------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Dr. Strangelove with a Texasdrawl
China Bluntly Rebukes U.S. Over Nuclear Policy Review
U.S. test missile hits warhead; no decision on Saddam
Russia reiterates opposition to U.S. missile defence
New Zealand to Keep Nuclear Ship Ban
Russia May Soften on U.S. Weapons
Interview: DOE's nuclear bloodhound
Senators Insist on Role in Arms Pacts
Nuclear Preemption - "Bush's Toxic Texan image abroad"
Nuclear Posturing
Nuclear fallout
Newsmagazines: 60 minutes segment on nuclear waste tonight
Washington's nuclear posture
No certainty in Senate races

MILITARY
U.S. Operation Comes Under Scrutiny
U.S. Commander Visits Ethiopia
Robert Mugabe: freedom fighter turned strongman
UK opens door to North Korea
Army fear over Blair war plans
Blunkett warns Blair of riots in Britain over Iraq
Colombian army says 17 rebels killed
Threat Meets Reality
EU heads give go-ahead to satellite navigation plan
Hindu Mob Sets Fire to Mosques in Northern India
Iran expands ties with many states despite 'axis' tag
Church in Pakistan Is Attacked, Killing Five and Wounding 40
US wants to double military presence in southern Philippines
Failure to Communicate
Afghanistan welcomes U.S. troops, for now
China seen tilting Hong Kong's media
The secret Afghan war

POLICE / PRISONERS
Police cameras stir debate
Court to Weigh Drug Testing by Schools
Cloudy, With a Chance of Terror
Nigerians Hopeful Woman Will Escape Stoning Death
Al Qaeda believed to be shifting money
UK warned of new al-Qaeda threat
'American Jihad': Suspect Thy Neighbor
Al Qaeda's Grocery Lists and Manuals of Killing

ENERGY AND OTHER
Proposed Calvert Budget Calls for No Tax Hike
Waste Not, Says Maker of New Fertilizer
Chemists trick Alzheimer's enzyme
Invisible Armies 'Secret Agents
Many Doctors Say They Are Refusing Medicare Patients
Security worries UN human rights panel

ACTIVISTS
Calvert Residents Unite Against Dump
Arab cities erupt in protest
Thousands march against capitalism as summit ends
Spanish police fire on EU protesters
EU Summit Ends With A Bang and A Whimper
Guatemala politician shot to death
Chinese Oil Country Simmers as Workers Protest Cost-Cutting





-------- NUCLEAR

Dr. Strangelove with a Texasdrawl

By ERIC MARGOLIS -- Contributing Foreign Editor -- margolis@foreigncorrespondent.com
March 17, 2002
Toronto Sun
http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/margolis_mar17.html

Last week was not a good one for the Bush administration's crusade against evil. First came news of the government-issued visas for two of the 9/11 hijackers. Next, much ballyhooed Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan turned out to be a dud. Only a handful of al-Qaida or Taliban fighters - and 14 civilians - were killed, at a cost of eight Americans dead and over 40 wounded. Hundreds of other al-Qaida/Taliban once again escaped to fight another day.

Worse, exiled King Zahir Shah, whom America intends to restore to the throne of Afghanistan, said the U.S.-led war in his nation was "stupid and useless" and should be called off. The U.S. media ignored this damning comment.

While the U.S. and its allies swatted shadows in Afghanistan, the Mideast was spinning out of control. Palestinian suicide bombers killed scores of Israeli civilians. Twenty thousand Israeli troops and 100 tanks rampaged through Palestinian territory, killing over 100 civilians and fighters in scenes that recalled the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising or Soviet tanks in Budapest in 1956. A recent poll showed a shocking 40% of Israelis favoured ethnic cleansing of Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza.

The usually cautious UN Secretary General Kofi Annan took the unprecedented step of demanding Israel end its "illegal occupation" of Palestinian territories and to cease assassinations, bombings, demolitions and the humiliation of Palestinians. He called on Palestinians to halt their suicide bombings. Annan made it clear he believed Israel was violating the Geneva Convention and international law.

This carnage came just as U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney was beginning a Mideast tour to drum up support for an invasion of Iraq, which appears slated for September - when stockpiles of U.S. precision munitions are replenished and the summer heat abates. His timing was awful. Britain's Tony Blair, America's most faithful satrap, gave only half-hearted backing to the plan as his Labour party split over a new war against Iraq. Other usually compliant allies - Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates - strongly opposed war against Iraq. Cheney was told there would be no Arab coalition against Iraq unless there was relative peace in Palestine.

SHIFTING GEARS

Accordingly, the Bush administration for the first time openly endorsed a Palestinian state, after previously vetoing similar UN Security Council resolutions. Bush, and pro-Israel super-hawk Cheney, who had previously dismissed Palestinians as "terrorists" and opposed a Palestinian state, were forced to shift gears and promise a "viable Palestinian state" to mollify Arab allies. Bush even showed support for the sensible peace plan being advocated by Saudi Arabia. However, cynical Arabs recall the U.S. also promised a viable Palestinian state before attacking Iraq in 1991, but failed to make good on its word.

Then, another bombshell exploded under the administration. The Los Angeles Times published a leaked Pentagon document, the secret Nuclear Posture Review, which widened the list of nuclear targets to seven nations and lowered the threshold for U.S. use of nuclear weapons. The list included Russia and China, "axis of evil" baddies North Korea, Iraq, and Iran, plus Libya, and Syria.

The review calls for use of U.S. nuclear weapons in the event of a conflict with China over Taiwan, an attack by Iraq against Israel, war in Korea, or, ominously, "surprising military developments."

It is appropriate for the U.S. to quietly use the threat of its nuclear arsenal to deter any nation from launching nuclear, chemical, or biological attacks on America. But now, the administration is clearly planning to use tactical nukes against underground bunkers and troop formations - in other words, moving from traditional deterrence to the kind of offensive nuclear war advocated by the Pentagon's Dr. Strangeloves during the Cold War.

This piece of lunacy will surely motivate nations on Bush's target list to rush to acquire nuclear and/or biowarfare weapons in order to forestall possible U.S. nuclear attack, thus defeating the campaign to limit nuclear proliferation. China will now be forced to accelerate its nuclear missile development.

U.S. plans to attack Iraq with nuclear weapons in the event of a war with Israel show just how deeply the Bush administration has fallen under the spell of Israel's Gen. Ariel Sharon and his far right Likud party. Why should the U.S. start a nuclear war on Israel's behalf when Israel has 200 nuclear weapons and one of the world's most powerful armed forces? Why target Syria, which poses zero threat to the U.S., while ignoring India, which is fast developing a nuclear-armed ICBM that can reach the USA?

The U.S. previously vowed never to use nuclear weapons against nations that did not possess them. Now, Bush's crusaders are planning to not only break this pledge, but threaten to use tactical nukes to vaporize opponents around the world.

This act of folly is a sign of the growing frustration of the administration over its inability to catch Osama bin Laden, shut down al-Qaida, pacify Afghanistan and deal with hatred of the U.S. throughout the Muslim world.

Nuking Baghdad won't solve the Mideast's problems. In fact, VP Cheney may find on his trip that far more Mideasterners fear America's nuclear weapons than Saddam Hussein's non-existent ones.

-------- china

China Bluntly Rebukes U.S. Over Nuclear Policy Review

March 17, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/17/international/asia/17CHIN.html

BEIJING - Using its strongest language against the United States in months, China accused Washington today of "nuclear blackmail."

The state television said that Vice Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing called in Ambassador Clark T. Randt Jr. to deliver "solemn representations" on a Pentagon nuclear policy review that contains contingency planning for a possible nuclear confrontation with China, among other countries.

"China wants to make it very clear that China will never yield to foreign threats, including nuclear blackmail," the television report quoted Mr. Li as telling Mr. Randt. "The days when China could be bullied are gone forever."

Threats would "simply increase the determination of the Chinese people to safeguard their sovereignty," he added.

Mr. Li also accused Washington of encouraging independence activists in Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a rebel province, by allowing Taiwan's defense minister, Tang Yiau-ming, to visit the United States and to meet senior officials.

Beijing typically issues angry protests when a senior Taiwan official is allowed into the United States.

But China was particularly upset by Mr. Tang's talks with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, the highest-level documented defense talks between the United States and Taiwan in at least 22 years.

China's Foreign Ministry said that Mr. Tang's visit, and his meeting with Mr. Wolfowitz at a private conference in Florida, jeopardized a recent warming in Chinese-American ties.

The talks focused on American arms sales to Taiwan and were seen by some analysts as an effort to counter China's growing military power.

On Wednesday, an official Chinese newspaper accused Washington of using the policy review as a pretext to resume nuclear tests and develop new nuclear arms to extend its military dominance in the world.

But Mr. Li's language was the strongest China has used against the United States in many months and stood out sharply against the background of improved ties since Beijing backed the American war on terror.

Mr. Li accused Washington of breaching three joint communiques, which paved the way for a normalization of ties, by offering Taiwan advanced weapons.

"The United States must abandon the idea of Taiwan as an unsinkable aircraft carrier," he was quoted as saying.

"Taiwan has been a burden on the U.S. shoulders for more than half a century," he added. "We don't see any good in the U.S. continuing to shoulder that burden. It will simply drop a stone on its own toes."

In the three communiques, Washington recognized Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan, promised to reduce arms sales to the island gradually and agreed to maintain unofficial links to Taiwan.

President Bush reaffirmed that recognition of Chinese sovereignty during a visit to Beijing last month, but he also said Washington would honor its commitment to protect Taiwan in the face of attack or provocation.

Last year, Mr. Bush said he would do "whatever it took" to help Taiwan repel any Chinese invasion.

-------- missile defense

U.S. test missile hits warhead; no decision on Saddam

By Joyce Howard Price
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 17, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020317-49496710.htm

The results of the Pentagon's latest missile defense test Friday night over the Pacific demonstrate that the test program is "showing some quite impressive success," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said yesterday.

In the test, a prototype interceptor rocket, launched from a tiny Pacific island near the equator, smashed into a dummy warhead 140 miles above the ocean, destroying them both.

The test warhead was on a modified Minuteman II missile launched nearly 5,000 miles away at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It was the sixth test of a prototype of a ground-based missle defense system and the fourth successful destruction of a dummy warhead.

In a wide-ranging interview on CNN's "Novak, Hunt & Shields," Mr. Wolfowitz said the test Friday night marked the "first time we have had anything that looked like a decoy warhead," and the interceptor "picked out the real warhead from the decoys."

He stressed that the test conducted was not a "realistic" analysis of "what intercepts would have to do," and the decoys used are "not as good a decoy as we would expect to face later."

"We're in a development program; people need to understand that," Mr. Wolfowitz said. "We are going to push where there is success. We killed one program this year because it wasn't working well. We have said over and over again it's an important area, where we are going to go down the avenues that work and cut off the avenues that don't."

The Bush administration says the United States needs a national missile defense system to protect against the possibility of such rogue nations as North Korea, Iraq or Iran from firing long-range missiles at this country.

The U.S. military is developing other types of anti-missile systems, besides the ground-based approach. In a test earlier this year, a ship-based interceptor rocket successfully knocked out a dummy warhead.

At least 19 more tests are needed before the ground-based missile defense system can be fully functional, Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Defense Department's Missile Defense Agency, told the Associated Press. He said tests are planned every three months and will continue for the next four to five years.

In the CNN interview yesterday, Mr. Wolfowitz was asked about the likelihood the United States will take military action against Iraq in an effort to topple Saddam Hussein from power. The United States has accused the Iraqi leader of developing weapons of mass destruction and considers him a continued threat to the stability of the Middle East.

"We have not made any decision yet about what to do in Iraq militarily or any other way," Mr. Wolfowitz said. "I mean, the president has stated there's a problem. He has all his options on the table, as he said. I think, in every case, our preference is always to try to solve these things through diplomatic means, if it's possible."

The deputy defense secretary acknowledged that Saddam has "shown great resistance to accepting any reasonable outcome," but Mr. Wolfowitz stressed no decision has been made on whether U.S. military force will be used against the Iraqi dictator.

"There has been no decision by the president on what to do. Let's make that clear," he said.

Mr. Wolfowitz also said nations that regularly declare their hostility to the United States, cooperate with terrorists and pursue the development of weapons of mass destruction are the "most noxious group possible."

Such countries, he said, could precipitate an event that could kill "tens of thousands or millions of Americans."

"We have to do something about it," Mr. Wolfowitz said.

----

Russia reiterates opposition to U.S. missile defence

Reuters
Saturday March 16, 8:49 PM
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-95158.html

MOSCOW - Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov reiterated on Saturday Moscow's opposition to U.S. missile defence plans, but said Russia would continue talks with Washington on new rules for strategic arms control.

The United States has decided to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) pact with Russia, which outlaws the missile shield Washington wants to create against attacks from potentially hostile states such as North Korea or Iraq.

"U.S. withdrawal from the ABM pact contradicts the interests of the international community," Ivanov said, speaking on Radio Mayak hours after Washington conducted a new test of its missile defence programme in space over the Pacific Ocean.

Russia says the U.S. departure from the ABM treaty has damaged the fabric of post-World War Two strategic stability.

After its attempts to rescue the pact had failed, Moscow has focused on negotiating with Washington a new framework of relations to replace Cold War-era nuclear deterrence.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has promised to match the U.S. decision to cut the number of nuclear warheads to 1,500-2,000 from current levels of around 6,000.

Moscow also hopes to sign a broad strategic agreement with the United States during President George W. Bush's visit to Moscow in late May.

