------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Pakistan ready to test new missile
Officials Evaluate Missile Test
Missile Scheduled For Defense Program Fails
Two PAC missiles fail to hit target
Books in Brief: 'Radiance'
Bush cautions N. Korea
U.S. Tightening Rules on Keeping Scientific Secrets
Veteran Xinhua Reporter Recalls Nixon's 1972 China Tour
New Voting Machines for California
Bush 2000 Adviser Offered To Use Clout to Help Enron

MILITARY
America's laser of death cleared for take-off
War Coverage Takes a Negative Turn
Thinking war through
Two Butchers
Colombia formally charges three Irishmen accused of training FARC
Atlantic solidarity cracks as U.S. rattles sabre
Germany evacuates 13,000 people after finding WW2 bomb
Bin Laden's No 2 'captured in Iran'
Europe Adamantly Opposed To Any U.S. Attack on Iraq
Iraq says has no plans to acquire mass destruction arms
Israel's Sharon's vows to win "war"
Hamas says another rocket fired on Israel
Helicopters Attack Palestinian Targets
Israeli Police Shoot Gunman, Car Blows Up
Suspected Islamic Militants Kill 8
Five Killed in Philippines
Rampages ignite Russian debate on army reform
Chechens are victims of the war on terror
CIA chief discusses terrorism with Yemeni
CIA Chief Visits Yemen President
The Future of the C.I.A.
FIRST CHAPTER
CIA Showcases Array of Spy Gadgets
Marine KC-130 That Hit Mountain Had No Night Vision
Wary Chinese welcome Bush as US enters their back yard
Many gulf vets file for disability

POLICE / PRISONERS
Feds Take Over Airport Security
Detainees Missing After Fire
Man Jailed 2 Years After Case Ended Sues District
D.C. Forms Network of Surveillance
Turks Consider Lifting Death Penalty
Al Qaeda's Road Paved With Gold
Allies Hear Sour Notes in 'Axis of Evil' Chorus
Slaughter of the Innocents

ENERGY AND OTHER
UK to up renewable energy, keep nuclear door open
Swap proposed to halt new California offshore drilling
Mammography Review Shatters the Status Quo
Refugee scandal rocks Sydney govt
A Whitewashing of History

ACTIVISTS
Italian Pressed to Resign
20,000 Israelis rally for peace
Israeli Army Objectors Spark Debate
How Can We Justify This?



-------- NUCLEAR

-------- india / pakistan

Pakistan ready to test new missile

Published 2/17/2002
UPI
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=17022002-112630-3166r

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Pakistani scientists have developed a new missile, called Shaheen II, and are ready to test it, reports said Sunday.

The reports follow two recent missile tests by rival India.

The mass circulation Jang newspaper said a recent report sent to the government said Pakistan's rocket scientists have sought permission to test fire the missile.

The report said the Shaheen-II, so far the country's most advanced long-range missile, is nuclear-capable and has a range of up to 1,553 miles.

"The test fire is necessary to accelerate production for defense purposes," said the newspaper, quoting the report.

Using solid fuel, Shaheen-II can reach its target in less than 12 minutes and can carry 1 ton of explosives.

With this missile, Pakistan can target distant Indian cities, such as Madras and Calcutta. "If fired from the Pakistani border, it can reach any target in India," the report said.

"Pakistan's missile technology is more accurate and advanced than India's," said Samar Mubarikmand, who is in charge of the Shaheen missile project. "And this fact has been recognized by international experts."

Both Pakistan and India tested nuclear devices in 1998 and have since been working on their delivery systems.

They also have deployed thousands of troops along their shared border after a Dec. 13 suicide attack on the Indian Parliament, triggering fears of a nuclear conflict in one of the world's most populous regions.

-------- missile defense

Officials Evaluate Missile Test

The Associated Press
Sunday, February 17, 2002; 10:30 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A24095-2002Feb17?language=printer

WHITE SANDS MISSILE RANGE, N.M. -- Engineers spent hours gathering data to determine why two Patriot missiles did not hit their targets during a test Saturday.

The test at White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico involved three missiles and three targets. It was designed to simulate a battlefield scenario.

"We had one hit and two misses," said Pam Rogers, an Army spokeswoman in Huntsville, Ala.

The Army and the Missile Defense Agency fired a PAC-3 missile to intercept a cruise missile target. It missed.

Meanwhile, two PAC-2 missiles were launched to intercept a subscale aircraft and a drone emitting radar-jamming signals. The missile trained on the drone hit its target while the other one missed.

The test, the first in a series of four, was aimed at demonstrating the operation and interaction of all the elements of the system - including radar, command and control equipment and systems to identify targets.

It involved the PAC-3 made by Lockheed-Martin and upgraded PAC-2s developed by Raytheon.

The high-velocity PAC-3 is the next generation of Patriot missiles being developed to provide better defense against advanced tactical ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and hostile aircraft, according to the U.S. Army Program Executive Office Air and Missile Defense in Huntsville, Ala.

The test was originally scheduled for Thursday but was put off until Saturday because of a malfunction in a target drone.

Prior to Saturday's test, the PAC-3 system had completed 11 successful development flights, including previous tests in which more than one missile intercepted targets simultaneously.

----

Missile Scheduled For Defense Program Fails

NATION IN BRIEF,
Washington Post
Sunday, February 17, 2002; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22456-2002Feb16?language=printer

A missile that the U.S. military hopes will be part of the Bush administration's missile defense program failed to intercept its target during a test, the Army said.

The upgraded Patriot PAC-3 missile, made by Lockheed Martin Corp., was supposed to intercept a cruise missile target over New Mexico. Two other older Raytheon Co. PAC-2 missiles also were launched as part of the test. The Army said only one of the two missiles scored a successful hit, destroying a drone aircraft.

The "hit-to-kill" missiles, advanced versions of the Patriot antiaircraft missile used against Iraqi Scud missiles in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, are designed to collide with their targets in flight at high speed.

Yesterday's test was designed to simultaneously shoot down a remote-controlled QF-4 "Phantom" fighter jet, a cruise missile and a smaller drone aircraft. This first operational test followed 11 successful developmental flight tests.

-------

Two PAC missiles fail to hit target in US land-based missile defense test

AFP
Feb 17, 2002
http://spacedaily.com/news/020217211535.6h8kn7ih.html

The Pentagon's testing of its land-based missile defense system hit a snag after two Patriot Advanced Capabilityintercept missiles missed their targets, US Army officials said.

The test of the Patriot missiles Saturday at the White Sands Missile Range in the western US state of New Mexico was designed by the army to simulate an actual battlefield scenario, with three targets and three missiles in the air at the same time.

While one of the Raytheon-built PAC-2 missiles was successful in hitting a full-scale drone aircraft, the PAC-3 and a second PAC-2 both missed their targets, the Army said.

The Lockheed-Martin produced PAC-3, designed to collide with its target in midair at high speed, failed to hit its cruise missile target.

The PAC-3, a next generation Patriot missile, had, prior to Saturday's test, successfully completed a total of 11 development flight tests. Those included two controlled test flights, three cruise missile kills and one aircraft kill.

The Army said an investigation into the cause of the intercept failures was underway.

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

-------- california

Books in Brief: 'Radiance'

New York Times
February 17, 2002
By TAYLOR ANTRIM
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/17/books/review/_0217br-scholz.html

RADIANCE By Carter Scholz. Picador USA, $24.

Entropy is the dominant principle of Carter Scholz's ambitious novel, which takes place in a nuclear weapons lab in Northern California during the 1990's. Pens leak, computers fail, toxic waste is misplaced. Philip Quine, Scholz's affecting hero, works on Superbright, a missile defense system more imagined than real, a theoretical relic of the cold war. Beholden to political realities, he must kill the project and shift from nuclear development to stockpile stewardship or lose financing. Quine is aware that nuclear science needs a nuclear threat to survive, and in order to forestall irrelevance, some of his colleagues are hellbent on making the world a more dangerous place. Wickedly satiric and eggheaded in its level of scientific detail, ''Radiance'' is a serious, engrossing novel. Grief percolates everywhere, especially in Quine's failing romance with a nuclear protester and his personal battle with ethics, what one researcher calls a ''wishful dream of scruples.'' Scholz, whose most recent book was a collaboration with Jonathan Lethem titled ''Kafka Americana,'' uses language that can be peculiar and Latinate, and his dialogue occasionally swerves toward the didactic. Nevertheless, his patient descriptions of the natural world are often beautiful, and he convincingly invests scientific discovery with the mystery of religion. As the novel progresses, we're plunged into a conspiracy to perpetuate the science of destructiveness. There are a number of sinister puppet masters ready to take up the strings as Quine unravels. Both vibrant and sad, ''Radiance'' is also terrifying in its implications.

-------- us politics

Bush cautions N. Korea

By Joseph Curl
THE WASHINGTON TIMES,
February 17, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020217-291232.htm

ELMENDORF AIR FORCE BASE, Alaska - President Bush yesterday warned North Korea not to join forces with terrorist organizations, vowing the United States will not allow "dangerous regimes to threaten freedom with weapons of mass destruction."

During a short refueling stop in Anchorage on the way to his trip to Asia, the president said the U.S.-led war on terrorism will not stop until "we have destroyed terrorism, until we have denied the threat of global terrorism."

"One of the most dangerous things that can happen to the future of our nation is that these kind of terrorist organizations hook up with nations that develop weapons of mass destruction," said Mr. Bush.

The United States and its allies must prevent "nations that have got a dark history and an ugly past" from developing such weapons.

"We expect them, and so do other freedom-loving countries, to change their behavior. But if they do not, the United States will do what it takes to defend our freedom, make no mistake about it," Mr. Bush said to cheers from several hundred U.S. airmen.

The president, who yesterday crossed the International Dateline and arrived today in Tokyo, will hold talks with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi before traveling to South Korea to speak with some of the 38,000 U.S. soldiers at the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) before ending his weeklong trip in Beijing.

"We're going to Japan and South Korea and China, where I'm going to continue to work with the leaders of those countries in our mutual concerns, starting with fighting the war against terror; making it clear that the resolve of this nation is steady and strong. To be able to look these leaders in the eye and say, 'When it comes to defending freedom, the United States of America will not blink,'" he said.

In his State of the Union speech on Jan. 29, Mr. Bush labeled North Korea one of three nations that make up an "axis of evil," along with Iraq and Iran. Several Democrats - including Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle - criticized the president's words, saying they prevent a constructive engagement with those three rogue nations.

But Mr. Bush said yesterday he still holds out hope the United States can persuade those nations to join the civilized world.

"We would like for them to change their ways, and we'll continue to pressure them to do so. We would like for them to conform to normal ways of treating their own people, plus their neighborhood, plus the world," said Mr. Bush.

But he said the United States will not stand idly by as the "axis of evil" perpetrates terror on the world.

Although the trip is expected to include such issues as reviving the anemic Japanese economy and improving U.S.-Chinese relations, it is likely to be dominated by Mr. Bush's tough stance toward the reclusive, communist regime in North Korea.

Mr. Bush yesterday criticized Pyongyang for refusing to engage in dialogue with the United States.

"I made an offer to have dialogue with North Korea, and they didn't accept," Mr. Bush told Asian reporters before leaving Washington. "So I guess the main impediment is they don't want to have a dialogue."

Before departing Washington, Mr. Bush said the DMZ is "one of the most dangerous places on Earth, where barbed wire marks a line dividing freedom and oppression."

He praised South Korea for "reaching out to the North in a spirit of friendship and reconciliation," but added: "Yet I will remind the world that America will not allow North Korea and other dangerous regimes to threaten freedom with weapons of mass destruction."

On China, Mr. Bush said he will urge President Jiang Zemin to open up his nation to trade.

"I can't wait to talk to the Chinese leadership about getting them to honor their agreements for the American farmers and ranchers to be able to sell our foodstuffs into China. ... There's many, many mouths in the world to be fed. And if I do my job by opening up markets, U.S. farmers and ranchers are going to feed them," he said.

Mr. Bush - who flew on Air Force One into an Anchorage snowstorm with Sen. Frank H. Murkowski, Alaska Republican - yesterday also made a pitch for his national energy plan. The president reiterated his support for drilling oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), taking aim at his critics who charge that it would damage the environment.

"Listen, we need to be exploring for oil and gas in ANWR," Mr. Bush said to applause.

"Oh, I've heard them all in Washington. I've heard all the skeptics say, 'Well, you can't do that. It's going to ruin this or that.'"

"Listen, there is no doubt in my mind, there's no doubt in your governor's mind, there's no doubt in the congressional delegation's mind, there's no doubt in the minds of people who take a sound, scientific look at this, that we can do so without endangering the environment, that we can find energy for America's people and at the same time preserve the beauty of Alaska," said Mr. Bush.

The president's Asia trip had originally been slated for October but was postponed after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

----

U.S. Tightening Rules on Keeping Scientific Secrets

New York Times
February 17, 2002
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/17/politics/17SECR.html

The Bush administration is taking wide measures to tighten scientific secrecy in the hope of keeping weapons of mass destruction out of unfriendly hands.

Last month, it began quietly withdrawing from public release more than 6,600 technical documents that deal mainly with the production of germ and chemical weapons. It is also drafting a new information security policy, to be released in the next few weeks, that officials say will result in more documents' being withdrawn. It is asking scientific societies to limit what they publish in research reports.

"We're working hard for a set of guidelines so terrorists can't use information that this country produces against us," Tom Ridge, the director of homeland security, said in an interview. "This will have to be a dynamic process." He added that scientists were being closely consulted on any new guidelines.

But critics say the most extreme steps proposed could make it impossible for scientists to assess and replicate the work of their colleagues, eroding the foundations of American science. They fear that government officials eager for the protections of secrecy will overlook how open research on dangerous substances can produce a wealth of cures, disease antidotes and surprise discoveries.

"It comes down to a risk-benefit ratio," said Robert R. Rich, president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. "I think the risk of forgone advances is much greater than the information getting into the wrong hands."

The federal reports already withdrawn, once sold freely to the public, include not only declassified ones from the 1940's, 50's and 60's but also modern ones that were previously judged to contain nothing that had to be kept secret. Experts say the sweeping withdrawal has few if any precedents.

R. Paul Ryan, deputy administrator of the federal Defense Technical Information Center, the Pentagon agency that has custody of the reports, said panels of scientific experts would be assembled to see whether the documents should once again be made available to the public or perhaps reclassified as state secrets.

The expert panels, he said, will determine "if we need major, minor or no revisions" to security guidelines.

Mr. Ryan added that he did not know when such deliberations might be completed or decisions made over the fate of the 6,600 withdrawn documents.

Since Sept. 11, the administration has sought to clamp down on the flow of information on several fronts. In October, for example, Attorney General John Ashcroft told federal officials that the Justice Department would support them if they resisted freedom-of-information requests. But science has now become the leading edge of the crackdown.

For instance, the White House has asked the American Society of Microbiology, the world's largest group of germ professionals, based in Washington, to limit potentially dangerous information in the 11 journals it publishes, including Infection and Immunity, The Journal of Bacteriology and The Journal of Virology.

One White House proposal is to eliminate the sections of articles that give experimental details that researchers from other labs would need to replicate the claimed results, helping to prove their validity.

"That takes apart the whole foundation of science," Ronald M. Atlas, president-elect of the society, said of omitting methods. "I've made it reasonably clear that we would object to anything that smacked of censorship. They're discussing it, and I wouldn't rule out them doing something."

He added that he was surprised by the number of his colleagues in academia who seemed willing to discuss publishing limits. "I think it undermines science," he said.

Abigail Salyers, the society's president, offered a more pointed rebuff. "Terrorism feeds on fear, and fear feeds on ignorance," she said in a statement to appear in the March issue of the group's magazine. The best defense against anthrax or any infectious disease, Dr. Salyers added, is information that can bolster public safety.

Experts say such issues are being debated at the National Academy of Sciences, which advises the federal government.

Mr. Ridge said the critics were overreacting. "I can understand their concern, but I'm not sure the alarm bells should be rung just yet," he said.

"Let's first do the work" of producing the new guidelines, Mr. Ridge said. He added that the scientists "have to remember what we're up against": terrorism with exotic weapons that could maim or kill millions of people.

Scientists and the White House have clashed before over the flow of scientific information. In 1982, the Reagan administration, eager to thwart Soviet spies, blocked the presentation of about 100 unclassified scientific papers at an international symposium on optical engineering in San Diego. The move was loudly protested, and the administration soon dropped such restraints.

Last fall, after five people died from anthrax spores contained in letters, a new debate arose over the need for curbs on information and materials that terrorists could use to make weapons that are especially deadly. The main worries centered on lethal germs, chemicals and radioactivity.

The Bush administration, already a strong advocate of federal secrecy, quickly pulled much information on arms and national vulnerabilities from government Web sites. But to the astonishment of many experts, it continued to permit the sale of old federal documents that detailed the government's research on and production of biological weapons. The work was done between 1943 and 1969 and was later renounced as Washington pressed for a global ban on such weapons.

This year, critics called with new urgency for such reports to be locked up. "It's just plain stupid to be making this kind of sensitive information so readily available," The Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., editorialized last month.

Late last month the administration began withdrawing the documents from sale, officials said. Researchers stumbled upon the gaps while trying to obtain reports from the National Technical Information Service, an arm of the Commerce Department in Springfield, Va., that sells military and other kinds of federal documents.

"It's amazing," said Matthew Lesko, the author of more than 100 books based on federal information. "Everything that's being asked for is classified." He added that the government may be overreacting. "If it's been out there for 40 and 50 years," he asked, "how are they going to stop it?"

Cheryl Mendonsa, a spokeswoman for the Commerce Department, said that 6,619 documents had been pulled from circulation as of Thursday and that the figure would rise as new candidates were identified for security review. "The process is ongoing," she said.

After requesting a withdrawn document, visitors to the service's Web site see the message: "Selected product is not available for online ordering."

Current federal policy generally bars the reclassification of formerly secret documents, but the Bush administration is considering an executive order that would permit it.

Steven Garfinkel, who recently stepped down as director of the government's Information Security Oversight Office, said the scale of the withdrawal was large by historical standards and unusual because all the documents were already in the public domain. He added that attempts to obtain the reports would still be possible under the Freedom of Information Act, but that "purposeful delays" would be likely until federal officials decided on the new classification levels.

Dr. Atlas of the American Society of Microbiology, who is a dean at the University of Louisville, said he was skeptical of the recall's merit. "Either the reports crossed a line they shouldn't have," he said, "or they've just removed information that would help the advancement of science."

Dr. Rich of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, who is a dean at the medical school of Emory University, was more supportive. Papers about making weapons of mass destruction, he said, should be promptly removed from public circulation.

But Dr. Rich cautioned that the benefits of basic research far outweighed any risks. He cited an example. Publishing an article on the bioengineering of viruses related to smallpox might look dangerous, he said. But such open research could greatly advance work on vaccines meant to battle a variety of ills.

"There is very little that comes out of university labs that could conceivably be considered sensitive," he said.

----

Veteran Xinhua Reporter Recalls Nixon's 1972 China Tour

Sunday, February 17, 2002
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200202/17/eng20020217_90475.shtml

Now in her 70s, Li Qin, a veteran reporter of Xinhua News Agency who covered U.S. President Richard Nixon's ice-breaking China tour, still clearly remembers the events that shook the world.

She recalled that Xinhua News Agency was authorized to release an announcement on November 30, 1971, telling the world that U.S. President Richard Nixon will visit China starting from February 21, 1972.

On the day when Nixon arrived in Beijing, Chairman Mao Zedong met with him and they talked for more than an hour. Li, the only reporter that covered the meeting, wrote a news story about the meeting. "The brief news item was written as deliberated by Premier Zhou Enlai and Henry Kissinger," she said.

Li recalled that the two sides agreed to use "serious and frank " to describe the talks Between Mao and Nixon.

On the Shanghai Communique, Li said that the Chinese and U.S. sides put forward their common grounds as well as differences in the Communique, an unprecedented practice in world diplomacy.

As she remembered, the first draft for the communique was worked out by the U.S. side, which tried to avoid the differences.

It was Zhou Enlai who proposed that both sides aired their views frankly in the communique, and the proposal was later adopted.

On the "historic handshaking" between Nixon and Zhou Enlai at the airport, Li said that the handshaking marked the advent of a new era, as it was compared to the unfriendliness shown by the

then U.S. State Secretary John Foster Dulles towards Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai when they attended a meeting in Geneva in 1954.

Li said that in covering Nixon's tour, Xinhua adopted a new practice of running follow-up stories after sending out flashes, and its flash about Nixon's arrival in Beijing was ahead of all dispatches by other news services.

Li herself values her friendship with Americans. She visited the U.S. in 1973 as a member of the Chinese press delegation.

Just a few days before U.S. President George W. Bush begins his China visit, the veteran reporter voiced her hopes that the U.S. government would handle the Taiwan issue properly so that Sino-U.S.relations will expand faster to benefit the peoples of the two countries and contribute to world peace and development.

----

New Voting Machines for California

By Helen Dewar
Sunday, February 17, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22455-2002Feb16?language=printer

California has become the first state to be required by law to replace by 2004 the kind of punch-card voting machines that caused political chaos in Florida in the 2000 presidential election.

A ruling by a Los Angeles federal judge Wednesday ordered the California secretary of state to bring forward the timetable for replacing the outmoded punch-card machines from the proposed July 2005 date, Reuters reported.

A number of other states, including Florida, are moving ahead voluntarily with replacing the machines after the "hanging chad" debacle in several Florida counties. But the Los Angeles court ruling was the first in the nation requiring the elimination of the machines in time for the next presidential election in 2004.

No major problems were reported in balloting in California in the 2000 presidential race; about half of the state's 17 million voters use the punch-card machines. The California branch of the ACLU, which filed the lawsuit, had alleged that the error rate violated the constitutional rights of voters.

----

Bush 2000 Adviser Offered To Use Clout to Help Enron

By Joe Stephens
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 17, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22380-2002Feb16?language=printer

Just before the last presidential election, Bush campaign adviser Ralph Reed offered to help Enron Corp. deregulate the electricity industry by working his "good friends" in Washington and by mobilizing religious leaders and pro-family groups for the cause.

For a $380,000 fee, the conservative political strategist proposed a broad lobbying strategy that included using major campaign contributors, conservative talk shows and nonprofits to press Congress for favorable legislation. Reed said he could place letters from community leaders in the opinion pages of major newspapers, producing clips that Reed would "blast fax" to Capitol Hill.

"We are a loyal member of your team and are prepared to do whatever fits your strategic plan," Reed wrote in an Oct. 23, 2000, memo obtained by The Washington Post.

"In public policy," he wrote, "it matters less who has the best arguments and more who gets heard -- and by whom."

The memo offers a glimpse into the relationship between Enron and the influential conservative, who was first recommended to the company in 1997 by Karl Rove, now a senior adviser to President Bush. Reed, head of the Atlanta-based consulting firm Century Strategies, is the former executive director of the Christian Coalition and current chairman of the Georgia Republican Party.

Reed has drawn criticism for his 1997 work on one Enron issue, a Pennsylvania deregulation matter, but Century Strategies Vice President Tim Phillips said yesterday the firm's relationship with Enron continued until October 2001, when it ended by "mutual agreement."

Phillips said Enron never finalized the specific lobbying job outlined in Reed's memo, but he declined to answer questions about what tasks Reed did carry out for the Houston company. Reed did not return phone calls.

