Ikeja hospital mortuary, where a few families waited outside for permission to remove the remains of loved ones.
Red Cross spokesman Patrick Bawa, meanwhile, said the organization suspended its aid operations today and locked up all its food and other provisions, which were stored at the Ikeja army base.
The army had ordered the Red Cross to hand over all supplies, Bawa said, adding that the agency was bound by its convention to refuse. Military officials had no immediate comment.
-------- arms sales
British arms sales to Africa soar
Observer Worldview
Kamal Ahmed, political editor
Sunday February 3, 2002
The Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4348828,00.html
The government was facing condemnation from protesters against the arms trade last night after new figures revealed that the value of arms sales to Africa will more than quadruple by next year.
The figures will come as an embarrassment to Tony Blair, who is preparing to visit the continent this week. The Prime Minister has said he wants to 'heal the scars' of underdevelopment in the region.
High levels of spending on arms are seen as one of main causes of poverty in Africa.
A report by the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) reveals that in 1999 African nations received £52 million in arms in deals with British firms.
That figure rose to £125.5m in 2000 and is set to top £200m next year. A £28m deal to supply Tanzania with a military air defence and traffic control system agreed this year and a £100m-a-year deal with South Africa to supply Hawk jets will inflate the figure.
Small arms deals have also been signed with Egypt, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Zimbabwe.
It is believed that the question of arms will be raised at Blair's meetings with African leaders in Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal. Clare Short, the International Development Minister, is also travelling with the Prime Minister.
'On the one hand the Government is talking about the urgent need for constructive development in Africa, while on the other government departments are underwriting and assisting arms dealers to sell weapons on the continent,' said Richard Bingley of CAAT.
'There has been a tangible increase in arms export activity to Africa under this government and it is likely this pattern will soar over the next few years.'
Later this year, the Government will give official backing to one of the continent's largest arms fairs. Africa Aerospace and Defence will take place in September and is expected to be used by British defence firms as a showcase for their weapons.
The UK's Defence Export Services Organisation, part of the Ministry of Defence, will be taking part in the exhibition, while Trade Partners UK, part of the Department of Trade and Industry, will be sponsoring UK defence companies appearing at the exhibition.
This week, the Government will face fresh scrutiny over its arms policy when the Lords launches a concerted attack against the Export Control Bill, which the Government has said will cut illicit trade in arms.
A series of amendments to be laid down by the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats will aim to close loopholes that critics say have left the Bill toothless.
Government opponents say the Bill makes no reference to the need for sustainable development as part of any arms deal, despite European Union rules that say it should be taken into account. It was the lack of a development clause in the legislation that allowed the Tanzania air defence deal to go through, despite critics saying it was too highly advanced for such a poor nation.
The Lords will also attack the lack of provision of powers to pursue arms brokers who break trading rules while operating abroad, and will say independent scrutiny of arms deals is needed by parliamentary committees.
Last night, the Government defended its position on Africa, saying that the Prime Minister was not going to promote any particular business or arms interests.
'It is about opening a conversation; this is not about grabbing immediate deals,' the Prime Minister's official spokesman said. 'It is about addressing in a serious way the problems that have bedevilled Africa.
'No one is saying that you can resolve these problems in a week, or a month or a year, but you can begin to address these issues.'
Blair will say that he wants to tackle the 'failed states' of the region and make up for 30 years of economic problems on the continent.
He will also discuss the situation in Zimbabwe where Robert Mugabe is under the threat of European Union sanctions.
-------- asia
Al Qaeda's Southeast Asian Reach
Group Operating in 4 Nations Believed Tied to Sept. 11 Hijackers
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, February 3, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14662-2002Feb2?language=printer
SINGAPORE -- Asian law enforcement officials investigating an alleged plot by Muslim extremists to blow up Western embassies and U.S. naval vessels here have uncovered a sophisticated underground group affiliated with the al Qaeda terrorist network in Southeast Asia that aided participants in the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
The group, known as Jemaah Islamiah, or Islamic Group, had cells in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia and also operated in the Philippines, officials said. They said the militant group was directed by a radical Indonesian cleric who served as a conduit between his eager followers in Asia and al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
The cleric, Riduan Isamuddin, who uses the alias Hambali, played host to two men in Malaysia in January 2000 who later went on to hijack the American Airlines Flight 77 plane that crashed into the Pentagon, a Malaysian government official said. Later that year, the official said, Hambali ordered a member of the Malaysian cell to provide accommodations and a letter of reference to another visitor to Malaysia, Zacarias Moussaoui, a man now in U.S. custody, charged in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks.
Hambali, who is on the run, has emerged at the center of a global investigation into Jemaah Islamiah, an organization whose scope and complexity appears to have been similar to the operations of Osama bin Laden's followers in Europe and the United States.
Government officials said the overriding aim of the group, which was created in Malaysia in the mid-1990s by Hambali and a fellow Indonesian cleric, Abubakar Baasyir, was to overthrow secular governments in the region and create an Islamic state linking Malaysia, Indonesia and the Muslim-dominated southern Philippines. But along the way, Hambali and Baasyir transformed the group into "a part of the broader al Qaeda syndicate," an official in Singapore said.
"Hambali was al Qaeda's point man in Southeast Asia," the Malaysian official said.
Government officials in the Philippines and Malaysia are investigating whether the bearded and bespectacled Hambali, 36, was involved in a 1994 plot to bomb 12 U.S. passenger jets in Asia. The Malaysian official said Hambali had spent time in the Philippines with two of the men convicted in the case, Ramzi Yousef and Wali Khan Amin Shah. The official said Hambali also assisted a Malaysian trading company partly owned by Shah that was used to raise funds for the bombings.
Authorities also believe that Jemaah Islamiah was responsible for unsolved bombings in Indonesia and the Philippines over the past few years, including a series of explosions in Jakarta and Manila in December 2000 that killed 35 people.
Asian and Western officials said that details emerging about Jemaah Islamiah's operations have provided a startling warning about the development of Islamic militant activities in Southeast Asia. For years, governments assumed such groups had exclusively domestic agendas -- the creation of independent Islamic states or the imposition of Islamic law. While some groups have enjoyed a popular following in recent years, Jemaah Islamiah was relatively obscure.
Foreign terrorists, particularly those belonging to al Qaeda, were regarded as short-term visitors who wanted to take advantage of lax immigration rules and reduced scrutiny from Western intelligence agencies. But disclosures about Jemaah Islamiah, the officials said, reveal the degree to which bin Laden's organization has burrowed into the region and dispersed local militants around the globe.
"What's alarming are the regional links," a senior U.S. official said. "It's not just one country that they've infiltrated. It's at least four."
Authorities in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines have arrested 37 suspected Jemaah Islamiah members since early December, but they are still searching for Hambali. Officials in Singapore and Malaysia said he traveled to Afghanistan in October, but they believe he has returned to the region and is hiding in Indonesia.
After the United States began its military campaign in Afghanistan, authorities in Singapore said Hambali approved plans for another al Qaeda attack: Members of a Jemaah Islamiah cell here were to drive trucks packed with powerful fertilizer bombs into the embassies of the United States, Britain, Israel and Australia. Before they were arrested in December, cell members had completed a detailed reconnaissance of the embassies and had acquired four tons of ammonium nitrate -- twice the amount that Timothy McVeigh used to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
"There was an imminent danger," a senior Western diplomat here said. "Their plans could have been operational in a week."
Officials in Singapore and Malaysia said the arrests have largely destroyed Jemaah Islamiah, although they acknowledge there may be several members still at large, particularly in Indonesia. Of greater concern, they said, is the ammonium nitrate, which is still missing.
The officials said the material, a fertilizer widely used to make bombs, was delivered to the Malaysian town of Muar, which sits on the Straits of Malacca, just across from Indonesia. They said the ammonium nitrate was packed into 80-kilogram (176-pound) bags and sent to Indonesia's Batam island, just south of Singapore.
"They may have broken up the group, but there's still an enormous amount of explosive out there somewhere," a diplomat in Singapore said.
Officials said that the Singaporean militants were bankrolled by bin Laden's network and that at least eight of the 13 members were trained at al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.
Another cell in Singapore, which also was under Hambali's command, was allegedly plotting to blow up U.S. warships docking here, attack a shuttle bus used by American military personnel and target the offices of major U.S. companies.
Officials in Singapore said the leader of that cell briefed al Qaeda leaders about the proposed attack on the shuttle bus when he traveled to Afghanistan for training between August 1999 and April 2000, showing them a grainy videotape of a subway station near the shuttle-bus stop that he recommended bombing. But the Singapore authorities said they believe the al Qaeda leadership eventually nixed the attack because the target was not large enough. The cell subsequently focused on attacking a U.S. naval vessel and American corporations, officials said.
Intelligence sources said the videotape was discovered by the CIA in an al Qaeda leader's house in Afghanistan along with briefing notes written in Arabic. Although U.S. officials initially claimed that the arrests were the result of the videotape, Singapore officials said they were not provided with a copy of it until late December, four days after police made the last arrest.
A senior Singapore government official said the security officers began investigating the group shortly after Sept. 11 when a resident told police one of the members might have links to al Qaeda. Authorities rounded up all 13 suspects in December.
"The tape offered very useful corroboration," the official said. "But by then we had it all wrapped up."
Singapore officials and Western diplomats portray the investigation as a race against emboldened terrorists who were bent on extracting revenge for the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan.
In October, a few days after the U.S. airstrikes began, a Kuwaiti using the code name "Sammy" and an Indonesian using the name "Mike" slipped into Singapore to help Jemaah Islamiah members prepare for the truck bombings.
The cell members took the visitors to Napier Road, just off the city's main commercial boulevard, where they videotaped the U.S. Embassy, a hulking, gray stone edifice atop a grassy hill. Sammy and Mike advised the cell that they would need 17 tons of ammonium nitrate in addition to the four tons they already had.
Although the cell was broken up by police before they could carry out the attack, the dragnet was too slow to nab Sammy and Mike before they fled Singapore. Under interrogation, members of the cell claimed they did not know Sammy's and Mike's real names, but they provided enough details to investigators for them to focus on the Philippines, officials said.
Two weeks ago, Philippine police, acting on information from Singapore, arrested the man believed to be Mike, a boyish 30-year-old named Fathur Rahman al-Ghozi, a former student at an Islamic school in Indonesia run by Baasyir, the co-founder of Jemaah Islamiah.
Philippine authorities now believe al-Ghozi -- who traveled between Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines -- was a key Jemaah Islamiah operative who also knew Hambali and was responsible for a series of bombings in Manila on Dec. 30, 2000, that killed 22 people and injured more than 100. Some intelligence officials believe the Manila bombings, as well as a raft of church bombings on Christmas Eve that year in Indonesia, may have been a test run for the planned attacks in Singapore.
Fluent in several languages, al-Ghozi moved effortlessly through Southeast Asia, using five passports and always staying in Muslim neighborhoods. He often traveled on small fishing boats to avoid detection, spending days at a time at sea.
After the Manila bombings, al-Ghozi repeatedly met or made contact with one of Hambali's key lieutenants, Faiz Abu Bakar Bafana, intelligence sources said. In one meeting, al-Ghozi has told investigators, Bafana ordered him to procure five to seven tons of explosives for use in Singapore and later gave him $18,000 as a down payment on the purchases, the sources said.
Officials in Singapore and Malaysia said the four tons of ammonium nitrate likely was purchased by Yazid Sufaat, 37, a Malaysian chemist who studied in California and owns a medical testing laboratory. Sufaat, a former Malaysian army captain, used his laboratory in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, to order the material in October 2000, the officials said.
U.S. and Malaysian officials said Sufaat is a Jemaah Islamiah leader in Malaysia and a close associate of Hambali's. A square-faced man with thick black hair, Sufaat was the person Hambali asked to host Moussaoui at his three-bedroom condominium in a suburban Kuala Lumpur high-rise in September and October 2000, the officials said.
Sufaat was arrested in December after returning from Afghanistan, where Malaysian officials say he served in a Taliban medical brigade.
The two Sept. 11 hijackers who visited Kuala Lumpur in January 2000 also stayed in Sufaat's condo for three days, although a Malaysian government official said intelligence agents photographing the building saw no evidence that Sufaat met with the men. The hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, were followed by Malaysian agents, who were tipped off by the CIA.
The official said Hambali, who had a set of keys to the condo, knew of the presence of Almihdhar and Alhazmi, and he likely met the men.
U.S. law enforcement officials believe the rough outlines of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington were likely discussed during the visit to Kuala Lumpur. The U.S. officials also believe the two men may have been involved during this time in the planning of the bombing of the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden nine months later, in October 2000.
Although Malaysian officials said they immediately passed along the information to the U.S. government, the CIA did not conclude the meeting was significant until after the Cole bombing, when one of the people in the photos was identified, in the summer of 2001, as a possible suspect in the Cole attack. The CIA subsequently warned U.S. immigration officials, to be on the lookout for Almihdhar and Alhazmi, but by then, the men had already entered the United States.
Moussaoui, a French citizen who has been charged in federal court with involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks, had traveled to Malaysia for flying lessons, a Malaysian official said. Moussaoui opted not to take the lessons in Malaysia after learning there were no flight schools in the Kuala Lumpur area, the official said.
Before Moussaoui left for the United States, Sufaat gave him phony business credentials written on stationery pilfered from a computer company his wife co-owned, officials said. The credentials were discovered by FBI agents when they raided Moussaoui's apartment in Minneapolis.