But Washington appeared increasingly reluctant to sign any binding treaties or get involved in any kind of strong verification system, something Moscow considers a must.

"There are forces in the United States who do not want any deals with Russia or any other country," Foreign Minister Ivanov said. "But we will continue talks and aim at reaching agreements."

Russia's Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov said on Friday he had failed to overcome differences over nuclear disarmament during his visit to the United States earlier this week.

-------- new zealand

New Zealand to Keep Nuclear Ship Ban

By Ray Lilley
Associated Press Writer
Sunday, March 17, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42433-2002Mar17?language=printer

WELLINGTON, New Zealand -- New Zealand has no intention of changing its policy banning nuclear-powered ships from the island nation's harbors and waters, Prime Minister Helen Clark said Monday.

Successive U.S. administrations have urged New Zealand to drop the policy but Clark said she would not relax the ban when she meets President Bush next week in Washington.

The Sept. 11 attacks showed that terrorist groups are prepared to "do almost anything" to advance their cause, Clark said.

"Therefore, a nuclear-powered vessel in your harbor presents a rather interesting target for such groups," she told National Radio.

Clark also ruled out seeking a new military relationship with the United States some 15 years after New Zealand was suspended from a joint U.S.-Australian-New Zealand alliance known as ANZUS because of its anti-nuclear laws.

New Zealand seeks "a very positive, warm relationship" with the United States, "but it won't be the same relationship it was when ANZUS was formed at the start of the '50s," she said.

Clark said long-standing differences over nuclear policy "will be noted" in passing during her White House meeting with Bush.

She said the key issues would be trade - New Zealand is seeking a bilateral free-trade pact with the United States - and international and regional security.

Clark will also protest the recent imposition of penalty tariffs on New Zealand's steel exports to the United States. New Zealand has initiated trade dispute procedures at the World Trade Organization over the move.

-------- russia

Russia May Soften on U.S. Weapons

March 17, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Russia.html

NEW YORK (AP) -- Russia could agree to a new nuclear arms pact that would allow the United States to store some decommissioned weapons for possible future use instead of destroying them, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said in an interview broadcast Sunday.

Ivanov's comments on NBC's ``Meet the Press'' suggested a softening of the Kremlin position on what Russia officials have called the main sticking point in progress toward a deal on nuclear arms cuts that both sides hope to secure in time for President Bush's visit to Russia in May.

Bush agreed last December to reduce U.S. arsenals of long-range nuclear warheads to 1,700 from 2,200, and Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia could go as low as 1,500.

But Russian officials have expressed strong concern over U.S. plans to store decommissioned weapons instead of destroying them, allowing them to be used in the future -- including against Russia if relations take a turn for the worse.

In the interview, conducted in Washington last week after he met with Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Ivanov said that a portion of the weapons decommissioned under the pact could be stored and that the details are ``negotiable.''

``Part of it may be stored. I don't argue with that principle, well, out of hand,'' he said. ``But the devil is in the details: how much, how long and how quickly it might go back to operational, and, well, jeopardize strategic stability.''

The leak of a classified Pentagon nuclear planning document revealing a contingency plan that could allow U.S. nuclear strikes against Russia prompted angry reactions from some Russian officials and threatened to overshadow Ivanov's U.S. visit. But he said Friday that Russia was satisfied with U.S. explanations.

He was upbeat about his U.S. trip in the interview broadcast Sunday, praising Bush as a ``visionary man'' and suggesting Bush and Putin are pursuing closer ties despite opposition from some within their own countries.

Bush ``understands that the times of the Cold War is definitely over, and that both leaders should be bold and imaginative enough to try and maybe overpower the bureaucracy of both countries, which sometimes has its own vested interest.''

Turning to Iraq, Ivanov said Russia believes that Saddam Hussein's regime may be developing weapons of mass destruction but that no action beyond existing U.N. sanctions should be taken unless that is proven.

``We calculate that there might be a problem in Iraq with weapons of mass destruction,'' he said. ``That's why we support strongly the idea that a huge team of international monitors should go to Iraq ... investigate whatever they wish (and) finally have a clear answer, yes or no.''

Under U.N. Security Council resolutions, sanctions imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 cannot be lifted until U.N. inspectors certify it is not pursuing weapons of mass destruction. Inspectors left in 1998 and Iraq has barred them from returning.

Russia has close ties with Iraq, which owes it billions of dollars, and has been pressing Baghdad to accept inspectors as a condition for lifting the sanctions.

Asked if Moscow would support military action if the United States decided it was necessary to oust Saddam, Ivanov said only that the United States has not informed Russia of such a decision.

But he said, ``The problem is not with Saddam Hussein. The problem is with weapons of mass destruction.''

-------- terrorism

Interview: DOE's nuclear bloodhound

By Scott R. Burnell
UPI Science News
3/17/2002
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=11032002-052510-2921r

UPTON, N.Y., March 11 (UPI) -- Radiation has never been high on most people's "must-have" lists, and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks only heightened worries about the possibility of backpack nukes finding their way into major cities.

Ralph James, however, has made a career of seeking out the energetic subatomic particles and rays emanating from some of the most dangerous elements on the planet. James, associate director for energy, environment and national security at the Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, is focused on creating smaller, cheaper, easier-to-use radiation detectors.

His work commands the attention of the White House and Congress, where recent hearings have focused on the consequences not only of nuclear weapon detonations, but of conventional explosions contaminated with radioisotopes.

The technology James works with is far more complex than the film badges or chattering Geiger counters Hollywood has long used to signify the hunt for uranium or plutonium. His devices involve semiconductor chips capable of spotting isotopes by their individual radiation "fingerprints."

The effort to safeguard the nation from rogue nukes might be hard-pressed to find a better bloodhound -- James has earned awards from the research and development community the past four years for his work to improve both the chips and the detectors.

Prior to Brookhaven, he worked at both Sandia and Oak Ridge National Laboratories. He earned his bachelor's degree in physics at the University of Tennessee and a master's in physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology before switching to applied physics, where he earned both an additional master's and his doctorate at the California Institute of Technology.

James spoke to United Press International during a conference at Brookhaven, where he gave a presentation on the accelerated effort to more widely deploy radiation detectors across the United States.

Q. You mentioned the development effort is underway for advanced sensors. On Capitol Hill, there's been a lot of talk not only of nuclear weapons smuggling, but also the possibility of radiological attacks. Phrases have been thrown around such as "a sensor on every lamp post," and this would appear to be the sort of technology that's going to fill that role.

A. You need to have something that's relatively inexpensive to be able to disperse them in such a widely distributed manner. You're also going to have something that doesn't have the operational constraints imposed by our really good detectors today that need this cryogenic cooling -- they just won't work in an unattended fashion for long periods of time. You're after something that's low-power, battery operated, very compact in size, long-term operation unattended, no maintenance; all those things are going to be required to make this happen. This (chip) technology really fits the bill.

Q. Can we discuss the technology in a little more detail? What direction is it taking?

A. The technology direction is very simple. We need sensors that are more sensitive, to detect radiation from a greater distance. This is very important if we're going to have this distributed network or even just checking in airports, tunnels and such. We also need detectors that have great specificity, where they can uniquely identify isotopes that are of great interest to us while not interrupting the flow of commerce with the sources that aren't of such concern.

We live in a world that's filled with radiation; it's in the walls, the floors, coming from space. So if we just have a dumb detector that senses radiation, we're going to constantly get false alarms. If this brings about an emergency response, we have a big problem. What we need is something that can discern special nuclear materials that might be part of something with nuclear yield. These are cases of plutonium-239, uranium-235, the ones people know about; (we have to spot these) materials from a wide range of naturally occurring isotopes. We can determine by a specific signature those isotopes that present the greatest risk to our citizenry, versus those that are shipped by the hundreds for a variety of nuclear medicines, gauging and other tasks.

Q. By signature, you mean empirical study has come up with a ratio of alpha to beta to gamma particles and rays that will signify a particular isotope?

A. That's not exactly how this works. Most of these materials emit X- and gamma-ray radiation. The rays are fairly penetrating and escape most shielding; charged particles, like alphas and betas, do not. We've got to detect based on gamma rays or neutrons. The gamma rays have telltale signatures associated with each nuclei, and each isotope has its own nuclei.

Q. Particular frequencies?

A. Yes, they really are frequencies. We refer to "energies" for the gamma emissions, but you can think of them as frequencies. Just as you can tune your radio to find the frequency of your favorite station, you can identify each isotope by tuning into the unique energies associated with the emissions. We can spectrally "window" and determine if (a source) is plutonium-239, a great concern for nuclear weapons, or something like americium-241, which is in practically every smoke detector in the Unites States.

Q. So this sort of system would seem to imply a network of simple detectors in a port of entry or an airport cargo terminal, designed to note the passage of something that's radiating in the proper energy bands and sound the alarm.

A. If you have limited resources, and we all do, and you're trying to have the maximum reduction of risk, you typically would focus on transportation choke points. These are the obvious things -- airports, seaports, train depots, tunnels, bridges and such. That's not going to give all the layers of defense you want, so you'll have to couple that with other things and this is where cost becomes a major issue.

Where'd you like to deal with this is with a sort of distributed network system. With any major city, if (the detectors) are cheap enough, you could put them with every fireman, every policeman, even with every postal worker. Now you have all these people going out in all these different regions with sensitivity to radiation. These individuals need just two signals, a warning that there's elevated radiation and another that might denote danger. You'd have a very strong network, it would be extremely difficult to move things around when you've got that many people. We see this happening in the future; eventually, you could see the detectors all coupled together (and) processing information.

As technology advances, you could see these attached to GPS devices, so that when something occurs, the detector could communicate with a central location that then checks to see if other detectors (have gone off). That would give you a very high level of confidence that something's going on that we should look into.

Q. Understandably there's a very high interest level (in these detectors), a very high effort level. Given the resources being put into this, what's a reasonable timetable to expect this type of network?

A. There are a couple of issues -- cost and the technology advancements. The detectors are available now, but there's a matter of cost. With economies of scale, you expect those costs to come down. It's also a big effort within Brookhaven to work with Russian labs to help them with material control and accountability. In terms of when we may be able to see these larger resources, I'm sure that's being discussed, but I'm not in a position to offer precise information.

-------- treaties

Senators Insist on Role in Arms Pacts

New York Times
March 17, 2002
By THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/17/international/17ARMS.html

WASHINGTON - The ranking Democratic and Republican members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have written to the Bush administration demanding that any nuclear arms reductions with Russia be submitted to the Senate as a formal treaty, according to copy of their letter obtained today.

Senators Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, and Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, said an agreement on "significant obligations by the United states regarding deployed U.S. strategic nuclear warheads" would "constitute a treaty subject to the advice and consent of the Senate."

Their letter to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was dated March 15, two days after President Bush expressed optimism that a deal on nuclear arms cuts would be ready for his meeting in May with President Vladimir V. Putin.

During a White House news conference, Mr. Bush clearly moved from reluctance to enthusiasm about signing a formal agreement with his Russian counterpart. But he left unclear exactly what format that agreement would take, and he has never committed to its being a treaty.

Thus, the Biden-Helms letter portends possible tensions between the White House and Congress over how - even whether - to make permanent and irreversible any reductions in American and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals.

At his Wednesday news conference, Mr. Bush said he agreed with Mr. Putin "that there needs to be a document that outlives both of us," adding, "And what form that comes in we will discuss." Secretary Powell said much the same thing in an appearance before the Foreign Relations Committee last month.

The Bush administration came into office warning that it would seek to modify and even abandon treaties it viewed as no longer in the national interest, and already has given the required legal notification that it will withdraw from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty to proceed with testing and deploying missile defenses.

Late Friday night, a prototype missile defense interceptor struck a mock warhead high over the Pacific Ocean in the fourth success out of six tests of the system, Pentagon officials said. Some arms control advocates voiced skepticism about the artificial conditions in the test, saying that the "kill vehicle" is told when the target will be launched, what it looks like and where it is headed. But the Pentagon described the test as "a major step."

On the question of nuclear arms reductions, Mr. Bush has moved almost month-by-month since his meeting with Mr. Putin in December, from indicating that a handshake alone would be sufficient to seal the deal, to his current position of agreeing to some sort of legally binding agreement.

While Mr. Biden and Mr. Helms are at opposite ends of the spectrum on many issues, their letter made clear that they are in full accord that the Senate's prerogative on treaties under the Constitution must be respected.

"With the exception of the SALT I agreement, every significant arms control agreement during the past three decades has been transmitted to the Senate pursuant to the Treaty Clause of the Constitution," the letter says. "Mr. Secretary, we see no reason whatsoever to alter this practice."

A State Department spokeswoman said there would be no comment today on the Biden-Helms letter. Mr. Bush has pledged to reduce America's 6,000-warhead nuclear arsenal to between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads over 10 years, and Mr. Putin has committed to as few as 1,500.

Recent descriptions of the Bush administration's review of the nation's nuclear posture worried arms- control advocates because the Pentagon plans to keep a significant number of warheads in storage even after they are removed from missiles and bombers. The Pentagon says those warheads are a hedge against unexpected threats, while advocates of arms control agreements say keeping such a substantial number of warheads in reserve calls into question the permanence of the cuts.

"The Helms and Biden letter is a very welcome message because it could lead the way to a more permanent reduction of U.S. and Russian forces," said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association. "The key outstanding issue remains the content of the agreement, which should in our view produce verifiable and irreversible reductions."