Last month Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, asked for a federal investigation into whether Rove arranged the 1997 Enron contract to avoid paying Reed from Bush campaign funds. Others have questioned whether the Bush camp had hoped to ensure Reed's allegiance during the early days of the campaign.

Enron has offered little information about its dealings with Reed, one of many prominent political figures and commentators the company cultivated ties with before it collapsed in bankruptcy late last year. Rick Shapiro, the Enron vice president to whom Reed addressed the memo, declined to comment.

Reed's influence has escalated over the last decade. He claims credit for helping Bush win several key presidential primary victories, and he has served as an adviser to members of Congress. Since 1997, when Reed opened Century Strategies, his consulting clients have included political candidates and corporations with interests in Washington. He dropped Microsoft Corp. as a client in 2000 after charges that he had lobbied Bush on behalf of the software company while Bush was governor of Texas.

The seven-page memo to Enron illustrates for the first time how Reed pitches his services to major corporations and how he draws on alliances he forged during ideological battles fought alongside conservative religious leaders. It also shows how political consultants have increasingly brought tactics once seen only in campaigns into the legislative arena.

Enlisting Reed's aid would have been in character with Enron's strategy of aligning itself with high-visibility political figures and pundits. Those who have accepted pay from Enron for their advice and other help include Bush economic adviser Lawrence B. Lindsey, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, economist Paul Krugman, CNBC commentator Larry Kudlow, U.S. Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick and incoming Republican National Committee chairman Marc Racicot.

Reed referenced his previous Enron work in the October 2000 memo, noting Enron had seen his "capabilities at work in the 1997 effort in Pennsylvania," where Reed helped Enron build support for electricity deregulation. "Since that time, we have built a formidable network of grass-roots operatives in 32 states," he wrote.

Reed offered to mobilize that network in an effort to deregulate the electricity market. At the time, Enron was seeking open access to the nation's power grid so it could compete with traditional utilities.

Reed's memo stresses that his firm's "long history of organizing these groups makes us ideally situated to build a broad coalition" benefiting Enron. He said Enron's arguments for deregulation were less important than commanding attention by enlisting the aid of elected officials' friends and supporters.

"There are certain people -- a friend or family member, key party person, civic or business leader, or major donor -- whose correspondence must be presented to the [elected] official for his personal reading and response," Reed wrote.

Such prominent figures could act as surrogates for Enron while pressing lawmakers to rewrite statutes, Reed said.

"We have the capacity to generate dozens of high-touch letters from an elected official's strongest supporters and the most influential opinion leaders in his district," he wrote. "Elected officials and regulators will be predisposed to favor greater market-oriented solutions if they hear from business, civic, and religious leaders in their communities."

Reed's memo said his organization had a record of harnessing the "minority community" and the "faith community" to support his clients.

Reed proposed two lobbying strategies, one costing $177,000 and the other $386,500.

"I will assume personal responsibility for the overall vision and strategy of the project," he wrote. "I have long-term friendships with many members of Congress."

Reed proposed sending 20 "facilitating letters" to each of 17 members of the congressional commerce committees that handle deregulation. Under the proposal, Enron would pay Reed's firm $170,000 for generating the letters, each signed by a third party.

Reed asked Enron to pay his firm $25,000 to generate letters to the editors of newspapers, each signed by a prominent figure. "These op-eds and letters are then blast faxed to elected officials, opinion leaders and civic activists for use in their own letters and public statements." He said his firm had recently "placed" opinion pieces in The Washington Post and the New York Times.

A $79,500 telemarketing campaign would have cold-called citizens and offered to immediately patch them through to Congress.

"For one recent client, we generated more calls to a U.S. Senate office than had been received since impeachment" of President Bill Clinton, he wrote. "The result was a major victory for the client."

Finally, Reed said he had enjoyed "great success" in using conservative news-talk programs to spread his clients' message to "faith-based activists."

"Our public relations team has extensive experience booking guests on talk radio shows, and has excellent working relationships with many hosts," he wrote, proposing a $30,000 fee.

"We look forward to working with Enron," he said.

Staff researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.


-------- MILITARY

America's laser of death cleared for take-off

By Sean Rayment
17/02/2002
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/02/17/wbush217.xml&sSheet=/news/2002/02/17/ixworld.html

AMERICA'S enemies will soon face a weapon, once confined to the Star Wars films, that can bring death at the speed of light.

The special operations AC-130 Spectre gunship, whose conventional weaponry has been used to devastating effect since the Vietnam War, is to be fitted with a laser that can shoot down missiles, punch holes in aircraft and knock out ground radar stations.

Despite the successful operations against Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan, the emergence of asymmetric terrorist warfare - attacks such as September 11 where the enemy is unseen - has led the Pentagon to identify the need for a more sophisticated and deadly weapons system.

The next generation gunship, codenamed AC-X and nicknamed 'Son of Spectre' by US defence officials, will carry all the weaponry already used on the AC-130, including twin 20mm Vulcan cannon (capable of firing 2,500 rounds per minute), 40mm Bofor cannon (100 rounds per minute) and a 105mm Howitzer. Its 21st-century addition, however, will be its biggest punch: a chemical oxygen iodine laser (Coil), capable of carrying out lethal and non-lethal attacks.

The advantage of laser weapons is that they strike at the speed of light. In the Coil, the power of a chemical reaction is converted to laser energy, and the weapon can carry on firing as long as its power source is intact.

Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary, has given the go-ahead for the next-generation AC-130, which includes full funding for the "integration of a direct-energy weapon".

The Pentagon is yet to announce when the new laser-equipped "Son of Spectre" will come into operation, but it is understood that the first upgraded version could be involved in military operations within two years.

Although lasers exist that can hit aircraft, disable optically guided missiles and destroy communications lines, the ability to vaporise enemy troops and vehicles Star Wars-style will take a few more years to develop.

The Spectre, flown by the 16th Special Operations Squadron, has a crew of 13, including two observers using television and infra-red images to direct the four gunners on to their target.

Working in pairs, normally providing close air support for special forces ground operations, Spectres can circle targets for hours, pulverising areas the size of football pitches with extraordinary precision.

The Spectre has, however, come to the end of its operational life and further upgrades have been ruled out on cost grounds.

Rob Hewson, the editor of Jane's Air Launched Weapons, said: "The laser will be the atomic weapon of the 21st century. Since the 1970s, US scientists have conducted a series of secret experiments in the Nevada desert using lasers.

"We know that they had lasers capable of causing immense damage but they needed huge power packs. This remains a problem and this is why a laser weapon can only be fitted on an air frame the size of the AC-130. But advances will be made and the power plant will shrink and one day it will dominate the battle field.

"The Americans may already have a very powerful laser weapon far more advanced than we have seen. They have been carrying out research in this field for years but it is a very secret weapons programme and we have no idea how far they have progressed."

Once the Coil and its power plant have been fully developed, the USAF hopes to fit it to a whole range of manned and unmanned aircraft, such as the Predator reconnaissance probe, which is fitted with Hellfire missiles and has been used in CIA operations in Afghanistan.

Lasers could also be used as an additional weapon system to fighters, bombers, helicopter gunships and warships but this is unlikely for a decade.

-------- afghanistan

War Coverage Takes a Negative Turn
Civilian Deaths, Military Errors Become Focus as Reporters Revisit Bombing Sites

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 17, 2002; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22049-2002Feb16?language=printer

When U.S. soldiers conducted a raid north of Kandahar, Afghanistan, on Jan. 24, it was initially reported as an American victory.

"U.S. Special Forces got into a fight with the Taliban. . . . Fifteen Afghan fighters were killed and 27 taken into custody," said ABC's Peter Jennings.

"Army Special Forces stormed two Taliban compounds," said NBC's Jim Miklaszewski. Newspapers carried similar stories, adding such caveats as "Defense Department officials said."

Days later, however, a few reporters in Afghanistan began challenging the official accounts, eventually prompting the Pentagon to acknowledge that those captured were not Taliban members after all. On balance, though, some journalists say the news business has been too passive during a war in which the first, often lasting impressions are left by military briefers at the lectern.

"We are the auditors of this operation," said Mark Thompson, Time magazine's defense correspondent. "Sometimes you get the feeling there's a little too much Arthur Andersen going on."

After five months in which the Bush administration drew consistently upbeat coverage for a successful military campaign, the media climate has turned sharply negative. Suddenly, the issues of civilian casualties, military mistakes and the Pentagon's own credibility have been dragged into the national spotlight.

Perhaps there was lingering resentment among journalists over their limited access during the war while Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was hailed on magazine covers like a rock star. Perhaps the tales of innocents slain in remote Afghan villages became too heart-rending to ignore. Perhaps there was a news void as the fighting largely subsided and the Osama bin Laden trail went cold.

Or perhaps it is easier for reporters to raise uncomfortable questions about military blunders now that the Taliban regime has been toppled and the threat to American troops greatly eased.

Whatever the cause, war coverage now resembles a kind of time-lapse photography, with journalists revisiting the scene of past bombing raids for the kind of up-close-and-personal reporting that was all but impossible while the ground war was raging.

On Monday, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and the New York Times reported allegations by some of the 27 Afghans captured in last month's raid that American forces had beaten and kicked them -- prompting Rumsfeld to order an investigation. A day earlier, the New York Times ran a lengthy piece on civilian deaths in several raids in Afghanistan. On Wednesday, The Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times examined civilian casualties in a raid in October.

But the Pentagon still controls access in some areas where journalists want to dig for information. One dramatic clash took place last weekend when Washington Post reporter Doug Struck tried to visit the site of the Jan. 24 raid. He was turned away at gunpoint by U.S. soldiers who threatened to shoot him if he went farther.

Struck said from Afghanistan that "the important thing isn't whether Doug Struck was threatened. It shows the extremes the military is going to to keep this war secret, to keep reporters from finding out what's going on."

Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke defended the department's dealings with the media. "I think it's a reflection of the often confusing and shifting nature of a very unconventional war," she said. "It's always a balance. We want to put out as much information as we can, and we want that information to be as accurate as it can be. We can't always do that as quickly as some reporters would like."

Since the Persian Gulf War, the military and the media have been arguing over the degree to which journalists can accompany battlefield troops without jeopardizing their safety. These complaints grew louder after the United States began bombing Afghanistan Oct. 7 without activating previously designated pools of reporters. At the same time, Rumsfeld threatened to prosecute anyone caught leaking classified information.

Now that journalists are relatively free to invade Afghanistan on their own, the war's latest phase has produced a spate of murky, conflicting accounts of whether U.S. troops sometimes targeted the wrong people.

CBS correspondent David Martin said Rumsfeld's crackdown has meant that "the real story does not seem to bubble up from below in the reporting chain the way it used to. People who care about their credibility with you no longer trust all the information they're getting. They've become more cautious because they don't want to be made to look the liar when some other report comes up two days later."

Thompson said the military itself frequently has incomplete information about the impact of its bombing. "The Pentagon was pretty much as blind as we were," he said. "As painful as it was to watch, the Pentagon has provided us with their changing assessment as it occurred. Frankly, I don't know how they screwed up so bad."

Not all journalists are critical of defense officials. "I know there are a lot of complaints from reporters that this war has been harder to cover, but personally I don't find it so," NBC's Miklaszewski said. "You get the first blush from military sources, and in many cases a more thorough examination finds it didn't exactly happen that way."

CNN's Bob Franken, who recently visited Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, said officials at the U.S. naval base there considered lifting the ban on filming the transfer of detainees. But, he said, "people on the ground got a tremendous amount of grief from higher-ups for suggesting the idea. I was told there was a concern about what if something goes wrong. Well, in a free society you report the good and the bad."

The day after the Jan. 24 raid, National Public Radio introduced a report from Mike Shuster by noting that "there have been many accusations of errant bombs that killed civilians and civilians who died because they were too near military targets."

"It's been a hard story to get," said Barbara Rehm, NPR's managing editor. "We've tried very hard to chip away at it. The best information for us has been on the scene. I wish we had infinitely more access. It's hard moving around the country."

On Jan. 28, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Knight Ridder and London's Guardian reported claims by Afghan villagers that those killed in the raid four days earlier were, as the Los Angeles paper put it, "pro-government local residents, not hard-line Taliban holdouts as described by the U.S. military."

The Pentagon opened an investigation Jan. 30, even as Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said there was no evidence that U.S. forces had struck the wrong target. The military later released the 27 captives.

In the incident involving Struck, Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, a Pentagon spokesman, said the reporter was turned back "both for his safety and that of the soldiers who were there doing that work."

Although Struck presented his credentials, Quigley said, he was accompanied by armed Afghan guards and "we had no idea who these guys were."

Struck called that explanation "an incredibly specious excuse on the part of the Pentagon." He said his guards, who remained at the bottom of a hill where the soldiers were stationed, "were clearly no threat to the Americans and clearly going nowhere."

Struck said the soldiers' commander, after consulting by radio with his superiors, told him: "If you go further, you would be shot."

Quigley challenged the reporter's version, saying the commander had told Struck: "For your own safety, we cannot let you go forward. You could be shot in a firefight."

Struck said: "That's an amazing lie. Those words were not spoken. With all due respect, Admiral Quigley was not there; I was."

The question of access has come up in other settings. At Camp Rhino, the U.S. Marine base in Afghanistan, military spokesmen repeatedly told reporters last month that they could not see, interview or photograph the detainees because of Geneva Convention rules -- even though the administration was then arguing that the detainees were not formally covered by the international agreement.

Clarke, maintaining that the captives always enjoyed Geneva-type protections, said the military has accommodated "scores and scores of reporters" on airplanes, aircraft carriers and even with Special Forces units. "We go to extreme lengths to the extent possible to facilitate media coverage of this war," she said.

Miklaszewski said the media is still getting a good picture of the war: "A complete picture? We'll never get that. There's still information being released about secrets kept during World War II."

-------- business

Thinking war through

By Andy Murray
Sunday, February 17, 2002
Eagle-Tribune, Turnpike St., North Andover, MA, 01845
From: Stephen Kobasa <skobasa@pop.snet.net>
http://www.EagleTribune.com

A Raytheon missile blasts off from a ship at sea and burns a path to a target somewhere off in the darkness. It's a flashy show many in this country have seen on television.

But few have seen what another local defense contractor, Dynamics Research Corp., can do. That's because when the Andover-based company completes its mission, it's often with a schedule or a schematic -- not 10,000 pounds of rocket fuel.

While other defense contractors sell tanks and toilet seats, Dynamics Research Corp. sells the know-how that makes the military's systems run more efficiently.

"Companies like Raytheon or Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman make the things the military buys that drive, shoot or go 'bang.' What we do is to help the armed services ... integrate different technologies with one another," said James P. Regan, Dynamics Research's chief executive officer, sitting in the company's corporate headquarters on Frontage Road.

For example, Dynamics Research has come up with ways American submarines can travel anywhere in the world and still deliver a missile on-target with unwavering accuracy. The Navy's Trident missile program has been a client for more than 30 years.

But Dynamics Research Corp. doesn't stop there. While nearly three-fourths of its business comes from the U.S. military, Dynamics Research counts on commercial and state and local governments for another 21 percent of its business.

Apart from a small manufacturing operation in Wilmington, wherever Dynamics Research goes, it is selling expertise -- in information technology, logistics, running complex systems. Some of its programs include advising the Air Force on which planes to ground for repairs and teaching Army field surgeons how to make fewer mistakes under pressure.

It's a rapidly growing niche market. According to an analysis of Department of Defense prime contract awards in 1999, the most recent year available, the largest increase in procurement programs was in services, which increased $2.4 billion.

"The reality is, FedEx ships things more cheaply than the government does, likewise (a contractor) cutting payroll checks," said Chris Hellman, a senior analyst for the Center on Defense Information, an independent monitor that published the study.

Today, many military projects, outposts and functions are outsourced as a way of dealing with shrinking military budgets, Hellman said. Some overseas military bases are even run by private contractors, he said.

"It's one of the surprising things you find today in the way we are fighting wars. A lot of it is being done by civilian contractors," said Hellman.

Thomas Meagher, an equity research analyst who follows Dynamics Research for BB&C Capital Markets in Virginia, says the market for military services is expanding. But what's important now is where the soldiers are and where they're expected to go if they're called up. Since World War II the United States has relinquished many of its military bases on foreign soil, but it still needs to deploy people to trouble spots quickly.

"That has placed much more of a premium on managing the logistics. It's not just getting there; it's getting everything you have up and running together," Meagher said. That requires planning that sometimes is done by private companies.

The nation's current war on terrorism has opened the spigot on military spending in a way that seems to be benefiting private contractors, no matter their size. Armed services are relying more on private companies, but so are the larger contractors who are trying to fill a variety of orders.

"One of the ironies is that as the large contractors get larger, they are increasingly willing to subcontract out large portions of the work they do. They are not at all shy about getting smaller, niche companies to do their work for them," Hellman said.

Dynamics Research almost wasn't around to benefit from the wartime spending spree.

Before Regan and the current management team arrived in November 1999, Dynamics Research had slogged through two years of million-dollar losses. The company's management had failed to keep up with growth, or focus on its key military contracts, Regan said.

Regan, a former executive for contractor Litton PRC, made improving execution and morale two of his early objectives. The company began offering an employee stock ownership program and cut its work force, laying off a total of 150 workers in 2000 and 2001.

By the end of 2001, the company had reported its eighth-straight profitable quarter and earnings of $6.5 million, or 81 cents per share, on 2001 revenues of $201.1 million. Its fourth-quarter profit of $1.8 million in 2001 was an 80 percent increase over the same period a year ago.

"If we have not turned it around, we are well into the turn, and all indicators are positive," Regan said last week.

Dynamics Research currently employs 1,500 employees worldwide, with the bulk of them -- 800 -- at its offices in Andover, Wilmington and Newton.

Meagher thinks Dynamics Research is being rewarded for the turnaround in its stock price, which has climbed from less than $4 a share when BB&C Capital Markets began tracking the company, to slightly more than $15 a share this week.

"The new management has done a superb job of turning the ship around," Meagher said.

Meagher said he doesn't expect the company to grow expansively in the coming years or market many of its products to the broader commercial sector, even though the company recently signed a multi-year deal to sell its medical error reduction course to a network of community hospital nationwide. Getting outside of its niche was where Dynamics Research got clobbered before, Meagher said.

"With everything that has happened since 9-11, there is not a lot of reason to push something you don't know a lot about and you are not very good at unless it is a slam-dunk," Meagher said.

Regan said most contractors have yet to see much of the business that will come from an increase in defense spending for the war on terrorism and widening defense spending in the future, but he is carefully watching what happens in Afghanistan. The armed services' brilliant fighting with very few casualties does not happen easily, and Regan hopes demand for his company's ingenuity will be in greater demand when forces return.

"We basically won a war with two casualties. ... Behind that is a lot of planning, a lot of computer systems and a lot of data," Reagan said.

--------

Two Butchers
'Beyond the Mountains of the Damned: The War Inside Kosovo' by Matthew McAllester

Reviewed by Robert D. Kaplan
Sunday, February 17, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13312-2002Feb15?language=printer

BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS OF THE DAMNED
The War Inside KosovoBy Matthew McAllesterNew York Univ. 225 pp. $24.95

In badly constructed books, the reader doesn't care what happens on the next page. In well-constructed books, the reader can't wait to see what happens on the next page. This book is a rare, third kind: The reader dreads what will happen on the next page. Nevertheless, he feels compelled to read on.

In Beyond the Mountains of the Damned, Newsday correspondent Matthew McAllester proves to be more than a journalist: He displays the natural gifts of the storyteller, who, in the most uncanny ways is able to develop characters, build tension, and keep a plot churning. Rather than being placed alongside other journalistic accounts of war-torn Yugoslavia that have been published since the mid-1990s, Beyond the Mountains of the Damned belongs in the category of books that includes Eleni, Nicholas Gage's page-turning classic of the Greek Civil War.

McAllester tells the story of Isa Bala and his family, Kosovar Albanians from the town of Pec, and how they are destroyed by a local Serbian mobster, Nebojsa Minic, during the NATO air war against Serbia in the spring of 1999. Isa Bala is a butcher, an uncomplicated man whose entire self-image is built on his family and the home and protection he provides for it. The man who will ruin his life, Nebojsa Minic, is a particular species of war criminal, the kind that only communist regimes produce. A petty thief nurtured by the criminal rackets, underemployment and alcoholism characteristic of socialist dictatorships -- even relatively benign ones like Tito's -- Minic later ripens into a sadist. "Narrow eyes sat on either side of a large, straight nose that made Minic look like he was leaning towards you even when he wasn't. Years of working out in prison had made his forearms and shoulders solid and powerful." Minic wears a headband, and on his lower lip and chest sports tattoos of the Serbian words for "dead" and "dead man."

In trouble with the police since he was 11, Minic graduated in the early 1990s from smuggling oil and cigarettes to trafficking in drugs. Nineteen ninety-five found him in Srebrenica, escorting truckloads of civilians to mass execution sites. Back in the Kosovo town of Pec after the war in Bosnia, he boasted about the Moslem girls he had raped. Relations between Serbs and Albanians in Pec, as I know from my own reporting trips there in the 1980s, had a particularly nasty edge to them. But what aggravated Minic's hatred of his Albanian neighbors was less a historical grudge than a heroin deal gone sour, for which he blamed his Albanian business partners. While NATO, in 1999, was bombing from 10,000 feet, Minic, now wearing two orthodox crosses around his neck and calling himself and his men "warriors," ethnically cleansed the Albanian part of Pec. What does a woman do while her husband is being beaten by someone like Minic? In the author's words, you behave as if you met a bear in the woods. "Stare at the ground in front of you. Don't look the bear in the eye."

McAllester takes the reader not only along the streets where atrocities have been committed but inside homes while they are happening. As is the case with many good reads, the power of such scenes comes from the order in which events are presented. First the author develops a character, then later in the book informs you about his fate. Or the author will describe how a family is brutalized, then describes, almost as an aside -- in the course of a succeeding chapter about his own adventures in war-torn Kosovo -- how he meets a traumatized eyewitness to the previous account. In this way, the reader becomes an observer not only of what was happening inside Kosovo during the NATO bombardment but of what was happening to McAllester himself and how he managed to assemble his book.

What foreign policy lessons can be derived from this riveting work? I am not sure that there are many, though, to be fair to the author, the mechanics of policy lie somewhat outside the scope of his narrative. The NATO air campaign was carried out clumsily. While there was little or no intention to insert ground troops in Kosovo, public pronouncements to that effect from the Clinton administration provided Serbs like Minic with the assurance that they could murder with impunity. Nevertheless, there simply may not have been another way to remove Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic from power. In particular, critics of then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright might consider that had the Rambouillet peace conference been better orchestrated, so that the bombardment of Kosovo were unnecessary, the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo might still have occurred -- albeit more gradually -- and rather than facing a war-crimes trial in the Hague as he is now, Milosevic would still be in power in Belgrade, continuing to destabilize the region.

Near the end of the book, the author provides this chilling commentary: "Pec is Albanian now. Its people are euphoric. But part of that euphoria is born of hatred. Part of the reason they are so happy is that they never have to see another Serb again on their streets. The people of Pec like their sameness." •

Robert D. Kaplan is the author of "Balkan Ghosts" and, most recently, "Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos."