U.S. officials have alleged that Sufaat also gave Moussaoui at least $35,000, but the Malaysian official said Sufaat has denied in interrogations that money changed hands.
"We have found no evidence of it," the official said.
U.S. and Malaysian sources said the U.S. government has asked Malaysia to extradite Sufaat. But the Malaysian official disputed characterizations by U.S. officials that Sufaat played a crucial role in hosting Moussaoui or with anything else having to do with the Sept. 11 attacks. "If Hambali was the travel agent, then Sufaat was the guy at the airport holding the sign," the official said.
Sufaat initially appeared an unlikely candidate to join a militant group. He spent four years in the United States, studying biochemistry at California State University's Sacramento campus. After graduating in 1987, he returned to Malaysia and joined the army, where he served as a lab technician in a medical brigade.
But shortly after he came back with his wife, a Malaysian he met in California, his mother-in-law felt he was not religious enough and asked him to study with a Muslim teacher, the official said. The teacher, the official said, was part of an informal network of radical clerics that included Hambali.
"After a while, Sufaat meets up with Hambali and he's slowly inducted into the network," the official said. That was in the mid-1990s. By the end of the decade, Sufaat rose to become a trusted lieutenant of Hambali's.
Sufaat's wife, Sejahratul Dursina, told a Malaysian Internet news service Friday night that her husband, who earlier in the day was ordered detained for two years, was innocent. "I strongly deny these allegations against him," she said. "They are baseless, wrong and outrageous."
Little is known conclusively about Hambali. He was born and educated in Indonesia. In the mid-1980s, he and other radical Muslims, including Baasyir, the co-founder of Jemaah Islamiah, fled to Malaysia to escape a crackdown on Islamic militancy ordered by Indonesia's then-dictator, Suharto. In the late 1980s, Hambali traveled to Afghanistan to fight against Soviet occupation forces. When he returned, infused with a desire to continue an armed struggle to promote Islam, he began preaching at mosques around Malaysia that advocated a holy war against the United States. Officials said he developed a friendship with Baasyir in the early 1990s, and they jointly set up the Jemaah Islamiah.
The Malaysian official characterized Baasyir as the group's "godfather" and Hambali as the "consigliere."
Under pressure from its neighbors, Indonesian police summoned Baasyir for questioning in late January. But police did not arrest him, saying they needed to further investigate his alleged connections to al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiah.
Correspondent Philip P. Pan in Manila and staff writer Dan Eggen in Washington contributed to this report.
-------- europe
European Security Leaders Alarmed by Bush's Stance
U.S. Officials in Munich Stress Urgency of Anti-Terror Initiative
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 3, 2002; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14727-2002Feb2?language=printer
MUNICH, Feb. 2 -- A parade of European security officials expressed alarm today about what they considered an aggressive, go-it-alone stance staked out by President Bush in his State of the Union address last week, especially his warning that the United States was prepared to take preemptive action against Iraq or other countries that provide terrorists with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
The U.S. delegation to an international security conference here responded to their concerns with bipartisan unity. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) and a host of other foreign policy heavyweights urged the Europeans to get with the American program and faulted them for a lack of urgency in combating terrorism.
Wolfowitz, who is considered the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, played against expectation. When a panel moderator pointedly asked him to explain Bush's description of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an "axis of evil" that had sought weapons of mass destruction, Wolfowitz said simply, "Countries must make a choice."
He was followed by McCain, who delivered a fiery speech attacking Iraq and called on countries to decide whether they stood with the United States. "A day of reckoning is approaching," said McCain, a former presidential candidate. "Not simply for Saddam Hussein, but for all members of the Atlantic community [NATO]."
Lieberman, who was his party's most recent nominee for vice president, promptly stood to endorse "everything my colleague and friend has said."
"The American speakers -- Wolfowitz, McCain and Lieberman -- all had Iraq in the cross hairs," said Andrew Krepinevich, executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank specializing in defense issues.
The biggest surprise of the first session of the 38th annual Munich conference, which gave U.S. and European officials their first opportunity to assess the ways in which the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have affected both sides of the Atlantic, may have been the clear disconnect between the two sides about the urgency of the situation.
After listening to a dozen European officials vaguely discuss how plans should be made to eventually increase their military budgets, William S. Cohen, the Clinton administration's last defense secretary, lectured the audience on the need for quicker action. "This in fact poses a threat to civilization as we know it," he said.
But the Europeans expressed qualms about the stated U.S. willingness to act unilaterally if necessary.
"There is a danger that the Europeans and the Americans in pursuing terrorism may diverge in their points of view," said Karl Lamers, the foreign policy spokesman for Germany's conservative opposition Christian Democratic Party. "We want to participate, which is why I would ask our American friends to bring us along in the formation of strategy, instead of you doing it and asking us to trot along behind."
Similarly, Menzies Campbell, the foreign affairs spokesman for the centrist Liberal Democrats in Britain's Parliament, questioned Bush's threat to attack Iraq, saying that "action against Iraq, it seems to me, would require incontrovertible evidence," which he said was lacking.
Some officials said they feared the United States had become so technologically advanced and militarily adept that it no longer believes it must heed the views of its European allies. "We are losing our punch and our political influence," warned Angela Merkel, the leader of Germany's Christian Democrats.
Trying to come to terms with a United States altered by the terrorist attacks, Europeans expressed surprise at the size of the Bush administration's proposed $48 billion increase to the defense budget, the swiftness of the apparent U.S. victory in Afghanistan and the willingness of the United States to go it alone if necessary.
Wolfowitz sought to explain the Bush administration's stance, arguing that the current situation was different from the 1991 Persian Gulf War, in which the United States carefully cultivated a coalition. "Unlike the war of 10 years ago . . . the events of September 11 have made this a case of national self-defense," he said.
Some conference participants also noted that in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Bush thanked Russia, India, Pakistan and China for their support in the global war against terrorism but said almost nothing about Europe or NATO.
In a note of concern about another ally, McCain in his speech called Saudi Arabia's cooperation in the Afghan campaign "disappointing." Before the Afghan war began, the Saudi government privately expressed unhappiness that the United States planned to coordinate the bombing from a new high-tech headquarters at Prince Sultan Air Base, near Riyadh.
Asked about those comments, McCain said in an interview, "I think they're still an ally, but all of us have been disappointed by their funding of the madrassas that teach Islamic radicalism and encourage young people to attack the West and attack Americans in particular."
At the end of the day, Wolfowitz spoke to reporters after meeting with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov and was asked about U.S. intentions toward Iraq.
"We've made no decisions about where we're going," Wolfowitz said. "We're a long way from decisions about what to do."
-------- iran
Iranian Minister Responds to Bush
By Edith M. Lederer
Associated Press Writer
Sunday, February 3, 2002; 2:18 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15571-2002Feb3?language=printer
NEW YORK -- A high-ranking Iranian official in New York for the World Economic Forum said Saturday that Iran was "shocked and disappointed" by President Bush's comments earlier this week that it is part of an evil axis of terrorist nations.
Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammad Adeli said Bush's comments during his State of the Union speech were inconsistent with the cooperative relationship Iran and the United States had developed in their fight to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan. Bush said Iran, Iraq and North Korea constitute an "axis of evil."
"The situation that we have now in Afghanistan, militarily and also politically, is the result of understanding and cooperation between Iran and the United States, and the other forces that engaged in the war against Taliban," said Adeli, the highest-ranking Iranian attending the forum.
Earlier this week, however, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - the most powerful figure in Iran - denounced Bush and called America "the most hated Satan in the world." President Mohammad Khatami, a moderate who has engaged with the United States, said Bush "spoke arrogantly, humiliatingly, aggressively and in an interfering way - and worse than anything, it is an insult to the Iranian nation."
"We have been shocked and disappointed that contrary to what was developing and had been achieved, we had something totally unexpected," Adeli said. "We think this should not be the reward for cooperating after a long period of time."
Iran and the United States have not had ties since the storming of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Iran condemned the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, however, which led officials to explore the chance of closer relations.
Following the attacks, the United States quietly praised Iran for its help in the war on international terror. Iranians and Americans have worked together to fight the Taliban and to create Afghanistan's new government.
But this week Bush charged that Iran was after ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, and Secretary of State Colin Powell expressed concern that hardline elements of the Iranian government may be trying to exercise "undue influence" over the new government in Afghanistan.
Adeli said the "undue influence" comment did not make sense, considering that Iran has been involved in Afghanistan for the past 20 years, and that Iranians had helped in the anti-Taliban campaign.
"It's ridiculous, a claim of this kind of things," he said. "The magnitude of involvement of Iran inside Afghanistan was tremendous. Now we are directing all of this toward the central authority of Afghanistan."
A very stable and strong central government in Afghanistan, he said, "is in our national interest."
"We think all countries in the region and outside the region should support the central government and we have used every influence we have to convince all regional leaders to support the central government," he said.
Adeli dismissed Bush's accusations that Iran was seeking to build a ballistic and nuclear weapons arsenal and said reports that Iran supplied the weapons found on a ship intercepted by Israel in the Red Sea last month were "fabricated."
Israel said those weapons were destined for the Palestinians.
"We have never, ever given any weapons to Mr. (Yasser) Arafat," he said, referring to the Palestinian leader.
----
Rumsfeld Rips Iran on Afghanistan
By Matt Kelley
Associated Press Writer
Sunday, February 3, 2002; 11:15 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A16337-2002Feb3?language=printer
WASHINGTON -- Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld on Sunday accused Iran of letting some Taliban and al-Qaida members escape from Afghanistan.
"There isn't any doubt in my mind that the porous border between Iran and Afghanistan has been used for al-Qaida and Taliban to move into Iran and find refuge," he said.
Rumsfeld also said the United States "has any number of reports" that Iran has been contributing to instability inside Afghanistan by arming various Afghan factions. President Bush last week called Iran, Iraq and North Korea an "axis of evil" countries that might give terrorist groups chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said Iran had helped with international conferences putting together an interim Afghan government and providing financial aid to rebuild the country. But Powell said Iranian elements were trying to gain "undue influence" in western Afghanistan and said Iran continued to work to improve its ballistic missiles and seek nuclear weapons capabilities.
Iranian officials have denounced Bush's comments and denied giving any help to the Taliban or Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network. Iran's government had opposed the Taliban regime in neighboring Afghanistan before the Taliban's collapse late last year.
"We hated each other and we never had any commonalities," the head of Iran's powerful Guardian Council, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, said Friday.
Part of the reason was that until the Sept. 11 attacks, the Taliban regime was backed by Pakistan, a regional rival of Iran. Pakistan has strongly supported the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, and Rumsfeld on Sunday criticized Iran for not taking similar actions.
"The Iranians have not done what the Pakistan government has done - put troops along the border to prevent terrorists from escaping out of Afghanistan into their country," Rumsfeld said, acknowledging that some terrorist fighters probably have slipped into Pakistan despite the blockade.
"We have any number of reports that Iran has been permissive and allowed transit through their country of al-Qaida," the secretary said on ABC's "This Week."
Asked if the United States planned any response to Iran's actions, Rumsfeld said, "We don't announce things we're going to do before we do them."
Bush warned Iranian officials in January not to harbor al-Qaida fighters and not to try to destabilize Afghanistan's new government. If the warning were ignored, Bush said the United States would deal with Iran "in diplomatic ways, initially."
The president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said the United States also was concerned about possible "Iranian attempts to surreptitiously influence Afghan politics at a very delicate time."
The relationship between those neighbors, she said on "Fox News Sunday" "should be above board, it should be transparent."
-------- iraq
War on Terror Should Not Include Iraq, Russia Tells U.S.
February 3, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/news-arms-conference.html
MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) - Russia laid bare its differences with the United States over the war on terrorism on Sunday, challenging President Bush's attack on the ``axis of evil'' and accusing the West of double standards.
The cracks emerged at a security conference in Munich over the weekend as Washington, ratcheting up its rhetoric against Iraq and Iran, signaled it could take pre-emptive action.
U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the meeting Saturday that countries tolerating terrorism would be held to account and referred to the State of the Union address last week in which Bush described Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an ``axis of evil'' seeking weapons of mass destruction.
But Russia, which has better relations with all three, insists the U.S.-led campaign against terrorism in Afghanistan must not be expanded to other countries and has been increasingly irritated by the American saber-rattling.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, in a blunt rebuff, told Wolfowitz and the other delegates Sunday there was no evidence that Iran had connections with terrorist organizations.
And he said Russia had its own list of ``rogue states,'' naming U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, which Moscow says helps fund Chechen separatists fighting its own troops: ``Not many people in the West like the fact that we have some commercial ties with the countries which you describe as rogue states,'' Ivanov said.
``Well, we don't like ... some of your allies like Saudi Arabia or Gulf states who give finance to terrorist organizations.''
A Russian deal to build Iran a nuclear power station has been a regular target of criticism from Washington.
``DOUBLE STANDARDS''
Ivanov also accused the West of ``double standards'' for failing to condemn the Chechens as ``terrorists'' with the same vigor as they pursue Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network.
He warned that disagreements over who was counted a terrorist could undermine the U.S.-led coalition Russia has joined against the Islamists that the United States blames for the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
``What is our greatest concern today is the existence till the present time of double political standards with regard to separatism, religious extremism and fanaticism,'' Ivanov said.