He said a formal treaty "provides both sides with clearer and more durable commitments," adding, "Given the magnitude of this subject, such clarity is essential - rather than leaving open the door to possible renewed nuclear tension."

Senate committee aides said that a president had three ways to formalize legally binding agreements.

One is a commitment under the president's sole executive authority, and does not come before the Congress. One is a legislative-executive agreement, which is submitted to both houses of Congress and requires a majority vote. The third is the two- thirds vote of advice and consent from the Senate on treaties.

Mr. Biden and Mr. Helms, in their letter, stressed their desire to "work closely with the Executive Branch on this matter," but said an arms control agreement with Russia must be submitted to the Senate.

-------- u.s. nuc weapons

Nuclear Preemption - "Bush's Toxic Texan image abroad"

By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, March 17, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38747-2002Mar16?language=printer

Nuclear weapons have posed the heaviest burden of leadership for every American president since Harry Truman. There can be no more awesome responsibility than having to think about the circumstances under which a nation or perhaps even the world would be destroyed on your command, as George W. Bush has just been reminded.

The classified version of this administration's first important statement to itself about nuclear weapons found its way into the Los Angeles Times last weekend. The disclosure provoked outcries of alarm from anti-nuclear activists and a determined effort by officials to minimize or dismiss the document.

Don't buy the smoke screen. The nuclear posture review written at Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon is a revealing statement. This planning document helps establish an ethos of nuclear strategy that will inevitably influence what and how the president thinks about atomic weapons.

Ronald Reagan was horrified by his first detailed briefing on American nuclear strategy, according to a famous story told by his aides. Reagan was so revolted by the doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD) and its balance of terror that he demanded an alternative: a strategic defensive shield against Soviet nuclear attack. The idea collapsed along with the Soviet Union.

Reagan's emotional response to the ultimate weapon resembled the nuclear antipathy expressed by Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton during their presidencies. A calculated, highly pragmatic approach seems to characterize the Presidents Bush, father and son.

I found candidate George W. Bush's campaign discussions of nuclear strategy to be careful to businesslike. In his initial exposure to the grim details of how much destructive power he would have at his fingertips, Bush posed a deceptively workaday question: Why do we need so many nuclear weapons now that the Soviet Union has disappeared?

The Soviet attack on Europe that U.S. nuclear weapons were to deter had lost all plausibility in Bush's mind. He prodded discussions about unilateral reductions in the U.S. arsenal that would save money and perhaps contribute to better relations with Russia. His version of missile defense is far more tentative and far less ideological than was Reagan's Star Wars notion. When the Russians insisted on a legally binding document to cover strategic arms reductions, Bush went along.

So there was little theology or Strangelovian analysis in Bush's original contemplation of nuclear strategy. Then came Sept. 11 and the war in Afghanistan. Those events have significantly darkened this administration's nuclear ethos. Any weapons that can be used to preempt worst-case scenarios are being looked at in a new light.

This is one of the three important indirect revelations of the nuclear posture review: It suggests that deterrence is a meaningless concept for suicidal terrorists like Mohamed Atta and probably for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. That may be true for Iraq's Saddam Hussein or North Korea's Kim Jong Il as well. The review makes clear a turn by the Bush team to a strategy of preemption, including by nuclear weapons if necessary, to prevent these rulers from passing on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to terror networks. This represents a devaluation of deterrence by the Bush administration.

Second, the authors of the defense paper document the administration's deepening skepticism about the effectiveness of traditional U.S. and international nonproliferation policies and arms control treaties.

Thinking they were talking in private, the planners list seven countries as candidates to glow in the dark permanently if they get out of line: Russia and China, because of the size of their arsenals and the uncertainty of their political futures; Iraq, Iran and North Korea, performing "axis of evil" encores here because they support U.S.-targeted terrorists and have or seek WMD; Libya and Syria, not previously spotlighted but secret makers and stockpilers of chemical weapons.

Finally, like most bureaucratic exercises, the paper works backward from a desired conclusion. The goal is a resumption of nuclear testing. The authors sing the praises of new mini-nuclear weapons and radioactive bunker-busters that, alas, cannot be developed if the United States continues the voluntary moratorium on testing being observed by the world's established nuclear powers.

That, for me, is the least convincing part of the exercise. The losses from going first and thereby encouraging China or France to test new nuclear devices outweigh the gains that a resumption of U.S. testing now would bring. And it would do nothing to lessen Bush's Toxic Texan image abroad.

The administration is right in insisting that this is the beginning, not the end, of an important internal discussion. But it is being intellectually dishonest in disowning the shaping power of what has already been written and which must now be weighed by the president.

----

Nuclear Posturing

By Michael Getler
Sunday, March 17, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35872-2002Mar15?language=printer

A week ago Saturday the Los Angeles Times reported on its front page that the Bush administration "has directed the military to prepare contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against at least seven countries and to build smaller nuclear weapons for use in certain battlefield situations, according to a classified Pentagon report."

The Sunday New York Times had two front-page stories on the new nuclear posture review. Then the Los Angeles Times did two more front-page stories, and the New York Times did a third. Administration officials were questioned on the Sunday TV talk shows, and strong reactions arose abroad to the press accounts.

The Post handled the story in a much more subdued fashion. A news story Sunday on Page A27 said the administration "is preparing new guidance for the Pentagon on where to target" the nation's nuclear arsenal and "giving greater emphasis to potential use against China, North Korea and several threatening Middle Eastern states." On Tuesday a story on Page A4 said the Bush nuclear review follows a pattern set five years ago by the Clinton administration.

Some readers asked, "What in the world are your editors up to when a news item of this importance is buried deep inside the paper?" as one e-mail put it. Another said The Post accounts "largely debunked the importance" of the stories in the other papers, "implying that it was no big deal. It is a big deal. Although the administration says it is routine contingency planning, the review does envision development of new tactical nuclear weapons, the conceivable use of nuclear weapons on non-nuclear countries and the possible resumption of nuclear testing."

The Post stories were carefully done, seeking to put the review in context. But readers cannot be blamed for feeling The Post was playing down this story. The irony is that veteran Post reporter Walter Pincus has been leading the way on this for months. On Dec. 20, for example, Pincus reported about completion of initial studies on how nuclear weapons can be modifed to attack underground bunkers and tunnels that conventional weapons can't destroy, and also about studies on "the need for a new, low-yield nuclear weapon" against such facilities in North Korea, Iraq and China. That story went on Page A29. On Feb. 19 Pincus reported, on Page A13, that the recently completed nuclear posture review indicated the administration was studying "a new generation of nuclear weapons . . . at the same time it has announced its intention to sharply reduce the number of operationally deployed U.S. nuclear warheads."

So what's going on here? Did The Post play the story properly, given what insights had been reported before? Did The Post's rivals overplay the story? A Post editorial on Wednesday seemed to suggest as much, stating: "Recent reports about the Bush administration's review of U.S. nuclear weapons strategy have tended to obscure the fact that much of what the administration laid out in the congressionally mandated report isn't new."

Yet the end of that editorial says the administration's new plans for an old idea -- the development of low-yield nuclear weapons for smaller targets -- "is troubling" and "could lower the threshold for launching a nuclear attack."

That sounds to me as though it makes the case for this to have been a front-page story here somewhere along the line, especially given the generally muscular approach the administration has taken toward its enemies' list.

Adding to the spectacle of such widely differing news display among the nation's three top dailies is the attitude of the administration toward the leak -- to the New York and Los Angeles papers -- of this supposedly secret document; hardly a peep -- until Defense Secretary Rumsfeld blasted the leakers on Wednesday -- from an administration that threatens federal employees if they utter an unauthorized word about the war in Afghanistan. It makes you wonder if White House officials didn't mind this leak, so they could get their "don't mess with us" message out without launching it and then look cool and calm, explaining that this kind of review goes on all the time, and it's nothing new.

------

Nuclear fallout
A classified document on U.S. nuclear arsenal plans was leaked recently, but the White House didn't seem too upset. Some say Bush is taking a risky gamble, playing the leak as a deterrence card.

By Michael Hill
Baltimore Sun Staff
March 17, 2002
http://www.sunspot.net/news/opinion/bal-pe.nuclear17mar17.story?coll=bal%2Dpe%2Dopinion

In Stanley Kubrick's movie Dr. Strangelove, the Soviet Union has developed the ultimate nuclear deterrence, the Doomsday Machine that will blanket the world with deadly radioactive fallout in the event of a nuclear attack on that country.

Peter Sellers' title character has a fundamental question for the Russian ambassador. "Why didn't you tell anybody about it?" he asks from his wheelchair.

It turns out the Soviet premier was saving the news for a holiday celebration, but Strangelove had pointed out their fatal error - the Doomsday Machine wouldn't deter anyone who didn't know about it.

And that may well be why there has been no histrionics about the leaking of a classified Pentagon document this month that detailed the latest plans for the U.S. nuclear arsenal - possibly developing new types of weapons that could be used against places such as China, Russia, Iraq, North Korea, Syria, Iran and Libya.

The story reporting the details of the administration's Nuclear Posture Review first appeared in the Los Angeles Times. There have been no denials of the document's veracity from the White House, no calls for a hunt to get the leakers. And therein lies the delicate paradox that comes with having a stock of the most devastating weapons ever devised. They are so horrendous that a sane person could not contemplate using them, but if everyone thinks you would never use them, they do no good.

Avner Cohen, a senior research fellow in the Program on Global Security and Disarmament at the University of Maryland, College Park, says that such documents are usually kept within what he calls "the highly classified nuclear bubble" where chilling contingencies are often discussed. When they get out of that bubble, then the documents may have a very different meaning.

"The administration seems not to be so upset about this leak from a classified document," he says.

"So maybe the document is somewhat embarrassing when you sit down to talk to Arab leaders, but the leaks may also play a purpose in terms of deterrence of Saddam Hussein," Cohen says. "The U.S. is still as committed to the nuclear taboo as before, or so I hope. But in the eyes of the adversary you are trying to deter, you want to give them some kind of worry, some element of uncertainty."

But many fear that if the Bush administration is playing a deterrence card with this leak, it is a risky gamble. For one, it potentially changes a longstanding policy of the United States not to expand its nuclear arsenal by suggesting building new tactical weaponry.

"The notion that has leaked out that the U.S. is going to be building new kinds of nuclear weapons for new situations in the future [is] actually not what the U.S. has promised to do in its attempt to restrain the spread of nuclear weapons," Richard Butler, former head of U.N. weapons inspection in Iraq, said in an interview on CNN last week. "It has promised it wouldn't be doing that."

Butler said this was the most disturbing part of the leaked document. "The U.S., I think, cannot argue successfully to others that we have to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction if the U.S. is itself building new ones, new types," he said.

'Contrary' to assurances

Targeting the countries named in the leaked document also potentially calls for a violation of a tenet of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty that promises no nuclear strike against any non-nuclear country that signed the treaty unless they attack in conjunction with a nuclear power.

"We have promised our allies, and adversaries for that matter, that these weapons will only be used for deterrence," says Gar Alperovitz, also at Maryland's Program on Global Security and Disarmament. "This document is contrary to those assurances."

Paul Boyer, a historian at the University of Wisconsin, says he thinks the document represents the kind of contingency planning that is the job of such Defense Department analysts, but still has the potential for a dangerous resonance. "I don't anticipate a nuclear attack on these [targeted] countries, but what I think it does is lower the threshold by introducing the idea of nuclear war as feasible and possible," he says. "That definitely is a move away from the absolute firewall policy that supposedly has been the American position in the past."

Boyer agrees that this adds to the problems of proliferation, and raises the possibility of nations that have nuclear weapons using them.

"If the U.S. is perceived as a nation seriously thinking of using nuclear weapons to resolve its problems, what signal does that send to India, Pakistan, Israel and other nations that have nuclear weapons?" he asks.

Milton Leitenberg of the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland, says that serious consideration of using nuclear weapons for anything other than a response to a devastating nuclear attack ended a quarter century ago when President Jimmy Carter killed the development of the neutron bomb. "Certainly since then, nobody thought we would be hearing of this again," he says.

Though the leaked document had its genesis in the Clinton administration as analysts considered the country's changing defense needs, Leitenberg does not think it was an accident that it surfaced in the Bush administration.

"These guys are nuclear weapons war fighters," he says of the Bush administration personnel in the Defense Department, meaning many of them have always wanted the armed forces to have tactical nuclear capability. He notes that Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld was last in the Cabinet before Carter, when these issues were still on the table.

"My reaction is that Rumsfeld has gone back to the desk he had in 1976 and envisioned that every stack of papers is still in the same place. He doesn't agree with the last 25 years.

"These are nuclear weapons war fighters who think these things are to be used for our benefit and advantage, screw the rest of the world. Who cares about proliferation?" Leitenberg says.

U.S. 'more vulnerable'

Alperovitz argues that anything that encourages nuclear proliferation damages the security of the United States.

"The U.S. is surrounded by oceans," he says. "No one is going to take us out with conventional weapons, so we are more vulnerable to the nuclear threat than anybody. So any spread of nuclear weapons reduces the security interests of the United States."

Alperovitz says that those in the Defense Department now are "unilateralists."

"They think they are protecting the security of the country by using all the weapons we have available," he says. "I just think their judgment is wrong. Their thinking comes from a motivation to protect security, but it is more likely to weaken security."

Strong taboo

But others argue that the nuclear taboo is too strong to be damaged by a document like this.

Thomas Schelling of Maryland's School of Public Affairs notes that the taboo has been in effect for more than 50 years.