-------- colombia

Colombia formally charges three Irishmen accused of training FARC

Sunday February 17, 7:47 AM
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020216/1/2i0c5.html

Colombian prosecutors have formally charged three Irishmen accused of training leftist guerrillas in the use of explosives, media here reported.

Niall Connolly, Martin McCauley and James Monaghan were also charged with using false documents to disguise their identities and the true nature of their activities in Colombia, El Espectador reported on its website Friday, citing official sources.

The three men are to remain under arrest until their trial and, if found guilty, could be sentenced to up to eight years in prison each, the weekly reported.

Witnesses testified that they saw the three men in the Switzerland-size zone in southern Colombia controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and technical evidence revealed traces of explosives on their clothes, the report said.

Connolly, McCauley and Monaghan were arrested by the Colombian military at Bogota's international airport on August 11, suspected of having trained FARC rebels in the use of explosives -- charges the men denied.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams acknowledged in October that Connolly, 36, was a Sinn Fein representative in Cuba, though he said the appointment was made without his knowledge or official authorization from the group, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

The IRA has denied that the three men are members.

-------- europe

Atlantic solidarity cracks as U.S. rattles sabre

By John Chalmers
Sunday February 17, 7:06 PM
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-89816.html

BRUSSELS - The "continental drift" that seemed to be driving the United States and Europe apart before September 11 is suddenly back on.

The interlude of transatlantic togetherness that followed the suicide hijack attacks on New York and Washington has been cut short, analysts say, by the Bush administration's go-it-alone belligerence in the widening war on terrorism.

Capturing in one phrase the sense of shared vulnerability and interdependency in those first days after September 11, the liberal French newspaper Le Monde, rarely a flag-waver for American interests, had declared: "We are all Americans".

Last week, the same paper published an essay on U.S. foreign policy headlined: "Is the United States going mad?"

The Europeans are alarmed by President George W. Bush's world view -- characterised by what many see as a crass labelling of Iran, Iraq and North Korea as the "axis of evil".

They are particularly dismayed that Washington, brimming with confidence after its victory in Afghanistan, may now be preparing to try and topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, seen as the main check on Washington hawks, last week repeated earlier assurances that there were no plans for early strikes against Baghdad.

But it did nothing to stem the flow of worried and indignant rhetoric from European Union capitals.

First French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine attacked America's "simplistic" approach to the war on terrorism. And then last week German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer warned Bush not to treat his allies like satellite states.

"The international coalition against terror is not the foundation to carry out just anything against anybody, and particularly not on one's own," Fischer said."

"UNILATERALIST OVERDRIVE"

The EU's external relations commissioner Chris Patten, a British Conservative, called on European governments to stop Washington going into "unilateralist overdrive".

He returned to the charge a few days later, saying the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan had "perhaps reinforced some dangerous instincts": that the projection of military power is the only basis of true security, that Washington can rely only on itself and that allies may be useful as an optional extra.

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, who holds the European Union's rotating presidency, summed up the mood in an interview with Germany's Der Spiegel weekly: "We shall have to discuss the new vision of American foreign policy," he said.

"We are experiencing a historic moment in which Europeans and North Americans must redefine their alliance."

Philip Gordon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington, said the Atlantic allies had surprised each other in September: Washington did not shoot from the hip and the EU backed its war on al Qaeda and Afghanistan's ruling Taliban.

There had been a mood change from the early days of the Bush administration, which had walked out of the Kyoto climate change accord, challenged the global nuclear order with its plans for missile defence and seemed disengaged in the Middle East.

With September 11, the United States, Europeans and even Russia closed ranks against terrorism and -- for the first time in its history -- NATO invoked a founding mutual defence clause under which an attack on one is treated as an attack on all.

The Europeans had hoped to seize on that solidarity to draw Moscow into closer partnership with the West, give Middle East peacemaking greater priority and help stabilise the Balkans.

Yet Bush has seemed keener on widening the war on terrorism and this has included -- as France's Vedrine put it -- a "blind acceptance" of the "policy of pure repression" conducted by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon against the Palestinians.

"Now both (the United States and the Europeans) are reinforcing each other's worst tendencies," Gordon said.

"Bush is returning to what the Europeans were afraid of in the first place: an emphasis on the military side and suggestions of a clash of civilisations. Europe is returning to its worst tendencies: simply complaining and providing no alternative policy. This leads to a negative cycle."

TWO-TIER NATO

Wolfgang Hager at the Brussels-based Centre for European Policy Studies, said many Europeans were anxious about the "belly-driven tough approach" of a "parochial Texan president".

"There is a general feeling that this is a dangerous, out-of-control presidency, and not just among the usual suspects like France," he said.

The seeds of doubt about a new era of interdependence were sown early after September 11, with Washington's decision to seek only a sprinkling of help from its allies in Afghanistan.

The yawning capability gap between the United States and its NATO partners suddenly came under the spotlight: the $48-billion increase planned for the U.S. defence budget in 2003 is far larger than the total annual defence budget of its biggest ally.

The U.S. ambassador to NATO, Nicholas Burns, said recently: "Without dramatic action to close the capabilities gap, we face a real prospect of a future two-tiered Alliance."

NATO Secretary General George Robertson has long urged the Europeans to spend more on crisis management capabilities but more recently he has warned more gravely that failure to do so could spur America towards "unilateralism or isolationism".

Paul Rogers, professor of peace studies at England's Bradford University, argued in a recent article that little has changed in terms of U.S. security policy since September 11: where cooperation is necessary it will be sought, but where a unilateral policy is seen as appropriate its will be pursued.

Rogers said that if Washington does decide to take the war on terrorism to Iraq, "the potential divide between European and U.S. approaches to security that were evident before September 11 may become the core issue in transatlantic relations".

-------- germany

Germany evacuates 13,000 people after finding WW2 bomb

Sunday February 17
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-89817.html

HANOVER, Germany - German police said on Sunday they had evacuated 13,000 people from their homes after finding an unexploded British World War Two bomb on the outskirts of the northern town of Hanover.

The 250 kilogram (500 pound) bomb, found on an industrial site of the Siemens AG engineering company, has a delayed action fuse which is unstable, police spokesman Hermann Fraatz said.

"We've set up a 1,000-metre safety radius and because this is a residential area we've had to ask a lot of people to leave their homes," the spokesman said.

Bomb disposal experts have yet to decide whether the bomb can be safely defused or will have to be detonated.

Unexploded bombs are often found in Germany, which had many of its major cities bombed to ruins during the war, but it is rare for as many as 13,000 people to be evacuated.

The evacuation was planned for Sunday after the bomb was located last week by experts studying World War Two reconnaissance photographs taken by the bombers as they passed over Hanover, and handed over by Britain.

"We check the photos for bomb impact points and then for craters. If an impact point does not coincide with a crater, it might conceal an unexploded bomb," said Fraatz.

-------- iran

Bin Laden's No 2 'captured in Iran'

Rory McCarthy in Islamabad and Luke Harding in Kabul
Monday February 18, 2002
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,652071,00.html

Osama bin Laden's most senior lieutenant, the Egyptian militant Ayman al-Zawahiri, has been captured and jailed in Tehran, a leading Iranian newspaper reported yesterday.

Zawahiri, the founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, was arrested several days ago and has been imprisoned in the city's Evin jail, where political prisoners are usually held, the Hayat-e-Nou newspaper said.

If the report is correct, the arrest is the most serious strike at the heart of Bin Laden's al-Qaida network since the World Trade Centre attacks, and a diplomatic coup for Tehran.

The FBI has Zawahiri on its most-wanted list in connection with the August 1998 bombings of two US embassies in east Africa in which 224 people were killed. It has offered a $25m reward for information leading to his capture.

The Farsi-language paper gave few details yesterday about the arrest and no indication of the source of its information. The paper is regarded as reliable and is run by Hadi Khamenei, a leading legislator and the brother of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

But Iran's foreign ministry said last night. "The news that has been published in the Hayat-e-Nou newspaper is not true. We deny it," Hamid Reza Asefi, a foreign ministry spokesman, said.

In Kabul the interim government said many al-Qaida and Taliban fighters had crossed into Iran but it had no information on Zawahiri. "We are not aware that a person of al-Zawahiri's stature has been arrested," foreign ministry spokesman Omar Samad said.

Zawahiri, 50, who wears thick spectacles and a long, dark beard, is regarded as Bin Laden's closest ally. He has been living with him in Afghanistan for several years and often served as his personal doctor. In an interview in June last year, Bin Laden said he had merged Zawahiri's Islamic Jihad with al-Qaida.

In December, Afghan commanders involved in the attacks on Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan said they believed Zawahiri had recently been at the camp. His wife and three daughters were later reported to have died in a US bombing raid, although it was thought Zawahiri was not with them at the time.

Washington has criticised Tehran for allowing al-Qaida and Taliban fighters to slip across its border and Iran was named by George Bush as one of three "axis of evil" countries.

-------- iraq

Europe Adamantly Opposed To Any U.S. Attack on Iraq

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, February 17, 2002; Page A29
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22242-2002Feb16?language=printer

BERLIN -- U.S. allies in Europe are deeply fearful that the Bush administration is moving inexorably toward a military clash with Iraq, and while they are being blunt in their opposition, they also are beginning to wonder if Washington cares what they think.

Europe has a long-standing pattern of hesitating in the face of U.S. determination to act militarily, followed by unifying with the Americans as hostilities loom and then begin. But this time, the Europeans insist, they are firmly opposed to expanding the war on terrorism to Iraq.

"No support," Josef Joffe, a German foreign policy analyst and editor of the weekly Die Zeit, said in an interview. "Will Europe do anything to hinder it if the U.S. goes ahead? No. Will they deny things like overflight rights? No. . . . But active political support? None."

Publicly, European leaders are using bullhorn diplomacy to condemn what they view as a belligerent unilateralism that will undermine, if not destroy, the solidarity created in the aftermath of Sept. 11.

"The stunning and unexpectedly rapid success of the military campaign in Afghanistan was a tribute to American capacity," Chris Patten, the European Union's external affairs commissioner , wrote in Friday's Financial Times of London.

"But it has perhaps reinforced some dangerous instincts: that the projection of military power is the only basis of true security; that the U.S. can rely only on itself; and that allies may be useful as an optional extra but that the U.S. is big enough to manage without them if it must," he wrote.

In today's world, no country in Europe is a superpower. That reality has tended to make Europeans more respectful of talk and international institutions as ways to settle disputes. Moreover, waging war without others' help is simply not an option for most of the countries. While a number of European countries are helping U.S. forces in the Afghan theater, the conflict has underlined again the gap in U.S. and European military capabilities.

In Afghanistan, said Joffe, "people watched with amazement as this [U.S.] global military machine meshed. And there is fear of that power."

Some Europeans have said that the victory in Afghanistan was an opportunity for international cooperation and nation-building, a loathed term in the White House.

"We have to do all we can to bolster weak or failing states and prevent them from falling into the clutches of the bin Ladens of this world," said Patten.

European skepticism about strikes on Iraq had been building for weeks, but blossomed after President Bush's State of the Union address, in which he referred to Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an "axis of evil."

French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine called the Bush administration's approach "simplistic." He was joined by German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, a pro-American politician who risked the political future of his party, the historically pacifist Greens, to support the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan.

"The international coalition against terror is not the basis to take action against someone -- least of all unilaterally," Fischer told the German newspaper Die Welt. "All European foreign ministers see it that way. That is why the phrase 'axis of evil' leads nowhere."

Even Britain, the United States' closest European ally in the war on terrorism, has sounded skeptical about the axis of evil. Foreign Minister Jack Straw, in a visit to Washington three days after Bush spoke those words, brushed aside the remarks as domestic politicking. "The president's State of the Union speech is best understood in the context of the midterm elections in November, it seems to me," Straw told the British media.

Without evidence of Iraqi involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks -- of which there is none, they say -- the Europeans question the legality of military action and fear it could cause chaos in the Arab world, cast the United States as bent on hegemony and spark intense anti-Americanism in Europe.

"We know which nations' representatives and citizens were fighting alongside the Taliban and where their activities were financed from," Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week. "Iraq is not on this list."

European officials insist that there are still diplomatic and economic avenues to ensure that Iraq is not developing weapons of mass destruction. Fischer said that Iraq should be pressed to allow U.N. inspectors to return to the country and that "the sanctions regime must be further developed so that Iraq cannot produce or bring on line weapons of mass destruction." Patten said the Iraqi opposition could be bolstered.

Despite the differences, Europeans say they share the Bush administration's goal of bringing down the Iraqi leader. "We would like a new government leadership in Iraq, primarily because the people need a new government," said Karsten Voigt, coordinator of German-American relations at the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. "The differences start on how to achieve that. We need a serious debate across the Atlantic."

Correspondents T.R. Reid in London and Sharon LaFraniere in Moscow contributed to this report.

----

Iraq says has no plans to acquire mass destruction arms

Sunday February 17, 4:11 AM
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-89735.html

BAGHDAD - Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said on Saturday that his country -- accused by Washington of being part of an "axis of evil" -- did not intend to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

"...weapons are important to defend the country against ambitions of foreigners and elements of evil, but your country is not interested in acquiring weapons of mass destruction," Saddam was quoted by the official Iraqi News Agency (INA) as saying.

"We want to acquire more science to serve ordinary people and humanity at large," Saddam told a group of scientists from the Iraqi Nuclear Energy Organisation.

U.S. President George W. Bush's administration is looking at ways to oust Saddam on the grounds that Baghdad is developing weapons of mass destruction.

Bush has repeatedly warned Saddam that his country would face the consequences if he does not allow U.N. weapons inspectors to return.

Iraq has barred the inspectors, charged with scrapping its chemical, nuclear and biological arms programmes, since U.S. and British warplanes bombed Baghdad in December 1998. Iraq denies it has any weapons of mass destruction.

Bush has also called Iraq a member of an "axis of evil", with Iran and North Korea, saying he would not stand by as those states developed weapons of mass destruction.

Speculation has mounted since Bush's State of the Union speech last month that military action against Iraq was imminent, something U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has repeatedly denied.

-------- israel / palestine

Israel's Sharon's vows to win "war", as peace camp make surprise showing

Sunday February 17, 9:31 PM
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020217/1/2i6bh.html

Israel vowed to win the "war" against the Palestinians after a deadly suicide bombing on a West Bank Jewish settlement and a missile attack on an Israeli army base, which triggered retaliatory air strikes on the city of Nablus.

But as violence rocked the Palestinian territories, Israeli doves held one of their largest peace rallies in Tel Aviv, with around 15,000 people turning out to call for an end to the occupation.

"Israel has never lost a war and will win this one declared by the Palestinians," Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told security officials in a meeting to discuss the situation Saturday night, after renewed attacks capped a weekend of raging violence.

"If we remain united we will attain our goal, we will triumph," said Sharon, threatening to step up military operations.

Palestinian officials later accused Israel of creating a buffer zone half a mile (one kilometre) deep the length of the Gaza Strip's eastern boundary with Israel to stop radicals firing rockets into Israel.

Sharon spoke after two Israeli teenagers were killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber in the Jewish settlement of Karnei Shomron in the northern West Bank.

The bomber from the secular Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), blew himself up in a pizzeria where young people were gathering for a night out. Some 30 people were also injured, five of them seriously.

Shortly afterwards, Islamic radicals from the Hamas movement fired a home-made rocket at an Israeli army post in the northern Gaza Strip, causing no casualties but damaging a building.

Israel responded with air strikes on the head office of the governor of Nablus, in the West Bank, the city's police headquarters, the offices of the PFLP, and a building belonging to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Israel has cornered Arafat in his West Bank headquarters in Ramallah to pressure him into cracking down on violence, but the effect has been only an escalation of killing.

Israel blamed Arafat for the settlement bombing as it does for every attack, with a government spokesman saying he was in "close collusion" with extremist organisations.

The recent escalation, which saw Palestinian militant groups destroy for the first time ever one of Israel's formidable battle tanks and step up the use of home-made Katyusha-style rockets, has rekindled memories of the Lebanon war, which the Jewish state abandoned after two decades of bitter fighting in May 2000.

Tanks carried out another raid in the north of the Strip Sunday, and a Palestinian security chief, Colonel Khalid Abu al-Ula, accused Israel of using Palestinian land as a buffer zone, in contravention of all peace agreements.

Fuelling Israel's fears of a Lebanon-style war on their doorstep, the head of the fundamentalist Shiite Hezbollah in southern Lebanon urged the Palestinians to imitate his group's guerrilla tactics late Saturday.

But in Tel Aviv, the Israeli peace camp held one of its largest rallies to pressure Sharon to find a political solution to the crisis and end the 35-year occupation of the Palestinian territories.

----

Hamas says another rocket fired on Israel

Sunday February 17, 6:53 AM
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-89745.html

JERUSALEM - The Palestinian militant group Hamas said it carried out another attack inside Israel using its new longer-range Qassam-2 rocket on Saturday and threatened similar strikes against major population centres.

The Israeli army said one homemade, metre-long Qassam-2 rocket had landed on the Israeli community of Kfar Aza, close to Palestinian-ruled Gaza, but caused no casualties. It was the second strike with the new Palestinian weapon in a week.

The army later said Palestinians had fired one of its first-generation Qassam rockets, a version Hamas had used several times earlier in recent months, at a military installation near the Jewish settlement of Nisanit in northern Gaza on Saturday night.

In a statement, Hamas's military wing said it had fired the two Qassam-2 rockets as "a warning response to the Zionist criminals for the criminal bombing by planes and tanks of our people".

The Israeli army says the Qassam-2, first used last week, can hit Israeli cities if fired from the West Bank, an area where Israel believes they have already been deployed.

"They (the Israelis) will know what will happen if one of our rockets lands on a residential area during the day, as they saw today and as we have tried to avoid until now," Hamas said.

Saturday's attacks raised the spectre of further retaliation from Israel, which launched air strikes in response to the first Qassam-2 attacks against an Israeli community a week ago.

"We regard this as a very grave and intolerable act for which we will find the right answer," an Israeli army spokesman said following Saturday morning's attacks.

The Hamas statement said it fired two rockets on Saturday "in response to recent Israeli strikes and daily humiliation, killing and destruction as well as displacement of our people".

It mentioned a retaliatory Israeli air strike on Friday that reduced a Palestinian security compound in Gaza to rubble and killed a police lieutenant.

The Qassam-2 has a longer range -- up to eight km (five miles) -- than the previous rocket type used by militants. Israel has warned it views the deployment of the rockets as a grave escalation in the nearly 17-month-old conflict.

----

Helicopters Attack Palestinian Targets

By Mohammed Daraghmeh
Associated Press Writer
Sunday, February 17, 2002; 9:46 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23987-2002Feb17?language=printer

NABLUS, West Bank -- Israeli helicopters fired missiles at Palestinian buildings in the West Bank city of Nablus early Sunday after a suicide bomber attacked a nearby Jewish settlement, killing two Israeli teen-agers.

In the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian policeman who was wounded in a clash with Israeli soldiers a day earlier died in a hospital.

The missiles hit the headquarters of the Nablus governor, a police station, an empty residence intended for Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on his visits to the city and an apartment block, witnesses said. A resident of the apartment block was lightly injured.

The helicopter attack followed a suicide bombing Saturday in a pizza restaurant at the Jewish settlement of Karnei Shomron, where a 14-year-old girl and a 16-year-old boy were killed and 27 people were wounded, seven of them seriously. The army said the helicopter strike was launched "in the wake of murderous attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers."

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the second biggest group in the PLO, claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing in a leaflet and a phone call to The Associated Press. It said the bomber was an 18-year-old house painter from the West Bank city of Qalqilya. Karnei Shomron lies between Qalqilya and Nablus.

Palestinians have fired on Jewish settlements countless times and ambushed settlers on the roads, but the suicide bomber in Karnei Shomron was the first to blow himself up inside a settlement. Earlier Palestinian suicide bombings were inside Israel or at Israeli military positions in the Gaza Strip.

The PFLP is a secular group with a Marxist ideology. Nearly all the suicide bombings against Israel in 17 months of violence have been carried out by Muslim extremist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Israel holds Arafat responsible for the current wave of Palestinian bombing and shooting attacks. "Yasser Arafat is continuing a campaign of carnage against Israeli civilians," said Dore Gold, a government spokesman. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon maintains that Arafat could prevent the attacks but is not doing so.

Also in the West Bank, Israeli soldiers pitched tents inside Palestinian-controlled territory for the first time since fighting broke out in September 2000. Israeli forces have been in the village of Tamoun for a week, entering after a Palestinian attacker infiltrated an Israeli settlement and fatally shot three people before he was killed. The Israeli military said the tents were put up to improve living conditions for the soldiers but did not signify a lengthy stay.

A policeman wounded on Saturday in a clash with Israeli soldiers at the El-Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip died Sunday, hospital officials said, bringing the number of police killed in the fighting to four. The Israeli army said troops entered the camp and seized some Palestinian police positions in a response to a bomb blast that destroyed an Israeli tank and killed three of its crew last week.

Israeli police set up extra road blocks on Sunday in areas close to the northern West Bank after Hamas threatened to avenge the death of a member who was killed in an explosion in the West Bank city of Jenin on Saturday. A parked car blew up as the militant, Nazih Abu el Sbaa, 25, was walking past it.

Many prominent Palestinian militants have taken to walking or taking the bus, and stopped using their own cars, for fear of Israeli missile attacks, Palestinian witnesses say. Several militants have been killed in their cars by missiles fired by Israeli helicopters.

Hamas said Israel was responsible for Abu el-Sbaa's death. The Israeli army refused to say whether Israel planted the bomb, but said Abu el-Sbaa was involved in planning three suicide bomb attacks.

The explosion in Karnei Shomron took place as thousands of Israelis held a peace rally in Tel Aviv, calling on the government to resume peace negotiations with Arafat. Among the speakers was the PLO's representative in Jerusalem, Sari Nusseibeh.

Gold said talks would not be renewed until the violence stops. "That is not just the position of Israel. It is the position of the United States and the European Union," he told The Associated Press.

The Bush administration has called on Arafat to do more to rein in Palestinian militants.

----

Israeli Police Shoot Gunman, Car Blows Up

By REUTERS
February 17, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-mideast.html

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli police killed a Palestinian gunman during an exchange of fire outside a northern Israeli army base on Sunday, before the gunman's accomplice fled in a car which blew up minutes later, Israeli police said.

Details of the incident were sketchy, but Israeli northern police commander Yaacov Borovsky said it was not a suicide bombing as Israeli media had originally reported, but an apparent attempt to carry out a shooting and suicide bombing attack at the base, near the northern Israeli city of Hadera.

Borovsky said traffic police stopped a car on suspicion it had been stolen. A passenger got out and opened fire at police officers outside the army base. Police returned fire and killed the passenger, who was found with a bomb strapped to his body.

During the exchange, the driver of the car sped off and shortly afterwards the vehicle exploded during a police chase.

The fate of the driver was not immediately clear.

``For some reason the car exploded and appeared to have a bomb inside,'' Borovsky told Army radio.

Three people were wounded in the back-to-back incidents, medics said.

``A man dressed in jeans emerged from the car and started firing at the policeman,'' Yaacov, a witness, told Israel Radio.

``I saw the policeman rock back a little, it looked like he was wearing a bulletproof vest. And a gunfight began at a five-yard range, about 10 bullets were fired.

``The other terrorist who was in the car got out, and then got back in and took off,'' he said.

Another witness who saw the car blow up described the explosion as a ``very powerful blast.''