Analysts say some U.S. policymakers, notably the hawkish Wolfowitz, may want to exploit the political momentum at home generated by outrage over the attacks to strike a decisive blow against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
But Wolfowitz told reporters Saturday that his comments did not mean the United States was about to strike Iraq.
The security conference came ahead of a meeting in Rome on Monday between NATO allies and Russia to discuss terrorism.
The 19 countries of the alliance -- spurred by Moscow's help in the war on terrorism, especially in providing intelligence -- agreed in December to establish a forum ``at 20'' in which Russia could have a full say in some security issues.
But with Bush's taking the war on terrorism to Afghanistan virtually alone, doubts about NATO's continued relevance since the collapse of the Soviet Union are being voiced again.
NATO Secretary General George Robertson, in a now familiar refrain, argued that the Western defense alliance still had a central role in dealing with the new, post-Cold War threats.
``Even superpowers need allies and coalitions to provide bases, fuel, airspace and forces. And they need mechanisms and experience to integrate these forces into a single coherent military capability,'' he told the Munich conference.
However, he said NATO must evolve, and one of the biggest challenges was the modernization of European and Canadian forces to ensure a fair sharing of the burden with the United States.
APPEAL FOR CASH
Appealing to European finance ministers, Robertson noted that Europe struggled to maintain its 50,000 peacekeeping troops in the Balkans and said hardly any country could deploy effective forces in significant numbers beyond its borders.
``American critics of Europe's military incapability are right,'' he said. ``So if we are to ensure that the United States moves neither toward unilateralism or isolationism, all the non-U.S. allies -- Europeans and Canadians -- must show a new willingness to develop effective crisis management capability.''
The NATO chief also urged Washington to ease ``unnecessary restrictions'' on foreigners acquiring American technology or face problems forming military coalitions with European forces.
--------
Saudi: We May Not Support Iraq Attack
February 3, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Saudi.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Saudi Arabia's former intelligence chief suggested Sunday that his country might not support U.S. military attacks against Iraq even if Saddam Hussein were found to be developing a nuclear weapon.
Prince Turki al-Faisal was asked whether Saudi Arabia would allow the United States to stage military action from Saudi Arabia or would support such an endeavor if the United States determined that the Iraqi president was making progress toward acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
Turki, a member of the ruling Saudi royal family did not respond directly, but said covert operations in support of those in Iraq who want to unseat Hussein would be more effective. He said the Saudi secret service, which he led from 1977 until August, had proposed that approach since the Persian Gulf War.
``Any change in Iraq with the Iraqi regime and toppling of Saddam Hussein must come from inside Iraq,'' Turki said on NBC's ``Meet the Press.''
``If you send invasion forces from outside, you will only rally people to Saddam Hussein,'' said Turki, who stepped down in August from the Saudi secret service he had led since 1977.
Turki said the Saudis had evidence that Hussein had for years been trying to buy the ingredients for -- and ways to develop -- nuclear weapons. Iraq has barred U.N. weapons inspectors for over three years.
The Saudi royal family is balancing its long, beneficial alliance with Washington against its fear of being overthrown by Islamic militants who oppose the basing of ``infidel'' U.S. troops in the land of their religion's holiest shrines.
The relationship has been tested by the Sept. 11 attacks. American investigators said 15 of 19 terrorist hijackers were Saudis, and the suspected mastermind is the Saudi-born exile Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida network.
Since the attacks, U.S. officials have publicly praised Saudi cooperation, but the kingdom has come under private criticism for allegedly not providing sufficient support.
Turki said the Saudi people ``totally condemned and rejected'' the attacks and are confused by the mixed messages.
-------- israel / palestine
Women volunteer for attacks
By Inigo Gilmore
LONDON SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
February 3, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020203-77521691.htm
RAMALLAH, West Bank - Dozens of Palestinian women have begun volunteering for military operations against Israel after the first female Palestinian "martyr" of the intifada, or uprising, blew herself up in Jerusalem last week. Wafa'a Idris, 28, a Palestinian medical assistant, killed an Israeli pensioner and wounded more than 100 others last Sunday when she detonated a bomb she was carrying in one of Jerusalem's busiest streets.
Radical Palestinian Islamist groups have since reported a surge of requests from other women keen to take part in military operations against Israel. Until last week, Palestinian women had played only supporting roles in military and terrorist operations, though the Koran explicitly states that jihad, or holy war, can be carried out by women as well as men. Last week's suicide bombing appears to have ended a social taboo, and even the most conservative Islamist groups have come to appreciate the propaganda benefits of female recruits.
Idris' attack was carried out in the name of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a group affiliated with Yasser Arafat's moderate Fatah faction.
At her local Fatah headquarters, an official said: "There is no doubt that this is a turning point. It has given women a burst of enthusiasm to join the fight, and many are now volunteering to carry out attacks."
The spiritual leader of the Islamic Hamas militant group, Sheik Ahmad Yassin, told a London-based Arab-language newspaper that "in this phase (of the uprising), the participation of women is not needed in martyr operations, like men," Agence France-Presse reported.
"We can't meet the growing demands of young men who wish to carry out martyr operation," the blind and ailing 65-year-old Muslim cleric told the Asharq al-Awsat daily yesterday.
However, he added that once the current 16-month-old uprising enters its "decisive phase, everyone will participate without exception," and that "women form the second line of defense in the resistance to the occupation."
Sheik Yassin added that if a Hamas woman wanted to carry out an attack she "must be accompanied by a man," such as a relative under Islamic precepts, "if the operation requires an absence of more than a day and a night."
Another Hamas leader, Sheik Hassan Yusef, told Agence France-Presse on Monday that "the Prophet Mohammed always defended women's right to jihad."] According to the Koran, on Judgment Day, a shahid, or martyr, of either sex will face no reckoning and will be guided into Paradise by a beautiful nymph. Some Muslim clerics also preach that a martyr will be looked after by 72 houris, the beautiful virgins of Paradise. The promised bliss has no sexual connotations, many clerics say. Women who put themselves forward to become martyrs say they would be content with being in Paradise and expect no specific rewards.
The changed mood has caused chaos at military and police checkpoints. Women have rarely, if ever, been searched in the past. But at Kalandia checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah, soldiers have been attempting to cope with the new threat.
--------
Israel Attacks Naval Base; Crowds Rally for Arafat
February 3, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/03/international/middleeast/03GAZA.html
JERUSALEM, Feb. 2 (AP) - Israeli helicopters fired missiles at a Palestinian naval base in the Gaza Strip today, in what the army said was retaliation for mortar shells and gunfire directed at a Jewish settlement and military outpost.
In both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, thousands of Palestinians rallied in support of Yasir Arafat, who has been confined to the West Bank town of Ramallah for the last two months.
Even as the violence continued, the speaker of the Palestinian parliament, Ahmed Qurei, met with the Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, for two hours in New York late Friday.
Mr. Qurei was one of three senior Palestinian officials who met with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Wednesday, Palestinian officials said. It was Mr. Sharon's first meeting with a top-level Palestinian delegation since he became prime minister a year ago.
Speaking with reporters in New York this afternoon, Mr. Peres said he believed that the Palestinians wanted a cease-fire as the means to a political solution, and were "ready to begin" by dismantling violent groups associated with the Palestinian Authority, and exerting control by a single entity. If that happens, he said, each side could recognize the other's right to statehood, and detailed negotiations could follow on borders and the issue of Jerusalem.
"While we don't negotiate under fire, clearly we will negotiate to stop fire, and in order to stop fire, we have to have some political water," Mr. Peres said in sketching the outline of the talks while declining to offer details. He added that "we have drafts; we don't have yet a real agreement," and that "the real agreement will come" once there is a cease-fire.
He emphasized that the Israeli government had not approved even that much, and that Mr. Sharon might express a different view to President Bush when he visits Washington next week.] Mr. Arafat, speaking to reporters in 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.
Before daybreak today, Israeli helicopters fired missiles at a Palestinian naval base near Deir el Balah in the central Gaza Strip. No one was wounded 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 Mr. Sharon. "To the garbage dump of history," the coffin read on one side.
At a rally in the West Bank town of Nablus, Mr. 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," he said, his voice played over a loudspeaker. "The occupation has to end for there to be peace between us and them."
Also today, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a radical faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, announced that it was rescinding its contacts and activities with the P.L.O. in protest over the continued detention of its leader, Ahmed Saadat.
Mr. Saadat was arrested several weeks ago by the Palestinian Authority for questioning in the killing last year of an Israeli cabinet minister. The Popular Front claimed responsibility for the shooting.
Arafat Voices Hopes
Yasir Arafat, describing the Palestinian vision, expressed the hope of a peace with Israel "between two equals," in an article on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times today [Week in Review, page 13.]
He also attacked Prime Minister Sharon, saying recent Israeli attacks "do little to move the peace process forward."
-------- landmines
Danger Looms in Collecting a War's Explosive Residue
U.S. Bombings Add to Task of Clearing Mines, Ordnance
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, February 3, 2002; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14836-2002Feb2?language=printer
HERAT, Afghanistan, Feb. 2 -- The steel carnage of war lay before Sean Moorhouse, the twisted metal and moonscape craters left by a U.S. bombing run. Littering the scene were explosives of every lethal form -- bombs, grenades, artillery shells, rockets -- that were scattered when the Americans hit a Taliban munitions camp.
"Don't kick anything," he advised.
For Moorhouse, 34, a bomb disposal expert working for the U.N. World Food Program, the work has just begun. As the war in Afghanistan subsides, the job of cleaning up its explosive residue looms huge.
Afghanistan is littered with an estimated 10 million land mines, the product of 23 years of war. And that was before U.S. planes dropped thousands of pounds of explosives in four months of bombardment after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
The explosives included cluster bombs, each of which scatters 202 smaller bombs. When they hit, they are designed to rain incendiary fire and armor-piercing shrapnel over a wide area.
"Our problem is not the ones that worked," said Moorhouse. "It's the ones that didn't." The bombs that failed to explode on impact are now lying in wait, a daily danger to curious children, wandering shepherds and refugees who stumble across them.
Moorhouse said the problem is greater than the Pentagon acknowledges. The Pentagon contends the "failure" rate of cluster bombs -- those that do not explode -- is 5 percent to 7 percent. Moorhouse calculates the failure rate is 14 percent to 19 percent, leaving as many as 38 live "bomblets" on the ground from each dropped cluster bomb.
He also says some bombs missed their targets. Comparing the target coordinates provided by the U.S. military with where the bombs fell shows "the accuracy of the U.S. figures is pretty doubtful," differing by as much as four miles, he said.
Bashir Ahmad, 25, lives in a crowded warren of mud-brick homes about a mile from a military camp on the outskirts of Herat, and almost as close to a second camp. He was on his roof, feeding his pet pigeons and chatting with his father and a neighbor, when a U.S. plane passed overhead. The sky blossomed with mustard-colored canisters floating from tiny parachutes, he said.
Suddenly, his neighborhood was an inferno of shrapnel and fire. Pieces of the cluster bombs ripped through his back, arms, legs and side. As he stumbled from the high-walled homes, he saw the remains of the other two men.
"I know the Americans were aiming at the army camps," said Ahmad, whose home was destroyed and who lost partial use of an arm. "What is the use of being angry?"
When the smoke cleared, the area was littered with dozens of the canisters. Nabi Bullah, 60, was eager to clear the debris. "I didn't know what they were," he said. He picked up a dozen canisters and threw them into the muddy canal that runs through the neighborhood. He now knows he is lucky to be alive.
"They are usually pretty sensitive," Moorhouse said of the cluster bomb canisters, which are designed to send fragments through seven inches of steel. "They can go off if they are in the rubble and you just move a brick, or if you use a radio in the area."
The cluster bombs and other unexploded ordnance have set back the painstaking efforts to remove the land mines that have been planted in Afghanistan since the Soviet invasion in 1979.
"I used to be able to send my teams" to outlying provinces to remove mines, said Haji Siddiqui, manager of the regional mine action committee, which has more than 200 disposal experts on the job. "Now we are too busy here in Herat. We can't even get to the other areas."
Mine removal started in 1989, but in western Afghanistan, only about one-fourth of the mined areas have been cleared. "At this rate, it will take us 30 to 35 years," said Mulajan, an official of Afghanistan's Mine Control Planning Agency.
The dangers are compounded by people moving around because of the war.
"There are lots of refugees who are starting to come back," said Mohammad Farhad, who is part of a program to educate Afghans about the dangers. "They don't know where the dangerous areas are."
And there are new risks, Moorhouse said. His experts spent 14 days digging out an unexploded 2,000-pound bomb -- one of the larger U.S. weapons -- that was buried near a residential area.
"If it had blown up, a lot of people would have been killed," he said. They defused it and loaded it onto Moorhouse's truck to take it to a remote area for detonation. "Strangely, there weren't many volunteers to ride with me."
Moorhouse used to work as a broker at the New York Stock Exchange, which he said "was not very rewarding to me. It is all about money."
A British national who served as an intelligence officer in Rwanda, he signed up with a relief agency working on mine removal, and has worked in Mozambique and Kosovo for the Swiss Federation for Mine Action. He has been in Afghanistan for two months, under contract with the U.N. program.
Moorhouse is passionate about his job, and has been fascinated with explosives since boyhood. As he walked carefully through the debris of the U.S. airstrike on a Taliban munitions dump, he rattled off the names of the armaments on the ground, a catalogue of contributors to Afghanistan's misery.