"The inhibition against using nuclear weapons is very, very strong," he says. "The Soviets didn't use them in Afghanistan where they could have made good use of them. The Israelis didn't use them in the '73 war when there were two Arab armies on the move. I don't think Nixon ever had the slightest notion of using them in Vietnam, and Margaret Thatcher wouldn't dream of using them off the coast of Argentina."

Cohen notes that though the

first President George Bush, via his Secretary of State James A. Baker III, threatened Iraq that the United States might use any weapons at its disposal should Iraq use chemical or biological weapons in the gulf war, Bush did not even allow nuclear warheads in the war zone.

"He was very, very cautious," he says. "In his conduct, I think he was respecting the nuclear taboo. I don't think this George Bush is any more trigger happy than his father."

Still historian Boyer says raising the possibilities mentioned in the leaked document is scary.

"In the Cold War period, the big fear was a global nuclear holocaust, the big one, that set the threshold of terror so high no one thought of crossing it," he says. "But when contemplating using smaller nuclear strikes against a single nation, somehow that seems more acceptable since you're not going to blow up the world.

"Nevertheless, with any nuclear strike, you are talking about massive levels of destruction and radiation with incalculable after effects. The idea that this is legitimate strategic thinking since you're not going to blow up the world is really very chilling when you stop and think about it."

Deterrence value

And Boyer, who has studied the Cold War, questions if nuclear weapons have the same deterrence value now than they did then.

"During the Cold War, we were dealing with a clearly structured apparatus of state power in the Soviet Union, a clear command structure," he says. "We may not have liked the Soviet Union, but in general we trusted them to behave in a responsible, rational fashion.

"But when you are dealing with rogue states, with terrorist groups, beneath the level of a national command structure who could be getting access to nuclear weapons in underhanded, clandestine means, the idea of deterrence, it seems to me, becomes largely irrelevant," Boyer says. "Many of these groups have an apocalyptic mindset, so the idea of a conflagration that would engulf a large part of the world is a turn-on, it's exciting, it's the fulfillment of prophecy."

Whether rattling the nuclear sword in the manner of this leaked document deters the possibility of such a war, or encourages it, there has been a muted reaction, much less than Boyer remembers from the Cold War when anti-nuclear protests were powerful political movements.

"We are coming up on 60 years since the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki," he says. "The kind of terror the atomic bomb initially generated in the public mind is largely an abstraction for most people today under the age of 50. But the terrible events of Sept. 11 are very vivid in everyone's mind. That sense of vulnerability everyone felt is a way to provide justification for all kinds of military thinking that would not have been contemplated just six months ago."

-------- us nuc waste

Newsmagazines: 60 minutes segment on nuclear waste tonight

Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35917-2002Mar15.html

60 Minutes (CC). Segments include ... a look at the government's plan for dealing with millions of gallons of liquid nuclear waste... (Channel 9 at 7 - Washington DC).

-------- us politics

Washington's nuclear posture

Straits Times
March 17, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/worldbriefings-200231621596.htm

SINGAPORE - Assuming that the news report on the Pentagon document is basically true and that, therefore, the United States is planning for a situation in which it might have to use those weapons, the review of its nuclear posture is deeply troublesome.

To give credit where credit is due, it is only the United States that has the wherewithal to make a definite global point today. Other countries must be grateful to it, therefore, when it uses its power to protect the world from terrorism. ... However, gratitude must be balanced by concern when its power is transformed into a sense of self-entitlement, a mentality which implies that it has an indisputable right to be Number 1 in the world forever.

The occasions on which it could contemplate the use of nuclear weapons are undoubtedly serious, but putting out a nuclear hate list of countries in advance is unlikely to make the world a safer place for everyone. Instead, those countries may take an interest in making the world less safe for America.

----

No certainty in Senate races

Washington Times,
March 17, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020317-65812196.htm

The Republicans need a net gain of only one to reclaim the Senate and break the Democratic logjam that has blocked President Bush's initiatives....


-------- MILITARY

-------- afghanistan

U.S. Operation Comes Under Scrutiny

March 17, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Afghanistan-The-Battle.html

BAGRAM, Afghanistan (AP) -- The plan was to seal all escape routes from the Shah-e-Kot valley and then slowly squeeze al-Qaida and Taliban fighters who had massed in the frigid hills of eastern Afghanistan.

But bad weather and a setback to Afghan allies on the first day of Operation Anaconda meant things didn't go according to plan, U.S. and Afghan officials involved in the battle said.

That may have allowed some -- perhaps hundreds -- of the fighters to escape.

The Afghans under Zia Lodin, who were supposed to swarm around a 3-mile-long ridgeline known as The Whale and block any escape west from the valley, were instead repulsed by a mortar ambush that killed three of Zia's men and an American Special Forces soldier, Chief Warrant Officer Stanley L. Harriman, 34.

Meanwhile, bad weather delayed the arrival of a unit from the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division that was supposed to seal any escape to the north. The unit was to drop in by helicopter shortly after the other coalition troops arrived just before dawn on March 2, but did not land in the area until late that night.

The weather delay, along with Zia's pullback, left some escape routes out of the valley open.

U.S. Army officials say al-Qaida and Taliban fighters did not escape the battle area in large numbers, nor did many of them try.

``We looked at a combination of hit-and-run tactics and the possibility they would stay and fight for a couple of days and then exfiltrate the area,'' said Lt. Col. David Gray, the chief of operations for all coalition forces engaged in Anaconda. ``Then we looked at what we considered the most dangerous course of action, which was that the enemy would try to stay and fight American soldiers toe-to-toe. In this particular case, he decided to stay and fight.''

That view, however, is not shared by all the Afghan commanders, many of whom fought in the war against the Soviets in the 1980s.

Several Afghan commanders are convinced many al-Qaida and Taliban fighters did escape, squeezing through narrow passes and secret paths out of the valley. The Afghans say only a few dozen bodies have been found more than two weeks after the fighting began.

Though many details have yet to come out, a clearer picture of Operation Anaconda has emerged from interviews with the officers who planned and commanded it and with Afghan fighters and witnesses on the ground.

Planning for the operation began in early February, Gray said, after intelligence information indicated a large number of al-Qaida and Taliban had massed in the mountain area of Paktia province.

The plan was for troops from the 10th Mountain Division and 101st Airborne Division to take up seven blocking positions on the 12,000-foot eastern ridgeline of Shah-e-Kot valley, blocking escape to the east and south, Gray said. Special forces from Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany and Norway also took part.

Afghan soldiers under Zia, accompanied by U.S. special operations forces, were to move in to the west around both ends of The Whale, which rises up to about 9,000 feet and stands in front of the eastern ridgeline. Between the two ridgelines were three small valley hamlets.

Delayed for several days by bad weather, the attack got under way on the morning of March 2. Hundreds of American soldiers were roused from their tents at Bagram Air Base and told to get their gear and head to the airfield. Hours later, they were flying by helicopter to what would become the largest U.S. battle of the five-month Afghan campaign.

Within two hours of landing at Shah-e-Kot that morning, infantrymen from the 10th Mountain Division and the 101st Airborne had secured six of the seven mountain passes on the eastern ridgeline above the valley, often after brief but intense firefights, Gray said.

But it was at the seventh pass, nicknamed Ginger Valley, where much of the fiercest fighting occurred.

Some 86 soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division, Charlie Company, landed nearly on top of a large al-Qaida position at the site on the southern end of the ridgeline and almost immediately took mortar and small arms fire.

Apache attack helicopters, AC-130 gunships and B-52 bombers pummeled the al-Qaida positions, but the enemy fighters continued to fire on the Americans. The battle raged for 18 hours, with 28 U.S. soldiers suffering injuries, before the Americans withdrew and repositioned their forces farther south.

Though the battle was harrowing, Gray said it was an intelligence coup.

``While it was very scary and fierce for the men, it helped us back here realize where the enemy was concentrated,'' he said. After that, Ginger Valley became a major focus of the American effort.

Gray and other U.S. Army officials said that they expected to face about 150-250 al-Qaida fighters in the Shah-e-Kot valley, and that many of them would flee soon after the fighting began.

But the enemy fighters stood their ground, and U.S. officials quickly upped their estimate of the number of al-Qaida and Taliban in the valley to somewhere between 500 and 1,000 -- a figure some Afghan commanders believe is too high.

Over the next two days, Zia and his men to make another push on The Whale. American forces moved southward along the eastern ridgeline, clearing it of al-Qaida positions and tightening a circle around Ginger Valley, Gray said.

The battle was fierce, with the soldiers from the 101st Airborne engaged in a five-hour mortar exchange in the north. U.S. bombs sent thunderous shock waves through the valley.

The heaviest American casualties occurred March. 4, when a Navy SEAL, Petty Officer 1st Class Neil Roberts, 32, fell from a MH-47 Chinook helicopter and was captured and killed. Later, a second helicopter returned under fire and dropped troops near where Roberts fell. Six more Americans died in the fighting.

Despite the difficulties, U.S. officials say they severely damaged enemy positions during those initial days.

``We wiped out this huge pocket,'' said Col. Frank Wiercinski, who commanded coalition ground forces in the initial assault.

``They had been building this place and this defense for years. We definitely put a spike through their heart,'' he said.

Wiercinski said that during the first two days of the battle, his men attacked al-Qaida positions, secured terrain and identified new targets. The three villages were largely deserted of civilians even before Anaconda began, but al-Qaida and Taliban fighters had set up mortar positions, prompting U.S. bombing.

Maj. Gen. Frank L. Hagenbeck, the commander of all coalition troops in Afghanistan, acknowledged that some civilians may have died in the fighting, but he blamed al-Qaida and Taliban fighters for using the villages to launch attacks.

Gray said that from March 5 to March 9, U.S. forces continued to move down the eastern ridgeline while Zia's men fought for control of The Whale and the valley floor, known as Objective Remington. Wiercinski said al-Qaida and Taliban fighters were still trying to launch small counter attacks.

By March 9 ``we were pretty much sitting on top of Objective Ginger, dominating Objective Remington, and had isolated The Whale using lots of air power,'' Gray said.

Wiercinski said that from March 7-12 the fighting tapered off. Al-Qaida snipers were the biggest problem.

Zia's forces, along with those of other Afghan commanders who had linked up with him, finally took control of The Whale and the valley floor on March 12.

By March 13, most of the coalition forces that launched the offensive had been replaced by a smaller force of Canadian soldiers and 10th Mountain Division troops. Their mission was to scour The Whale and the rest of Shah-e-Kot valley for remaining enemy fighters and search caves for intelligence information.

Col. Kevin Wilkerson, who led that part of the operation, said his soldiers have found bomb-making material, ammunition, terrorist manuals, medical equipment and supplies in the caves.

-------- africa

U.S. Commander Visits Ethiopia
Military: Gen. Tommy Franks discusses security with officials concerned about Somalia.

March 17, 2002
From Associated Press
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-000019580mar17.story

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia -- Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, discussed regional security and the war on terrorism with top Ethiopian leaders Saturday, a senior Ethiopian official said.

The visit by Franks, head of the U.S. military's Central Command whose sphere of responsibility includes Ethiopia and other Horn of Africa nations, came amid concerns among U.S. and Ethiopian officials that neighboring Somalia could become a center for terrorist activities.

His talks with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and the military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Samora Yenus, focused on regional security and the fight against global terrorism, the Ethiopian official said on condition of anonymity. Franks has not spoken to reporters during an African tour that has also included stops in Eritrea and Kenya. The Central Command, based in Tampa, Fla., is responsible for U.S. military operations in 25 countries in the Persian Gulf, Asia and the Horn of Africa.

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, U.S. officials have named Somalia, which has been without an authoritative central government since January 1991, as a possible haven for members of the Al Qaeda terrorist network.

Both Ethiopia and Kenya have large ethnic Somali communities and long, porous borders with Somalia, which is controlled largely by clan-based factions rather than the 2-year-old transitional government.

The Ethiopian official did not give details of the talks, but Meles has made no secret of his concern about Al Ittihad al Islami, a Somali Islamic fundamentalist group that the United States says has ties to Al Qaeda, which he recently said has members in the transitional government.

----

Robert Mugabe: freedom fighter turned strongman

Sunday March 17
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-95340.html

HARARE - Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe, a former Marxist guerrilla, was sworn in on Sunday for a new six-year term in a ceremony boycotted by the opposition and by Western powers.

Hailed at independence in 1980 as a model African democrat, the former freedom fighter is now widely seen as a tyrant who has destroyed his once rich southern African state.

"Mugabe seems to have gone bonkers in a big way," South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu said in January.

"When you disregard the rule of law, when you do not allow space for dissent and when you use violence to silence your critics...you are on the slippery slope towards dictatorship with the trappings of a multi-party democracy," Tutu, a former Nobel Peace Prize winner, said.

Few other African leaders have been so vocal in their public criticism of Robert Gabriel Mugabe, 78, the man who led the former Rhodesia to independence, to prosperity and then to penury.

As unemployment and inflation have soared to record levels in the country of 13 million people, of whom no more than one percent are white, he has repeatedly blamed an alleged British-led Western conspiracy for the economic woes.

Brushing aside the punitive withdrawal of almost all foreign funding, he has refused to rein in war veteran supporters or to slow the seizure of the huge white-owned commercial farms that generate most of the country's foreign earnings.

Whites built their wealth on the backs of black labour, he says, and it is time for them to repay the debt.