A week ago, two Palestinian gunmen, one with a bomb strapped to his body, opened fire outside an army base in the southern city of Beersheba, killing two female soldiers.

-------- pakistan

Suspected Islamic Militants Kill 8

By Binoo Joshi
Associated Press Writer
Sunday, February 17, 2002; 9:55 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23997-2002Feb17?language=printer

JAMMU, India -- Suspected Islamic militants shot and killed eight Hindus in a midnight attack on a remote mountainous village in troubled Jammu-Kashmir state, police said Sunday.

Another six Hindus were wounded when the assailants barged into two adjacent homes in Narala, a village in Rajouri district, 70 miles northwest of Jammu, the winter capital of Jammu-Kashmir state, police said.

The victims included four women, police in Jammu said.

The village is a 10-hour trek from the nearest highway.

No one claimed responsibility for the killings, but police blamed them on the Islamic militants groups fighting for Kashmir's independence from India.

The government says at least 30,000 people have been killed in the fighting, which began in 1989. Human rights groups put the death toll at twice that.

India accuses Pakistan of training and arming the militants and facilitating their infiltration into Indian territory for attacks on government forces and people.

Pakistan denies the charge and says it provides only moral and diplomatic support.

India moved hundreds of thousands of troops to the border with Pakistan after it blamed a Dec. 13 attack on the Indian Parliament on two Pakistan-based militant groups and Pakistan's spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence.

Pakistan responded by mobilizing its forces on the border and the cease-fire line dividing Kashmir between them. The nuclear rivals have fought two of their three wars for control of Kashmir since they won independence from Britain in 1947.

India said it will not pull its forces back until Pakistan stops supporting cross-border terrorism and hands over 20 people wanted for crimes in India.

Pakistan has banned the two militant groups and promised to curb any terrorist activity on its soil. However, it has refused to extradite the 20 men wanted by India.

-------- philippines

Five Killed in Philippines

WORLD In Brief,
Washington Post
Sunday, February 17, 2002; Page A30
Associated Press
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22448-2002Feb16?language=printer

TABIAWAN, Philippines -- Grenade blasts ripped through a market and a movie theater in the southern Philippines, killing at least five people as more American troops arrived under tight security to join a growing U.S. force on a new front in the campaign against terrorism.

The blasts -- one of them a few miles from a base where U.S. military personnel are staying -- underscored the dangers they could face while advising and training Philippine troops fighting the Abu Sayyaf, a Muslim rebel group U.S. officials say has been linked with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

-------- russia

Rampages ignite Russian debate on army reform

By Jon Boyle
Sunday February 17, 11:15 PM
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-89828.html

MOSCOW - Murderous rampages by absconding soldiers have aroused growing concern about the parlous state of Russia's military, igniting debate about conscription and a bold liberal blueprint to overhaul the country's armed forces.

In recent weeks Russia has witnessed a depressing series of incidents involving heavily-armed deserters leaving in their destructive wake a trail of bodies of innocent bystanders.

The most deadly episode involved two paratroopers, traditionally among Russia's best-trained troops, who this month shot dead nine people after deserting their Volga region base.

"There is rising concern about the level of crime within the armed forces," Vadim Solovyov, managing editor of the weekly Nezavisimaya Gazeta Military Review, told Reuters.

"There are some interesting figures which show that about a quarter of all cases before the military prosecutor are linked to violence inside the barracks."

Russia's armed forces have inherited from the Soviet Red Army an unenviable reputation for violent hazing of recruits. The Committee of Soldier's Mothers of Russia estimates 3,500 conscripts die each year from beatings, malnutrition and disease.

Defence analysts say violence is bound to occur in a system that recruits men with criminal records, acute psychological problems and the educationally sub-normal.

"I think we are at a crucial moment because we can see how the old (Soviet-era) system is collapsing," said Alexander Golts, a Moscow-based independent defence analyst.

ALTERNATIVE SERVICE

Reliable statistics are hard to come by, but the increase in reported incidents appears to indicate a groundswell of public concern which has been mirrored by the debate over conscription.

Late last week the government published its much-awaited "alternative service" bill, which some say could help stem rampant draft-dodging.

Students and those with health problems can avoid the draft, while others pay bribes of $2,500 to $10,000 for exemptions, says the Committee of Soldier's Mothers. "Only those who cannot pay or who are not smart enough end up serving," says Golts.

Boris Nemtsov, leader of the Union of Right-Wing Forces (SPS), says that in the wealthy Moscow area only 7,000 of the 150,000 men of draft age (18-27) were called up last time.

The government draft allows conscientious objectors and ethnic minorities living traditional societies, to complete national service in hospitals, the fire service and other state bodies instead of the armed forces.

They may remain in their home districts and engage in studies, a clear snub to the General Staff. But the cabinet did back the generals' demand that alternative service be twice as long as the two-year military draft. Some fear that will make alternative service a dead letter.

Underlying the alternative service debate is a deeper struggle to force a reluctant military to speed up the sluggish reform process. Solovyov says the military oppose personnel cuts which could see the servicemen who remain secure better pay, because they still want Russia to act as a world, not a regional, power.

BOLD BLUEPRINT

Vitaly Tsymbal and his research team at the Institute of the Economy in Transition, a liberal think-tank, have drawn up a bold military reform plan for the SPS which, he says, has broad support in military and government circles.

With detailed costings, it provides for a five-year transition to a volunteer regular army of 400,000, with a 160,000-strong reserve of conscripts serving just six months.

That, he says, would help stamp out hazing.

Paring down Russia's 1.2 million military would finance an increase in a soldier's basic pay to 3,500 roubles ($100), well above the current levels.

"Our current military budget would increase by two percent. So we are not talking about astronomical sums of money."

But the reforms would decimate senior ranks, including the army's estimated 2,000 generals. Golts says Russia has as many colonels as lieutenants, "which is why these people are fighting for the status quo."

President Vladimir Putin's view remains unclear, though his inclusion of senior SPS figures at a cabinet meeting on reform last autumn signalled he is unhappy with the pace of change.

Despite a threefold rise in the defence budget since 1999 to $9.6 billion, the military remain as cash-strapped as ever.

Analysts note the cabinet is unlikely to have rejected the General Staff's hardline alternative service plans without a green light from the Kremlin.

The battle over the 2003 starting date for the SPS plan could come to a head at a March 15 cabinet meeting. The military want change put off until 2010, preceded by pilot schemes.

Tsymbal says Nemtsov will seek to persuade Putin at a meeting on Monday to make a firm commitment to the 2003 start date in his state of the nation address, due next month.

"If the president says that the reforms will start at the beginning of 2003, then that will be a victory for us."

--------

Chechens are victims of the war on terror

By ERIC MARGOLIS -- Contributing Foreign Editor
February 17, 2002
Toronto Sun
http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/margolis_feb17.html

Does any of this sound familiar? In September, 1999, four apartment buildings, two in Moscow and two in other Russian cities, were blown up, killing over 300 people, wounding hundreds more. Panic and outrage spread across Russia.

Russian authorities immediately blamed the Chechens, fierce Muslim people of the Caucasus whose tiny country had battled brutal Russian colonial rule for 250 years, surviving even mass deportation by Stalin to Siberian concentration camps. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Chechens declared independence. Russia invaded Chechnya in 1994 and laid it to waste before being driven out two years later by Chechen mujahedin.

In 1999, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer and point man for Russia's military-industrial complex, emerged from the shadows to become prime minister under ailing President Boris Yeltsin. Putin claimed the bombings were the work of Chechen "Islamic terrorists financed by Osama bin Laden," though he offered no proof.

Putin promised to "liquidate all terrorists." He proclaimed Russia was facing a war between good and evil. "It's our boys," said Putin, fanning war fever and hysteria, "against terrorists" belonging to an "international Islamic conspiracy." Putin's alleged evidence of Chechen guilt was never forthcoming. Chechen leaders denied any responsibility for the bombings. Why they would seek war with Russia after gaining independence was never explained. Thousands of "swarthy looking" (meaning Muslim) men from the Caucasus and Central Asia were arrested, brutally interrogated and held without charges.

After a mysterious incursion into Dagestan by a small number of Chechen and Dagestani mujahedin, Putin ordered the Russian Army to invade independent Chechnya, calling it a "nest of Islamic terrorists." Russian forces bombed and shelled the capital, Grozny, already shattered by the 1994-96 war in which an estimated 100,000 Chechen civilians were killed. Grozny, in the words of a Russian journalist, was turned into "the Hiroshima of the Caucasus."

FEROCIOUS RESISTANCE

Today, Russian forces are continuing their repression of ferociously resisting Chechens. Intensive bombing and shelling have killed 57,000 more civilians and made 200,000 refugees, say Chechen officials. Human rights organizations accuse Russian forces in Chechnya of ubiquitous brutality: mass murders and reprisals, arson, looting, torture, running concentration camps. Moscow rejects all such criticism, saying rough methods are justified against "terrorists."

The bloody war has become a shadowy, murky struggle, combining a fight for independence with gang warfare by both sides. Russian journalists who reported on Moscow's crimes in the Caucasus were threatened with death, rape, or kidnapping. The exiled Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya told me the Russian government even sells remains of its soldiers killed in Chechnya back to their families.

In late 1999, I wrote that the apartment bombings were a pretext to invade Chechnya and were likely a provocation staged by the Russian security service, FSB (successor to the KGB).

The Kremlin kept insisting "Islamic terrorists" did the bombings. A few months later, a wildly popular Putin, whose approval ratings hit 80%, was swept into the presidency of Russia on a wave of patriotic fervour, jingoism, xenophobia and anti-Muslim hysteria.

Then, in late 1999, after the four bombings, FSB agents were caught red-handed planting a large bomb in the basement of an apartment building in the city of Ryazan. Local police were called and arrested the FSB agents - until they revealed their identity. After press reports, the FSB lamely claimed it had been running a "security test" to check preparedness. The bags of "explosives" they were planting actually contained sugar, claimed FSB. However, the Ryazan police reported the bags contained "explosive substances." The local police were overruled, the Russian press was intimidated into silence, or compelled to toe the government line, and the matter was hushed up.

Now, a Russian historian and a former KGB-FSB officer have written a book in which they claim the FSB - not Chechens - planted the bombs to justify a second Russian invasion of breakaway Chechnya. Recently, exiled Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, a bitter foe of Putin who has long maintained close contacts with Chechen leaders, claims he will soon reveal evidence the FSB was indeed behind the bombings.

NEEDED SUPPORT

Before 9/11, the U.S. and European Union had criticized Russia for massive human rights violations in Chechnya. But once Washington needed Russian support for its invasion of Afghanistan - and the Russians cleverly told George Bush the Chechens were "linked to Osama bin Laden" - the White House abruptly re-branded the Chechen national resistance - hitherto described as "freedom fighters" - as "Islamic terrorists."

Presidents Bush and Putin proclaimed a joint U.S.-Russian "war against Islamic terrorism" and sanctioned Russia's savage repression in the Caucasus. The EU dutifully fell into line. The FSB whispered to the CIA that Afghanistan was filled with Chechen "terrorists" trained and financed by bin Laden, although, in fact, there were only a handful there who had come for military training or medical care. The Bush administration shut down all Chechen Web sites and halted fund-raising to assist the beleaguered Chechen people.

America, once the champion of democracy and freedom, had come down squarely on the side of reaction and repression.

All in all, a remarkable, intriguing and quite sinister series of occurrences.

-------- spy agencies

CIA chief discusses terrorism with Yemeni

World Scene
February 17, 2002
Combined dispatches and staff reports
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020217-71211356.htm

SAN'A, Yemen - CIA Director George J. Tenet made a brief visit yesterday to Yemen, where an official said the United States has offered to base CIA and FBI teams to help the government fight terrorism.

A Yemeni diplomat said Mr. Tenet and President Ali Abdullah Saleh discussed the investigation into the October 2000 bomb attack on the USS Cole and the hunt for al Qaeda operatives in Yemen.

A U.S. Embassy official declined to comment on Mr. Tenet's six-hour visit.

U.S. officials fear al Qaeda members fleeing Afghanistan might seek refuge in Yemen, and last week the FBI issued an alert for 17 men believed to have been planning an attack against the United States or on Americans in Yemen. U.S. and Yemeni officials said Thursday that five of them were in custody in Yemen.

Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of the U.S. military's Central Command, visited Yemen on Monday, and President Bush spoke by telephone with Mr. Saleh just after Gen. Franks' visit.

----

CIA Chief Visits Yemen President

Sat Feb 16,
By AHMED AL-HAJ, Associated Press Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&u=/ap/20020216/ap_on_re_mi_ea/yemen_us_9

SAN`A, Yemen (AP) - CIA (news - web sites) director George Tenet made a brief visit Saturday to Yemen, where an official said the United States has offered to base CIA and FBI (news - web sites) teams to help the government fight terrorism.

A Yemeni diplomat said Tenet and President Ali Abdullah Saleh discussed the investigation into the October 2000 bomb attack on the USS Cole (news - web sites), the hunt for al-Qaida operatives in Yemen and developments across the Red Sea in the Horn of Africa.

A U.S. Embassy official declined to comment on Tenet's six-hour visit.

Washington has pushed for greater cooperation from Yemen in the hunt for terror suspects since the attack on the Cole, which killed 17 U.S. sailors. The United States blames Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s network for the attack in the southern port of Aden.

Now, U.S. officials fear al-Qaida members fleeing Afghanistan (news - web sites) might seek refuge in Yemen, where the borders are porous and remote areas are only nominally under government control.

Last week, the FBI issued a terrorist alert and said it was searching for 17 men possibly linked to al-Qaida and believed to have been planning an attack against the United States or on Americans in Yemen. No attack took place, and U.S. and Yemeni officials said Thursday that five of the 17 men were in custody in Yemen.

A U.S. official said on condition of anonymity last week that the CIA is beginning to arm and train counterterrorism teams and intelligence services in a number of countries. He declined to name the countries.

On Saturday, a Yemeni police official said on condition of anonymity that Yemen was studying a U.S. offer of assistance.

In Washington, FBI spokesman Bill Carter, while not commenting specifically on Yemen, said Saturday that "any request of assistance to any foreign government in the fight against terrorism would be taken very seriously. Everything would be done to provide the assistance."

Yemen, fearful it could become a target in the U.S.-led campaign against terrorism, has stepped up its cooperation with the United States in recent months. In December, security troops battled tribal forces during a search for al-Qaida members in a remote region.

Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of the U.S. military's Central Command, visited Yemen on Monday, and President Bush (news - web sites) spoke by telephone with Saleh just after Franks' visit to discuss the war on terror.

Interior Minister Rashad al-Eleimi and U.S. Ambassador Edmund J. Hull met Saturday and discussed the development of the new Yemeni coast guard, an Interior Ministry official said on condition of anonymity. He said the United States has offered Yemen 15 new coast guard boats.

The U.S. Embassy declined to comment.

Tenet came to Yemen from Egypt, where he met Saturday with President Hosni Mubarak (news - web sites). Neither side made any statement after the meeting.

----

The Future of the C.I.A.

New York Times
February 17, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/17/opinion/17SUN1.html

Washington can be a funny town. As the House and Senate are gearing up to hold joint hearings on the intelligence community's response to terrorism in recent years, including the failure to detect or prevent the terror attacks of Sept. 11, lawmakers are showering the Central Intelligence Agency and other spy organizations with money. Indeed, these are boom times for the C.I.A. The agency's overseas operations are expanding, its budget is growing, and its director, George Tenet, is spending more time with the president at the White House and Camp David than any spy chief since the C.I.A. was created more than a half-century ago.

The paradox says a lot about the role of intelligence in the age of terrorism. It is indispensable. Because accurate, timely intelligence is so important to the nation's security, punishing the C.I.A. for its lapses by cutting its resources has not been an option. But setting the right direction for the nation's spy agencies must be one of the top goals of the Bush administration and Congress. The policy, budget and staffing decisions being made today will shape these institutions for years and determine how effective they will be in fighting terrorism.

Washington, as is its custom, seems to be approaching these matters without a comprehensive plan. The last presidential order setting broad goals and priorities for the intelligence agencies was issued by Bill Clinton in 1995, before the dimensions of the terrorist threat were fully recognized. The White House is only beginning to think about a new directive. Meanwhile, Congress has been adding billions of dollars to the overall intelligence budget before thoroughly reviewing the counterterrorism programs of the C.I.A. and other agencies.

The lack of coordination is understandable, up to a point. There was not time in the frightening aftermath of Sept. 11 to review long-term intelligence policies. Congressional leaders wanted to let the C.I.A. deal with the immediate threats and the war in Afghanistan before hauling in Mr. Tenet and other officials for an intensive review of past behavior. But the hour has come to get on with these important exercises. The White House and Congress cannot properly redirect the C.I.A. and other agencies unless they can identify what went wrong - and right - before Sept. 11.

Mr. Tenet, stung by the events of Sept. 11, has thrown the C.I.A. into the war against terrorism, building on programs he established before the attacks. The agency played a central role in designing and executing the American battle plan in Afghanistan, which relied heavily on an unusually effective fusion of intelligence and military operations. Making use of its newly enriched war chest, the C.I.A. has been busy cultivating relationships with foreign intelligence services that may be helpful in tracking terrorist organizations. Mr. Tenet's determination and energy are admirable, but he should not be operating without some wider national discussion about where he wants to take the C.I.A.

The word around Washington is that Mr. Tenet, in essence, is reshaping the agency into a spy organization devoted primarily to combating terrorism and the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and materials. That reallocation of resources began during the Clinton administration, but since Sept. 11 it has apparently moved like a tidal wave across the agency as money and manpower have been diverted from the C.I.A.'s usual programs to the fight against terrorism.

Assuming these trends continue, an assumption that seems a safe bet, the C.I.A.'s clandestine service, which runs spy operations around the world, will probably double in size in the next five years and engage in increasingly aggressive covert activities to thwart terrorist plots. The agency is sure to expand its war-fighting role, using field officers and specialized weapons like the unmanned, missile- firing Predator spy plane to support American forces in combat. With plenty of cash and a hunger for novel espionage technologies, the C.I.A. can be expected to invest heavily in secret scientific projects, hoping to regain the inventive role it played during the cold war, when it pioneered the development of spy satellites.

Much of what Mr. Tenet is doing makes sense, but the C.I.A., primed with money and adrenaline, may be tempted to overreach. President Bush has given the agency a hunting license to break up Osama bin Laden's terrorism network. Mr. Tenet need look no further than the agency's own checkered history to know how cautious he must be in exercising this power. As the agency hires hundreds of new intelligence officers, he must be painfully careful to avoid recruiting people unsuited to the responsibilities that come with operating with a free hand on behalf of the United States in some of the world's most treacherous places.

Mr. Tenet has said that by 2005, more than 30 percent of the C.I.A. work force will have been there for five years or less. The influx of new employees and the retirement of veterans could leave the agency without an adequate number of battle-tested leaders. That makes it imperative for Mr. Tenet to be smart about promoting the right people and instilling the right values in them. He is right to be revising the compensation system so he can retain the best officers, analysts and managers.

Future presidents and directors of central intelligence will look back at this period as a critical moment, when the C.I.A. and other spy agencies recast themselves to protect the nation against grave new threats. There is no margin for error.

--------

FIRST CHAPTER
'A Convenient Spy'

New York Times
February 17, 2002
By DAN STOBER and IAN HOFFMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/17/books/chapters/0217-1st-stober.html?pagewanted=all

At the end of the workday on Friday, December 2, 1982, Wen Ho Lee sat down at his office desk and made a brief phone call to California that would change his life in ways he could never imagine. His call was prompted by news that another Taiwanese-American nuclear scientist, this one at Lawrence Livermore, was in some kind of trouble and had lost his job. The situation could have implications for Lee as well, because, as he understood it, the other scientist was caught doing something Lee himself had been busy at, providing unclassified documents to the government of Taiwan.

Lee placed the call, and Gwo-Bao Min came on the line from his suburban Bay Area house a few minutes from the lab. Lee introduced himself in Mandarin as a weapons designer at Los Alamos, the holder of a Q clearance. The "weapons designer" description was an exaggeration, of course.

Still speaking in Mandarin, Lee mentioned a mutual friend, another Livermore scientist who had spoken to Lee about Min. Then Lee got down to business. He had contacts with Taiwan, he bragged, and offered to help Min find out who had "squealed" or "made little reports" on him. Maybe they should get together and talk.

Min attempted to tone Lee down, saying, maybe we shouldn't talk about this now. Min didn't seem interested, and he got off the phone fast. Lee's strange call must have been confusing to Min, as it was to the FBI agents secretly taping all of Min's phone calls. For Min and the agents knew what Lee did not - that Min, though Taiwanese by birth, had not been helping Taiwan. Instead, the agents believed, Min was a spy for the People's Republic of China, a man who had given away highly classified secrets about the design of the neutron bomb and other nuclear weapons. The FBI code-named their investigation of Min "Tiger Trap."

Gwo-Bao Min was born in Taiwan in 1939, a few months before Wen Ho Lee. In 1962, after graduating from National Taiwan University in Taipei with an engineering degree, he came to the United States. He earned a master's degree in engineering from West Virginia University, then, in 1970, a doctorate in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan. He became a U.S. citizen and went to work for Lawrence Livermore in 1975. He and his wife settled into a modest but comfortable ranch-style home in nearby Danville to raise their children.

His coworkers found him friendly and capable; to his friends, he was a kind man and a good father. Occasionally, he talked of going into business with his family. He worked in the lab's D-Division, where researchers did systems studies, looking at nuclear issues from a larger perspective than the design of one weapon. It was not unusual for D-Division scientists to go to the lab's technical library and check out papers on a wide range of issues. At one point, Min worked on missile defense, the precursor of the Reagan-era Star Wars program.

In 1979, Min talked with Chinese scientists. Later, a spy inside China provided U.S. intelligence with clues that pointed to Min as a security risk. FBI agents from the San Francisco Field Office tore into every part of his background, followed him around, and obtained a special warrant from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in Washington to monitor his telephone and perhaps bug his house.

The agents discovered that in his trips to the lab library, Min had accumulated a mass of data about a variety of weapons, well outside of his job responsibilities. A team of experts, including scientists from Los Alamos, "did a job on his office," compiling lists of every document he checked out. The volume of material would climb just before his trips to China. "You could almost tell when he was leaving," according to one team member.

When Min was stopped in an airport in 1981 en route to China, he was carrying papers with detailed answers to five questions, including one about the two-point detonation system for primaries that made miniaturization of missile warheads possible.

The investigators were convinced that Min had given away the design of the W70, the warhead for the Lance missile, popularly known as the neutron bomb.

If so, China would gain twice over. First, with the neutron bomb itself, and second, by learning how to reduce the size of the plutonium primaries in its own warheads. The W70 contained a primary that was exceptionally small, despite its spherical shape. U.S. officials worried that China could use the primary in a "road mobile" missile launched from the back of a truck.

China tested its own neutron bomb on September 25, 1988.

Investigators thought they knew the identity of Min's contact with Chinese intelligence. But when the FBI agents finally made their move in 1981, rounding up and questioning both Min and the supposed contact, they were unable to get confessions from either. Bill Cleveland, the agent who headed the investigation, thought he had pushed Min "right to the brink" of confessing. "I really thought I had him," Cleveland told his coworkers.