"That's an 82-millimeter Russian artillery shell. There's a Pakistani-made mortar. That one's a Chinese copy of a Russian grenade. That's from Serbia. Those rocket-propelled grenades -- very unstable.
"Oh, look," he said, picking his way carefully into a crater. "It's an Iranian copy of an American Claymore mine." He looked it over carefully, disappointed that he could not add it to his collection. "The detonators are still armed," he said.
U.N. agencies are involved in this work because the explosives must be removed before the relief workers can do their jobs. Even pinpoint strikes such as the demolition of a Taliban munitions dump near Herat become a civilian problem, because the bombardment tossed the munitions into surrounding residential areas.
The disposal experts usually disarm mines and larger bombs, but the cluster bombs are too sensitive, so they pack sandbags around them and detonate them. There have been no casualties among the teams working on disposal since the U.S.-led war began, Moorhouse said. But "there's a certain inevitability about casualties," he said. "People get blase. They say, 'I've done this a million times,' and get careless."
But the work carries rewards, said Moorhouse.
"We've found munitions on roofs, in gardens, all over," he said. "I've taken things off of houses, and then sat with the family to have tea while they moved their belongings back in. There's an immediate sense of satisfaction."
-------- nato
Robertson says NATO still relevant but work to do
Sunday February 3, 9:07 PM
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-87525.html
MUNICH, Germany - NATO Secretary General George Robertson mounted a robust defence of the 19-nation alliance's relevance on Sunday, but warned European nations that they must build their military capability to avert U.S. unilateralism.
Robertson, speaking at a security conference in the German city of Munich, also urged Washington to share defence technology with its European allies -- or face a choice between acting alone or not acting at all.
Doubts about the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation's usefulness first surfaced with the collapse of the alliance's arch-foe, the Soviet Union.
With the United State's decision to take the war on terrorism to Afghanistan virtually alone, commentators have again started to argue that NATO is being marginalised and that its future is in doubt.
U.S. Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the security conference on Saturday that NATO needed a revamp to face the new challenges thrown up by the September 11 hijacked airliner attacks on America.
But Robertson, in a now familiar refrain, argued that NATO has a central role in dealing with the new threats which were highlighted by the suicide attacks on New York and Washington, which left more than 3,000 people dead.
"The critics were wrong after the Cold War and the Gulf War," he told defence heads and experts from 43 countries. "They are wrong now. NATO is not only a part of the campaign against terrorism -- it is an essential part."
He said the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan reinforced the fact that modern military operation cannot be undertaken by a single country.
"Even superpowers need allies and coalitions to provide bases, fuel, airspace and forces. And they need mechanisms and experience to integrate these forces into a single coherent military capability," he said
NATO MUST EVOLVE
However, he said NATO must evolve to safeguard its relevance, and one of the biggest challenges was the modernisation of European and Canadian forces to ensure a fair sharing of the security burden.
Appealing to European finance ministers, Robertson noted that Europe struggles to maintain its 50,000 peacekeeping troops in the Balkans and said hardly any country could deploy effective forces in significant numbers beyond its borders.
"American critics of Europe's military incapability are right," he said. "So if we are to ensure that the United States moves neither towards unilateralism or isolationism, all the non-U.S. allies -- Europeans and Canadians -- must show a new willingness to develop effective crisis management capability."
The NATO chief also called on Washington to help European defence modernisation by easing "unnecessary restrictions" on technology transfer and industrial cooperation.
Without this, interoperability within NATO or within coalitions would become impossible.
"The gap between American forces on the one hand and European and Canadian forces on the other will simply be unbridgeable," he said. "And for Washington, the choice could become: act alone or not at all, and that isn't really a choice at all."
-------- philippines
We Will Do The Fighting
Sunday, February 3, 2002; Page B01
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11809-2002Feb1?language=printer
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of the Philippines has allowed U.S. forces to reenter her country for six months to help train the Philippine military in its fight against the terrorist group Abu Sayyaf, a band of Muslim rebels that allegedly has ties to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Arroyo says, however, that she told President Bush that six months is the limit for the training, which began Thursday. The American presence is controversial; a decade ago, U.S. troops withdrew from bases there after Philippine voters approved a referendum asking them to leave. Washington Post-Newsweek's Lally Weymouth interviewed Arroyo, 54, on Friday in New York, where she was attending the World Economic Forum.
Excerpts:
Is terrorism a threat to your region?
In our region there are terrorist cells all over.When we met at ASEAN [the Association of Southeast Asian Nations] and at APEC [the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum], Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines decided we would help one another fight terrorism and other transnational crimes that occur in our common seas with joint patrols. We decided to do interdictions and exchange intelligence information.
It has worked out very well. When Nur Misuari, leader of the Moro National Liberation Front [known as the MNLF], had his short-lived rebellion in the Philippines in November and then escaped to Malaysia, he didn't find a safe haven. He was put in jail. They waited for us to pick him up and bring him back home for a trial.
Recently, Indonesia's President Megawati [Sukarnoputri] has been complaining about arms being smuggled into Indonesia from her neighbors. We were able recently to capture an Indonesian who had been shipping explosives out of our southernmost city into Indonesia. So we've been helping one another. Megawati has recommended that we should also include Singapore and Thailand in our cooperation.
How active has al Qaeda been in the Philippines?
We have evidence of their active presence in the Philippines up until 1995, when we came across evidence about the perpetrators of the [1993] World Trade Center bombing. We were able to help the U.S. convict them.
Are you talking about the arrest of Ramzi Yousef in 1995? [He was apprehended in Pakistan after fleeing Manila, the Philippine capital, and is now serving a life sentence for masterminding the World Trade Center bombing.]
Yes, and Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law, who was living in the Philippines until 1995.They had front organizations here but after we assisted the U.S. in convicting the World Trade Center bombers, bin Laden's brother-in-law left and those organizations closed up shop. Some of the literature about their activities said they did not find the Philippines a hospitable place for international terrorism.
Long before Sept. 11, we were already fighting terrorists. We have been able to confine them to one small island. After Sept. 11, we felt that terrorism should not spread.That is why I was one of the first to respond. To be successful against the terrorists in the Southwest Philippines, we have American military trainers there to improve the capability of our forces to fight terrorists.
Isn't the allegation that Abu Sayyaf has links with al Qaeda?
I have just told you that our evidence goes up to 1995.
So you're saying that it doesn't have any links?
I am not saying that. I am saying that the evidence we have is up to 1995.
How long do you think U.S. troops should stay on the ground?
We have an agreement. They will stay six months.
I know that you have encountered some opposition.
Some, but the latest survey says 83 percent of our people approve.
So you don't feel any pressure from the opposition?
Now, let me talk about the opposition. I called a meeting of the National Security Council, including opposition leaders, and they supported my position.
Here we have read that the opposition is giving you a hard time.
I am not having a hard time. It's not opposition to my administration but to the American presence in the Philippines.
President Bush, in his State of the Union address, mentioned that al Qaeda would be fought in countries such as Yemen, Somalia and the Philippines.
Terrorism is not a franchise of al Qaeda alone. That is the essence of the operational agreement between my country, Malaysia and Indonesia.
What did you think about the president's idea about moving against Iraq and Iran?
I can see that President Bush has found his mission. He feels that his destiny is to wage a successful war against terrorism, which has reared its ugly head and has made life difficult for many countries.I can say this because we have suffered in the Southwest Philippines and where you have terrorism, it is difficult to fight poverty.
You mean poverty is the breeding ground?
Where you have poverty, it's easier for the evil of terrorism to spread.
Do you need both a military and a political approach?
Yes, because terrorism and poverty are linked. We have to look at new ways poverty can be fought -- not the old traditional massive handouts. I like to call it a hand up for the self-reliant. The beneficiaries must be accountable. In the Philippines, we have tried our best to be self-reliant. That's why we are going to be doing the fighting. As for the economy, we were able to achieve [a] 3.7 percent [growth in] GNP [gross national product] in a sea of recessions and 3.4 percent in GDP [gross domestic product], even though we lost our export markets. We achieved this very healthy growth rate because we built up our domestic market. We got the budget deficit under control and were able to supply domestic demand to make up for the loss in the export markets.
Terrorism has been going on for a long time in the south.
The MNLF rebellion was settled in 1996 with a peace agreement. The MILF [Moro Islamic Liberation Front] is there, but we are having very successful peace talks. The MILF has publicly distanced itself from bin Laden and al Qaeda. I think that is the fruit of our interfaith dialogue. The terrorists want to make this a religious war, but we want to foster religious understanding.
They want to make it a religious war between the Christians and the Muslims in the south?
They are trying to bill it that way, but we are not fighting Muslims. We are not fighting Islam. We are fighting terrorism. On the one hand we fight terrorism, and on the other we seek to understand Islam and the Islamic people.
What do you think that you can achieve with these U.S. military trainers in six months? Can you defeat the terrorists, or merely put pressure on them?
The terms of the training order are very clear.They will stay six months and enhance the capability of our soldiers to fight terrorism with training, intelligence and equipment from the U.S.
How do you feel about President Bush saying he will extend the fight to North Korea although there is no evidence that it was involved in the Sept. 11 attack?
He has evidence that I don't have. I work with him. When the U.N. called for a coalition to fight terror in Afghanistan, we let our airspace be used. We let our bases be used.
How would you feel if the U.S. goes ahead and attacks Iraq? Would you support us?
It hasn't happened yet. I don't want to pass judgment on hypothetical situations.
Do you find the United States a new country after Sept. 11?
Oh, yes. It is a new country.
Do you talk to President Bush often?
The last time we talked, I reiterated that the U.S. troops must not engage in combat [in the Philippines]. We have to keep pushing. After the military victory, this coalition might drift apart. But we should keep it together and form a world coalition against poverty.
----
Innocent Muslims killed as Bush allies 'crusade'
Shootings and torture by security forces are spreading fear in the Philippines, the new flashpoint in the US war.
Film-makers Jonathan Miller and Rob Lemkin report
Sunday February 3, 2002
The Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,644045,00.html
Syed Kaing Mabbul was a coconut farmer on the exquisitely beautiful island of Basilan in the southern Philippines, the hottest new target in President George W. Bush's global war on terrorism.
His misfortune, his mother told us, is that he has the same name as a commander of the Abu Sayyaf, a bloodthirsty group of Islamic extremists financed by robbery, piracy, ransom and - in the past, at least - by Osama bin Laden.
About 150 Americans, the advance party of a force of about 650, are already in the southern Philippines for a six-month 'military' exercise that began formally last Thursday. Their task is to train Filipino soldiers how better to fight Abu Sayyaf, and to rescue kidnapped missionaries Martin and Gracia Burnham of Wichita, Kansas, who have been in captivity for eight months.
Syed fled the island last May, and has been living in a lean-to shack on the outskirts of Zamboanga City, on the island of Mindanao, about 15 miles north of Basilan across a turquoise sea.
Local Muslims took us to meet Syed's mother, Azirah Mabhul. She told us he had been betrayed to the army by seven fellow Muslims who had split a bounty of a million pesos (about £14,000).
'They picked up my son at 8am,' she told us. 'They brought him to Malagutay Brigade Camp, blindfolded him, beat him, stripped him, then hung him upside down for eight hours. They inserted ground-up chilli paste into his rectum to force him to confess to belonging to Abu Sayyaf.'
Azirah said that when she finally located her son, he still couldn't sit down. 'Mum,' he said, 'I just can't take the pain any more.'
In mid-December, Syed Kaing Mabbul was taken, with 79 other terrorist suspects, to a high security jail in the capital, Manila. He hasn't been heard from since.
It was impossible to confirm his story, but Muslim community leaders vouched for his innocence. His case is one of many accounts of harassment, indiscriminate arrest, disappearances, routine torture and killing now producing growing concern over 'gross and rampant human rights violations' against Muslim civilians.
Human rights leaders point the finger at the America's new ally in its global war, the Philippine armed forces. Since 11 September, they say, incidents of abuse have grown, and there is a palpable climate of fear.
'We are the ones who are living in terror,' said the imam of a mosque in a squalid Muslim ghetto on the edge of Zamboanga City. 'This war against terror is just the latest campaign in a 400-year crusade against Islam,' he said, echoing the convictions of the wider Islamic world.
Although the Philippines' five million Muslims comprise a minority in Asia's only Roman Catholic country, they no longer feel on the fringe of the global Islamic community.
Syed's case was just one 'among hundreds,' said Zenaida Sabaani-Lawi, director of Murid, a Muslim organisation which provides micro-finance to local women. 'There have been killings too. It's been getting worse since 11 September. It's as if they now have a licence,' she said. 'This is state terror.'
-------- propaganda wars
Arab TV disowns Osama interview
By Tarek al-Issawi
ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 3, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020203-17119558.htm
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - An influential Arab television station said yesterday that it never aired an October interview with Osama bin Laden because the interview was conducted under duress and the questions were dictated to its correspondent.
The statement from Al Jazeera was the latest round in a rift between the satellite outfit and CNN over the bin Laden interview. Al Jazeera objected when CNN began airing the video Thursday, and a CNN official fired back, saying the cable network had done nothing illegal and Al Jazeera should explain why it hadn't made the tape public in the first place. That explanation came yesterday in a statement faxed from the Qatar-based station to the Associated Press. CNN spokeswoman Megan Mahoney declined to comment on the Al Jazeera statement.