MUGABE JAILED FOR 10 YEARS

When Britain imposed personal sanctions to curb his travel and his foreign banking privileges, he fired back: "What do I have to go to Britain for? A wretched country, dreadful."

Mugabe, known in liberal international circles 40 years ago as the thinking man's guerrilla, was jailed for 10 years in 1964 for fighting white minority rule.

But when, after a negotiated settlement with London and white leader Ian Smith, he was elected as the first black prime minister, he offered forgiveness and reconciliation.

He expanded schooling for blacks left trailing under white rule and presided over a booming economy. After two terms as prime minister, he rewrote the constitution and won election as president in 1990.

The change was possible after he had crushed a seven-year armed rebellion in Matabeleland province and humbled his only rival for power, ZAPU leader Joshua Nkomo.

There was a world outcry over alleged atrocities against civilians in Matabeleland, where mass graves were found.

Later, as the debt burden began to weigh heavily and a younger generation of voters responded less enthusiastically to his liberation war record, Mugabe shored up his base with patronage.

An increasingly independent trade union movement defeated his attempts to raise fuel and food prices and rejected a proposed tax to fund war-veteran grants.

WHITES BLAMED

In February 2000, Mugabe tasted defeat for the first time when voters in a referendum rejected a new constitution that would have given him yet more powers.

He turned on the small white minority, blaming them for the referendum defeat, and urged them to go back to Britain.

"We made a mistake when we showed mercy to those who are hard-hearted, permanently hard-hearted," he said during the election campaign.

"When you show non-racialism to die-hard racists...people with...a false culture of superiority based on their skin...you are acting as a fool," he said.

He said his black political foes in the opposition were puppets of the whites and their British masters, and set about limiting their commercial and political influence.

He rammed legislation through parliament allowing his government to seize more than half of the white-owned farms and did nothing to stop self-styled war veterans, many of them too young to have fought in the liberation conflict, from occupying other farms, often with violence.

He ignored court orders to halt the farm seizures, used presidential powers to override the courts and replaced independent judges with cronies.

Mugabe was born on February 21, 1924, on the Kutama Mission northwest of Harare and educated by Jesuit monks.

He worked first as a primary school teacher, but continued to study, stacking up seven university degrees -- three of them while in prison -- to bolster his intellectual image.

In 1995, after the death of his Ghanaian-born first wife, Sally, he married Grace Marufu, his former secretary and mother of two of his children. Their third child was born in 1997.

-------- britain

UK opens door to North Korea
Peter Beaumont and Kamal Ahmed in Barcelona

Sunday March 17, 2002
The Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,668944,00.html

Britain is to welcome North Korea, described by President George Bush as part of the 'axis of evil', back into the international fold. An ambassador will go there there for the first time in nearly 50 years.

Under the dictatorship of Kim Jong-il, North Korea has been accused by the US of attempting to develop nuclear weapons, and has launched a three-stage rocket capable of carrying a nuclear warhead into space. This is despite widespread poverty and starvation in one of the world's most closed and intolerant police states.

The moves follow the recent warming of relations between London and Iran - another 'axis of evil state' - which included a visit by Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to Tehran.

A North Korean trade delegation visited London last week to meet Foreign Ministers Baroness Symons and Denis McShane. A ministerial visit to Pyongyang, North Korea's capital, during the World Cup being partly staged in South Korea this summer, has been discussed.

Government sources said that despite the singling out of North Korea by Bush as one of three pariah states responsible for proliferating weapons of mass destruction, the Government had decided it is time for constructive dialogue with the West.

Ministers have also recognised that North Korea's belated abandonment of its isolationist position that was more Ice Age than Cold War may lead to trade opportunities in a country bordering South Korea and rapidly developing markets in China.

Foreign Office sources have told The Observer that the upgrading of mission to include an ambassador would require North Korea letting Britain upgrade its existing its communications facilities in its embassy in Pyongyang, so diplomats would be able to communicate with London without being eavesdropped on.

----

Army fear over Blair war plans
Military chiefs slam lack of strategy to topple Saddam

The Iraq debate - Observer Worldview
Kamal Ahmed and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday March 17, 2002
The Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,669008,00.html

Britain's military leaders issued a stark warning to Tony Blair last night that any war against Iraq is doomed to fail and would lead to the loss of lives for little political gain.

As the debate over whether to commit British troops alongside American forces intensified, the leaders urged 'extreme caution' over any moves towards war, saying servicemen faced being bogged down in a perilous open-ended commitment.

Claiming that the Government had yet to give any clear political direction over committing troops - America has asked for up to 25,000 UK personnel to join an invasion force - the sources warned that Arab countries were likely to rebel over any Western attack on Iraq without a Middle East peace deal.

Failing that, the sources said Saudi Arabia was unlikely to allow its bases to be used against Saddam Hussein. Defence sources said that, without Saudi cooperation, it would be difficult to launch a sustained attack by American and British forces.

Underlining their fears of a military strike, senior armed forces figures will warn the prime minister this week that without a leader-in-waiting to take over from Saddam, there is little chance of any successful move to overthrow the Iraqi dictator.

Opposition forces in Iraq are not as strong as they were in Afghanistan, Blair will be told. There seems to be no potential successor to Saddam that the West and Iraq's Arab neighbours could accept.

As it became clear that British troop commitments in Afghanistan would have to be extended beyond the April deadline set by the prime minister, the briefings revealed the level of concern over further military deployment against Saddam.

Although Blair has insisted no decisions have been taken, Foreign Office officials have said it was unlikely that America would be satisfied with simply sending United Nations weapons inspectors back to Iraq. This suggests that increased military strikes are the only option being seriously considered by president George W. Bush. He said last week that 'inaction was not an option'.

In a further sign of British military anxiety, leaked Ministry of Defence papers reveal the Army is warning it will need a substantially more money in this summer's Comprehensive Spending Review if it is to take on a new military campaign.

The briefing papers, prepared for General Sir Michael Walker, Chief of General Staff, warn that future funding for defence 'remains very taut, given the range of operational tasks placed on the MoD and armed forces'. Matching the available money to these tasks 'remains a very significant challenge'.

If the Government expects the forces to take on extra tasks as part of the campaign against terrorism, 'then the resources for those tasks will have to be found'. It is believed that the MoD has asked for £500 million in next month's Budget to pay for its increased commitments.

The papers reveal that British peacekeeping troops will stay in Afghanistan longer than expected, raising fears of the Army becoming embroiled in yet another long-running commitment overseas, which will drain resources.

The UK, which leads the international peacekeeping force in Kabul and has committed more than 5,000 troops, is due to hand over control of the force to Turkey next month. But it will now have to provide at least some troops 'until the end of its [the force's] mandate' - now June.

Yesterday, Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, backed up the warnings by saying he expected British troops to remain in Afghanistan for the rest of the year.

The Government has already begun trying to win 'hearts and minds' for the second phase of the war on terror. In a briefing document given to a committee of Labour MPs with expertise in defence and foreign affairs last week - and passed to The Observer - the Foreign Office says Saddam is accelerating Iraq's weapons programme.

'Its ballistic missile programme has made continued progress, and facilities damaged by Operation Desert Fox in 1998 have been repaired; in the absence of inspections, we believe Saddam is planning to extend the range of his missiles beyond the 150km limit imposed by the US.

'We believe the Iraqi regime continues its biological and chemical weapons programmes.'

----

Blunkett warns Blair of riots in Britain over Iraq

By Francis Elliott, Deputy Political Editor,
UK Telegraph
17/03/2002
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/03/17/niraq17.xml&sSheet=/portal/2002/03/17/ixport.html

DAVID BLUNKETT, the Home Secretary, has warned Tony Blair that military action in Iraq could provoke serious civil disorder in Britain.

His message to the Cabinet came amid increasing unease among Labour MPs and European Union leaders at the Prime Minister's support for the US stance against Saddam Hussein.

A senior minister told The Telegraph that Mr Blunkett was concerned that an attack on Iraq would spark riots in the Middle East that could spread to Britain. Mr Blunkett reportedly told colleagues: "We cannot separate Iraq from the Middle East or we will have major disturbances both internationally and in Britain."

He briefed the Cabinet on the domestic consequences of joining a US military strike at a recent meeting. Muslim leaders last night backed the suggestion that tensions raised by the continuing violence in the Middle East could lead to rioting in the event of a UK attack on Iraq.

One of the authors of the Government's official report into last summer's race riots in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham said there was a groundswell of resentment at Mr Blair's stance on the issue.

Ahtsham Ali, a member of the Home Office community cohesion review team, said: "Muslim youths were angry and frustrated at the action in Afghanistan; that frustration may lead to further incidents if there is action in Iraq."

Meanwhile, Romano Prodi, the president of the European Commission, said that the EU might formally oppose military intervention, a clear indication that Mr Blair faces isolation on his support for President Bush.

The Prime Minister, however, denied that he lacked any support at this weekend's European summit in Barcelona. "This issue has not been the dominant issue at this summit. We are not at the point of decision on this, or near it. When we are, I have no doubt we will discuss things closely," he said.

Donald Anderson, the Labour chairman of the Commons foreign affairs select committee, added that the Government should not be deflected from joining the US in attacking Iraq if that was judged to be in the national interest.

"We cannot hold back from actions that we believe are necessary because a portion of the community may be offended by it," he said.

-------- colombia

Colombian army says 17 rebels killed

World Scene
March 17, 2002
Combined dispatches and staff reports
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020317-9707544.htm

BOGOTA, Colombia - Troops attacked leftist rebels inside a former rebel safe haven in southern Colombia yesterday, killing 17 guerrillas, the army said.

Soldiers had been pursuing rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, in the region for days after the guerrillas set up a roadblock and detained buses and 42 persons, an army commander said.

Yesterday's battle marks some of the heaviest fighting in the former safe haven since President Andres Pastrana ended a three-year peace process with the FARC last month and began a military operation to retake parts of the Switzerland-size zone.

----

Threat Meets Reality

Washington Post
Sunday, March 17, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35962-2002Mar15?language=printer

On Feb. 23, Colombian senator Ingrid Betancourt, 40, became the sixth legislator to be kidnapped by the left-wing guerrilla group known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC. The rebels claim they won't release the hostages until the government passes a law allowing prisoner exchanges between the FARC and the military. Betancourt, a candidate in Colombia's May 26 presidential election, has made a name for herself as an outspoken foe of corruption. She has been called brave and inspiring by some, a media hound and a naive child of privilege by others. Her celebrity status might have been the reason that the FARC seized her: She's the kind of hostage who attracts media attention. The following is adapted from her book, "Until Death Do Us Part," which was published in December by Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins.

DECEMBER 1996: The Christmas vacation begins in a few days; the legislative session is almost over. Even more than usual, I'm rushing back and forth between my office and the legislative assembly. I'm 35 years old, and I've been a member of the assembly for two years.

Toward 3:30 in the afternoon, while I'm talking with someone in my office, my secretary pokes her head in.

"Someone's asking to see you right away, Ingrid. A man."

"Does he have an appointment?"

"No, but he's very insistent."

"All right, tell him I'll see him immediately after this person, but for no more than half an hour."

He comes in: elegant, in his forties, average height, neither handsome nor ugly, so that later on I will be unable to describe or identify him.

"Please sit down."

"Thank you. We've been following your work with the greatest attention, Doctora, and we have the highest regard for what you are doing."

We smile at each other. I assume he's going to ask for something, like most of the people who come to see me.

"And that's why I wanted to meet you, Doctora. We're very worried about you. Colombia is going through a period of great tension, great violence. One must be careful, very, very careful."

I'm used to this kind of talk. Most of the people I meet share this obsession with danger. Women, in particular, assure me, with genuine affection, that they're praying that nothing happens to me. I tell them that no one can enter the Capitol building without presenting papers. I say this calmly, because I believe that those in power exploit the fear that grips Colombians.

"Don't worry," I tell this man, "I'm surrounded by a discreet but highly effective security apparatus. That said, I'm grateful for your interest in my welfare. But what can I do for you?"

His eyes become a little steelier. "I'd like to know you better, Doctora, but the reason I'm here is to warn you. We are extremely concerned."

"That's very kind of you, and I'm touched by your concern, but I have very little time, as my secretary must have told you." I look at my watch, making sure he sees me do it. "You haven't understood me," he continues coldly. "I'm telling you that you must really be careful."

I realize that he's not the kind of visitor I'd imagined, not a citizen in distress, or a bashful admirer, but an emissary.

"What's the message?" I ask, with a slight laugh. "Are you threatening me?"

"No, this is not a threat. I'm not here to frighten you. You have to realize that you're in danger, that your family is in danger. I'm speaking to you on behalf of people who have already put out a contract on you. They advise you to leave, because the decision has been made. To be perfectly clear, what I'm telling you, Doctora, is that we've already paid the sicarios."

Suddenly, I know he's not lying. In Colombia, the word sicario makes everything clear. Sicarios are young men with motorcycles who live in Colombia's poorest neighborhoods, and they're hired every day -- for ridiculously small sums -- to kill people.

I've turned a corner. The period of mere intimidation is over. Six months earlier, as I was leaving the Capitol on a cold night in July, shots were fired at my car and that of my bodyguards. No one was hit, and I'd tried to believe that we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"In short, what you're telling me," I say, "is that you're going to kill me."

"I've come to tell you to leave because steps have been taken." He gets up, holds out his hand, and politely says goodbye.

Now I'm alone in my office, stunned, drained, inert. Whom should I notify? The police? For all I know, my visitor may well be part of the security service, which would explain how he was able to make his way through the building without being stopped. A few seconds pass before I recover my wits and call my secretary.