FBI officials went to federal prosecutors and recommended prosecution, but the Justice Department felt the evidence was too weak. The case lacked a confession or any proof of "transfer," such as a photograph of Min handing over documents to the Chinese. Additionally, a long court proceeding ran the risk of unmasking the U.S. asset - the spy - in China.

Min was told he could resign from the lab or be fired. He quit in February 1981, and went into the trading business, traveling often to China, trips missed completely by the FBI. When Cleveland, on assignment in Beijing, ran into Min, it was startling for both of them. Min seemed to think that Cleveland had followed him all the way across the Pacific Ocean.

Even after Min was interrogated and forced from the lab, the FBI kept up its surveillance, convincing a judge to renew the wiretap. From the agents' experience, some suspects grew complacent when they had beaten the rap. Others might panic at the attention and call for help.

The wiretap led to nothing, however, except Wen Ho Lee. When Cleveland's agents first listened to Lee's voice, a year after Min's dismissal, they had a hard time understanding his name. Certainly, none of them had ever heard of him. But the conversation, confusing as it was, alarmed them. Here was a nuclear-weapons scientist making an unsolicited phone call to a spy suspect, offering help. Even the most favorable interpretation of Lee's scrambled understanding of the facts led to the conclusion that he was eager to form an alliance with someone he thought had been fired for passing U.S. documents to a foreign country in violation of security rules. The FBI quickly launched an investigation, under the guise of a scheduled review of Lee's security clearance. But the agents did not question Lee for another year, not wanting to spoil the secrecy of the wiretap on Min's phone by moving sooner.

Finally, on November 9, 1983, agents went to talk to Lee. As always, the diminutive scientist was smiling, polite. They asked general questions, to test him, to see if he would lie. Did he know Gwo-Bao Min? Had he called him? Offered aid? Lee denied all, claiming he had no idea of how to get in contact with Min. His denials, an agent would say later, were unequivocal. The agents thanked Lee and went away. Six weeks later they came back, armed with evidence from the wiretap, which they showed to Lee. Now his story changed. Yes, he admitted, he had called Min.

As the agents listened, Lee explained about his aid to the Taiwanese government, how he had begun sending unclassified reactor-safety documents, beginning in 1977 or 1978, and had performed consulting work. "Lee indicated that starting about 1980, he would receive requests for papers and reports from the Taiwanese embassy, which he would then copy and mail to the embassy," as Attorney General Janet Reno would later testify. Lee said he thought Min was doing the same thing, and he was concerned. Lee was edging closer to the truth, but was still holding back. It was the beginning of a recurring pattern, in which Lee would retreat under pressure, not telling the full story until it was unavoidable.

By then the FBI had obtained toll records for Lee's office phone and knew that he had phoned the Coordination Council for North American Affairs, the equivalent of Taiwan's embassy in Washington, during the same period that he had called Min. But Lee denied making the calls.

The agents were interested in something else that day. Min was still very much on their minds, and they had a plan to snare him. They asked Lee to cooperate, to participate in a "false flag" operation against the same scientist he had offered to help a year before. Lee agreed. With the FBI tape recorder rolling once again, Lee telephoned Min, pretending to be an agent of China, seeking Min's partnership in espionage. When the phone call fizzled, the FBI paid for Lee to travel to Min's Danville home. Wired with a hidden microphone, he knocked on the door. There was a brief conversation, but Min did not respond to Lee's enticements and the false flag was over. In the end, Lee had become a player in the intelligence game, as both suspect and servant of the government.

Another month went by. Lee agreed to the Bureau's request for a polygraph. On January 24, 1984, Lee went in for the test, and now had a slightly different story about Taiwan. Some of those unclassified documents he had mailed to Washington, he said, carried a special marking, NOFORN, for "no foreign dissemination." It wasn't a crime, but Lee had played fast and loose with the security rules. According to a secret report compiled by the government, "Wen Ho Lee stated that his motive for sending the publications was brought on out of a desire to help in scientific exchange." Lee had also said "he helps other scientists routinely and had no desire to receive any monetary or other type of reward from Taiwan."

He now also admitted making the calls to Taiwan's unofficial embassy. With that off his chest, Lee passed the lie detector test. He was no spy, the examiner ruled. Still, he was a walking security risk, a holder of a high-level clearance who had winked at the rules and then lied about it. People had lost their security clearance for less.

Tiger Trap was an important case to the FBI. It increased the Bureau's worry level about scientists giving away secrets. "I'm more afraid of a visiting physicist than I am an intelligence agent," fumed Ed Appel, an agent in the San Francisco office. "I worry about the scientist who shares his formula with the other guy because they have a wink, a smile, and a handshake, or they're going to save the world together."

Tiger Trap remained an open case, but a secret one. Lee's role was so far from center stage that almost no one at Los Alamos knew about it. His clearance was not revoked; no disciplinary action was taken. An opportunity to head off the trouble ahead was missed.

--------

CIA Showcases Array of Spy Gadgets

February 17, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-CIA-Exhibit.html

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. (AP) -- For the first time, the public is getting a large scale view of the CIA's and KGB's real-life James Bond gadgets, from a replica of the Russians' deadly poison-dart umbrella to some of the Amercians' most ingeniously concealed cameras.

The exhibit, which opened to the public Sunday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, includes dozens of items borrowed from the CIA's collection in Langley, Va., many of them never before shown to the public.

``Questions have been asked about why we invest so much money in the intelligence community,'' said Lloyd Salvetti, director of the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence. ``We thought we should team with the president's library to get out our message about why we exist.''

The exhibit also includes items from private collector Keith Melton, and features some fictitious materials, as well.

There's the shoe-phone Don Adams, as secret agent Maxwell Smart, wore in the 1960s television comedy series ``Get Smart,'' and the Dr. Evil ring Mike Myers wore in the film ``Austin Powers International Man of Mystery.'' Also on display is a pair of Diana Rigg's leather pants from the hit British TV spy series ``The Avengers.''

The real spy equipment dates as far back as the Revolutionary War. Among the cameras on display is one from 1885 that could be concealed on a person's body. Others, from World War I, were mounted on carrier pigeons. A popular Cold War version slipped into the back of a leather glove.

The world's first microdot, a document shrunken down to a tiny point, is also on display. It dates back to 1852.

From the early days of the CIA's predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, there are tire spikes, bombs and ``liberator pistols.'' The latter were mass produced for $1.72 each and dropped to resistance fighters during World War II.

``Some of the very same techniques used during World War II are being used in Afghanistan today,'' said Toni Hiley, curator of the exhibit and of the CIA museum at Langley, though she declined to elaborate.

Spy gadgets from the other side are on display as well, including a replica of a large wooden seal of the United States that was a gift from the Soviet Union to Moscow's U.S. Embassy in 1945. It hung over the ambassador's desk for seven years before the listening device was discovered.

Many of the gadgets used by the Soviet Union and the United States look remarkably similar.

But one device CIA officials say they never had was a version of the KGB's deadly umbrella that was used by an unknown assailant to kill Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in London in 1978. A model of the umbrella is part of the display.

The pinnacle of the display, Salvetti said, is the leather binder in which the president receives his daily intelligence reports. Until the early 1990s, the very existence of such briefings was classified.

The empty binder is on loan from the White House for the length of the exhibit, which runs until July 14.

On the Net:
Reagan Library: http://www.reaganlibrary.net/
CIA: http://www.cia.gov/

-------- us

Marine KC-130 That Hit Mountain Had No Night Vision
Aviators Wonder Why Tankers Equipped to Land in Dark Are Not Being Used in Afghan War Zone

By Steve Vogel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 17, 2002; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22048-2002Feb16?language=printer

The Marine KC-130 tanker plane that crashed into a mountain in Pakistan last month was not equipped with night-vision equipment, which has been installed in some Marine KC-130 aircraft in the United States and, according to aviators, might have prevented the accident.

All seven crew members aboard the plane were killed in the deadliest incident involving U.S. forces in the Afghanistan war.

The Marine Corps has nine KC-130s that have been modified so they can be flown by pilots with night-vision goggles (NVGs), but none has been deployed in the war.

The decision not to use those planes is being questioned by some Marine aviators, who say tankers flying in the Afghanistan theater routinely fly at night into unfamiliar, primitively equipped airfields in mountainous terrain.

"Why is the Marine Corps flying KC-130s over there without night-vision goggle capability, when the capability is there?" asked a former Marine KC-130 aircraft commander. "Why were you operating those airplanes in that environment when you have other choices?"

Marine Corps officials said eight of the nine KC-130s modified for night-vision goggles are assigned to Marine Reserve squadrons.

They defended the Marine commanders' decision to select KC-130s from active-duty squadrons, even though they fly older, less well-equipped planes.

Lt. Col. Russ Jones, an aviation officer with Marine headquarters at the Pentagon, said night-vision goggles provide a "safety margin" for KC-130 pilots.

But he said that until two investigations into the crash are completed, it is too soon to say whether they would have helped. "I have no clue whether goggles would have made any difference in the mishap," he said. "The jury's out."

The KC-130R, which was carrying fuel bladders on a resupply mission, crashed Jan. 9 while trying to land at night at the Shamsi military airfield in a remote area of southwestern Pakistan.

However, aviators familiar with the aircraft say circumstantial evidence suggests night-vision goggles might have prevented the crash. There are early indications that there was no mechanical failure and the plane apparently issued no distress call.

Also, Shamsi is considered a difficult airstrip in a mountainous valley, and the night of the crash was moonless, with strong crosswinds reported.

Witnesses said they saw the plane circle the base twice before crashing into a mountain on its third pass. These reports, some aviators said, suggest the pilot may have had trouble finding the runway at Shamsi, which like many airfields in Central Asia has no radio navigational aids to guide pilots.

"It was making its third attempt to land when it crashed," said the former KC-130 commander, referring to those witness reports. "He couldn't find the runway. You have [night-vision goggles], and that's not a problem."

A military flight crew member who said he had flown into Shamsi aboard a C-130 about a month before the accident described the airfield on an Internet message board as "a challenging strip at night" and said that crashing into the mountains "would be very easy to do especially if they had other problems distracting them."

Night-vision goggles take available light, including from the stars and moon, to illuminate what to the naked eye is a dark landscape. A mountainside that may otherwise be difficult to see would be plainly evident with the goggles.

Night-vision goggles are not as important for large, four-engine transports such as the KC-130 as they are for helicopters or fighter jets, and several military pilots questioned whether they would have prevented the accident. The KC-130 is routinely flown safely at night without goggles, they said.

To use night-vision goggles, cockpit display lights must be modified to avoid "blossoming out" the goggles with flashes of light that could disturb a pilot's vision.

Eight KC-130Ts built in the 1980s have been modified to fly with night-vision goggles and are assigned to Marine Reserve units, including four to a squadron in Newburgh, N.Y., and four to a squadron in Fort Worth. One modified older model is assigned to an active-duty squadron on the West Coast.

The main reason the reserves have more modernized planes than the active-duty Marines is that Congress in recent years has mandated that many new weapons systems remain with the reserves to ensure that it does not become a hollow force.

Marine Lt. Col. Ken Hopper, commander of the Fort Worth squadron, said the goggles would be useful to KC-130 pilots in Afghanistan.

"Once you fly with NVGs, you don't ever want to fly without them, because they're that good," he said. "It definitely helps if you're going into an unlit field or with blackout operations."

In late January, several weeks after the accident, the KC-130 squadrons in New York and Texas received activation orders and each is preparing to send detachments overseas, including the modified KC-130s.

Jones said the decision to activate those aircraft was "not in any way, shape or form" connected to January's accident, and he said no decision has been made on where to send the planes.

Lt. Gen. Fred McCorkle, who retired last year as head of Marine aviation, said that because the KC-130Ts are assigned to the reserves, it was difficult for the Marine Corps to send them to war. "In this case, it would be a political issue," he said, since it involves taking civilians away from their families and jobs.

However, President Bush gave broad authority to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in September to call up reserves. More than 75,000 National Guard and Reserve troops had been activated as of last week, along with hundreds of aircraft.

Reserve units do not have the same readiness as active units, Jones said. But he and other aviators said the reserves are well trained and can be quickly brought up to a level of full readiness.

The KC-130 is the Marine Corps' multi-role, fuel-carrying variant of the C-130 Hercules, a military transport that has been in service more than four decades. January's crash was the first fatal one involving a KC-130 since 1970.

----

Wary Chinese welcome Bush as US enters their back yard

By David Wastell in Washington
17/02/2002
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$DFJK05QAAAC3RQFIQMFSFFOAVCBQ0IV0?xml=/news/2002/02/17/wbush17.xml

AS President Bush arrives in Beijing on Thursday for talks with President Jiang Zemin, American soldiers will be doing what was, until now, unthinkable: setting up a combat air base less than 300 miles from China's border.

Base-building: a US cargo plane arrives in Kyrgyzstan with equipment to aid the war on terrorism

In a neighbouring country that was once part of the Soviet Union, United States engineers, technicians and planners are constructing a 30-acre compound to house about 3,000 servicemen and an array of fighter jets, transporters and tanker planes.

It is a substantial logistical operation, requiring the airlifting of powerful generators and a giant satellite communications dish, and the building of facilities for personnel.

About two million pounds of jet fuel will eventually be stored at the base, along with aircraft spare parts.

The base, being built at Manas in Kyrgyzstan, is the largest of a string of facilities in five countries of Central Asia where, until September 11, there was no US military presence.

All are intended to bolster the war on terrorism, initially inside Afghanistan, yet all have something else in common: they are very close to China's eastern flank.

"I'm sure the Chinese are watching us very carefully," said one Washington official. "They had been trying to expand their own influence into Central Asia, to fill the vacuum left by Russia. It must be irritating to see America doing that instead."

All told, the new bases will bring the number of US forces in the region - on ships and at bases from Saudi Arabia in the west to Manas in the east - to more than 50,000, many of them on China's doorstep.

As well as the substantial forces inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, 3,000 US personnel are stationed at bases in Uzbekistan, and a similar number in Tajikistan which, like Kyrgyzstan, borders China.

The significance of the expanding US military footprint is not lost on those involved. At a staff meeting last month, Brigadier General Christopher Kelly, the Manas base commander, told his officers that their mission was historic.

"Fourteen years ago, in the middle of my career, this was the heart of the Soviet empire," he said. "You bet it's a little eerie to be here."

Nor is its significance lost on Moscow, which regards the area as within its own sphere of influence, nor on Beijing, which also views the new US military activity in Indonesia and the Philippines with some alarm.

"They thought we were not much interested in this area of the world," said a Washington analyst. "Now they find we're back with a bang in their own back yard."

Although officially none of the bases is intended to be used for the long term, officials have stressed that Washington will not abandon Central Asia once al-Qaeda is eliminated.

"America will have a continuing interest and presence in Central Asia of a kind that we could not have dreamed of before," said Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, recently.

Chinese worries are likely to be raised when Mr Bush meets Beijing's leaders this week. He left last night for Tokyo, and will then fly to South Korea before going to China.

The White House has seized on the war against terrorism as a chance to build bridges with China after last year's stand-off over the captured US spy plane.

"We consider China a partner in that global war," said one administration official. "They have been helpful on the financial front, on intelligence, on law enforcement and diplomatically."

A Pentagon spokesman said Mr Bush's visit would "act as a springboard" for more bilateral military exchanges. US officials also want an agreement to open an FBI office in Beijing to help in the fight against terrorism and drugs.

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Many gulf vets file for disability

Associated Press
February 17, 2002
http://www.sptimes.com/2002/02/17/Worldandnation/Many_gulf_vets_file_f.shtml

The Persian Gulf War has been over for more than a decade, but questions about sick veterans linger.

Nearly 199,000 veterans -- or more than one in four -- who served in the Persian Gulf from August 1990 to July 1991 have filed disability claims, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

"It's stunning," says Pat Eddington, author of Gassed in the Gulf: The Inside Story of the Pentagon-CIA Cover-Up of Gulf War Syndrome.

Tens of thousands of Gulf War veterans have complained of illnesses including chronic muscle and joint pain, anxiety, fatigue and memory loss. The ailments have collectively been called Gulf War syndrome.

But researchers have disagreed on the causes and even whether a syndrome exists.

A study published this month in the British Medical Journal suggested that unexplained illnesses experienced by some Gulf War vets are not unique and should be placed in a general context of postcombat syndrome.

But other researchers and veterans groups have blamed nerve gas, pesticides and vaccines for some sicknesses.

The U.S. Department of Defense says there is a higher incidence of illness among Gulf War veterans when compared with military personnel who were not deployed in the region at the same time.

But "putting a label to that or having an explanation -- we're not there yet," says Austin Camacho, spokesman for the department's deployment health support directorate.

About $174-million has been spent on nearly 200 studies, but none has found conclusive proof that any illnesses were directly caused by the war, said Jim Benson, a VA spokesman.

The VA recently announced that a preliminary study found Gulf War veterans are nearly twice as likely to develop ALS, known as Lou Gehrig's disease, as other military personnel.

[To learn how to apply: National Gulf War Resource Center, http://www.ngwrc.org]


-------- POLICE / PRISONERS

Feds Take Over Airport Security

Sun Feb 17
By JONATHAN D. SALANT,
Associated Press Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&u=/ap/20020217/ap_on_go_ot/airline_security_16

CHANTILLY, Va. - The government took responsibility Sunday for security at U.S. airports with a pledge to safeguard travelers while also treating them with courtesy.

Passengers will not notice many immediate changes with the federal takeover, said John Magaw, the new undersecretary for transportation security. Management of security has switched from private companies, but many of the same procedures and employees are to remain in place, he said. "As of now, we will make sure we're observing the screening and make sure it's being done properly," Magaw said at a news conference at Dulles International Airport.

He cited a few differences now that the government is in charge. Passengers will be offered chairs and shoehorns when they are asked to remove their shoes to be inspected for explosives. Also, travelers who are inspected with handheld wands will be able to see their valuables in front of them.

"I want to make sure it is a highly professional screening, but it also has courtesy toward the passenger," Magaw said. "It's safe and passenger friendly as much as possible."

The Sunday deadline was one of several in legislation passed in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

By Nov. 19, all security screeners are supposed to be federal employees, and by the end of the year, all checked bags will have to be screened by explosive detection equipment.

Last month's deadline to screen all checked bags for explosives was met by airlines making sure luggage did not get on an airplane unless the passenger also boarded. Critics say the passenger-bag match would not stop a suicide bomber.

The Transportation Department's inspector general said last week that many bags would have to be screened with handheld wands rather than $1 million explosive detection machines if the government is to meet the Dec. 31 deadline.

While the government now is in charge of aviation security, representatives of the airlines will remain in place at security points, but will report to the government rather than to the carriers. Most of the airport security companies will stay in place, although they, too, will report to the government.

----

Detainees Missing After Fire

WORLD In Brief,
Washington Post
Sunday, February 17, 2002; Page A30
Reuters
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22448-2002Feb16?language=printer

LONDON -- British police said that 25 asylum seekers were still missing after a fire ripped through the immigrant detention center where they were being held, and that some of them may have died.

Fifteen of those who ran off amid the chaos of Thursday night's blaze at Yarl's Wood immigrant holding center, Europe's largest such detention space, had been recaptured, police said.

"We're working on the possibility that one or possibly more of those who are missing could have perished in the fire," a spokeswoman for Bedfordshire Police said. "The fire was extremely hot, and at this stage it's impossible to tell whether there were any fatalities."

Police say they believe the fire -- which caused an estimated $50 million in damage -- may have been started deliberately by detainees trying to escape the center, 40 miles north of London.

----

Man Jailed 2 Years After Case Ended Sues District

By Clarence Williams and Serge F. Kovaleski
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 17, 2002; Page C04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22462-2002Feb16?language=printer

A man who spent nearly two years in a D.C. jail after his case was dismissed has sued the District and the city's Corrections Department.

The lawsuit filed for Joseph S. Heard on Friday lists 11 complaints and seeks $440 million in damages for the 22 months he spent in the Southeast facility, where he had been detained on a misdemeanor trespassing charge that was dismissed Oct. 13, 1999, on the grounds he was mentally incompetent to stand trial.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court, claims that Heard, who is deaf and mute, was denied his constitutional and civil rights and that the city violated the federal Americans With Disabilities Act by not providing adequate sign language interpreters and TDD technology for him to communicate with authorities.

"I'm not going to make any other comments about the case at this time. That's it in a nutshell, what you see in the complaint," W. Thomas Stovall II, one of Heard's three attorneys, said in a voice-mail message.

Corrections spokesman Darryl J. Madden referred questions to the city's legal office. Peter Lavallee, spokesman for the Office of the Corporation Counsel, said it was policy not to comment on pending litigation.

The suit also alleges that Heard was required to take medication against his will because he was unable to effectively communicate with jail doctors or staffers.

Each complaint asks $40 million in damages -- $20 million compensatory and $20 million punitive -- and includes claims that he was denied rights under the Fourth, Fifth, Eighth and 14th Amendments.

U.S. marshals took Heard to the jail without any paperwork after his case was dismissed. Jail staffers failed to secure his release papers from other corrections staffers at the courthouse, and at some point his file was put in storage.

Corrections Director Odie Washington suspended four staffers last month after a two-month internal inquiry and after acknowledging that Heard's case was mishandled.

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D.C. Forms Network of Surveillance
Police System of Hundreds of Video Links Raises Issues of Rights, Privacy

By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 17, 2002; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22341-2002Feb16?language=printer

District police first experienced the power of live video as a law enforcement tool during NATO's 50th anniversary summit in April 1999, when officers in a command post captured a panoramic view of a secured capital from a helicopter circling overhead.

They used the technology again during protests against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in 2000 and again during last year's presidential inauguration and became so keen on it that they incorporated it into a high-tech center. That center was ready for service on the kind of day it was conceived for: Sept. 11.

Now, with the war on terrorism shifting the frontiers of law enforcement, the D.C. police command and control facility is expanding into one of the country's most extensive computerized surveillance networks, linking hundreds of government video cameras that already monitor streets, subway stations, schools and federal facilities.

Police acknowledge that the system is in "an embryonic state" that will develop for months and years, depending on public debate over its proper limits. They have no plans to plug in private camera systems, for instance, except for that of a Georgetown business association that has asked to take part. But police are also reacting to the country's post-September mood, eager to protect Washington's unique environment using technology that has moved from a concept to a reality, nurtured by millions of dollars' worth of development by the federal government.

"The video technology is state-of-the-art, fully computerized switching equipment that is very similar to what you would find in a NASA or defense command center," said Stephen J. Gaffigan, a former Justice Department director of community policing and head of the D.C. police project.

"I don't think there's really a limit on the feeds it can take," Gaffigan said. "We're trying to build . . . the capability to tap into not only video but databases and systems across the region."

Police departments across the country have been using surveillance video for years to deter crime and guard property in specific districts. The D.C. police project, however, makes Washington the first U.S. city to be able to peer across wide stretches of the city and to create a digital record of images, according to security industry and police chiefs associations.

U.S. security experts are working with satellite-based optics that enable camera operators to see in the dark, zoom in to see the type on a printed page from hundreds of feet away and peer inside buildings.

The potential of such technology, pioneered for the military, presents a host of issues. Is the system designed to catch terrorists or street criminals? Should it be used all the time or only for defined incidents? Once in place, will authorities expand it by building a repository of images or directing it to controversial uses such as computer facial-recognition software? And who controls the cameras, the recordings and the decision-making?