Last fall, members of bin Laden's al Qaeda group contacted CNN and Al Jazeera separately and suggested submitting a set of written questions to bin Laden, Al Jazeera's statement said. The stations coordinated among themselves, with CNN submitting six questions and Al Jazeera submitting 23, the statement said.
Ten days later, it said, Al Jazeera's correspondent then in Kabul, Tayseer Allouni, was told he must cover an important event. He was blindfolded and taken by armed men to interview bin Laden. "The correspondent received a list of questions that were imposed on him, and only a few of them were the ones CNN and Al Jazeera submitted," the statement said. "The interview, in which Allouni was subjected to intense psychological pressure, made it difficult to accomplish it professionally." The statement said Mr. Allouni was told to air the interview in full or he would be harassed.
Al Jazeera received the interview Oct. 21 via satellite in its offices in Kabul, the statement said. Station officials decided not to air it "since the circumstances under which it was conducted did not represent the minimum limit of objectivity and professionalism." Al Jazeera's statement expressed "bewilderment" at CNN's position. It said CNN obtained the tape in an "unknown way and aired it without Al Jazeera's approval and without explaining the circumstances of the interview."
The Qatar-based station did not confirm CNN reports that it had severed a cooperation agreement between the two media outlets. However, it said further discussions with CNN were needed. During the interview, bin Laden said the U.S. war on terrorism was leading the American people "into an unbearable hell and a choking life." He spoke without emotion as he told the interviewer that killing innocent civilians "is permissible in Islamic law." On Friday, CNN said it received the 60-minute interview through unspecified unofficial channels. Chief News Executive Eason Jordan said that "once the tape came into our hands, it would have been journalistically irresponsible to ignore it."
Initially, Al Jazeera had denied that the interview existed. But last month, its editor in chief, Ibrahim Helal, said he had several videos of bin Laden, possibly including a taped interview, that were not broadcast because they were deemed not newsworthy or of poor technical quality.
U.S. government and intelligence officials apparently knew of the interview soon after it was completed. CNN said the U.S. government had a copy and British Prime Minister Tony Blair quoted the interview in a speech in November.
-------- us
US eyes Russian base in Vietnam, starts talks with former foe Hanoi
Saturday February 2, 2:38 PM
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020202/1/2eiw7.html
Washington has begun negotiations with former foe Hanoi for access to a key Soviet Cold War naval base on Vietnam's central coast after the Russian lease expires in 2004, US officials said here.
The US military is seeking an "arrangement" that will allow it to use the base at Cam Ranh Bay for port calls and support for its operations in southeast Asia, Pacific commander Admiral Dennis Blair told reporters after talks here Saturday with Vietnamese officials.
But Washington is not looking to set up a permanent base here or anywhere else in southeast Asia, he insisted.
Viewed as one of the best natural harbours in the region, the Cam Ranh Bay base was ironically originally built by the Americans but lost to the then Soviet Union following the US humiliation in the Vietnam War.
Last year a cash-strapped Moscow announced that it would give up the base when its 25-year lease runs out in 2004 as it can no longer afford it.
"The status of Cam Ranh Bay has obviously now changed with the end of the Russian lease," said Blair.
"We are looking for places for our ships to visit. We are looking for various arrangements to suit our needs in this region ... It is important to us in this area of the world."
The launch of joint military operations with the Philippines Thursday against Abu Sayyaf guerrillas has prompted many analysts to point to the gaping lack of US facilities in southeast Asia since Washington closed its Philippine bases in 1992.
But Blair insisted Washington had "no desire to have more permanent bases in the region."
"What we seek is a flexible set of arrangements so we can cooperate with countries in the region and get the job done when the necessity is there."
Blair said he had discussed access to Cam Ranh Bay with "several" top Vietnamese officials although the negotiations were still in their "early stages."
On Friday he met Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, Foreign Minister Nguyen Dy Nien and Defence Minister Phan Van Tra.
US ambassador Raymond Burghardt said one possible arrangement would be for Vietnam to declare Cam Ranh Bay open to port calls by foreign warships, as it has already done with the ports of Haiphong and Ho Chi Minh City.
That arrangement would not be exclusive to the United States but would allow port calls by its warships.
"Vietnam has taken the position that its ports are open to ship visits on a multilateral basis," said Burghardt.
"Vietnam will have to decide whether to open Cam Ranh Bay to ship visits. If it is open to ship visits, it will be on the same basis as the two exisiting ports."
Having been at war with most countries in the region at some time or another over the past 60 years, Vietnam has been careful during its economic opening of the past decade to pursue relations with all countries equally.
In recent years, it has welcomed port calls by warships from an array of former foes, including most recently China with whom it fought a brief but bloody border war in 1979.
A key US military installation during the Vietnam War, Cam Ranh Bay became a key strategic pawn of the Cold War.
In its heyday in the early 1980s before Mikhail Gorbachev cut back Moscow's global role, the base served as a Soviet listening post covering most of the Far East and as a harbour for the Soviet nuclear fleet, according to intelligence sources.
But in recent years it has received few port calls from Russian ships and its intelligence role has greatly diminished, analysts said.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS
Prisoners of War defined,
as excerpted from Article 4 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War:
Sunday, February 3, 2002; Page B04
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11817-2002Feb1.html
A. Prisoners of war . . . are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have fallen into the power of the enemy:
1. Members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict as well as members of militias or volunteer corps forming part of such armed forces.
2. Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfill the following conditions:
(a) That of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
(b) That of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;
(c) That of carrying arms openly;
(d) That of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war. #
3. Members of regular armed forces who profess allegiance to a government or an authority not recognized by the Detaining Power.
[So where are these "laws and customs of war" defined? mailto:prop1@prop1.org - et]
----
At Camp X-Ray, a Thawing In the Animosity and Fear
Detainees Get More Comfortable, Talkative in Interrogation
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 3, 2002; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14854-2002Feb2?language=printer
GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, Feb. 2 -- Army Pvt. Mitchell Jeffers says he can't help being shocked by the odd, awkward interruptions in the war on terrorism that he witnesses as he empties the bathroom buckets of the al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners he is guarding at the U.S. naval base here.
"So many of them keep saying, 'Thank you, thank you' all the time," said Jeffers, a military police officer from Fort Hood, Tex. "A lot of them seem to be really glad to be here rather than in a war in Afghanistan."
It is strictly against regulations for military police officers such as Jeffers to reply to the detainees' chitchat. But many of the Army and Marine Corps MPs on duty say they are struck by how the grimness and tension of the first two weeks of detention have lightened subtly. It means some captives are talking more freely in interrogation, too, officers said.
It started about a week ago, when commanders at the prison facility, Camp X-Ray, rewarded the prisoners' generally good behavior by saying they could converse freely among themselves and with their guards. "It's like the Tower of Babel here," an officer said, referring to the myriad languages spoken by the 158 prisoners from 28 countries brought here from Afghanistan.
The soldiers were interviewed within shouting distance of Camp X-Ray, which is carved out of near-wilderness of low, scrubby hills near a junkyard filled with abandoned cars.
Jeffers, a Tennessean, said he knows perfectly well that some captives who engage him in conversation have an agenda. They may be hoping he'll lower his guard or give them some special privilege, he reckons.
But others, especially some of the scores who are between the ages of 18 and 25, appear to be warming up to their captors in recent days, military personnel said.
"Some of the younger ones in particular are loosening up in their interrogation," an officer said. "They're relating to the interpreters who speak their language and seem to be realizing we Americans are not as bad or scary as they thought we were."
Top commanders at the base declined to discuss the progress of the interrogations.
"As long as we're getting information, we're going to ask them questions," said Marine Brig. Gen. Michael R. Lehnert, who runs the detention operation.
He scoffed at critics' speculation that his personnel are mistreating prisoners for information. "There is no torture, no whips, no bright lights, no drugging," he said. "We are a nation of laws."
Holding a two-inch-thick book containing the rules of captivity under the Geneva Conventions, Lehnert said, "We're complying wherever it is possible and practical with the conventions. . . It's a work in progress."
He said he did not know when any new prisoners would be delivered because that decision will be made in Washington.
Drop-offs by military transport jet ended more than a week ago because there was no more space for new arrivals. But Navy Seabees construction crews working almost around the clock in 10-hour shifts have laid concrete and wrapped metal fencing to build 8-by-8-foot enclosures for 162 new prisoners.
Another reason for suspending the caravan of C-141s was that military interrogators had not questioned all 158 arrivals, and commanders wanted them to catch up before bringing in newcomers. Although interrogators lack enough translators for some South Asian dialects, the questioning has sped up since interrogators have a new, more spacious building with private rooms. The cramped, steamy tents where they had done business slowed the process, officers said.
Meanwhile, some military personnel here described tentative progress in the interrogations.
Maryland Army National Guard Sgt. Karen Carr, a library computer specialist from the Eastern Shore, helps keep the master computerized list of the 158 detainees. She said many of them had given false names to interrogators in Afghanistan, but a number have recently admitted their lies to interpeters here.
At times she and her colleagues catch them when visiting their cells and offering to help send postcards to families back home -- that is when discrepancies in the names often emerge. Moreover, she senses a recent thawing in the animosity and fear of many captives.
"They're getting more comfortable," Carr said. "They're 'fessing up, and sometimes they're spilling their guts."
Some U.S. soldiers wonder whether a few prisoners will turn out to be less than the violent fanatics they have been called.
In recent weeks, some camp personnel have said David Hicks, 26, the Australian adventurer and kangaroo hunter captured with the Taliban, was snarling nonstop threats against the guards, saying he would kill an American before he left Cuba.
But today, guards said his rage has abated.
"We haven't had to calm him down at all lately," a guard said. "He knows what he did -- he knows he messed up."
Australian officials said Hicks was cooperative in answering questions posed by interrogators from his country aboard a U.S. military ship in the Arabian Sea a few weeks back.
"The detainees are doing what they're told," Jeffers said. "Yes, they're criminals and terrorists, but they're becoming more used to us every day. I think some of them are not as bad as everybody's thinking."
"Some of them are making clear to us they like the conditions here," he said. "We [U.S. military guards] want to get out our side -- we're not abusing these people."
----
Romania, Italy team up in bid to bust Mafia ring
Briefly
Washington Times
February 3, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020203-11641024.htm
BUCHAREST, Romania - Italy and Romania have started a joint effort to stem the increasing activities of the Italian Mafia in the Eastern European country, Interpol said Thursday.
"We have proof that Cosa Nostra and others have conducted business in Romania," Paolo Sartori, Interpol's liaison officer in Romania, told Pro-TV, referring to the notorious Sicilian crime syndicate.
Romanian Police Chief Mihai Stoica said police had seized documents from several companies accused of having links to or belonging to the Sicilian Mafia.
Ukraine destroys 30,000 illegal CDs
KIEV - Ukraine bulldozed some 30,000 pirated CDs on Friday in a move aimed at showing Washington it is serious about stamping out copyright violations on music productions and escaping trade sanctions imposed last week.
"The operation is intended to show that we are becoming a civilized society," the head of the Kiev tax administration, Mikola Gordienko, told Agence France-Presse. The compact discs with a street value of more than $90,000, confiscated in police raids in the Kiev region early last year, were crushed by bulldozers at a clearing on the outskirts of the city.
U.S. officials regard Ukraine as the capital of music piracy in Europe, exporting as many as 40 million illegally produced CDs per year, although Kiev contests the figure.
Austria's finest busted for calendar strip
VIENNA, Austria - A group of Austrian policemen who posed armed and naked for a calendar have been barred from the force's elite unit as punishment, a police spokesman said Thursday.
Some 350,000 of the calendars have been printed, showing Austria's long arm of the law in the raw, with guns, handcuffs or nightsticks, and superimposed over photos of scantily clad women.
The 10 officers were either members of, or looking to join, Cobra, an elite unit whose tasks include providing security for important persons visiting Austria.
"This would mean people like the pope," said Interior Ministry spokesman Major Rudold Gollia.
----
Inmates, Families Housed Together in Unusual Experiment
Convicts Are Condemned To a 'Paradise' in Mexico
By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, February 3, 2002; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15119-2002Feb2?language=printer
ISLA MARIA MADRE, Mexico -- Lorena Avila Suarez was 8 years old when she arrived by boat on this tiny Pacific island, coming ashore to be with her father, a convicted murderer.
She grew up among the other inmates and their children in one of the world's most unusual prisons, an island with a church, a bakery and a dance hall where convicts are allowed to serve sentences alongside their family members.
Then she fell in love with a convicted cocaine trafficker. So when her father was released a few years ago, and her mother and three sisters left with him, Avila Suarez stayed behind with her new husband. She still lives here in the prison where she has spent most of her life.
"Sometimes I would rather be on the outside. It is always the same here," said Avila Suarez, 25, nuzzling up to her husband, Jesus Lopez, 33, who has 18 years left to serve. "But when I leave, I would like it to be with him."
Isla Maria is a Mexican government prison experiment in the Pacific Ocean 95 miles south of Mazatlan. Started at the turn of the century as a Mexican version of Alcatraz, where the worst of the worst were condemned to a life of hard labor, it has been transformed into a relative paradise for inmates who have shown a willingness to reform.