"Marina, where did that guy come from? How did he get in?"

"I don't know. All of a sudden he was just there, in my office."

"What's his name? Did you get his name, at least?"

"No, I thought he knew you, that he was one of your friends."

Betancourt hastily arranged for her children, Melanie, then 11, and Lorenzo, then 8, to leave the country. The next day, she and her boyfriend (now her husband) took them to New Zealand, where the children's French-born father was living. Betancourt soon returned to Colombia, however, and resumed the anti-corruption campaign that had led to her election in 1994. The following excerpt flashes back to that election, and shows her naivete as she decides to run for Colombia's House of Representatives, as well as her flair for shaking up the establishment and grabbing the public's attention.

JANUARY 1994: The election is only two months away and we don't have a slogan, not a poster. Then I remember a young public relations guy I met when I worked on someone else's campaign. His name was German Medina. I make an appointment with him for the following day.

"I'm going to help you, Ingrid, and we'll talk about money later. But where's your program? I can't do anything without your program."

"It can be summed up in three words: Fight against corruption."

"Okay, but you're a candidate in Bogota, and you need to say what you want for the capital."

"The construction of the subway that we've been waiting to have for half a century, the protection of the air we breathe, which is now among the most polluted on the planet, and a policy to help families and children. But none of that will be possible if corruption absorbs the funds appropriated. Find me something that will symbolize my battle with this disease."

Two days later, German brings over . . . a condom! At once I see how powerful this symbol is, precisely because it's shocking, because no one can be indifferent to it. It's the midst of the AIDS epidemic, and the condom makes the analogy between disease and corruption immediately evident. I'm completely won over. An idea strikes me: I'm going to hand out condoms -- on the street. I call everyone in my address book, and say: "Do me a favor. Bring me condoms. I need hundreds, thousands."

I stand at traffic lights and knock on drivers' windows. "My name is Ingrid Betancourt, and I'm a candidate for the legislature. I believe corruption in politics is the equivalent of AIDS. We have to protect our democracy by voting for honest people. Here, I'm giving you this condom so you'll remember me on election day."

My father [a well-known Colombian diplomat who worked for UNESCO in Paris, where Ingrid was raised and educated] soon finds out about the condoms. He phones me, very upset. "One of my friendssaw you on the street, Ingrid. You don't have the right to do this to me. My own daughter handing out . . . . It's disgraceful, degrading . . . .I'm ashamed of you, Ingrid!"

After an item about my father's displeasure appears in a widely read newspaper column, I cease to be anonymous; the media rush to cover the daughter of a former minister who dares to hand out "rubbers against corruption." I no longer need to knock on drivers' windows; they roll them down and smile at me.

My mother phones. "It's incredible, but your father is beginning to find this business with the condoms amusing."

A few months after her election, Betancourt helped create a legislative commission to investigate links between government officials and the country's drug traffickers, or as she calls them, "the mafia." In February 1995, she and two other commissioners found themselves summoned to a hush-hush meeting with Gilberto Rodriquez and his two brothers, who run the Cali drug cartel. The three brothers reveal that the government, which had taken credit for tracking down and killing drug boss Pablo Escobar, only knew of Escobar's whereabouts because the cartel had provided the information. The conversation turns to allegations about drug money in Colombia's 1994 presidential campaign:

GILBERTO PRETENDS that his honor has been wounded. "Doctora," he replies stiffly, "we also have the right, don't we, to have political convictions? Lots of people give money anonymously to this or that candidate; we shouldn't we do the same?"

Someone knocks on the door and we're asked to step into the living room. We hear the sound of footsteps and muffled conversations, and then, through the double frosted-glass doors of the living room, we're stupefied to see that the visitors are policemen in uniform. Are these men really being tracked down by all of the country's police, or is that only a sham?

When we resume our conversation, I say in astonishment:

"You were just saying that you were hounded by the police, but the police seem to get on rather well with you."

"I have good connections," Gilberto says. As we seem stunned to hear this, he continues with a certain tone of self-importance in his voice:

"It is exactly the same with the parliament! Most of your fellow representatives are in our pay."

"What do you mean, most?" I say, thunderstruck.

"About a hundred representatives and more than half of the senators, Doctora. Would you like their names?"

Though I don't say anything, he names a dozen legislators. On that note, the meeting comes to an end. Two days later, as agreed, we tell the press what the Rodriquez brothers have revealed to us concerning their involvement in Escobar's liquidation. But we keep to ourselves the main lesson we've drawn from our encounter: the mafia's influence over all the nation's institutions, including the Congress -- which makes the laws -- and the judicial system and the police, which are charged with enforcing these laws.

This will have an effect on my future thought and action.

In the 1998 presidential campaign, Betancourt supported Andres Pastrana, who won. She then broke with him because, she says, he reneged on a public agreement they had signed -- which set down a program for rooting out corruption and reforming the government.

THE FRAGILITY of the "Pastrana method" is already apparent. A former television journalist, the president always seems to attach more important to "media coups" than to serious reflections on the issues.

We immediately saw this in the euphoria following his election, when he made a historic "gesture" toward the FARC, the armed guerrilla group of some 15,000 that has been fighting the government for several decades. In the name of peace, Pastrana granted the FARC nearly 17,000 square miles of national territory. And what commitments did he get in exchange for creating this zone? None whatsoever. This abandonment of sovereignty was made in the vaguest possible way, at the risk of sending the message that the state was ready to weaken itself to get into the good graces of warlords.

It's as if the political leaders and the guerrillas are helping each other to maintain a state of war that suits them but is destroying our country. The guerrilla leaders don't want to be told that the battle they're waging in the name of the people is, paradoxically, strengthening the political class that is the source of people's misery and sustaining the system of corruption under which it flourishes. This is what I have told them. They know what I think, and this allows me to maintain distant but frank relationships with them, without ambiguity.

We first need to decide what kind of peace we are going to seek. Do we want a fake peace imposed by terror? That is what the paramilitaries, the illegal clandestine instrument that flourishes with the Colombian government's permission, are offering us. Do we want a peace that results from the defeat of democracy and the installation of a communist regime? That is what the guerrillas are fighting for. Do we want a peace agreement negotiated by a corrupt regime in order to maintain the status quo and allow a select few to share the privileges? That is what our establishment is trying to preserve.

None of these possibilities will free us from the drug traffic emporium and the violence that accompanies it.

The paramilitary forces are an example of how corruption nurtures violence. Financed by powerful landlords and drug traffickers, and all too frequently trained with the help of high-ranking army officers, these illegal troops are doing what the law forbids our army to do: They carry out massacres, tortures and persecutions. As long as the paramilitaries are allowed to operate, the Colombian government will lack the legitimacy required to discuss peace with anyone.

I have twice been elected with a remarkable number of votes, and today I feel ready to put a stop to corruption. Now that I've arrived at this point, will they kill me, too? My relationship with death is like that of a tightrope walker: We're both doing something dangerous, and we've calculated the risks, but our love of perfection invariably overcomes our fear.

According to polls before her abduction, Betancourt has drawn negligible support in the May 26 presidential election. As of yesterday, she was still being held hostage.

-------- europe

EU heads give go-ahead to satellite navigation plan

By Adrian Croft
Sunday March 17, 1:22 AM
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-95275.html

BARCELONA, Spain - European Union leaders agreed on Saturday to push ahead with the development of a multi-billion-dollar satellite navigation system, despite U.S. reservations over duplication of its own military GPS network.

Ending months of indecision over the Galileo system, EU leaders meeting in Barcelona authorised transport ministers to take decisions on the financing of the network which will make Europe independent of GPS (Global Positioning System).

"We've got a result on Galileo," Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar told a news conference after the two-day summit, underlining the project's political and economic importance.

"It's been blocked for a long time. It now no longer is," he said. "Galileo is now approved. Everyone has subscribed to it."

He said the EU leaders had asked their transport ministers, who are due to discuss the project on March 26, to take "all appropriate measures" to implement and finance it.

The proposed network of navigation satellites would have commercial applications such as enabling drivers to pinpoint their vehicle's position.

A deal has been on the cards since Germany recently dropped its hostility to the expensive scheme, raising the prospect that other sceptics -- Britain and the Netherlands -- might also agree to pay their share and enable the next phase to go ahead.

European Commission President Romano Prodi reacted angrily when asked if the project offered value for money.

"I don't see any other public instrument that is so valid. This instrument that will make a complete revolution in the European scientific strategy and economic. It costs less than 130 km (80 miles) of highway.

"The question is do we want to do it or not? Do we want independence or not?" he told Reuters.

NO TO SPACE "SERFDOM"

The Galileo project has been championed by French President Jacques Chirac, who has said Europe could not accept "serfdom" in the space arena by relying on the Pentagon's GPS network.

"It's a strategic programme for Europe's technological development and to reaffirm Europe as a major player in the space arena," Chirac told the leaders in Barcelona on Friday.

The Pentagon raised objections about the plan last December, warning that future enemies might make use of the proposed civilian European system in a war with the West.

Earlier this month, the State Department said the U.S. government saw no compelling need for Galileo because GPS would meet the world's needs for the foreseeable future.

The State Department said that if the EU did decide to build Galileo, the United States wanted cooperation to ensure that the European system could operate in coordination with GPS.

The EU's executive Commission has rejected the U.S. criticism, saying it was in no one's interest to make the world rely on one system.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said Germany had agreed to allow the plan to go forward but that he expected private co-financing for the project once it was out of development.

European Commission transport spokesman Gilles Gantelet welcomed the agreement, saying: "It is very important that the Union's heads of government have decided to support Galileo."

"Galileo will become a reality," he said.

The Commission wants EU transport ministers at their March 26 meeting to decide on technical aspects and financing of Galileo, he said.

So far, 180 million euros ($159.4 million) has been spent on the project. The EU is now looking for its 15 member states to commit to release a further 450 million euros. Together with 550 million euros pledged by the European Space Agency, this will assure funding for Galileo's 2001-2006 development phase.

The total cost of the project, due to be completed in 2008, would be 3.2 billion euros.

-------- india

Hindu Mob Sets Fire to Mosques in Northern India

March 17, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-india-mosque.html

CHANDIGARH, India - A Hindu mob torched Muslim mosques and shops in northern India Sunday amid continuing violence in the country's western Gujarat province.

Police in the northern state of Haryana said about 300 people surrounded the house of a Muslim family following rumors it had slaughtered a cow, an animal Hindus regard as sacred.

Not finding the family at home, the mob torched two nearby mosques and three Muslim shops, an official in the police control room in Luharu town of Haryana's Bhiwani district said.

``The situation is now under control and there was no loss of life,'' Rajpal Singh, Bhiwani's senior superintendent of police, told Reuters.

Police said they did not find any evidence of an animal's slaughter at the site and the rumor appeared aimed at stirring trouble in the town, some 250 km (156 miles) south of Chandigarh, Haryana's capital city.

A police official said the stone mosques were partially burned but not completely destroyed.

India, an officially secular nation, has been badly shaken by a wave of religious bloodletting that began with the death of 58 people who were killed when a train carrying Hindu devotees was torched by a Muslim mob in Gujarat last month. Over 700 people, most of them Muslims, have been killed in reprisals across the state triggered by the train attack.

GUJARAT SIMMERS

In Gujarat, which in the past three weeks has been home to India's worst communal violence in a decade, police reported scattered incidents of looting and violence.

One person was killed Sunday evening when police fired on a mob setting fire to a factory at Chandola, about 12 miles from Ahmedabad, the state's main city.

P.C. Pande, Ahmedabad's police commissioner told Reuters that arsonists set fire to a room inside another factory in the Madhavpura area of the city.

Police have imposed a curfew until Monday morning in five areas of Ahmedabad, Pande said.

The Press Trust of India news agency said two people were stabbed to death in the state's Baroda district and added that several incidents of stone-throwing and arson were reported from many parts of the state.

The latest upsurge in tensions comes against the backdrop of a stepped up drive by hardline Hindu groups to build a temple on a disputed site in the northern town of Ayodhya where a mosque was razed a decade ago.

Hardline Hindus believe Hindu god-king Rama was born on the site of the mosque and want to rebuild a temple dedicated to him that they say was destroyed by Muslim invaders in the 16th century.

Saturday, some 500 Hindu hard-liners ransacked the legislature in India's eastern state of Orissa, breaking windows and damaging furniture, to press their demand for building the temple in Ayodhya.

-------- iran

Iran expands ties with many states despite 'axis' tag

By David R. Sands
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 17, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020317-91512970.htm

Iran's charter membership in President Bush's "axis of evil" hasn't prevented Tehran from improving its relations with a variety of states, including longtime regional rivals and close U.S. allies in Europe and Asia.

While North Korea and Iraq face diplomatic isolation, Iran has managed to expand security and commercial ties with its Arab neighbors, the European Union, Russia, China and several Central Asian states.

Iranian President Mohammed Khatami, during cordial visits to Austria and Greece last week, announced he would set off on a five-nation Central Asian tour to "improve bilateral relations" with front-line states in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.

"Iranians are very good at keeping track of the score of the ballgame," said Daniel Brumberg, a Georgetown University professor of government who has written on Iran's foreign and domestic policies.

"On the international front, they have pursued a policy driven by pure pragmatism, and they have a lot of successes to show for it," he said.

The successes have come in the face of U.S. concern over Tehran's weapons buildup, its support for radical Islamic militant groups fighting Israel, and charges that Iran is trying to undermine the fragile interim regime in neighboring Afghanistan.