As Norm Siegel, former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union, once put it, "Who's watching, why are they watching, and, perhaps most importantly, what are they doing with the videotape?"

The D.C. Council and the House Government Reform subcommittee on the District plan to hold hearings, and police and watchdog groups say they welcome a public debate to set the rules.

"The technology [used by the District] can be a very powerful tool," said Richard Chace, spokesman for the Security Industry Association, a trade group of equipment manufacturers that advises governments to have policy drive their use of technology, not vice versa. "But it has to be controlled. You have to be careful who's in charge of it and have proper procedures and protocols."

The security industry and the 15,000-member International Association of Chiefs of Police plan to hold a conference to discuss intelligence sharing, following a statement the association released on self-regulation of video monitoring in March.

Sheldon Krantz, chairman of an American Bar Association task force on technology and law enforcement, said the bar in 1999 released its first guidelines for police surveillance in two decades to fill a void in constitutional and legislative regulation of the fast-changing field and to call for public input.

"When George Orwell wrote '1984,' probably even he just did not anticipate what kind of eavesdropping and electronic technology we now have," said Krantz, a white-collar defense lawyer and former Boston University Law School research director, who added that there are very good reasons for public surveillance. Still, he said, "technology has evolved to a point where it can literally take away virtually all notions of privacy."

The rapid expansion of video surveillance -- and occasional abuses -- is neither hypothetical nor new. The Supreme Court has defined Americans' right to privacy based partly on the distinction between public and personal spheres, but camera proliferation can blur that distinction.

Cameras at automated teller machines capture 250,000 customer transactions daily for Citibank, for instance, and the security industry estimates that more than 2 million surveillance cameras are in use across the country. In Manhattan in 1998, volunteers counted 2,400 electronic eyes in public places used to catch everything from red-light runners at traffic intersections, shoplifters outside grocery and department stores, and drug sellers loitering near lampposts. Former mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R) credited surveillance with slashing crime in public housing by 20 to 40 percent, and cameras have been added to Washington Square and Times Square in the city.

A 2001 survey by the International Association of Chiefs of Police concluded that 80 percent of 19,000 U.S. police departments have deployed closed-circuit television in their jurisdictions, and 10 percent more plan to do so soon. Police in Tacoma, Wash., cut service calls in half with seven cameras in a neighborhood plagued by drugs and gangs.

Advances in facial-recognition software present new opportunities and new concerns. The technology, controversial when first attempted on a wide scale at last year's Super Bowl in Tampa, has been tested since Sept. 11 by a handful of airports in cities including Boston; Oakland, Calif; St. Petersburg, Fla.; and Dallas, and it has been studied by airports and law enforcement agencies in many other jurisdictions, including Virginia Beach.

Abroad, England has experienced the greatest benefits and costs of what sociologists dub a "culture of surveillance." More than three-fourths of British localities patrol public spaces with the help of video. The London Underground has 14,000 cameras, and the central government installed 1,300 cameras as part of its anti-terrorism "Ring of Steel" defenses around its financial district. Street crime dropped 19 percent from 1993 to 1996 there.

On the other hand, the country reeled in 1996 when more than 80,000 copies of a $15 video, "Caught in the Act," were sold. The 45-minute voyeur video depicted couples engaged in sex in office closets, violent break-ins, women in their bedrooms and even a shot up the skirt of Princess Diana.

Groups such as the ACLU support cameras to catch red-light runners and to patrol parking garages, but the pace of public surveillance technology is overrunning traditional legal notions of average citizens' rights to anonymity and free association, said ACLU Associate Director Barry Steinhardt.

Libertarians invoke Orwell's haunting line from "1984": "There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment."

D.C. police officials, acknowledging the sensitive nature of the debate, say they intend to move carefully. Their project has won support from several established law enforcement and technology figures. In addition to the Secret Service and FBI, the U.S. Capitol Police and U.S. Park Police are expected to reach agreement soon to permit links from their video assets to the D.C. center when events warrant, Gaffigan said.

As described by police officials, the District links computer video servers to 13 digital police cameras programmed to automatically scan such public places as the Capitol, the White House, the Washington Monument, Union Station and major bridges. D.C. public schools, Metro and the D.C. Department of Transportation have agreed to link 500 cameras overlooking train stations, roads and school hallways in an emergency. As a crime is reported, the cooperating agency can feed views of the scene, surrounding alleys or streets to police commanders and to computer screens installed in nearly 1,000 squad cars.

"In the event a biochemical or any other event happens in a subway," Gaffigan said, "a central command officer can actually look in and see what's going on." Police could also see inside a school in case of a shooting or hostage incident, manage an evacuation, track a getaway car -- or perhaps stop a saboteur before one struck.

Executive Assistant Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer said police will not tolerate misuse by camera operators and say that although daily operations will increasingly be run from the command center, its video displays will be activated only during incidents or special alerts, such as that issued by the Justice Department last week.

Police are drafting policies on recording and storage of images, among other issues.

"There are lines that will be drawn which no one should cross," Gainer said. "When we are in a public space, what we do and how we behave is visible to anybody, including the police. But now with technology and the way you can get a picture from a satellite or a remote camera, people probably just need to be aware of that more."

The power of surveillance images was clear after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, when agents combed through neighboring buildings' videotapes in an effort to identify their "John Doe" suspects.

More sophisticated technology is on the way. The General Services Administration has dedicated $1 billion since 1995 to building security, screening and surveillance devices and personnel and is proposing spending $75 million this year on projects such as X-ray machines, reinforced glass and facial-recognition software. Engineers are hard at work to create software to join such databases as surveillance image libraries with lists of suspected individuals.

D.C. police say that facial-recognition technology is unreliable for now and that they have no intention of including video from private sources -- other than a pilot test requested by the Georgetown business district.

But industry leaders say technology is continuing to expand.

"The digital video collection, as it becomes cheaper and more accessible technology, will become the method of video surveillance," said Chace, spokesman for the Security Industry Association. "It's just a no-brainer."

The trick, said John R. Firman, director of research for the International Association of Chiefs of Police, is to do it right.

"We have to maximize our ability to blend, share and combine information," he said. "The real bottom line is there should never even be a Big Brother issue. There should be consensus among law enforcement, justice community and citizens to say, how do we keep ourselves and our country safe?"

-------- death penalty

Turks Consider Lifting Death Penalty

February 17, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Turkey-Death-Penalty.html

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) -- Nationalists in Turkey's coalition government said Sunday they opposed lifting the death penalty, a key European Union demand for the country's membership in the group.

In September, Turkey limited the death penalty to cases involving terrorism and those that happen during times of war. The EU, though, has demanded that Turkey eliminate capital punishment altogether and not hang Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan, now on death row.

The EU's demand to abolish capital punishment would amount to giving concessions to Kurdish rebels, the nationalists said. Ocalan is the leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK.

``Yes to EU, but you can't accept demands which overlap with those of the PKK,'' said Ismail Kose, deputy chairman of the Nationalist Action Party. ``We will certainly continue to oppose lifting the death penalty in crimes committed against the state.''

Ocalan was sentenced to death in 1999 on charges of treason for leading a separatist rebellion against the state for autonomy in the country's Kurdish-dominated southeast.

Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit is hoping to lift the death penalty by reaching a consensus in parliament for the sake of EU membership.

Turkey has not executed anyone since 1984.

-------- terrorism

Al Qaeda's Road Paved With Gold
Secret Shipments Traced Through a Lax System In United Arab Emirates

By Douglas Farah
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, February 17, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22303-2002Feb16?language=printer

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Just as the United States and its allies swept toward Afghanistan's main cities last autumn, the ruling Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network sent waves of couriers with bars of gold and bundles ofdollars across the porous border into Pakistan.

In small shops and businesses along the border, the money and gold, taken from Afghanistan's banks and national coffers, were collected and moved by trusted Taliban and al Qaeda operatives to the port city of Karachi, Pakistan, according to sources familiar with the events.

Then, using couriers and the virtually untraceable hawala money transfer system, they transferred millions of dollars to this desert sheikdom, where the assets were converted to gold bullion. The riches of the Taliban and al Qaeda were subsequently scattered around the world -- including some that went to the United States -- through a financial structure that has been little affected by the international efforts to seize suspected terrorist assets.

This account of the flight of the Taliban and al Qaeda treasure from Afghanistan is based on dozens of interviews in Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Europe and the United States. The gold trail was described by intelligence officers, law enforcement officials, gold brokers, and sources with direct knowledge of some of al Qaeda's financial movements, but not by Taliban or al Qaeda operatives.

The interviews offered a tantalizing glimpse into the critical yet mysterious role played by gold in the finances of al Qaeda, both before and after the Sept. 11 attacks. Gold has allowed the Taliban and bin Laden to largely preserve their financial resources, despite the military attack that battered their forces in Afghanistan, investigators and intelligence sources said.

Al Qaeda also used diamonds purchased in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo, tanzanite from Tanzania and other commodities to make money and hide assets. But gold played a uniquely important role in the group's financial structure, investigators and intelligence sources said, because it is a global currency.

"Gold is a huge factor in the moving of terrorist money because you can melt it, smelt it or deposit it on account with no questions asked," said a senior U.S. law enforcement official investigating gold transactions. "Why move it through Dubai? Because there is a willful blindness there."

Exempt from international reporting requirements for financial transactions, gold is a favored commodity in laundering money from drug trafficking, organized crime and terrorist activities, U.S. officials said. In addition, Dubai, one of seven sheikdoms that make up the United Arab Emirates, has one of the world's largest and least regulated gold markets, making it an ideal place to hide.

Dubai is also one of the region's most open banking centers and is the commercial capital of the United Arab Emirates, one of three countries that maintained diplomatic relations with the Taliban until shortly after Sept. 11. Sitting at a strategic crossroad of the Persian Gulf, South Asia and Africa, Dubai has long been a financial hub for Islamic militant groups. Much of the $500,000 used to fund the Sept. 11 attacks came through Dubai, investigators believe.

"All roads lead to Dubai when it comes to money. Everyone did business there," said Patrick Jost, who until last year was a senior financial enforcement officer in the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Hand-Carried by Couriers

When the U.S. bombs began pounding Taliban and al Qaeda targets last autumn, the rush of gold and money out of Afghanistan intensified.

Pakistani financial authorities said that $2 million to $3 million a day is usually hand-carried by couriers from Karachi, Pakistan, to Dubai, mostly to buy gold. Late last year that amount increased significantly as money was moved out of Afghanistan, they said. Pakistani and U.S. officials estimate that about $10 million from Afghanistan was taken out by courier over three weeks in late November and early December. The Taliban fled Kabul, the capital, late on Nov. 12 and abandoned Kandahar on Dec. 7.

One of the couriers of cash and gold to Dubai was the Taliban consul general in Karachi, Kaka Zada, who took at least one shipment of $600,000 to Dubai in the last week of November, according to two Pakistani sources who witnessed him carrying the money.

In addition, U.S. and other officials said, millions more were sent through hawalas, the informal money transfer system widely used across the Middle East, North Africa and Asia that, outside of major cities, often serves as the only money transfer system. Rather than moving money through traceable mechanisms such as wire transfers, hawala brokers take a client's money, then call or e-mail a counterpart in the area where the client wants the money delivered. The counterpart pays out the sum. When the transaction is complete, the records are destroyed.

Gold is often used by hawala brokers to balance their books. Hawala dealers also routinely have gold, rather than currency, placed around the globe.

"There are no traditional banking systems in Afghanistan or Somalia," said Jost. "Everything is done through hawala, and gold is the fuel hawala runs on."

U.S. investigators, led by the Customs Service, have begun poring over transactions of some of Dubai's largest and most prestigious gold brokerages for possible links to the movement of al Qaeda or Taliban money, and have found unusual gold shipments into the United States after Sept. 11.

A Customs official said that as part of efforts to "investigate terrorist financing," the agency was "scrutinizing movements of gold by several companies, including ARY Gold," one of Dubai's largest and most prestigious gold bullion and jewelry dealers.

ARY's cramped headquarters is located in the heart of Dubai's gold market -- an area several blocks square, filled with stores that sell little else. Abdul Razzak, the Pakistani owner of ARY Gold, strongly denied knowingly doing business with the Taliban or al Qaeda.

"I am a God-fearing person, but all my life I have been afraid of religious people like the Taliban," said Razzak. "I wouldn't like to deal with Taliban people, and we don't like Taliban people.

"If you say you want 100 kilos [220 pounds] of gold, I can give you that wherever you want in 12 hours. What you do with it is your business," he said.

Razzak, who owns three of Dubai's largest gold jewelry stores, said he imports and exports gold legally. Dubai has no restrictions on either activity, and Razzak said competitors were spreading lies about his company out of jealousy.

During two interviews here, Razzak displayed few hints that he was a powerful political and financial broker. Wearing a simple white robe, he spoke in a small office separated by a glass partition from brokers monitoring a bank of computers. On the wall were plaques commemorating his gifts to charitable causes.

In 1998, Pakistani investigators looking into government corruption found two checks, each for $5 million, allegedly paid by ARY Gold in 1994 to Asif Ali Zardari, the husband of then-prime minister Benazir Bhutto, to secure a two-year monopoly on gold imports to Pakistan. While acknowledging he held the monopoly and shipped $500 million in gold to Pakistan from 1994 to 1996, Razzak said that he had paid no bribes and that "enemies" had falsified the bank documents.

Razzak was cleared of criminal charges in Dubai but still faces charges in Pakistan from that case, Pakistani authorities said.

"Always if you are doing good business, people are jealous," Razzak said. "Everyone, all the leaders of Pakistan, come to me for advice. We are well known and famous, and people don't like that."

Smuggling for Profit

In addition to using gold to hide assets, there is evidence that al Qaeda smuggled gold into Pakistan and India for profit. Smuggling gold is lucrative because the two countries have a high demand for gold and legal gold imports are taxed.

An al Qaeda manual found by British forces in Afghanistan late last year included not only chapters on how to build explosives and clean weapons, but on how to smuggle gold on small boats or conceal it on the body, British and U.S. officials said.

The officials said that the Taliban and al Qaeda moved large quantities of gold into Afghanistan after the Taliban rose to power in the mid-1990s, in part because most people in the region are more familiar with gold than foreign currencies.

The officials said the Taliban collected taxes in gold from the heads of Pakistani and Indian trucking networks that hauled cargo through Afghanistan.

Donations to al Qaeda and the Taliban from wealthy supporters were often made in gold, the officials said, and taxes on opium production, a source of revenue for both groups, were also paid in gold, according to U.S. and British officials.

Gold bullion was flown directly from Dubai to the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar on Ariana Afghan Airlines, the officials said.

"The Taliban took gold into Afghanistan because there was nothing else they could take there," said Jost, who has studied the use of gold by terrorist groups. "The local money was worthless [and] foreign currency brings suspicion, but if you show up with gold, people know exactly what that is worth."

For al Qaeda to operate, the gold must be easily convertible to cash, and be available around the world. For that, the organization is believed to rely on a hidden financial network across the Middle East, Pakistan and Europe, U.S. and European investigators said.

William F. Wechsler, who monitored bin Laden's finances at the National Security Council during the last two years of the Clinton administration, told Congress in September that bin Laden initially rose to prominence for building "a financial architecture that supported themujaheddin in Afghanistan against the Russians."

"It's this financial architecture that continued with him when he turned to terrorism, and it's this financial architecture that is at the heart of how al Qaeda today gets its finances," he said.

Much of that architecture, according to French, Pakistani and American investigators, is modeled on the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). BCCI was founded by Pakistanis and bankrolled largely by leaders of the UAE. In the 1980s it was used to launder drug money, harbor terrorist funds and buy illegal weapons. Its collapse in 1991 was a major global financial scandal.

The CIA used BCCI to funnel millions of dollars to the fighters battling the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Bin Laden had accounts in the bank, U.S. officials said. The bank also specialized in dealing in commodities such as diamonds and gold.

The BCCI Model

A 70-page French intelligence report, prepared for Parliament in October and obtained by The Washington Post, outlined some details of this network. "The financial network of bin Laden, as well as his network of investments, is similar to the network put in place in the 1980s by BCCI for its fraudulent operations, often with the same people (former directors and cadres of the bank and its affiliates, arms merchants oil merchants, Saudi investors)," the report said. "The dominant trait of bin Laden's operations is that of a terrorist network backed up by a vast financial structure."

A senior U.S. investigator said U.S. agencies were looking into these ties because "they just make so much sense, and so few people from BCCI ever went to jail. BCCI was the mother and father of terrorist financing operations."

The report identifies dozens of companies and individuals who were involved with BCCI and were found to be dealing with bin Laden after the bank collapsed. Many went on to work in banks and charities identified by the United States and others as supporting al Qaeda.

The French report highlighted the role of Saudi banker Khalid bin Mahfouz, a former director of BCCI, whose sister is married to bin Laden. In 1995 bin Mahfouz paid a $225 million fine in a settlement with U.S. prosecutors for his role in the BCCI scandal and went on to serve as director of the National Commercial Bank, one of Saudi Arabia's largest.

But in April 1999 bin Mahfouz was placed under house arrest in a hospital in Taif when Saudi officials, at the urging of the United States, audited his bank and found that millions of dollars were being funneled through the bank to charities controlled by bin Laden, U.S. officials and the French document said.

While retaining shares in the bank, the report said, bin Mahfouz no longer directs the institution and remains under house arrest. In the past he has denied ties to terrorist activities. U.S. intelligence officials said Washington pushed for the audit of bin Mahfouz's bank but was never allowed to question him.

Saudi officials "weren't willing to let us talk to him," said one U.S. source with direct knowledge of events, "and we asked at a very senior level."

U.S. and European investigators said it is al Qaeda's ability to tap into commodities such as gold, and to move its resources through both the hawala system and banking structures, that makes it so hard to disrupt.

Dubai's links to suspected terrorist financing and money laundering have long been a point of contention between the United States and the United Arab Emirates.

"There is no question the UAE was used by terrorists, the question is why," said a U.S. official. "It is no more lax and unregulated than many places. The answer is, Dubai is so damn convenient."

Three former Clinton administration officials said that two senior U.S. delegations went to the emirates, one in July 1999 and one in January 2000, to press for measures against terrorist financing. "We got exactly nowhere," said a participant in one of the meetings.

A spokesman for the UAE Ministry of Information said the "visits and requests from the U.S. in 1999 and 2000 represented a part of the normal exchange of information . . . aimed at enhancing cooperation and tackling issues of mutual concern."

Since Sept. 11, U.S. officials said, the emirates have been much more cooperative on tracing suspect finances and last month enacted the most stringent money laundering laws in the region.

U.S. investigators acknowledge they have been slow to focus on the trail of gold and the hawala network. While a handful of investigators had been urging that more attention be paid to those areas, they were largely ignored because the concepts are so foreign to the Western way of doing business, current and former officials said.

Wechsler, the former National Security Council official, said that U.S. law enforcement and intelligence know "virtually nothing" about how the hawala system operates and its relationship to gold.

"We don't know where the hawalas are, we don't even have an order of magnitude on how much money they move," Wechsler said. "We don't know how much it costs to be bin Laden. All I can say is, it costs millions and millions of dollars."

Researcher Robert Thomason in Washington and special correspondent Kamran Khan in Karachi contributed to this report.

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WHITE HOUSE MEMO
Allies Hear Sour Notes in 'Axis of Evil' Chorus

New York Times
February 17, 2002
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/17/international/asia/17ALLI.html

WASHINGTON, Feb. 16 - As a new and glaring rift emerges between the White House and America's allies over how to pursue the next phase of the war on terrorism, something odd has happened: President Bush and his top aides now seem to welcome, even to egg on, the sharp differences prompted by Mr. Bush's determination to expand his battle against what he calls "evil" regimes.

In private, his friends and closest aides report, Mr. Bush fumes about weak-kneed "European elites" and scared Arab leaders who, in his view, lack the courage to stand up to states that may one day provide terrorists with nuclear or biological weapons.

Today Mr. Bush departed for Asia saying that the goal of his trip was to strengthen his antiterrorism coalition. But it was telling that even before Air Force One departed, the South Korean press was filled with denunciations of his inclusion of North Korea as part of the "axis of evil," protesting that Mr. Bush was undercutting years of diplomacy aimed at luring the Stalinist North out of its frightfully armed shell with economic incentives.

In China, where Mr. Bush is making a delayed state visit, the country's leadership has warned in the past few weeks of "serious consequences" if the president takes military action against Iraq. Beijing has voiced worries about a re-emergence of American unilateralism, which it thought had faded in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks.

But in the last two weeks, Mr. Bush's strident tone has suggested just the opposite. In appearances across the country, he has built on the "axis of evil" phraseology of his State of the Union address, knowing full well that each repetition irritates and divides the countries he once hailed as his great coalition partners.

His national security aides - usually more attuned to how Mr. Bush's words play Poland or Peru than Peoria - have begun to cite evidence that Americans are behind the broader mission of rooting out rogue states seeking weapons of mass destruction, even if the allies are not.

They compare Mr. Bush's mission to Ronald Reagan's single-minded goal of ridding the world of Communism. They describe their boss as a man who emerged from the first phase of the war more convinced than ever that the United States alone has the power to complete its task, with the coalition if possible - and without them if necessary.

It is an America-first position that Vice President Dick Cheney voiced with particular clarity on Friday to the Council on Foreign Relations.

"America has friends and allies in this cause, but only we can lead it," he said in a ballroom filled with many of his old friends and former colleagues. "Only we can rally the world in a task of this complexity against an enemy so elusive and so resourceful. The United States and only the United States can see this effort through to victory."

When America's allies have begged to differ in recent days, they have found themselves engaged in open, public bickering with even with the most diplomatic members of Mr. Bush's war council.

It started when France's foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, dismissed Mr. Bush's approach to Iran, Iraq and North Korea as "simplistic," and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell shot back that his French colleague was "getting the vapors."

Then, all this week, there has been a far more telling war of words between Mr. Powell and Christopher Patten, the European Union's foreign affairs minister. Until a few days ago, he was a favorite of Washington conservatives for the tough line he took against China while serving as Britain's last governor general to Hong Kong.

When Mr. Patten started off the tiff by accusing Mr. Bush of taking an "absolutist" approach to the world, Mr. Powell shot back that his old friend deeply misunderstood and said, "I shall have a word with him, as they say in Britain."

Before he had a chance, Mr. Patten published a lengthy rebuke of the administration in The Financial Times, saying that American success in Afghanistan had "reinforced some dangerous instincts," including the belief that "the projection of military power is the only basis of true security," that "the U.S. can rely only on itself," and that allies were "an optional extra."

He is hardly alone in that view. The German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, said this week that the Bush administration was treating coalition partners like "satellites," a term clearly meant as a comparison to the old Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc.

And then President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Bush's newest strategic partner, weighed in with the observation that the members of the antiterror coalition signed up to battle the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and "Iraq is not on this list."

Even Canada - America's closest allies save for Britain - warned that any effort by the United States to act unilaterally in the next phase of the war "will go nowhere."

What makes these exchanges particularly notable, apart from their bluntness, is the shift they reflect in foreign views of Mr. Bush - and Mr. Bush's evolving views of his allies.

For the first nine months of his presidency, whenever Mr. Bush was tempted to act on his own - dumping the Kyoto Protocol on global warming with barely a warning to Japan or Europe, for example - he usually followed up with an intensive round of fence-mending. By this summer, he was moderating his language, paying off America's dues to the United Nations and talking about the future of new partnerships.