Rehabilitation is a bedrock principle of the Mexican judicial system, so much so that neither the death penalty nor life imprisonment is allowed under law. Proponents say Isla Maria is a logical extension of that idea: If prisoners are going to have to return to life in a normal community one day, why not keep them in a prison that simulates a normal community?
There are no cells or bars here. The inmates are called "colonists." They wear no uniforms and live in ordinary housing on streets that look like those in any Mexican town. While navy officers on the perimeter of the 54-square-mile island carry machine guns, the prison guards carry no guns. About 600 children of inmates live in little houses with their parents and attend public schools on pretty, palm-lined streets.
"This prison used to be almost hell. The inmates were treated savagely and humiliated," said the warden, Raul Soto Calderon. Now, he said, "If you didn't know this was a prison, you wouldn't realize it. There is nothing like this in the world."
For one thing, it would be expensive to duplicate.
With an annual budget of $4 million for 1,600 inmates, the government pays about three times as much to handle each prisoner here as it does for those at any other prison. Transportation costs for supplies and people are high. The warden, for instance, recently had to rent a small plane to airlift a prisoner with a severe kidney problem.
Public Security Minister Alejandro Gertz Manero, whose department runs the prison, questions the wisdom of a cash-strapped government running what he calls a "paradise." He would like all Mexican prisons to focus on making criminals pay restitution for their crimes.
Some also question the wisdom of allowing children to grow up in prison. In several other Mexican prisons, children also live alongside their parents, usually their mothers. Although this practice is lauded for keeping families intact, it is also criticized because it means children are raised in a community of criminals, where everything from freedom to food is limited.
"For some children it can be a little damaging," said Oliva Suarez Ilago, Avila Suarez's mother, who now lives on a peach farm in central Mexico. "They see things they shouldn't. They become aggressive and badly spoken."
Avila Suarez, who does not have children, says other parents worry about having to wait for medicine that arrives on a weekly ship. "Some children are exposed to good people on the island who say to them, 'See where I am. Learn from me,' " she said. But other children live among "people who don't want to change."
Yet for some children, living here is far safer than it is in the rough neighborhoods they left behind, and the government white-washed housing is often better, too. "I like it here because I am here with my dad," Maribel Cisneros, 13, said recently as she sat at her desk in a history class. "My dad is here because of drugs."
The inmates clearly like it here.
"When I got here I cried. What beauty!" said Guadalupe Rodriquez Quiroz, a convicted heroin-seller who spent four years in a crowded, violent Tijuana prison before arriving here. There, she said, guards made inmates pay for everything, including use of the bathroom.
A key element of the Isla Maria experiment is to take power away from guards, who have often turned Mexican prisons into sewers of bribery and illegal punishments. Here there are only 36 guards.
Most of the inmates are at Isla Maria on drug convictions; the typical sentence here is 10 years for marijuana trafficking. But there are a few who committed robbery, assault or even murder. And the sight of Luis Oscar Mendez Juarez, who killed a man during a robbery in Mexico City, swinging on a hammock by the ocean can be a bit jarring.
The new warden said he is still weeding out the prison population. He said some of the inmates who have been sent here do not meet the island's current standards. He is in the midst of a major expansion, nearly doubling the inmate population this year to 3,000. He is also planning to order off the island any children over the age of 12.
All inmates have the option of bringing their families, but many spouses and children do not want to forfeit their jobs and routines on the mainland. For some, it is prohibitively expensive to get to Mazatlan, where a navy ship shuttles families to the island. Isla Maria has also been unable to completely shed its reputation for harsh treatment, so it has not been much in demand among the main prison population in Mexico. But word is getting out.
Avila Suarez and her husband share a one-bedroom home with a concrete floor and sparse furnishings: a double bed, a tiny television and a radio. They eat red snapper and other fresh fish caught by inmates. Their two lime-green parrots, Lino and Gustavo, fly freely about the house.
"They have never been caged," Lopez said.
Before being moved here, Lopez spent several years in a Guadalajara jail, where, he said, "you are obliged to be aggressive to stay alive."
"I would be a different person if I had to stay in Guadalajara," Lopez said. There he learned that "you rob or are robbed, you defend yourself or you are beaten. Here, it is so safe you can leave your bike outside for three days and nobody would take it."
Now the chatty Lopez is host of the island radio show, "Window by the Sea." He said people here "are afraid to make mistakes because they will be forced to leave the island."
Warden Soto Calderon said that in the nine months that he has been here, he has transferred 93 trouble-making inmates to mainland prisons. A few people have been punished for trying to ferment corn or rice to make moonshine or for smoking marijuana. Punishment is banishment to a camp on the far side of the island where there is no music, television or family life. In the old days, it used to be splitting rocks in the hot sun.
Suarez Ilago, Avila Suarez's mother, said there were many good things about Isla Maria. Her husband, who killed a man in a street brawl, had no formal schooling when he arrived, but spent his years on the island finishing primary school and learning to work a farm.
She said he now works hard on their little peach farm, no longer drinks and has had no more troubles with the law.
Despite the rehabilitative effect Isla Maria had on her husband, Suarez Ilago said, "I never forgot for a moment that I was in jail." During the decade she spent on the island with her four daughters, she would look out at the endless ocean and see it as invisible bars.
"I feel bad that I brought her to the island and then left her there," she said about her one daughter still in the penal colony. "It was like leaving half of my heart there."
But Avila Suarez said she does not feel like someone left behind. She has a job as a telephone operator, takes occasional vacations and lives what she considers a normal life. She said she misses the little comforts that the mainland provides, like variety of food, the sight of a mountain or a highway, the latest magazines.
But more important to her are the good times, and the lifetime of memories here. Nearly everyone on the island came to her wedding ceremony seven years ago. She was just 18, stepping lightly into marriage and adulthood in a prison dining hall with an inmate band playing salsa.
Researcher Laurie Freeman contributed to this report.
-------- OTHER
-------- imf / world bank / wto
Economic Forum Shifts Its Focus to New Dangers
February 3, 2002
By DAVID E. SANGER
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/03/international/03FORU.html
The world's most powerful policy makers and entrepreneurs, who have in the past used the World Economic Forum to promote the opportunities promised by technology and borderless commerce, seem more obsessed this year with their endless vulnerabilities.
In seminar rooms and in the hallways of the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan this week, the men and women who once trekked to Davos, Switzerland, to talk about how the Internet could revolutionize life in Indian villages have spent much of the last few days discussing more prosaic concerns: Keeping their corporate headquarters secure, their chemical and biological materials out of the wrong hands, and how to best fight terrorism.
While the meals have been opulent - sushi and cocktails at the Four Seasons, followed by endless courses at Le Cirque 2000 - for the chief executives and prime ministers, economists and "media leaders" gathered at the World Economic Forum, the main dish is anxiety.
Gone, too, is any post-Sept. 11 reticence about criticizing the Bush administration's war against terrorism and its charting of the economic rules of the road.
Almost every speaker congratulated the United States on how it has fought the war in Afghanistan. But in the next breath, many European and other leading diplomats say that Mr. Bush's use of the phrase "axis of evil" on Tuesday night, to describe Iraq, Iran and North Korea, made them fearful that a superpower on a roll was now looking for trouble.
The phrase instantly entered the Davos lexicon here and led members of the coalition against terrorism to question whether they had been seduced by the mirage of a new partnership with Washington, only to discover that Mr. Bush planned to run the war his way - if necessary.
The confrontations have been polite, but not exactly subtle. On Friday morning, no sooner had Secretary of State Colin L. Powell finished a brief discourse about dealing decisively with "rogue regimes," than Javier Solana, the secretary general of the council of the European Union and the former secretary general of NATO, told him that his allies do not just want consultation. They want a real vote, he said.
"For me, the coalition is a collective ambition to share responsibility, but to share also decision-making," he said.
The sentiments grew more blunt in small-group discussions seeking ideas for both fighting terrorism and "draining the swamp" of poverty that can breed terrorists.
After leading an hour and a half of discussion that produced more sound bites than new policy approaches - "freeze-dried foreign policy" muttered one human-rights official - Joseph Nye, dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, summed up the message he was hearing.
"For the Europeans," he said, " `axis of evil' was a bridge too far. There's a strong suspicion here that Bush is back to unilateralism, that after Afghanistan, America isn't especially interested in listening to the rest of the world."
Davos was on the road to pessimism even before this year's session. At the last meeting in Switzerland, Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, turned what was supposed to be a rapprochement with Shimon Peres, then the former Israeli prime minister, into an ugly confrontation accusing Israel of "fascist military aggression," that was built on policies of "murder, persecution, assassination, destruction and devastation."
Mr. Arafat is surrounded by Israeli tanks this year, and did not make the meeting. Mr. Peres is scheduled to participate in three sessions today.
Mr. Arafat is not the only one who is missing. Relatively few Japanese executives and just a smattering of government officials showed up. In the past, they came to argue that that they had their economic problems in hand and that their country was on the cusp of a rebound.
Now the numbers look bleak - on Friday the Nikkei stock average dropped below the Dow Jones industrial average for the first time in 45 years - and the government's popularity is sinking. So when a panel considered whether Japan would emerge from its difficulties intact, no one made a successful argument that Japan could find its way back for years.
Even without the Japanese, business executives here were in a deep funk. "If you want to talk to negative people talk to C.E.O.'s," said Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill, who used to be one, at Alcoa.
But Mr. O'Neill, who once argued that he had his finger on the pulse of the American economy because he made real products sold in real markets, has been in Washington long enough to believe that he now has a truer picture.
Company executives worry incessantly about what could go wrong, but he argued "that is not really reflective of what is going on in the real economy."
For true doom and gloom, though, there was the discussion on Friday about "asymmetric threats," an exploration of whether nuclear, chemical or biological weapons could be used by rogue states or groups.
Some C.E.O.'s wondered openly about whether their factories or laboratories could become victims of theft, sabotage or attack, or, to bring the issue truly close to home, whether they were safe inside the Waldorf.
For all the worry, the protests were nonexistent on Thursday and Friday and relatively mild early yesterday.
Ever since the debacle of the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle two years ago, store windows have been shattered and tear gas has been the official odor of meetings of world leaders. But near Park Avenue this week, windows were intact and the strongest smells have emerged from the coffee cups as idle police officers seek a place to stay warm.
Thus, New York bore no resemblance to Genoa, Italy, last summer, which was wrapped with razor wire to protect leaders of industrialized nations for their annual summit. Genoa was a ghost town of empty sidewalks and locked steel grates.
In contrast, traffic buzzed slowly around the East Side, and participants at the conference scooted across Lexington Avenue to pick up a latte at Starbucks. "Look!" said one amazed veteran of recent global conferences, "They've still got windows!"
But if the ranks of the protesters were thinned, so were the ranks of the entrepreneurs.
A few years ago in Davos the world seemed more prosperous and the stars of the show were Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, and Silicon Valley C.E.O.'s who ran seminars like "Wiring the World," and mixed it up with bureaucrats on the question of whether the Internet would foster so-called virtual democracies - like-minded people of many lands bringing about change.
This year, the seminars have more down-to-earth subjects, like survival. There was "The Future of Terrorism: What Are the Next Threats?" and "Crisis Management: Look Out Ahead."
Three years ago, Ted Turner entertained the elites with a discussion of how far media conglomerates could reach, boasting that CNN was making national borders irrelevant. Government officials sheepishly agreed.
But now borders are back and being secured. So is the power of government over private enterprise.
On Friday, the subject of one media panel was whether the American military would be within its rights to bomb broadcast facilities of Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite network, if it appeared to be giving aid to the enemy.
Former Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia warned that unlike nuclear material - which is almost all controlled by governments - chemical and biological agents are overwhelmingly in the hands of private industry, and that the responsibility should fall on corporations to devise ways to keep such material out of the hands of those who would misuse them.
"We're going to have to have a private sector effort here," he said, noting that if he were in business, "I'd want to get out in front" before the biological version of a Three Mile Island nuclear accident led to the imposition of "regulations that will stifle commerce."
Then the dispirited executives went to lunch, so that they could brace themselves for the afternoon session, "New Sources of Vulnerability: Thinking the Unthinkable."
----
An Elite Cast Debates Poverty
O'Neill, Bono, Gates Discuss Aid Plans at N.Y. Forum
By Ben White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 3, 2002; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14847-2002Feb2?language=printer
NEW YORK, Feb. 2 -- Rock star Bono, software star Bill Gates, Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill and former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo shared the stage at the World Economic Forum meeting here today for a well-attended discussion on how to lift developing countries out of poverty and fight AIDS and other diseases worldwide.
The panoply on stage, with Bono reclining in sunglasses and O'Neill sitting up straight in a suit, was theatrical. But the talk was deadly serious.
O'Neill reiterated his reluctance to support a large increase in the U.S. international aid budget, saying the funds being given are often misused and fail to help develop countries in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere.
Rather than back away from aid entirely, O'Neill suggested the issue should be approached with fresh "imagination." In many cases, he said, loans that can further drive countries into financial ruin, as happened recently in Argentina, should be replaced with direct grants.
"Is there anybody here who believes we should be making a loan to a country to give polio vaccinations or HIV drugs?" O'Neill said. "Is that a loan? I don't think so."
Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp., said he and his wife would donate $50 million to help fight the spread in Africa of the virus that causes AIDS. He also said the electorate in the United States and other developed nations should pressure politicians to dramatically increase the amount of money spent on public health.