Zalmay M. Khalilzad, the National Security Council point man for the region, said at a conference on U.S.-Iranian relations at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce last week that the administration supported a "prosperous and democratic Iran," but blamed Tehran for the continuing freeze in bilateral ties.

"The policies of the current regime both at home and abroad are responsible for the poor state of the country's economy and the hostile relations with the United States," Mr. Khalilzad said.

Robert Walpole, head of strategic and nuclear programs at the National Intelligence Council, said at a Senate hearing last week that U.S. analysts rated the threat from Iran's missile program on a par with the threat from North Korea.

"Our concerns about Iran pursuing an [intercontinental ballistic missile program] have gone up," Mr. Walpole told lawmakers last Monday.

But private analysts say fewer and fewer countries are following the U.S. line on Iran. Tehran, they say, has won points for its support of the international effort to rebuild Afghanistan. Its massive energy reserves and its large consumer market also have proved attractive abroad.

EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, who met with Mr. Khatami last Tuesday in Vienna, Austria, made clear that leading European nations were not ready to isolate Iran.

"We are more engaged with Iranian leaders than the United States, and we want to try to help the progressive forces in the country," Mr. Solana said.

A visit to Italy by Mr. Khatami in 1999 was the first to a European country by an Iranian leader since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Since then, Mr. Khatami has visited France, Germany and Japan, while Britain - America's staunchest ally in the fight against terrorism - dispatched Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to Tehran in September in a bid for better relations.

Mr. Khatami's welcome in Austria was so warm that the Viennese daily Die Presse chided Austrian President Thomas Klestil for not confronting the Iranian leader on human rights or terrorism.

"Klestil must be able to distance himself from the American 'axis' nonsense without completely, uncritically embracing the representative of an oppressive regime," the paper wrote.

It is not just Western Europe that has broken with Washington over Iran.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has made clear he will not curtail rapidly warming ties with Iran, despite a determined effort since September 11 to curry favor with Washington.

Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan's interim leader, was warmly welcomed in Tehran just a day after the Bush administration accused Iranian officials of attempting to undermine his authority.

Giandomenico Picco, a former U.N. undersecretary-general for political affairs who has dealt with many Middle East issues, says Iran's ties to its neighbors in the region have improved noticeably after a long ostracism in response to the 1979 revolution.

Saudi Arabia and Iran have long been considered regional rivals, in part because of Saudi financial backing for Baghdad in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and in part because of the religious competition between the Sunni form of Islam that reigns in the Saudi state and the Shi'ite form that dominates in Iran.

But just last week, the two countries held their fourth annual bilateral trade fair, symbolizing the burgeoning relationship between the two.

"I expect Saudi-Iranian relations to continue to blossom," Mr. Picco said.

Pakistan and Iran, longtime rivals for influence in the region, also have improved their ties. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf visited Tehran in November, and energy ministers from the two countries agreed last month to carry out a preliminary study for a proposed $4 billion gas pipeline running from Iran to India.

Even Washington appears far from unanimous in taking a hard line against Tehran.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr., Delaware Democrat, said in a speech last week that he favored "a much better relationship than we currently enjoy" with Iran.

He urged the Bush administration to drop its opposition to Iran's bid to join the World Trade Organization and said he was personally ready to meet Iranian parliamentarians in the United States or overseas to discuss improving bilateral ties.

-------- pakistan

Church in Pakistan Is Attacked, Killing Five and Wounding 40

New York Times
March 17, 2002
By RAYMOND BONNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/17/international/asia/17CND-STAN.html

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, March 17 - Two men walked into a Protestant church during the sermon on this warm spring morning here in one of the most heavily guarded areas in one of the most secure cities in Pakistan and threw several grenades. Five people died, including an American embassy employee and her daughter.

At least 40 people were injured, many critically, most of them foreigners.

The blasts sundered bodies of worshippers, and blood stained the ceiling at least 40 feet above the floor in the simple hall where the worshippers had just finished singing ``This is Holy Ground.''

A man's black shoe lay by the long table where coffee cups were stacked awaiting the post-service congregants.

This was the most deadly attack in which American civilians were killed since Sept. 11.

There has been a surge of sectarian killings of Shia doctors in recent weeks in Karachi, Pakistan, long know as a city with considerable crime and violence. The American journalist Daniel Pearl was kidnapped in Karachi in January and then killed.

On Friday, the Karachi police advised the American Embassy that ``elements connected to the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl are considering kidnapping more American citizens,'' the embassy said in a public warning. The embassy urged Americans to increase their security, and to travel in groups.

The attack in Islamabad today occurred at the Protestant International Church, a nondenominational church in the diplomatic enclave here, 400 yards from the sprawling American Embassy compound, where glistening razor wire coils along the top of brick walls.

``The attack this morning on worshipers in Islamabad was a cowardly act that took the lives of five innocent people and injured many more while they were worshipping,'' the American ambassador here, Wendy Chamberlain, said this evening.

``There is a hard lesson to be drawn from today's tragic event,'' she said, in a brief appearance, marked by emotion and resolve. President Bush and President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan ``were absolutely right to take on the terrorists no matter where they are,'' she went on. ``To say to them: no more. We will not give in to those driven by hate, to those so cowardly they throw explosives at innocent people in a house of worship.''

No group claimed responsibility for this morning's attack, and the police had few clues. The grenades were Russian-made, but that offers little insight, because in parts of this country, grenades and automatic rifles are as readily available as bananas in the market. It is possible that one of attackers was killed, police said.

The Americans killed were Barbara Green and her daughter, Kristen Wormsley, a high school senior. Mrs. Green was an employee in the human resources center at the embassy. Her husband was a diplomat, Milton Green, director of the computer section at the embassy. He and their young son were also injured, but not seriously, American embassy officials said here this evening.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the spouses and children of American diplomats had been sent home. They had only been allowed to return six weeks ago. Mrs. Green had left with the children and had returned last month.

One of those killed was a Pakistani citizen, another Afghani. The fifth victim has not been identified, and police said it might be one of the attackers. He will be hard to identify because just about all of his body between his neck and his knees was blown away, police said.

``It's a miracle'' that only five were killed, said a German aid worker who was one of those spared. Altogether 13 Americans were injured. Citizens of at least nine other countries were among the injured.

The church was only about half full, with 60-70 worshipers. Many diplomats and foreign aid workers have still not returned to the country.

It was not clear whether the attack was aimed at Americans, foreigners more broadly, or Christians. While this nation has been riven by sectarian violence, it has been between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Attacks on Christians, who make up less than 5 percent of the population, have been rare. Last Oct, 15, though, worshipers were killed when attackers opened fire in a church in Bahawalpur.

``It is a terrorist attack designed to embarrass the government,'' said the Islamabad police chief, Nasir Khan Durrani.

Along with siding with the United States in the war against terrorism in Afghanistan, General Musharraf has been carrying out his own war against domestic terrorists. He has banned several militant organizations, and the police have rounded up several hundred suspected terrorists.

In recent days, diplomats and Pakistani intelligence officials have expressed the fear that the banned groups were putting their operations back together and further terrorist attacks were likely.

This morning's attack suggests that no degree of caution may be enough.

Islamabad is one of the most tranquil cities in Asia. It is a created city, to be the capital, with broad leafy boulevards and expensive homes. Killings are not unheard of, but rare.

Add to that the increased security at the diplomatic enclave. There are several police checkpoints on the road lined by the embassies. Cars have to slow down, and weave around barriers. A car bombing would be difficult to pull off, but the search of individuals is cursory at best.

Moreover, one side of the enclave abuts acres of open forested area, where today men could be seen attending to cattle. It would have been easy for today's attackers to have walked through the field.

Solid information about the attack was hard to come by, with differing reports about the number of attackers and the number of grenades.

``There were four, five blasts, one at the back that alerted us all,'' said Nicholas Parham, who works with a British aid agency, Tearfund. ``Then he ran up the center aisle just past where I was,'' he said about the attacker that he saw.

He said the man had one grenade in his hand and several grenades on his belt. ``I didn't know whether he was going to blow himself up,'' Mr, Parham said. ``I hit the deck, and then there was another blast.''

The glass was blown out of every window and huge holes were punched in the ceiling. Blood soaked the floor throughout the room, about 80 feet by 80 feet.

The injured were taken to the Federal Government Services Hospital, a rundown facility with grimy walls and soiled sheets. Beefy American security personnel in civilian clothes were on guard in the dingy halls, as special American medical teams operated on the American casualties.

A body lay on a rickety metal trolley, covered by a sheet. A man came in, pulled back the sheet slightly, looked at the face, then sat down put his head in his hands and began to sob.

An American woman in a maroon baseball cap walked over to comfort him.

``We couldn't see anything, it happened so fast,'' said a German man at the hospital. ``There were torn bodies, parts of bodies, lying around.'' He had trouble hearing a reporter's question. ``Our ears are blocked,'' he said, from the blast, putting his hands to the side of his head.

``I wasn't there, I was lucky,'' said a Swiss man, walking the hospital halls in a daze. He normally attends services at the church, but he had just arrived from Europe and was still jet lagged.

After today's attacks, the embassy urged Americans to stay in their homes, and to avoid public places if they did go out.

In her statement this evening, Ms. Chamberlain declined to take questions but left no doubt the resolve of the United States to remain.

``Those of you who know me and who know the United States, and who know my president, will know that I will answer these questions another day,'' she said. ``Because we will be here.''

-------- philippines

US wants to double military presence in southern Philippines

Sunday March 17
AFP
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020317/1/2li2u.html

More than 600 US troops in an anti-terror operation in the Philippines want an equal number of reinforcements to deal with the non-combat aspects of the military campaign, a Filipino general said.

President Gloria Arroyo's government is studying the American government's request, Filipino military spokesman Brigadier General Edilberto Adan told reporters Sunday.

Some 660 US troops are deployed in the Philippines as part of Washington's global campaign against terrorism. Ten were killed in a helicopter crash in waters off the central Philippines last month.

The US contingent includes 160 Special Forces troops engaged in an advisory role on the island of Basilan, where about 5,000 Filipino troops are hunting an estimated 300 Abu Sayyaf Muslim guerrillas with links to the al-Qaeda terror network.

The rest of the Americans are based in this southern city, as well as in the central city of Cebu, where they fly surveillance and logistics missions in a joint operation scheduled to last until June.

"In principle, they (Americans) want a civil affairs component, which means construction of various engineering projects like roads and bridges," Adan said.

"These will require additional personnel, but not special forces. They have seen the need for a civil affairs component for solving the problems in Basilan, which could be answered by engineering and other types of work," he added.

Seven in 10 of the 350,000 mainly Muslim residents of Basilan, a jungle-backed volcanic island the size of Los Angeles, live on less than 75 US cents a day, according to government statistics.

The Americans would need "at least a battalion," the general said. A battalion comprises around 800 to 1000 soldiers.

He said that if Manila agreed to more deployments, it would have to be under another military exercise because the terms of reference of the ongoing campaign against the Abu Sayyaf sets limits on the number of US participants.

"It's not even on the drawing board. We are trying to determine how to go about it, what are the options to meet the objective of undertaking development projects," he said. "It's still being studied."

Meanwhile, Filipino troops on Basilan clashed with an Abu Sayyaf unit at dawn Sunday, leaving one soldier wounded, the military said.

No US Special Forces troops were involved in the fighting near the town of Tipo-Tipo, Captain Noel Detoyato told reporters.

He said the guerrillas involved in the fighting were not from the same faction holding two American Christian missionaries and a Filipina nurse hostage.

A Philippine military helicopter evacuated the wounded soldier while two other helicopter gunships attacked the rebel unit, he said.

The rebels were led by Amir Minkong, described by the military as an Abu Sayyaf leader, although the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) -- the largest Muslim separatist group in the Philippines -- say he is one of their own.

The MILF, which has over 1,000 troops in Basilan, has warned of possible confrontations if the Americans venture into their territory.

The MILF is currently observing a ceasefire with Manila, but the Philippines military said it would take action against the group if it attacked US troops.

Both Manila and Washington have said the 300-odd Abu Sayyaf rebel group in Basilan has ties to the al-Qaeda terror network of Osama bin Laden, the main suspect in the September 11 attacks in the United States.

-------- spy agencies

Failure to Communicate
'See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism' by Robert Baer

Reviewed by Barton Gellman
Sunday, March 17, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29933-2002Mar14?language=printer

SEE NO EVILThe True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on TerrorismBy Robert BaerCrown. 284 pp. $25.95

A third of the way through this provocative book comes a story that may leave you hoping two things roughly at once -- that Langley grows more operatives like Robert Baer, and that nobody gives them the keys to the executive suite.

It is 1986. Baer is a case officer in the CIA's directorate of operations. The agency has just turned down his proposal to kidnap a Hezbollah terrorist's family to exchange for American hostages. Now Baer brings home an offer from Syria's Muslim Brotherhood. Washington will tell the Brotherhood when President Hafez Assad is ready to take off from Damascus; the holy warriors will be standing by with a missile. Baer's bosses don't go for that either.

But Baer is determined to break up the unholy triangle of Iran, Syria and Hezbollah, collectively responsible for Lebanon's brisk traffic in American hostages. So he cables a new proposal to every CIA station in Europe. Why not send clandestine teams to wire "low-order explosives" to the ignitions of Syrian diplomatic cars? The bombs will fizzle, looking like botched assassination attempts. The agency can issue a fake communiqué claiming responsibility in the name of Hezbollah, and Assad will crush Hezbollah as he did his domestic Islamists at Hama in 1982. At headquarters, wiser heads note the drawbacks of igniting CIA car bombs in allied capitals.