Then came Sept. 11 and a new spirit of alliance. European and Asian leaders said they thought they were seeing a George W. Bush emerge. This was a president who invited foreign leaders to the Oval Office for long conversations, who dialed around the globe the way his father once had, whose go-it-alone tendencies were being sanded down by the realities of operating in a complex world that provided many physical and financial havens for terrorists.

Now, they fear, the old Mr. Bush may be re-emerging. The change in view began with his decision to withdraw from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, but since Russia seemed to react mildly, so did Europe. It accelerated when he declared that Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters were not "prisoners of war." Then came the "axis of evil," a phrase that European and Asian allies alike said dangerously lumped together three countries that pose very different challenges.

What bothers the Europeans the most is not entirely clear: Mr. Bush's goals, his missionary zeal, or the thought that Washington sees its role as wiping out bad governments and the allies' role as one of cleaning up with aid and peacekeepers.

Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage has little patience for that kind of hand-wringing. "It's very hard to attack something like `axis of evil,' " he said, "because Mr. Bush was not talking about people, but about regimes."

At the core of the debate lies a deeper question about American foreign policy that now bedevils Mr. Bush and his aides: is America stronger when it acts in an unfettered manner and defends its national interests directly, or when it acts with allies whose interests may frustrate Washington's goals?

-------

Slaughter of the Innocents
'The Lessons of Terror'
by Caleb Carr

Reviewed by Lorraine Adams
Sunday, February 17, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13313-2002Feb15?language=printer

THE LESSONS OF TERRORA
History of Warfare Against Civilians:
Why It Has Always Failed and Why It Will Fail Again
By Caleb Carr
Random House. 272 pp. $19.95

The word terrorism first came into use in 1795 to describe the guillotines, tribunals and witchhunts of the French revolutionary government. Since then, the definition has blurred and shifted. Today, some governments cannot agree on what constitutes terrorism. Some Arab states say that Palestinians bombing buses in downtown Israeli cities, for example, are freedom fighters. Even within the United States, government agencies have adopted differing definitions. One current and common usage holds that state murder of civilians is totalitarianism, while the killing of civilians by covert and fringe groups is terrorism.

Caleb Carr -- who is best known for The Alienist, a bestselling thriller about turn-of-the-20th-century New York -- has written a book in the months after Sept. 11 that defines terrorism as warfare that targets civilians. He proposes that there are advantages to defining it that way -- among them history's lesson that deliberately killing civilians is a doomed strategy. Basically an extended essay, Lessons of Terror draws on Carr's less-well-known background as a military historian. Its argument mirrors one he made in a 1996 article for the World Policy Journal. He predicted that treating terrorists as criminals rather than soldiers would prove to be a debilitating mistake of the Clinton administration, because police action tends to occur after the fact of an attack, while a sustained military offensive can be pre-emptive, destroying terrorist strongholds before the terrorists strike.

Arresting and trying some conspirators of the al Qaeda attacks of the 1990s brought a false complacency that terrorism was being addressed even as those prosecutions left the organization's leadership intact in Afghanistan, where it planned and trained unimpeded. The only military attack that Clinton launched after al Qaeda's East Africa embassy bombings in 1998 consisted of airstrikes against a deserted Afghanistan training camp and an alleged Sudanese chemical-weapons factory that turned out to be a legitimate pharmaceutical concern. Covert CIA attempts to kill Osama bin Laden neither hampered his organization's training and planning nor intimidated the Taliban government into giving him up. Carr believes that escalated military action, like our current war effort, is the only effective answer to terrorism. If we see terrorists as criminal members of "fringe" groups rather than as soldiers of a military organization (albeit one that is not a state-run army), we run the risk of underestimating them -- and attacks like those of Sept. 11 are the result.

Carr surveys Western and Middle Eastern military history, beginning with ancient Rome, to trace how those who have targeted civilians have fared militarily. At the same time, he takes up the parallel history of those who argued or acted against targeting civilians -- Francis Drake, Oliver Cromwell, Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel, Frederick the Great, Prussian general Helmuth von Moltke, George Shultz and Donald Rumsfeld. In their writings or on the battlefield, these men furthered warfare that was the antithesis of terrorism -- "limited, pegged to specific political goals, sparing of civilian life, and reliant on daring offensive action to resolve dangerous situations before they develop into overwhelmingly violent ones." Our war against Afghanistan, Carr says, with its emphasis on speed and limiting casualties, is an example of "progressive war."

Carr fairly addresses the times when the United States deliberately targeted civilians -- Sherman's march from Atlanta to the sea being an obvious example. He points out that killing 300,000 Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while it may have been decisive and may have saved American lives, stands as a low point in the history of mankind's uneven march toward progressive war. But America-bashing is not his goal. Carr notes that the Iroquois and the Aztecs murdered women and children long before European settlers arrived; romanticizing Native Americans and demonizing colonists is a mistake, he argues.

While Carr's broader theorizing is provocative, his compacted military history lessons suffer from distortion, brought on by his quixotic attempt to prove that those who kill civilians put themselves at a military disadvantage. But killers of civilians have won as many wars as they have lost -- the American experience being the most obvious. Japan surrendered, the Native American tribes were defeated, and the South lost the Civil War to the North. Deliberating killing civilians in those conflicts did not galvanize the populace to fight, as Carr's theory argues; instead, the strategy vanquished it.

Serious errors mar the book. During the American Revolution, Carr writes, rebel officers killed and plundered civilians. He quotes from two letters written by rebel commander Nathanael Greene in 1781. One, to Greene's wife, decries the cruelties and devastations visited on civilians. Another to Alexander Hamilton states, "Nothing has been more destructive to the true interest of this Country, than the mode adopted for its defence."

Reading these excerpts, one might conclude that Greene thought that killing civilians was hobbling the rebels' cause. Consulting Greene's letters more fully reveals a messier complexity. Greene wrote that Southerners were deeply divided about seceding from Britain and that civilians -- not soldiers -- were murdering civilians. And letters of British and rebel generals of the time show that the American troops' winning strategy had nothing to do with civilians one way or another. The outnumbered American troops outwitted the more numerous British troops by maneuvering them into a position they could not defend.

Historical records also contradict Carr's version of British conduct during the War of 1812. Carr wrote that the British "succeeded" in their objective, which was "to burn the city of Washington to the ground." But the British only burned parts of the Capitol, the White House and the Library of Congress in August 1814 -- after they had been evacuated. Carralso neglects to document his assertion that British treatment of Washington residents was "merciless." Most accounts of the attack indicate that the British treated Washingtonians with kindness, severely disciplining soldiers for stealingfrom abandoned homes. By painting the British as civilian targeters, "terrorists" in his formulation, Carr wants to suggest such conduct contributed to their losing the war. But the British -- the "good guys" in terms of their treatment of civilians -- lost the war. Carr's recasting of events in this and other instances throughout the book suggests that he is a better writer of fiction than history. •

Lorraine Adams, a Washington Post writer, frequently reviews for Book World.


-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

UK to up renewable energy, keep nuclear door open

Story by Mike Peacock
REUTERS UK:
February 17, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/14577/newsDate/17-Feb-2002/story.htm

LONDON - Britain should raise its target for energy supplied by renewable sources to 20 percent by 2020 but also keep open the option to invest anew in nuclear power, a government-commissioned report said last week.

Energy minister Brian Wilson signalled support for the conclusions of the Performance and Innovation Unit - a thinktank set up by Prime Minister Tony Blair - and said legislative plans would be published in the autumn.

The government should set overall domestic targets for a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency by 2010 and a further 20 percent over the next decade, the PIU said.

The government's existing target is for 10 percent of Britain's energy supplies to come from sources such as wind and solar power by 2010.

"The report is not about renewable versus nuclear, it is about balance and promoting innovation in new technologies," Wilson said in a statement.

"It stresses the potential for renewables and energy efficiency but also argues that the options of new investment in nuclear power and cleaner coal should be kept open."

Growing reliance on imported natural gas, from sometimes unreliable sources, and thinning North Sea oil reserves have fuelled concerns over the security of Britain's energy supplies.

Prime Minister Tony Blair asked the government unit last year to undertake a root-and-branch review of energy policy.

In a foreword to the report, Blair said the security of energy supply and climate change were international issues.

"The UK...must address these issues via international policies and agreement, particularly through EU market liberalisation and the Kyoto agreements," he said.

BRITAIN VS UNITED STATES

The long-awaited review's call for a near 10-fold increase of electricity generated from renewables will widen the gap with the United States in the fight to prevent global warming.

President George W. Bush will propose his own plan to combat global warming later last week, calling for a gradual reduction in U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases as an alternative to the strict Kyoto treaty he rejected last year.

The U.S. administration said it would set goals for greenhouse gas cuts based on U.S. economic growth and give firms incentives to do their share in meeting them. Kyoto, in contrast, set tough mandatory reductions.

But Britain too has a long way to go.

At present only 2.8 percent of UK energy supply is classed as renewable. The government has a target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 23 percent from 1990 levels by 2010, in excess of targets agreed last year as part of the 1997 Kyoto protocol.

Environmental campaign group Friends of the Earth said that without radical change, Blair's vision of leading the "coming green industrial revolution" will be no more than hot air.

It produced figures showing that in 2000, half government research and development went to nuclear power, less than a quarter to renewable energy. And over the last 25 years nuclear power has received more than three-quarters of available funds.

British Nuclear Fuels predictably welcomed the report.

"This report...confirms that nuclear generation will continue to remain an integral part of UK's future energy mix," BNFL chairman Hugh Collum said in a statement.

-------- environment

Swap proposed to halt new California offshore drilling

Story by Andrew Quinn
REUTERS USA:
February 17, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/14557/newsDate/17-Feb-2002/story.htm

SAN FRANCISCO - New oil and natural gas drilling off California's famous coastline would be permanently halted under a deal to swap undeveloped California tracts for similar blocks in the Gulf of Mexico, Sen. Barbara Boxer said last week.

Boxer, a California Democrat, said she was proposing legislation that would withdraw 40 undeveloped oil tracts off California's central coast and establish the area as an ecological preserve - a boon for environmental groups, who say new drilling could permanently scar one of the most beautiful coastlines in the world.

In return, the oil companies holding the leases would be offered credits, estimated at anywhere from $1 billion to $2.8 billion, for bids on lease tracts in the central and western Gulf already slated for development.

"We're going to swap it so that the oil companies can drill where people want them to drill," Boxer told a telephone news conference Thursday. "This is a major win-win. If it all works well we're all going to be celebrating. So far the indications are extremely positive."

Boxer's legislation, entitled the California Coastal Protection and Louisiana Energy Enhancement Act, is aimed at resolving a brewing struggle between the federal government and California over a total of 40 offshore California oil and gas tracts that the Bush administration has proposed opening up for new development.

The U.S. Department of Interior said it would study the proposal. "The administration is committed to working with local and state officials, and we are willing to study proposals which might resolve the issues regarding California's offshore leases," said department spokesman Mark Pfeifle.

New offshore oil drilling off California has been halted since 1989 - although oil production continues at existing state and federal tracts.

California, saying its right to review the environmental impact of the proposed new exploration had been ignored, sued to stop the new development and won a court order blocking new drilling pending full review.

That order is currently under appeal before the 9th Circuit in San Francisco.

Boxer said the swap plan, developed with Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu, had received a positive reaction from the oil companies holding the California leases, which include Aera, the combined California exploration and production operations of Exxon Mobil Corp. and Shell Oil Co., a unit of Royal Dutch/Shell Group ; Conoco Inc. , Nuevo Energy Co. and Samedan Oil Corp., a subsidiary of Noble Affiliates Inc. .

"I believe this plan will succeed, and if it does the ongoing battle over our coastline may well be over," Boxer said.

Nuevo Energy, which has been in contact with other energy companies regarding Boxer's plan, said it had not yet see the final legislation and would have no immediate comment.

OLD LEASES, NEW OIL

In 1999, in a move widely seen as marking a prelude for possible new oil drilling, then Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt extended the companies' leases while ordering a review of their impact on the environment.

The tracts were exempt from the Clinton administration's 1998 ban on new oil drilling because the leases were so old, some dating back to 1979.

The Bush administration has continued to push for possible resumption of oil drilling in the lease tracts, and this month offered a deal - rejected by California - aimed at resolving the dispute by permitting new exploration but only from existing rigs.

Government estimates show the leases, which range up and down the central coast near the resort city of Santa Barbara, could hold 1 billion barrels of oil.

The area's possible reserves of natural gas have also been growing increasingly attractive to energy companies as prices soared last year during California's power crisis.

While Boxer and Rep. Lois Capps, the Democrat who represents the Santa Barbara area facing much of the proposed new oil development, said they hoped the new deal would be swiftly approved, they said the state's court fight to preserve its right to review new oil drilling plans would continue.

-------- health

Mammography Review Shatters the Status Quo
Doubts About Its Value Alarm Many

By Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 17, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22282-2002Feb16?language=printer

Her patients cannot believe it. For years they had taken it for granted that mammograms saved their lives, or would. For years they had subjected themselves to the cold metal of the machine, the painful pinch of the plates. After all, everyone knew that early detection prolongs life.

But new assessments of the pivotal research supporting the effectiveness of mammography have cast serious doubt on that assumption, and Carolyn Hendricks, a Bethesda oncologist, finds herself "inundated" with questions. "Many patients are asking me, 'Why bother? What really is the point?' " she said. "Many women feel betrayed."

Thousands of miles away in Seattle, Joann Elmore says she no longer pressures women to undergo the X-ray screening. "We are learning from this experience that perhaps we oversold ourselves and the public on the benefits of mammography," said Elmore, head of general medicine at Harborview Medical Center. "We're hoping that it works. But we don't know."

In Minneapolis, Richard Carlson, a breast imaging specialist for 15 years, feels as if he has lost his medical moorings. "If true, this is going to be a very serious setback for breast cancer treatment and cures," said Carlson, whose wife was diagnosed with the disease three years ago. "This would put us back to the beginning: How are we going to reduce mortality from this disease?"

Three weeks after a National Cancer Institute advisory panel concluded there is insufficient evidence to prove that mammography reduces breast cancer deaths, doctors and patients are coming to grips with the chilling prospect that what they thought was medical gospel is anything but.

"It's conceivable mammography has a benefit, although if it does it is small," said Donald Berry, chairman of the NCI panel that threw Carlson and other physicians into such turmoil. "It's also conceivable it does not have a benefit. The bottom line is uncertainty."

Modern medicine is full of uncertainty, but mammography had been widely accepted for decades as the best way to spot abnormalities before they grow into deadly tumors. At times, scientists have debated the risks of radiation exposure and whether younger women should be screened. But confident that early detection saves lives, leading medical authorities have long advocated annual mammograms for women 50 and older.

The wave of doubt began with two scientists in Denmark, Peter Gotzsche and Ole Olsen. The researchers reviewed the seven leading studies of mammography screening and concluded there were significant enough questions about the quality of the research to undermine the results.

The data simply did not prove that mammography reduces breast cancer deaths, the two said. That prompted the NCI panel to reexamine the issue.

For women who begin annual mammograms in their forties, annual screening appears to add 36 hours to their life spans, said Berry, who is also chairman of the biostatistics department at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. "You would get a better benefit from walking to the doctor's office than getting those mammograms," he said.

Every woman who gets a yearly mammogram through her fifties has a 50 percent chance of receiving at least one false-positive reading, said Mary Ann Napoli, head of the New York-based Center for Medical Consumers. In addition to anxiety and expense, many will undergo unnecessary procedures -- from a simple needle biopsy to a mastectomy. Some experts say the risks of mammography may outweigh the benefits for some women.

"These are healthy, symptomless women" getting annual screening mammograms, she said. "You may end up with a lot of collateral damage to women who do not have invasive cancer."

Subsequent analyses have challenged the Danish study and the work of Berry's panel. The American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute and other leading medical organizations are still recommending routine mammography. In the coming weeks, the NCI, several medical groups and Congress will further scrutinize the issue. But it's unlikely the debate will be resolved soon.

"We're about the business of trying to prolong the survival of women with this deadly disease," Carlson said. "If we learn that we can't rely upon these studies to show a reduction in mortality from breast cancer in women who undergo routine screening, then we have very bad news for the women of the world."

Like Carlson, one of his patients, Jane Gregerson, wants to see much more research, not just on mammography but on the cause of breast cancer and possible treatment. "This whole thing reminds me of the red wine debates," she said. "Red wine is good, red wine is not good."

In several breast centers, doctors say a small number of women have canceled appointments, setting off fears in the medical community that tumors will go undetected.

"Every day in my practice I see breast cancer that would not have been picked up without mammography," said Washington breast cancer surgeon Peter Petrucci. He said he cringes over the latest headlines. "I know I'll have a bunch of patients who won't follow through and get a mammogram."

But Petrucci also acknowledges that legal and economic pressures -- and the difficulties in reading some X-rays -- can influence a course of treatment. "I see mammography overread because of concerns about liability," he said, adding that when in doubt, some radiologists err in favor of recommending surgery for a mysterious mark on the film.

Although mammograms can provide the first glimpse of breast cancer, a growing number of researchers say that does not necessarily mean the test saves lives. Abnormalities on the X-ray could be benign. In instances where the tumor is malignant, modern therapies -- not early detection -- may make the difference in mortality.

In recent years, physicians have made progress with less invasive surgery, such as lumpectomy, chemotherapy and hormonal therapy. So maybe all mammography does is detect some cancers earlier, but not necessarily when they are any more treatable.

But doctors such as Hendricks worry that in their search for better types of detection and cures, researchers will abandon a valuable tool.

"I am holding on to the promise [that] mammography helps me in the detection and treatment of breast cancer," she said. "I can't do my job without it."

Breast cancer survivors in particular fiercely cling to mammography as the gold standard in health screening -- and perhaps the only thing a woman can actively do to improve her chances of survival. They say that even the risks of mammography are minimal compared with the chance of detecting and curing cancer early.

Susan Hunt, 50, said the pain of surgery and days spent waiting to have a mysterious lump checked are awful. In her case, two scares over 10 years turned out to be benign. "But I'd sooner be in that category of trauma than the trauma of breast cancer," the Seattle lawyer said.

For Carl D'Orsi, chairman of the breast cancer committee of the American College of Radiology, there is no debate. "Women must have their mammograms; it is the only way to drop the mortality rate," he said, noting that breast cancer death rates have declined as mammography screening has increased.

Even if mammography does not lower mortality rates, it can mean less invasive treatment and greater "breast conservation" than if a large lump were discovered in a physical exam years later, several specialists said.

"As one patient said to me, 'If it doesn't save lives, at least it saves breasts,' " said Katherine Alley, director of the breast center at Suburban Hospital. To her, it is counterintuitive that early screening might not be beneficial.

But it is not unusual for anecdotes to clash with data, said Fran Visco, president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition.

"My breast cancer was found at age 39 with mammography," she said, acknowledging it is natural for patients to credit the X-ray machine with saving their lives. "Until I understood the evidence, I probably would have said the same thing."

-------- propaganda wars

Refugee scandal rocks Sydney govt

By Stephen Sheldon
2/17/2002
UPI
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=17022002-083002-6168r

SYDNEY, Australia -- When Prime Minister John Howard's government claimed last October that heartless Middle Eastern boat people had thrown their children overboard from a fishing boat in the Indian Ocean to emotionally extort their entry into Australia, it was the most highly charged story in the election campaign.

Now it turns out the whole episode never happened, but was crafted to reinforce security fears and prejudices about boat people and, more to the point, to gain electoral advantage for the Liberal-National Party coalition in what turned out to be a major come-from-behind victory for Howard's re-election.

It was truth and principles, not children, which now appear to have gone overboard, and it's the government that finds itself in deep water. The generous sort could perhaps say the party coalition fell for a rumor early on, but at best the excuse is rushing to act without first checking one's information. And even that excuse doesn't work for long.

The story of the alleged incident was hurried to the media by Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock on Oct. 7, the first Sunday of the election campaign. Ruddock said the abuse had been "clearly planned and premeditated."

"I can't comprehend how genuine refugees would throw their children overboard," said Howard that day.

There were few who disagreed or even questioned the veracity of the government's claims. Callers to the nation's talk-back radio shows were incensed.

Three days later, the government released photos of heroic young Australian sailors from HMAS Adelaide risking their lives to save the children allegedly tossed overboard.

The message, said the government, was clear: these were people whose values were alien to ours, and every effort should be made to keep them out of the country.

It was a policy the government had been pursuing since last Auguest, when it turned around a boatload of asylum seekers aboard the Norwegian freighter Tampa, and which was to be the government's key election-winning policy.

The boat people were then shipped to a remote island in Papua New Guinea, far from media access.

But two reports just released say no children were thrown overboard, and that senior government officials knew by the evening of Oct. 7 the allegations -- based on shaky verbal advice from officers aboard the Adelaide -- could not be confirmed.

Senior military officers, including the chief of the defense force, Adm. Chris Barrie, knew by Oct. 11 the story was incorrect and had told the Department of Prime Minister and senior bureaucrats. But weeks of verbal and written advice to the government went unheeded, and nothing was done to get the truth to voters prior to the Nov. 10 poll.

One report records that on Oct. 31, a brigadier told Defense Minister Peter Reith a video of the incident did not show a child being thrown into the water. Reith reportedly responded with words to the effect, "Well, we'd better not see the video then."

And the photos? Well, they were taken on Oct. 8 and actually showed the sailors rescuing passengers after the leaky boat had sunk.

One of the two reports, by Maj. Gen. Roger Powell, found there had been confusion caused by a "a combination of haste, over-enthusiasm, errors of judgment, misunderstanding and misinterpretation."

That may be, but most callers jamming talk-back radio lines and cramming the letters pages of the major dailies smelled a cover-up, and are outraged by the deception.

For his part, Howard is saying his government used the original (false) advice in good faith. In denying responsibility, he has sheeted blame back on Reith, and criticized "incompetent" officials in his own department and confusion among defense officials who, he said, never told him the incident had not occurred.

"Who knows when you might inadvertently mislead people," Howard said. "I've not misled the Australian public. I've not done anything to distort the situation."

It is a claim that is beyond belief. Political cartoonists are depicting Howard as Pinocchio, and with each day his nose is growing.

Defense officials also are incensed the armed forces have been used for political ends, an unprecedented development in a country that takes pride in the separation of military and political powers.

The former chief of Naval staff, Vice Adm. Sir Richard Peek, said just before the election the armed services were being completely muzzled and treated in the way the German population was treated by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in World War II. He now says it's time for the key naval officers involved to go public with the facts.

That may well happen during a forthcoming Senate inquiry intriguingly titled the "Select Committee on a Certain Maritime Incident," due to report by May 16.

The inquiry could seriously embarrass the government and senior advisers. But many are wary it could turn out to be a public service witch-hunt, with bureaucrats, not politicians, forced to walk the plank.

"People in (the Department of) Defense think they're being set up to be the patsies in this game," said Labor's Opposition Leader Simon Crean.

Whichever way it goes, it's likely Howard will ride out the storm. His credibility may be in taters for now, but if history holds true, the whole tawdry affair may not even be a lingering memory when the next election comes in three years.

----

A Whitewashing of History
Canadian Town Tried To Bury Its Founding By Black Pioneers

By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, February 17, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22442-2002Feb16?language=printer

PRICEVILLE, Ontario -- Some say only the dead in this town can speak the truth about how a virtually all-black settlement in Canada turned virtually all-white. But then, some of the living won't let them.