"If we took the world and reordered it so that you and me were close to a random neighborhood from some other part of the world, you would see the living conditions, the medical problems, the infant mortality, and of course the human spirit would respond to that," Gates said. He said private philanthropy, even from billionaires like himself, would not solve the problem.
U2 frontman Bono, a longtime advocate of international debt relief, said "unusual juxtapositions" such as his appearance with O'Neill and Gates have helped drive the issue of debt relief and public health spending into the news in a way that he alone could not.
"They don't want you [on television] talking about debt cancellation," he said. "They don't mind you talking about U2."
The musician, who recently traveled to Uganda to observe AIDS relief work, said he would expand his campaign beyond debt relief to focus on vaccination and disease eradication. He also said he would return to Africa with O'Neill in several weeks and spoke of a new "Marshall Plan" for Africa similar to the United States' commitment to rebuilding Europe after World War II.
Zedillo concurred with O'Neill that the primary responsibility for development lies with developing countries themselves. But he also said a more significant commitment was needed from rich nations. "These people are not free," he said. "Because they do not have education. They do not have health. They do not have nutrition. . . . We need real international assistance. We do need additional taxpayers' money."
Outside the forum today, the ranks of protesters swelled along Park Avenue. As many as 1,000 anti-globalization activists and advocates of scores of other causes pressed in behind metal barricades, yelled slogans and shivered in the cold as 4,000 police officers, many on horseback, looked on.
Protesters, surrounded by police in riot gear, also marched from Central Park toward the forum site at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel.
Among other forum discussions today, a group of foreign economic officials criticized the United States for what they described as protectionist policies, particularly toward the agricultural and textile industries.
But this event, which runs through Monday, is at least as much about partying as policy. To that end, the New York Stock Exchange was to throw a lavish party tonight for all 2,700 attendees.
-------- activists
Economic forum draws festive protest
By Betsy Pisik
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
February 3, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020203-591016.htm
NEW YORK - More than 2,000 protesters with dozens of causes converged outside the Waldorf-Astoria yesterday in a joyful and nearly trouble-free demonstration against the World Economic Forum.
Waves of demonstrators marched and danced through Midtown Manhattan, carrying placards protesting everything from war to capitalism to child labor to pollution.
The demonstrators were surrounded - and at times outnumbered - by lines of uniformed police, many of them in full riot gear with Kevlar vests.
The demonstrators were drawn out on this bright, chilly day by the World Economic Forum, a gathering of some 2,700 chief executives, world leaders, religious figures and the occasional celebrity. It is the kind of gathering where Microsoft founder Bill Gates and U2's lead singer Bono can share a podium to discuss increased spending for global health programs.
Protesters and police engaged in a couple of brief shoving matches, but there was none of the serious violence that has marred protests at recent gatherings of international leaders in other cities.
Nearly all the demonstrators had left the hotel area a few hours after sundown. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said 36 persons were arrested during the day.
Officers detained 27 protesters outside the Plaza hotel near Central Park for unlawful assembly or disorderly conduct, Commissioner Kelly said. He said "specific information" had been received that the demonstrators, all carrying either wooden shields or masks, planned to attack police.
Nine others were arrested at three different locations, including four after a scuffle with officers on Lexington Avenue, Commissioner Kelly said. Three police officers suffered minor injuries during the day, he said.
Discussions at the forum were focused on U.S. foreign policy, its potential role in breeding terrorism and the downside of globalization - all key issues for the protest groups.
At a morning session on the world's economy, Horst Kohler, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, bluntly criticized the United States for protecting its agricultural and textile industries from cheap foreign competition through tariffs and government subsidies.
Such policies keep poor countries from fully participating in the global economy, he said.
"We need to focus on giving developing countries better access, and this includes the phasing out of these subsidies, which are absolutely distorting and devastating sectors in the poor world," Mr. Kohler said to loud applause from the gallery.
However, most of the forum's activities were scaled back yesterday to make room for a previously scheduled wedding in the Waldorf's gilded ballroom. The forum's black-tie ball was held, instead, on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. That is exactly the kind of synergy many of yesterday's demonstrators say they were protesting.
"I see this as a meeting of the ruling class, those united for profit and not for people," said Geoff Bruen, an AmeriCorps worker from Newark, N.J., who bristled at the heavy police presence yesterday.
"The fact that they've got all these barricades up shows that this is not a democracy but a police state," he said. "The ruling class controls the police. I'm not surprised."
Many of the marchers used language straight off their signs in explaining what, exactly, they were there to protest. "They should be putting people before profits," said environmentalist Shira Zamir, who is studying politics at New York University.
Chris Johnson, a teacher at Washington Irving High School in Lower Manhattan, took his senior government class to participate in the demonstration. "They really dug it," said Mr. Johnson, who was wearing a foam Statue of Liberty crown and a leather jacket. "They borrowed signs, they marched."
Meanwhile, a group of cyber-activists claimed responsibility for crashing the forum's Web site Friday, but the site was up and running again yesterday.
After a brief rally in Central Park, the demonstrators - many waving fanciful masks, insects, flowers and other nature symbols - made their way down Fifth Avenue and across 60th Street, passing some of the most expensive stores in the city.
The salesman and two customers in Baccarat, the exclusive glass shop, watched the parade in unabashed delight through the store's broad windows. On display: a set of etched highball glasses, $265 for the pair. Managers of most chain retailers, including a Gap clothing store, however, closed their doors for the duration of the march.
Since the forum opened on Thursday, police have been guarding McDonald's, Starbucks and Gap clothing stores throughout the city after the retailers were targeted for vandalism in previous demonstrations. But the mood yesterday was as bright as the weather.
"I came here to sightsee, and this is a real sight to see," said Maria Gericanos, who stepped out of Bloomingdale's and found herself in the middle of the demonstration. Gripping her young daughter in one hand and four shopping bags in the other, the tourist from Madrid said she was glad to see the protesters behaving so well.
Moments later, Alexis Danzig marched past, her son, Tariq, 2, cradled in her arms.
"I'm here today because my son is going to grow up in a world where he has more resources than other people have. And that isn't fair, and it isn't right," she said.
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.
----
PROTESTS
36 Are Arrested, but Demonstrations Remain Peaceful
New York Times
February 3, 2002
By DAN BARRY
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/03/nyregion/03STRE.html
It turned out to be a beautiful day for protest yesterday, with a little something for everybody. Peaceful demonstrations, catchy slogans, colorful placards, plenty of police officers - and even a few arrests.
Yesterday was the ballyhooed day when thousands of anarchists, socialists and just plain-old regular folks came to New York to rally against the World Economic Forum, which has brought 2,700 government leaders and corporate executives to the Waldorf-Astoria for the express purpose of "improving the state of the world." Adding to the mix were thousands of police officers assigned to keep the peace, along with untold numbers of federal law enforcement officials and armed bodyguards. By early evening, an estimated 7,000 protesters had engaged in a loud but peaceful rally within earshot of the Waldorf on Park Avenue, and then disbanded. By that point, police officials said, at least 38 people had been arrested, on charges of disorderly conduct, unlawful assembly and reckless endangerment, and three officers had been injured.
"So far, so good," Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said last night, although he added that other challenges remained. Some 2,000 guests of the economic forum were to be bused under heavy guard last night for a dinner at the New York Stock Exchange in Lower Manhattan. In addition, two more protests are planned for today and another on Monday.
People intent on protesting had been trickling into the city for days, with a few joining some early demonstrations against the five-day forum, which convened on Thursday. But organizers have always maintained that yesterday would be the marquee day for peaceful protest, although they have not denied that outbreaks of unlawful behavior were possible, from civil disobedience to the kind of property destruction that has marred other protests against economic conferences.
Yesterday morning, as guests of the forum - at least those who did not linger at any of the exclusive parties on Friday night - arose to choose from a breakfast buffet of panel discussions, their critics began to assemble outside. So did hundreds of police officers; for every protester's placard, there seemed to be an officer's helmet.
Then, at 9:50, two young men were hauled away on charges that they had tried to block traffic by sitting on Park Avenue, across from the Waldorf. Although charges were dropped against one of the suspects, the incident seemed to serve as the starter's pistol for the day's events: Super Saturday had officially begun.
As the sun rose above the tall buildings along the East Side, a few hundred protesters limbered up in the barricadelike pens outside the Waldorf. Tambourines chimed, cowbells rang, chants started.
"Money for jobs!" shouted a man on the back of a black Ford pickup truck, his hoarse voice amplified by speakers. "Not for war!" responded the protesters - at least those who had not taped their mouths shut as a silent gesture of dissent. Meanwhile, hundreds of police officers stood on street corners or sat in vans, sipping coffee, waiting. There was nothing leisurely about that wait, as evidenced by the phalanx of 17 officers on horseback, directly across Park Avenue from the Waldorf.
At the same time, on 59th Street along the southern rim of Central Park, hundreds of other demonstrators had gathered in two spots: on the West Side, near Columbus Circle, and at the corner of Fifth Avenue, across from the Plaza Hotel. Police officers on bicycles darted in and out of the crowd, while dozens of others stood in clusters, watching the back- and-forth flow of young people carrying sharply worded signs.
"We're joking that their tactic must be to push us off the sidewalk," said Jeff Bale, 30, of a group called Mobilization for Global Justice.
Why had the protesters come? Mary Libby, 25, who said she worked with the homeless in Michigan, explained that she was "trying to reclaim the streets and our lives." Everything is upside down, she said, when corporate executives hire Elton John to perform at a private party at the Four Seasons, an event that took place Friday night.
She objected to paying Elton John a substantial fee to perform for an hour or two "when that money could be used to feed the homeless right outside the building they're in."
For a while, the scene felt more like a giddy political bazaar than the staging area for imminent ideological conflict. It was a minifestival of dissent, with colorful puppets and placards bobbing in the air, drums beating out a catchy beat and people handing out leaflets that decried capitalism in general and the forum in particular. Even some in the blue arc of police officers around the scene allowed a few smiles.
The intense preparation by the Police Department may have allowed for a relaxed smile or two from its ranks. As late as yesterday morning, police officials were meeting with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to go over last-minute details, and Commissioner Kelly was planning to monitor the scene in a helicopter.
From above, he might have seen general cooperation between those in blue and those who were not. At noon, Police Chief Allan H. Hoehl and other officials huddled with several lawyers for the rally; they looked like two sets of coaches wishing each other well before a game.
Ronald L. Kuby, one of the lawyers, later said that the two sides were ironing out minor details, like whether speakers could stand on the pedestal of a statue of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. They were allowed to stand on the first step. "We compromised," he said.
By 1:15 p.m., most of the protesters who had assembled at Columbus Circle had joined the others in front of the Plaza, and together they began a somewhat circuitous march toward the Waldorf, where hundreds of other demonstrators were continuing to chant and poke the sky with their placards.
Near the front of the parade were several women dressed as the Statue of Liberty, draped in silver and carrying papier-mâché torches. At one point, people hoisted two of the women above the crowd, in classic cheerleader formation, bringing a chorus of approval. The women in silver also delighted the crowd by forming a chorus line and singing "New York, New York."
Along the parade route, protesters stopped to photograph officers standing guard outside a Starbucks cafe, and occasionally shouted out to the people on the sidewalk, "This is more fun than shopping."
And at East 51st Street and Lexington Avenue, the parade passed a small counterdemonstration, in which people waved signs that said, "The Police Are Great, It's Terrorists We Hate," and "Seek Therapy."
But the day had its share of tension, of clashes between protester and police officer. Three people were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct at Columbus Circle; four at 47th and Lexington; two others at 52nd and Broadway.
The most dramatic moment, however, came at 1:30 p.m., when police officers waded into the tail end of the parade, at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, and arrested 27 people on charges of unlawful assembly and disorderly conduct. Mr. Kelly said that the police had received information that this group - which included people who he said were carrying plastic shields and masks - "were about to attack the police."
Debra Sweet, a spokeswoman for an activist organization called Refuse and Resist, said last night that the circumstances of the arrests were unclear. But, she said, "from reports we have, the police seemed to be extracting particular people, especially people wearing masks."
After the arrests, a few lawyers and legal assistants stood alongside a large Department of Correction bus containing some of the arrested, and tried to get their names. One young woman mouthed her first name: "L-A-U-R-A."
Another young man in custody shouted, "I think it's imperative to report that we did not do anything illegal." Then the bus pulled away.
At Grand Central Terminal, a group of about 200 protesters entered the station just after 7 p.m. and were surrounded by dozens of uniformed police officers, many of them from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. A number wore white visored helmets and heavy vests, carried riot sticks, and had gas masks and plastic handcuffs strapped to their belts. Two police dogs appeared.
The protesters clapped, sang and beat on drums, and were then surrounded by the police. After a period of tension, the protesters sat down on the floor of the terminal, but neither side made a hostile move and the air of confrontation gradually dissipated. Eventually, the demonstrators wound up gathered in small groups in the terminal, chatting or eating, as the police stood and watched, chatting among themselves.
------
Big Bang
'Radiance' by Carter Scholz
Reviewed by Tom Vanderbilt
Sunday, February 3, 2002; Page BW06
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6151-2002Jan31?language=printer
RADIANCE By Carter ScholzPicador. 386 pp. $24
In The Curve of Binding Energy, John McPhee's book-length profile of the nuclear physicist Theodore Taylor, a friend notes that this most brilliant man of science was a believer in divine guidance. "You would become pretty cynical," he added, "if you were working on bombs and didn't believe in any sort of religious values." And how to discern a false prophet from a true one? "It's like physics," Taylor would answer. "You believe Newton because his work hangs together. You might not believe someone else."