For years, the history of this rural settlement in southwestern Ontario was wrapped in a spooky silence. Photographs disappeared. Grave sites were plowed over, and tombstones from the black cemetery were stolen, hidden in stone piles, used as home plate in baseball games and as stepping stones in a wet basement.

It was as if the town were trying to erase the very existence of the black pioneers who settled this area in the early 1800s. Hide the fact that some of the whites who came here later married some of the blacks. Hide the fact that many generations later, some white people still living in this town may not be white at all. Just a drop, they used to say.

"There is a lot of history people don't know about," said Howard Sheffield, whose black ancestors lived in Priceville, about 100 miles northwest of Toronto. "The white people wanted to cover that history up because it relates back to them. They are black people that are passing for white. Some of those white people drove the rest of the blacks out."

Eventually, the only trace that black people had ever been in Priceville, working the land and building homes and a school, was the cemetery. Then in the 1930s, a white farmer named Billy Reid bought the land, plowed over the cemetery and planted potatoes.

That is what they say became of the history of black people in this part of Ontario. It was plowed over, buried and hushed up. But some of it survived, as when adults would whisper secrets, unaware that children were listening.

Now, black Canadians -- who make up about 1 percent of the country's 31 million people -- are trying to put the broken tombstones back together, pick up the pieces of their ancestry and fill in the spaces that were left in the history books. Books, plays and documentaries about the black experience in Canada have recently been released as a new generation of African Canadians comes of age and attempts to tell a history it was not taught in school.

"It was a shameful spot in the history of the community," said Jennifer Holness, director of "Speakers for the Dead," a film distributed by Canada's National Film Board that traces the search for tombstones in a divided town. "Shameful they eradicated the gravestones, which indicates how blacks were treated, that blacks were forced off the land and white settlers took their land. There were some intermarriages they thought of as shameful. There is a desire to keep that quiet."

But Holness said the story of Priceville encapsulates the story of racism in Canada and digs beneath a stereotype of racial tolerance. "We as Canadians trot around and say, 'Americans are so racist. Look at the segregation down South. Look at the lynchings.' But it was just as bad in Canada. We didn't have official segregation. But there were places blacks couldn't go. We can't be smug about Canada's place in history when it comes to racism."

The Priceville area was, she said, in some ways the Deep South of the North.

"Canada had slaves," said Sheffield, who lives in Collingwood, about 30 miles east of Priceville. "Don't think they didn't. Some escaped from the South, some were brought from the South and some were kept as slaves. They like to think it didn't happen here."

James Walker, author of "A History of Blacks in Canada: A Study Guide for Teachers and Students," said the first black person known to have lived in Canada was a young boy who came to the country as a slave in 1628 and was sold in Quebec.

From the 1600s to the early 1800s, "there was never a time when blacks were not held as slaves in Canada. Slavery is thus a very real part of our history, yet the fact that slavery ever existed here has been one of our best-kept secrets."

White Loyalists escaping the American Revolution brought many blacks as slaves to Canada. Freed blacks came as Loyalists themselves, and many of them fought for the British in the War of 1812.

Holness and filmmaker David Sutherland have pursued the story of Priceville because, they said, they wanted to tell the story of blacks in Canada who were not recent immigrants but who arrived here more than seven generations ago.

"Ultimately, what we wanted to do is expose these ridiculous ideas about race," Holness said. "We wanted to say, 'You are so ridiculous that you are going to discriminate against me because of the color of my skin and you know what? You might be related to me.' "

Sutherland said that in Priceville the filmmakers often ran into people who were reluctant to talk. "The underlying thing up there is you are who your grandparents are," Sutherland said. "We found some people who didn't want this to go further. 'Leave well enough alone. Aren't you people satisfied? Why do you want to stir up trouble?' "

"I thought, 'Trouble?' What does that mean? The idea of black ancestry, is that supposed to be trouble? As a black person, I don't see how that is trouble. But if more names were discovered, that might unsettle some people."

When Billy Reid bought the plot that included the cemetery, people here say, he knowingly removed some tombstones, buried them under a pile of rocks and proceeded to plant potatoes.

"I used to ask my father why that corner of the field was fenced off," Joyce Grimes, Reid's stepdaughter, said in the film. "He said, 'It was once a black cemetery. We raised very good potatoes on that particular piece of land.' "

Many white residents of Priceville joined a committee in 1989 to reclaim the cemetery, find the stones and restore dignity to the black pioneers. The effort was led by Les MacKinnon, who grew up hearing the stories about the "darkies' cemetery." MacKinnon said he was always bothered that he could walk to the grave of his grandfathers but that some of the people related to black settlers could not.

"The early black pioneers, they came here. They were the engine of growth and change," MacKinnon said. "It was their sweat, blood and tears that brought the bush to its knees and made space for farm fields. And then as the history was being written on the area, they were left out. The great white man showed up and wrote the history books."

When MacKinnon was a child, he heard stories. "I was always asking questions and I found out it was more productive sometimes just to sit quietly and not say anything. So I wouldn't be much older than the young lad there, maybe five, six at a quilting bee and I remember the old women arguing about darkies' corner and where was it," he said. "And each one of them had a different place that was darkies' corner."

MacKinnon, a tall man with thick hands, snow-white hair, ruddy skin and piercing blue eyes, drove through Priceville as a storm howled, covering fields and roads with snow.

"When those early black pioneers of African descent arrived here, they were faced with weather like this," MacKinnon said. "This is no place for the weak of heart or the timid."

He gave a guided tour to reveal the truth of Priceville. He pointed at what looked like empty fields, innocent houses. The buildings were deceiving; some of them still harbor tombstones taken from the cemetery.

MacKinnon slowed along Durham Road, where black families once lived. Now there is little or no trace of them. He stopped and pointed at a gray house. "That house there is the house that has tombstones in the basement, and the barn that's behind the shed, tombstones were used there, too."

He drove farther down the road, pointing at a white field. Behind the evergreens, there was a brick house. A family moved into that house in the 1960s and found a photo album in the attic. The photos were of a black man and a white woman "who were obviously closer than just friends," MacKinnon said. The woman who found the album took it to the town historian, who told her to burn it.

MacKinnon stopped at the intersection of Durham Road and Grey Road. "There it is, Durham Road Cemetery," he said. A sign reads: "The plot was dedicated October 13, 1990, in recognition of the pioneers of African descent and Loyalist stock who were early settlers in this area."

At first glance, it looks like just a small plot of vacant land surrounded by a fence. A closer look reveals piles of stones at the far fence. "We had ground-probing radar done on it, and it indicated somewhere around a hundred graves," MacKinnon said. "But we've only recovered four stones to this point in time."

Here, he paused, placing another bookmark in the controversy. It seems that the committee that was formed to restore the cemetery does not want to disturb any more of this plot by digging for more stones. "I only know what the stones tell us," MacKinnon said. "The stones were removed for some reason or another."

MacKinnon said an 1851 census showed that a large number of blacks lived here. Surely more people died here than the four indicated by the recovered gravestones, but it is unclear what happened to the other markers. He recalled an anonymous letter that arrived in 1999, giving a clue about where to look.

In the film, MacKinnon reads the letter: "I was told 65 or more years ago that when Billy Reid plowed up that cemetery, he took stones and floored his stable with them. I understand he ran cement on them."

Grimes, Reid's stepdaughter, provides an explanation in the film . "Back then people didn't have a lot of money to go to the store and buy stones. There were two or three stones in the basement of the home. Sometimes we had water in the basement. We needed them to walk on."

The population of Priceville has dwindled. The whole town is white now, with snow. "Where did the black people go?" MacKinnon said. "Some are still around. They are just not black any more."


-------- activists

Italian Pressed to Resign

WORLD In Brief,
Washington Post
Sunday, February 17, 2002; Page A30
Reuters
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22448-2002Feb16?language=printer

ROME -- Italy's interior minister faced calls for his resignation after revealing he had ordered police to shoot any protesters who breached security lines at the Group of Seven summit in Genoa last year.

Claudio Scajola told reporters on Friday that he gave security forces authority to use their weapons following the death of protester Carlo Giuliani, who was shot by a policeman as a police van came under attack.

"After the death that night, I had to give the order to shoot anyone who breached the Red Zone," Scajola said, referring to the most secure area of the city, where the leaders of the seven industrialized nations and Russia were meeting.

Scajola said the "open-fire" order was given not so much in response to the threat of stepped-up protests by anti-globalization demonstrators, but because of the risk of terrorism and an attack on President Bush.

----

20,000 Israelis rally for peace
Speakers urge nation to end occupation of West Bank, Gaza Strip

Dina Shiloh,
San Francisco Chronicle Foreign Service
Sunday, February 17, 2002
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/02/17/MN144828.DTL

A record number of Israelis rallied here for peace last night -- the biggest demonstration staged by the Israeli left since Palestinian-Israeli violence broke out in September 2000.

The demonstrators -- Israeli media estimated the size of the crowd at 20,000 -- listened to both Israeli and Palestinian speakers who had one central message: the need for Israel to leave the West Bank and Gaza.

The night's biggest applause was for Sari Nusseibeh, who is Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's chief envoy in Jerusalem.

Nusseibeh, also the president of Al Quds University, was speaking in front of an Israeli rally for the first time. He spoke in a halting Hebrew and appealed to the audience emotionally.

"I am here to tell you that there is no one to speak to, except Abu Ammar (Arafat), but there are answers to the problems: a return to the 1967 border, and two states for two people . . . We want a warm peace, not a cold peace, between our nations," he told the receptive audience.

Such public appearances by Palestinian officials in Israel are extremely rare these days, and Nusseibeh's decision to appear underscored his emerging role as an important advocate for ending almost 17 months of deadly violence and for resuming peace talks.

A growing number of Israelis say their country should pull out of at least part of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, even without a peace agreement.

Carrying signs bearing such messages as "This occupation is killing us all" and "Out of the territories, now," the demonstrators applauded and cheered when the speakers spoke critically of the coalition government.

"Brother, brother, get out of the territories," chanted the demonstrators.

A new student peace group called the Green Line called on Labor politicians,

especially Defense Minister Benjamin Ben Eliezer and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, to leave the government that joins the Labor Party with the right-wing Likud in a coalition. If the Labor ministers pulled out, the government would collapse and new elections would be called.

"We call on (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon and Arafat: Enough blood! Enough blood!" Yossi Sarid of the Meretz Party told the rally.

The rally followed another deadly day for both Israelis and Palestinians, including a suicide bombing, a gunbattle and a car explosion that resulted in seven deaths.

The demonstration gave a much-needed shot in the arm to Israel's peace movement.

"This rally is the resurrection of the moribund peace movement that was devastated by the events following the collapse of the talks at Camp David (in April 2000)," said Levi Weiman-Kelman, a Reform rabbi from Jerusalem who demonstrated in the same square against the Lebanon war two decades ago.

"We came today to try to stop the war which is about to take place between Palestinians and Israelis," said Azmi Bedeir, an Arab Israeli from Kfar Kassem in the Galilee. "The fact that there are so many people at this demonstration is a sign that the Israeli public is finally being roused from its apathy."

Over the years, Israeli political movements have always held their biggest rallies in central Tel Aviv. Some have even changed government policies.

Rallies held in the early 1980s, organized by Peace Now, attracted half a million people, and are credited with Israel's eventual withdrawal from Lebanon and the end of the Lebanon war -- often dubbed "Israel's Vietnam."

The coalition of peace groups that drummed up support for last night's rally included some new groups, such as Green Line: Students for Borders, but also others that have long been in the forefront of the Israeli peace movement,

such as Peace Now.

Also in the crowd were some of the approximately 250 Israeli army reservists who have refused to serve in the West Bank and Gaza.

The protest movement against the Israeli army's conduct in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in nearly 17 months of fighting with the Palestinians has touched off a firestorm of debate in a nation where army service is a pillar of citizenship.

The spokesman for Peace Now, one of the organizers of the rally, said the march and rally are the first major activities in the new "Get Out of the Territories -- Get Back to Ourselves" campaign. The campaign is trying to inspire a public debate on the continued occupation and its impact on Israel's future.

"We've planned a lot of activities in the next few months, including a huge rally on the 35th anniversary of the occupation, June 6," said Peace Now's spokesman, Didi Remez.

PEACE COALITION

The Peace Coalition, which organized yesterday's rally, is composed of the following bodies: Peace Now: Israel's largest and oldest organization advocating that Israel leave the territories. Founded in 1978, it has mobilized hundreds of thousands of Israelis to take to the streets in the past.

Meretz: A political party, to the left of Labor, which holds 10 seats in the 120-member Knesset, the Israeli parliament.

Labor Doves: An informal union of Knesset members and other members of the Labor Party who want their party to leave the national unity government. Members include former Justice Minister Yossi Beilin, architect of the Oslo peace accords.

Kibbutz Movement: The umbrella association of Israel's 200 kibbutzim, or agricultural co-operatives, most of which are still run on socialist principles and which are associated with the left.

Democratic Choice Party: A left-wing party with two Knesset members.

Hashomer Hatzair: The Socialist-Zionist youth movement of the Labor Party and other left-wing political parties.

Netivot Shalom: A religious peace movement.

Bereaved Family Forum: An organization founded in 1995, made up of both Jews and Arabs who have lost a member of their family as a result of the violence.

A recently formed group of university students who advocate Israel's withdrawal from the territories.

Other organizations present: A delegation from the group of approximately 250 reservists who refuse to serve in the West Bank and Gaza; Rabbis for Human Rights; Ta'ayush, an Israeli Arab-Jewish group; Women in Black; Yesh Gvul (Enough Is Enough); Gush Shalom (The Peace Bloc).

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

----

Israeli Army Objectors Spark Debate

February 17, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Refusing-To-Serve.html

JERUSALEM (AP) -- It began with a modest act of defiance: In newspaper ads, 52 Israeli reserve soldiers declared last month they would no longer serve in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Their number has since more than quadrupled, and has sparked a passionate debate in Israel about the limits of legitimate protest.

For many Israelis, the soldiers' accounts of acts of random brutality toward Palestinian civilians have also added a new urgency to resolving Israel's most burning problem -- what to do with the territories conquered in 1967.

The protest has reinvigorated an Israeli peace camp cast adrift by the collapse of peace talks and almost 17 months of Israeli-Palestinian fighting. It is now regrouping under the slogan ``Get out of the territories,'' with many advocating a unilateral Israeli withdrawal rather than waiting for a peace deal that may never materialize.

On Saturday night, thousands of Israelis gathered in Tel Aviv to call for a pullout in what appeared to be the largest peace rally since fighting began in September 2000. ``Get out of the territories!'' they chanted.

Conscientious objection has been rare in Israel as long as the consensus held that the country was fighting for its survival. But Israel runs a citizens' army, leaning heavily on reservists who can spend up to a month a year in uniform, and it cannot be isolated from the national mood as a whole. So every time the consensus has wavered, small groups of soldiers have refused to serve -- most notably after Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

The army has usually opted for a low-key response, jailing offenders for a few days or weeks, then transferring them out of the line of fire.

The latest objectors, who include a deputy brigade commander, refuse to talk to the foreign media, saying they don't want to air Israel's dirty linen abroad.

But Israeli newspapers and TV broadcasts have become virtual confessionals for soldiers haunted by their experiences in the Palestinian areas.

The Tel Aviv weekly Ha'ir recently published statements by 40 reservists recalling events that led them to join the protest, including what they described as unwarranted killings of unarmed Palestinian teen-agers and the routine humiliation of Palestinians at the Israeli checkpoints throughout the territories.

Artillery Lt. Ishai Sagi said he was alarmed by the order given to his entire battalion last December: ``Shoot anyone who picks up a stone.'' The army says soldiers are told to fire only when their lives are threatened.

Some reservists cite two watershed events last month: the army's destruction of dozens of houses in a Gaza Strip refugee camp that left many Palestinians homeless, and the killing of a West Bank militia leader at a time when a truce ordered by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat appeared to be taking hold.

Confronted for the first time with an armed uprising and a wave of suicide bombings, Israel's military response has been the harshest in 35 years of occupation. But some of the reservists cite experiences from long before the current round of violence broke out.

David Zonshein, a paratroop lieutenant, wrote that in May 1996, his unit accompanied Shin Beth security service interrogators on a nighttime search for a suspected arms cache in a West Bank house.

``For two hours, the two interrogators tormented a 14-year-old boy with severe blows all over his body, with threats and abuse,'' Zonshein wrote. No arms were found, he said.

The military has not answered each specific charge, but the armed forces chief, Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz, says few armies facing a foe blended into a civilian population follow an ethics code as strict as Israel's.

As of Sunday the fighting has claimed 936 lives on the Palestinian side. However, bombers and gunmen have killed more than 269 people on the Israeli side, and the conscientious objectors have met strong opposition, not just from army brass, but from dovish politicians.

Many Israelis view them as a danger to Israel's deterrent ability and say a unilateral pullout would make it look weak.

About 200 other reserve officers published a letter criticizing the ``dangerous and undemocratic initiative of refusing to serve.''

Nahum Barnea, a leading liberal columnist, agreed. Writing in the Yediot Ahronot daily, he warned that ``such actions poison the army internally ... and abandon it to those with a light trigger finger.''

Mofaz has accused the dissenters of inciting other soldiers to rebellion and has threatened disciplinary action.

Others, including former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon, say the soldiers should continue to serve but refuse orders they deem illegal. They note that the Israeli army was not built on blind obedience and that soldiers have not only the right but the obligation to question a possibly unlawful order.

However, in their declaration, published Jan. 25, the reservists said they were not just resisting individual orders, but occupation itself.

``We shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people,'' they said.

The main points of friction between soldiers and civilians are the roadblocks crisscrossing the West Bank to enforce travel bans through the patchwork of autonomous zones.

Human rights organizations have logged countless stories of beatings and other abuses at the barriers, many of which are manned by reservists.

Israel Channel 1 TV quoted an internal military document as saying the roadblocks have little security value. They can usually be evaded via back roads.

Ruchama Marton, an Israeli psychiatrist with Tel Aviv-based Physicians for Human Rights, said violations of the army's rules of conduct are seldom reported because soldiers troubled by bad behavior generally try to transfer out, or succumb to peer pressure and join in the abuse.

She said she believes Israeli society is being poisoned by the occupation. She noted that many of the incidents cited by the protesting reservists happened years ago but only now are coming to a head.

One reason, she said, is the escalation of the conflict into airstrikes, tanks in cities and blockades of Palestinian towns on an unprecedented scale. Another is a sense that a peace agreement which would allow an orderly withdrawal from the territories is nowhere in sight.

The Palestinians a year ago rejected the previous government's proposals for a Palestinian state in almost all the West Bank and Gaza, with a foothold in Jerusalem. They held out for more land and the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to move back to Israel -- a nightmare to most Israelis.

--------

How Can We Justify This?
Good words from Rep. Kucinich

By Representative
Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio)
Sunday, February 17, 2002
From: Bette Hoover <BHoover@afsc.org>

Let us pray that our nation will remember that the unfolding of the promise of democracy in our nation paralleled the striving for civil rights. That is why we must challenge the rationale of the Patriot Act. We must ask why should America put aside guarantees of constitutional justice?

How can we justify in effect canceling the First Amendment and the right of free speech, the right to peaceably assemble?

How can we justify in effect canceling the Fourth Amendment, probable cause, the prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure? How can we justify in effect canceling the Fifth Amendment, nullifying due process, and allowing for indefinite incarceration without a trial?

How can we justify in effect canceling the Sixth Amendment, the right to prompt and public trial? How can we justify in effect canceling the Eighth Amendment which protects against cruel and unusual punishment. We cannot justify widespread wiretaps and internet surveillance withoutjudicial supervision, let alone with it. We cannot justify secret searches without a warrant. We cannot justify giving the Attorney General the ability to designate domestic terror groups. We cannot justify giving the FBI total access to any type of data which may exist in any system anywhere such as medical records and financial records.

We cannot justify giving the CIA the ability to target people in this country for intelligence surveillance. We cannot justify a government which takes from the people our right to privacy and then assumes for its own operations a right to total secrecy. The Attorney General recently covered up a statue of Lady Justice showing her bosom as if to underscore there is no danger of justice exposing herself at this time, before this administration.

Let us pray that our nation's leaders will not be overcome with fear. Because today there is great fear in our great Capitol. And this must be understood before we can ask about the shortcomings of Congress in the current environment. The great fear began when we had to evacuate the Capitol on September 11. It continued when we had to leave the Capitol again when a bomb scare occurred as members were pressing the CIA during a secret briefing. It continued when we abandoned Washington when anthrax, possibly from a government lab, arrived in the mail. It continued when the Attorney General declared a nationwide terror alert and then the Administration brought the destructive Patriot Bill to the floor of the House. It continued in the release of the Bin Laden tapes at the same time the President was announcing the withdrawal from the ABM treaty. It remains present in the cordoning off of the Capitol. It is present in the camouflaged armed national guardsmen who greet members of Congress each day we enter the Capitol campus. It is present in the labyrinth of concrete barriers through which we must pass each time we go to vote. The trappings of a state of siege trap us in a state of fear, ill equipped to deal with the Patriot Games, the Mind Games, the War Games of an unelected President and his unelected Vice President.

Let us pray that our country will stop this war. "To promote the common defense" is one of the formational principles of America. Our Congress gave the President the ability to respond to the tragedy of September the Eleventh. We licensed a response to those who helped bring the terror of September the Eleventh. But we the people and our elected representatives must reserve the right to measure the response, to proportion the response, to challenge the response, and to correct the response.

Because we did not authorize the invasion of Iraq.

We did not authorize the invasion of Iran.

We did not authorize the invasion of North Korea.

We did not authorize the bombing of civilians in Afghanistan.

We did not authorize permanent detainees in Guantanamo Bay.

We did not authorize the withdrawal from the Geneva Convention.

We did not authorize military tribunals suspending due process and habeas corpus.

We did not authorize assassination squads.

We did not authorize the resurrection of COINTELPRO.

We did not authorize the repeal of the Bill of Rights.

We did not authorize the revocation of the Constitution.

We did not authorize national identity cards.

We did not authorize the eye of Big Brother to peer from cameras throughout our cities.

We did not authorize an eye for an eye.

Nor did we ask that the blood of innocent people, who perished on September 11, be avenged with the blood of innocent villagers in Afghanistan.

We did not authorize the administration to wage war anytime, anywhere, anyhow it pleases.

We did not authorize war without end.

We did not authorize a permanent war economy.

Yet we are upon the threshold of a permanent war economy. The President has requested a $45.6 billion increase in military spending. All defense-related programs will cost close to $400 billion. Consider that the Department of Defense has never passed an independent audit. Consider that the Inspector General has notified Congress that the Pentagon cannot properly account for $1.2 trillion in transactions. Consider that in recent years the Dept. of Defense could not match $22 billion worth of expenditures to the items it purchased, wrote off, as lost, billions of dollars worth of in-transit inventory and stored nearly $30 billion worth of spare parts it did not need.

Yet the defense budget grows with more money for weapons systems to fight a cold war which ended, weapon systems in search of new enemies to create new wars. This has nothing to do with fighting terror. This has everything to do with fueling a military industrial machine with the treasure of our nation, risking the future of our nation, risking democracy itself with the militarization of thought which follows the militarization of the budget.

United States Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio)


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