Western rationalism reached early for religion in the nuclear age; the first bomb test was dubbed Trinity, and Robert Oppenheimer was famously moved to quote a sacred Hindu text after the epochal flash in the proving grounds of New Mexico: "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." Science was quite capable of providing the means of destruction, but on the far horizons of the empirical it was faith that kept one from falling into the abyss.
The main characters of Carter Scholz's novel Radiance are nuclear physicists and engineers of a Tayloresque bent, ensconced at a Los Alamos-like facility known simply as the Lab, in Section J, or Research and Development in Advanced Nuclear Concepts (as Scholz writes, "Concepts as in weapons. Advanced as in not working yet.). Masters of the physical universe, they are ever questing for reassurances of a more spiritual nature. As a sinister aerospace consultant named Root opines about a lapsed researcher turned Beltway Machiavellian named Leo Highet, "Leo thinks religion is ignorance, the enemy of science. But he's wrong. Sir Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, Kepler, Priestly, Boyle, Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell: These were devout and prayerful men who looked for the apocalyptic coming of Christ. There's no contradiction. They all wanted to bend creation to man's will. To find if the fury in their hearts was God's or some other's."
The protagonist of Radiance is a physicist named Philip Quine whose piety toward pure science is quickly eroding. To admit that the Lab's experiments do not yet show a laser-based anti-ballistic missile system to be feasible is an act of heresy; the system will come, as will the Second Coming, and this faith keeps the funding intact, the underground tests on schedule, the end-game ever distant but ever in sight. If data aren't conforming, goes the assumption, change the test parameters. It is a world whose moral and intellectual subterfuges are exemplified in an exchange between Quine and a rival scientist (and rendered in Scholz's streamlined and erratically punctuated prose):
"Philip there are unknowns, everybody knows that, I mean Reese is fine with our unknowns they're known unknowns we all know that." Quine responds: "And what about the, the unknown unknowns? Everything that comes up in the next year two years four years six years that we can't see yet?" In this high temple of the nuclear priesthood, belief is everything: Belief not only in one's data, but belief that the work being done is indeed for a higher purpose.
Quine, a Graham Greene whiskey-priest for the nuclear age, soon embarks on a relationship with a local anti-nuclear activist, Lynn Hamlin, who belongs to an advocacy group that is unearthing progressively more deleterious information. As might be expected, this makes for some uncomfortable pillow talk. Quine, for example, must make sure to hide his classified documents prior to his paramour's arrival. Love, defense contracts, and the nonprofit sector supercollide. Sample dialogue:
" 'I'm so tired of fighting. Lynn, I don't want to fight.'
"She looked up at him. 'I may not be funded again.'
" 'What do you mean?' "
Strange love, indeed. As a story -- love, political or scientific -- Radiance can be a bit wanting, its characters insufficiently drawn, its supposed tensions too flaccid, its premise of government cover-ups and downwinders fairly movie-of-the-week. As fictional territory, these desert test sites have been better surveyed in the work of Don DeLillo and J.G. Ballard (two authors who also tend to use characters as conveyances for language and concepts). Intellectual and emotional energy, fused so winningly in a book like Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2, here often seem to be mere effects.
Where Radiance succeeds, however, is in its manic and omnivorous de-encryption of the pattern languages and closed-loop functionings of the nuclear defense establishment. Scholz has a pitch-perfect ear for the stilted vagaries of the syntax of nuclear nonproliferation, the clinical hysteria of classified doom scenarios, the frenetic cant of conference-table banter. There is a crackling and eerie energy to this world of whiteboards and white papers, black budgets and black boxes, and one willingly submits to the conspiratorial environs of the world Scholz has created, its secret codes and sensory overloads buzzing with the sonic dementia of a Sputnik transmission in one's bridgework. Scholz seizes upon the odd sonorousness of military patois (filling several pages with an inventory of atomic bomb tests known as shots and their peculiarly resonant titles: Buster Jangle, Tumbler Snapper-Able) and feels the pleasure of daubing unusual words like "spraddle" and "chirm" into the modernist texture (to describe, respectively, the act of standing against a urinal and the ring of a telephone).
Like the Lab itself, this is a novel where one's access is widened by the number of secret codes one knows: If the meanings behind acronyms like DARPA and CERN come easily to you, you'll like Radiance; if NRO and PGP register with equal facility, you'll love it. If human factors seem scaled down in this lyrical tone poem of theoretical physics, perhaps that is the fate of all nuclear fiction: How can anyone hold a candle to the flash of a million suns? •
Tom Vanderbilt is the author of "Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America," to be published in March.
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Thousands Mark N.Ireland's 'Bloody Sunday'
February 3, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-irish-march.html
LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland (Reuters) - Thousands marched through the rain-soaked Northern Ireland city of Londonderry Sunday, marking the 30th anniversary of ``Bloody Sunday'' when British soldiers killed 13 civil rights protesters.
The killings on January 30, 1972, angered the British province's Roman Catholic minority. Sectarian feuding between Catholics and Protestants turned into three decades of all-out guerrilla warfare and the incident still dominates today's shaky relations between the two sides.
``'Bloody Sunday' was the day we said this is our country not theirs and we won't give up that dream,'' Catholic Ryan McCraig, who was a teen-ager at the time, said as he marched. Crowd estimates ranged between 15,000 and 25,000.
None of the British paratroopers suspected of involvement in the 15-minute shooting spree has been charged and the three decades of sectarian violence killed at least 3,600 people.
But there is renewed hope of healing the still festering wounds between Protestants, who want to retain links with Britain, and Catholics, who favor integration with the Irish Republic.
The province's 1998 Good Friday peace agreement set up a power-sharing, home-rule government, and a major new inquiry into ``Bloody Sunday'' could go a long way toward securing a lasting peace.
The inquiry, ordered by British Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1998 and believed to be the most expensive in British history, has heard testimony from 475 witnesses since it opened in March 2000. It is expected to end in 2004.
``We already know the truth, but this inquiry will help close a chapter for us... It is what we have been waiting for 30 years,'' said Anne Mulhern, whose 27-year-old brother William McKinney was shot and killed on ``Bloody Sunday.''
SIMPLE CROSSES
Relatives and friends of the 13 dead -- a fourteenth died later from wounds sustained on the day -- led the march carrying simple white crosses carved with the names of those who perished in the 1972 protest.
Organizers of Sunday's gathering said it was the biggest annual ``Bloody Sunday'' march. No police attended the event.
American flags could be seen poking through the sea of bobbing heads and banners. A number of Irish-Americans regularly cross the Atlantic to join the march.
``I come here for two reasons,'' said Irish-born Jerry O'Keefe from California. ``I'm here to remember the dead and because I want to see Ireland united as it should be.''
The memory of ``Bloody Sunday'' has been kept alive through music -- most famously in Irish group U2's ``Sunday Bloody Sunday'' -- and the annual marches. Two new movies now document the events of the day.
``I think the two films that have been made have made a huge difference in delivering the message of the day to the world,'' said Northern Ireland's Education Minister Martin McGuinness, a member of the Irish Republican Army's political ally Sinn Fein.
McGuinness, a controversial figure in Northern Irish politics, acknowledged in a recent BBC interview that he was second in command of the IRA in Londonderry -- or simply ''Derry'' as Catholics call it -- on ``Bloody Sunday.''
He is highly critical of the new inquiry, which was welcomed by many relatives of the dead.
``I think the inquiry is deeply flawed because the British Ministry of Defense is not represented and the fact the rifles have been destroyed and thousands of photographs taken on the day have not been made available to the tribunal,'' he told reporters as he stood at the head of the march.
Earlier in the day a group of about 100 relatives and friends of the ``Bloody Sunday'' dead stood for a moment of silence with heads bowed under heavy rain at a memorial where the shootings occurred.
The inquiry, which paused for a week for the anniversary events, will continue Monday.
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Seven Arrested at Devonport
TRIDENT PLOUGHSHARES
3rd February 2002
From: Stephen Kobasa <skobasa@pop.snet.net>
TP website: www.gn.apc.org/tp2000
Seven Arrested in Devonport Anti-Trident Protest
Seven anti-Trident activists were arrested today at the Devonport naval dockyard in Plymouth during a protest against the refitting of nuclear weapon submarine HMS Vanguard there.
The seven, Angie Zelter, Erica Wilson, Margaret Jones, Jill Wood, Liz Wilson, Richard Holt and Sue Brackenbury, sat down in the roadway and blocked the dockyard's Drake Gate. They were removed and charged with obstructing the highway. They are likely to be released from police custody later this evening.
HMS Vanguard was the first of the four British Trident submarines to be commissioned and has left its usual berth at Faslane in Scotland to undergo the refit, which is to include the removal and replacement of the fuel rods which power its nuclear reactor.
The arrests come just a week before three days of direct action, from 11th to 13th February, by Trident Ploughshares and CND at the Faslane base on the Clyde, 30 miles from Glasgow. Hundreds of activists, from all over the UK and from Ireland, Belgium and Sweden are expected to take part, supported by members of the Scottish Parliament, including John McAllion (Labour), Lloyd Quinan (Scottish National Party) and Tommy Sheridan (Scottish Socialist Party).
A Trident Ploughshares statement said: " HMS Vengeance should not be refitted but should be taken out of service along with the three other Trident boats, disarmed, de-commissioned and scrapped. The government's decision to perpetuate the Trident system is a great opportunity missed, a complete failure to imagine anything more positive than hatred, terror and the threat of mass murder. It is now more clear than ever that the only real steps towards disarmament will come from ordinary people."
Contacts:
David Mackenzie
0870 458 3117 (07876593016)
Jane Tallents 0845 45 88 367
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Clergy court prison over nuclear base
SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY
3rd February 2002
by STEPHEN FRASER sfraser@scotlandonsunday.com
CLERGYMEN are planning to force sheriffs to send them to jail as part of a new wave of direct action against the Faslane nuclear base on the Clyde.
Ministers and priests, many of whom have convictions or charges pending from previous demonstrations at the base, have told Scotland on Sunday they will seek arrest by blocking entry roads to the base.
They hope their actions, due to begin in eight days, will force sheriffs to impose custodial sentences, helping to mobilise public opinion against the government.
Their move will also clog up Scottish courts, which are still processing more than 100 cases from a similar campaign last February.
Organisers behind the three-day campaign to blockade the base say they expect a record turnout, with protesters attending from across the UK.
They have been touring Scotland since Hogmanay to round up recruits and give instructions on non-violent protest techniques ahead of the protest.
The Rev David McLachlan, a parish minister from Elderslie, is planning to participate in the knowledge he still has charges pending for an arrest last year.
He is contesting a charge of alleged breach of the peace for blocking the road and says he is preparing himself to go to jail. He said: "I was offered a deal where if I paid a £50 fine, the case would be dropped and I would not have a criminal record but I was not prepared to accept I had been guilty of a breach of the peace. I did not pay that fine - as I felt it would have been accepting a guilt I did not feel - and I am not prepared to pay a fine in future."
McLachlan admitted his friends and family had urged him to pay up and stay out of trouble this year, but he said he felt he could not stay away from the event.
He said: "I don't fancy going to prison but ultimately, if that is what it takes to highlight the evil of nuclear weapons, then that is what it takes.
"As human beings, we have a duty to oppose things that are evil. To threaten other people with annihilation is a nonsense and is not something Jesus Christ would have condoned."
He admitted his decision is a ploy to mobilise public opinion and force the British government to change its policy on nuclear weapons.
"The politicians are showing no sign of acting on this evil so we are forced to find ways of drawing people's attention to what is going on here on Scottish soil," he said.
McLachlan's Kirk colleague, the Rev Norman Shanks, who works for the Iona community, is facing arrest for the third time in three years of attending the event.
He is adamant he will not pay any fine and is reconciled to the prospect of jail. "There is a well-established tradition of Christian protest that states there is a higher authority to whom one owes obedience than the law of the land, whatever that law might state."
The clergy are part of a 20-strong core group of ministers and priests who have protested at the blockades ever since the annual event, normally held in the second week of February, was launched in 1999.
The 20 are regarded as the most committed among a wider group of about 200 clerics who have attended the event.
Scottish Socialist MSP Tommy Sheridan and Lloyd Quinan, the Scottish Nationalist MSP, have confirmed they will participate in the blockade even though both have charges pending over a protest at the base in October last year.
The event, held over three days for the first time, is expected to attract record numbers. Last February it was attended by around 800, and resulted in 385 arrests.
Numbers are expected to be swollen by anti-war activists and opponents of globalisation.
David Mackenzie, a protest organiser, said: "We have always linked our action to the whole problem of global oppression and the excessive power held by the West over the rest of the world. The other thing that concerns us is the way in which the US does not appear to care about international law when it suits them, as in their treatment of prisoners from the Afghan conflict."
He said non-violent protest workshops have been held in Edinburgh and Glasgow to preserve the demonstration's peaceful reputation. He added: "We are trying hard to ensure everyone who attends this event has respect for the other people there and does not cause trouble."
The Crown Office and Strathclyde Police said ministers and priests would be treated just as any other protesters. A police spokesman said: "If demonstrators block the gates, whoever they are, then we will arrest them."
A Crown Office spokesman said anyone behaving unlawfully would be arrested and prosecuted.
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