Baer leaps from these pages as a zealous and creative man, courageous to the brink of recklessness, and altogether lacking the political and diplomatic judgment that an intelligence agency needs at the top. What the book does well is provide a spy's-eye view of CIA intrigues by one of the agency's best. And it makes a persuasive case, with much amusing evidence, that the CIA lost interest in the skills Baer had to offer.

Baer takes his central thesis from the CIA recruiter who lured him, somewhat by accident, into the craft. "Satellites and [eavesdropping] intercepts can't see inside someone's head," the recruiter told him. "You need a person to do that. Agents and the secrets they steal are the crown jewel of American intelligence."

How case officers go about their work is protected, Baer writes cheekily, by "a code of secrecy" as strict as that of "any other professional criminal organization." The fun of this book is the way Baer inducts us, alongside his younger self, into that world. We learn of rabbits and their pursuers, penetration agents and access agents, phase-three burnouts and tailing techniques named for dolphins and waterfalls. Where CIA censorship required deletions, Baer leaves black bands in the text -- an inspired device that invites the reader to count missing characters and play guess-the-secret.

A taste of Baer's style comes when he befriends a vodka-drenched Russian colonel in Tajikstan. There he learns that the Tajik interior minister is smuggling out tons of raw opium for sale in America. Baer demands a meeting and instructs the minister to cut it out. Two weeks later, Baer's house in Dushanbe explodes. Baer's Russian friend offers a T-72 tank to flatten the minister's house in turn -- a brick for a brick -- and we hold our breaths wondering what our narrator will do. (Baer declines.)

The book is at its best describing the breakdown in the CIA's operations directorate. A boss named John refuses to pass along a warning -- soon to prove true -- that an American will be kidnapped in Beirut. Baer has not filled out the right paperwork, John says -- he doesn't even know the source's date of birth. The reader wants to cheer when Baer defies his boss, in "a gross fracturing of all the rules," and slips into Lebanon's Bekaa Valley to learn more. Later, when Baer asks for Dari or Pashto speakers to debrief Afghan refugees, there are none to be had. "Headquarters instead offered to send out a four-person sexual-harassment briefing team." Baer's predecessor in one post has spent most of her energy evangelizing among the locals. In another, the supervisor is "conned into an operation to buy maps of the sewers of Beirut's southern suburbs," where there are no sewers to map.

Baer is constantly angry at Washington's refusal to take clear stands. The government didn't have the stomach to hold Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze accountable for the death of a CIA agent there. Washington tolerates Iraqi oil smuggling to Turkey when it could have "shut down the whole operation with a single telephone call." If it occurs to him that the United States might have competing priorities in Georgia or Turkey, he does not mention it. Baer's description of secret diplomacy in 1996, when he claims Sudan offered Osama bin Laden "to us on a platter," bears little resemblance to events I know well and reported in this newspaper.

Baer can write authoritatively on one page and with cartoonish fancy on another. He elevates Yasser Arafat, perhaps the weakest figure in the Arab world, to something near the status of master villain. Baer says Arafat "started out life as an Islamic fundamentalist," maintains the fundamentalists as "a reliable source of political strength" and had so powerful an influence with the Shah's enemies that "in a large sense, the 1979 Iranian Islamic revolution was suckled on the Palestinian teat." This comes close to self-parody. Baer also blames Arafat for destroying the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983, and he implies there may even be a trail to Osama bin Laden, a claim Arafat's worst enemies in Israel do not advance. Baer writes that "what you never look for, you are almost certain never to find." The converse, here, seems apposite.

Present at the creation, Baer adds an intriguing chapter to the literature on the Clinton administration's betrayal of Iraqi coup plotters in 1995. But he undermines the reader's trust with assertions that then-national security adviser Anthony Lake masterminded an FBI investigation meant to punish Baer for his role. No one who knows the mutual loathing between Louis Freeh and the Clinton White House will buy that.

Baer's epitaph for his own career comes from the classics he studied in his youth. "It was like The Odyssey, I finally figured out," Baer writes. "While we were off fighting Troy, the people back home were drinking and whoring." What Baer does not know about the people back home would fill another book entirely. But this one leaves the reader in little doubt that Baer fought bravely and well for an agency that lost its way. •

Barton Gellman, a former Jerusalem bureau chief and defense and diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Post, is a special projects reporter on the national staff.

-------- us

Afghanistan welcomes U.S. troops, for now

By Mehrdad Balali
Reuters
Sunday March 17, 3:43 PM
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-95331.html

KABUL - Victorious on the battlefield and with hopes high of impending U.S. aid, Americans are enjoying a popularity in Afghanistan that always eluded Soviet forces during Moscow's intervention in the 1980s.

But many Afghans believe the world's only superpower -- despite convincingly winning this month's Battle of Shahi Kot, the biggest ground clash of the war -- should not overstay its welcome.

American and other coalition troops cruising towns and villages in their armoured cars draw mainly cheers and smiles. The only harassment they face is from the hordes of beggars who roam the streets of Kabul asking for "bakhshish".

Some Afghans see the U.S. presence not only as liberation from fundamentalist Taliban rule but also as a guarantee that constant infighting between warlords will not drag the nation back into the civil war that erupted after the departure of Moscow's troops in 1992.

"The Soviets were brought to Afghanistan by puppet governments in Kabul, without any regard for the opinion of the people. But the Americans came to help us to get rid of the Taliban and al Qaeda," Dastehnegar, an official at the ministry of information and culture, told Reuters.

"For the time being they are welcome, but if and when they start behaving like the Russians, our people will naturally respond accordingly."

SOVIET INFIDELS, AMERICAN FRIENDS

Afghan Mujahideen warriors, many taught in Islamic schools, took into battle against the Soviets their fears that Moscow wanted to turn the Muslim nation into a communist, atheist land.

"The Russians were infidels. They wanted to destroy Islam and take the veils off women," said Shiraqa, an elderly street sweeper. "We don't see Americans so far meddling in our religion and way of life."

Anxious to keep Afghans on side, U.S. soldiers were firmly lectured on the need to keep a low profile and be respectful of Afghanistan's many traditions that are so unfamiliar to them.

U.S. troops at Bagram Air Base, the control point just outside the capital for the ground operations in Afghanistan, almost shyly slip out of the well-guarded compound to shake hands with villagers, making jokes with gestures and trading smiles.

"We are in this for the long haul. We are invited here by the Afghan government as a friend and we will fight until we remove all threats to Afghanistan and world peace," said General Frank Hagenbeck.

But Americans should not underestimate the pride of this land of warriors in their own fighting skills.

"It was the Afghan army who destroyed the militants in Shahi Kot," said Nouraqa, an army officer.

"If it weren't for the Afghan army, America would have been defeated in four days. They should leave here in three or four months or they may cause problems for us."

His opinion is that of a minority, but it reflects a growing debate on the issue.

STABILITY IS PARAMOUNT

"The more educated people are in favour of the presence of foreign forces because without them warlords will keep fighting amongst themselves. But those who do not know anything but fighting and benefit from unrest are against them," said Farid, a university professor.

"The unsavoury types know they have no place in a responsible, efficient government."

For the time being, the stability that has been brought by the U.S. intervention overrides all.

"America has brought us peace and security. Why should I engage in a holy war against it?" said Gholam Rabbani, a former Mujahideen warrior who lost both legs fighting the Soviets.

Nouraqa, a Kabul military base commander, spoke with affection of Americans and other Westerners in Afghanistan.

"They are very nice. I have seen nothing bad from them," he said. "I do not care if they are not Muslim. Everyone to his own religion."

-------- propaganda wars

China seen tilting Hong Kong's media

By John Sheridan
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 17, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020317-89186504.htm

Four and a half years after Hong Kong's return to China, the territory's government is creating an environment of media self-censorship and is influencing reporting on issues sensitive to Chinese leadership, a journalists group says.

"This is done by favoring those journalists and media organizations that are not overly critical of the government," says Cliff Bale, a Hong Kong journalist and one of the authors of the report.

The favors take the form of "government leaks, one-on-one interviews," he says.

The 2001 report published earlier this year by the Hong Kong Journalists Association is critical of Hong Kong's media organizations and the government's interference.

"Certain subjects are emerging as 'no-go' areas for some media outlets, and journalists - sometimes quick to pick up what their editors want - will simply never suggest articles on these subjects," the report says.

No-go areas include Taiwanese, Tibetan and Xinjiang independence movements, political and religious dissidence, and Hong Kong business concerns and leadership struggles on mainland China.

"There is still a strong perception of news that is too sensitive or controversial that might antagonize Chinese leadership and [the journalists] become more cautious," says Chris Yeung, political editor of the South China Morning Post, the largest English-language newspaper in Hong Kong.

The report also says the government helps determine what is covered by "courting editors and doing deals."

By most accounts Hong Kong has a dynamic media - 16 daily newspapers, four commercial television stations and two commercial radio stations - that function with no direct government control.

The U.S. State Department's annual report on human rights around the world released this month said Hong Kong's law "provides for freedom of speech and of the press, and the government generally respects this right in practice."

The report, however, also reflected the local journalists' concerns that "some journalists and news media practice a degree of self-censorship, particularly in mainland-related reporting."

The Heritage Foundation's annual Index to Economic Freedom report also lists Hong Kong as the freest economy for the eighth straight year.

Mak Yin-Ting, a Radio Television Hong Kong reporter who heads the journalists association, says the media do a good job covering local news.

For instance, the media recently covered Taiwanese protesters who were detained at Hong Kong's airport and sent back. And the report lauded coverage of Falun Gong, even after Chinese President Jiang Zemin warned the press it had a "social responsibility" when reporting on the group.

"We feared the worst before 1997, and it turns out that self-censorship is not perceived to be a major problem right now," Clement So, a Chinese University of Hong Kong journalism professor says, but notes he has seen a change in media sentiment toward Beijing.

"In the past, 'pro-China' and 'pro-Hong Kong' were two concepts on opposite sides of the political continuum. But now, five years after the hand-over, these two concepts [have] become almost the same," Mr. So says.

Now Hong Kong journalists might not even be aware they are self-censoring, Miss Mak says. "It creates an environment where reporters are not even aware of what is going on."

-------

The secret Afghan war

By Bernard F. Trainor,
3/17/2002
Boston Globe
http://www.globe.com/dailyglobe2/076/oped/The_secret_Afghan_warP.shtml

ARE YOU ON the objective? Are you still taking fire? What's your casualty count? Do you have prisoners? How many are wounded? How many killed? How about captured weapons? What type? Can you continue the attack? How's your ammo?

These were the questions thrown at me over the radio when I led a platoon of Marines in the Korean War - and I in turn asked of platoon leaders when I was a battalion commander in Vietnam. They are essential questions in judging victory or defeat. They are questions appropriate to the current battle at Shah-e-Kot.

Unfortunately, we are not privy to the answers. That makes it difficult to know how well we are doing in the war. There are no pictures of the carnage, no video of defeated soldiers, no schematics of what we intended to do and how successful we have been. All we have are assurances from the Pentagon that all goes swimmingly and victory is ours.

Pardon me, but knowing something about close combat, I'd like some evidence of victory. The battle has been described as ''fierce,'' yet our casualties have been extraordinarily light. There is no evidence of the enemy's losses.

In World War II, Korea, and even Vietnam, close combat had visual results. Casualties on both sides attested to the ferocity of battle. We also had testimony by those who fought of a harrowing trial by fire. We have none of this in Afghanistan.

True, some soldiers tell of enemy machine gun fire and mortar bombardments and complain that the friendly Afghan troops ran away. No one speaks of killing the enemy. They all praise the effectiveness of air strikes. But nobody talks about assaulting the enemy and apparently the friendly Afghanis were not up to the job. For lack of other evidence, it appears that commanders and their troops depend upon air strikes to kill the enemy.

I am not critical of the skill and bravery of the soldiers in this battle. Maybe bombs and rockets did kill the defenders of Shah-e-Kot. If so, it is to the good. It is better to defeat an enemy with airplanes than with attacking infantry. But the fact that enemy fire ceased under air bombardment does not mean that he was annihilated. Last month at the battle for Tora Bora, we were told of great success using air power. It now appears that many if not most of the Taliban and Al Qaeda soldiers survived the bombing and slipped away to fight another day. Many may have regrouped at Shah-e-Kot.

Notwithstanding the assertions of crippling enemy casualties in the latest battle, there is no visual evidence of it. Occupying mountaintops and empty caves does not count. Where are the prisoners and wounded we saw after the battles for Mazar-e-Sharif, Kunduz, and Kabul?

There is little doubt that the bombing inflicted punishment. Perhaps the nooks and crannies of the mountain redoubt are littered with the human detritus of war. But without proof we have only the Pentagon's word that damage to the enemy was extensive and telling. After Tora Bora, can we count on those assurances? If the Al Qaeda and Taliban soldiers successfully slip from one mountain complex to another, we will be in Afghanistan for a long time regardless of how we bomb.

The Pentagon is playing a shell game. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld tells us what he wants us to hear. At press conferences he adroitly sidesteps or patronizingly discounts honest questions from journalists and discounts conflicting reports from the field. When asked about enemy losses, we are told that ''we don't do body counts,'' an allusion to inflated claims of Vietcong losses in the Vietnam War. But, surely, Mr. Secretary, somebody in the Pentagon keeps a scorecard on enemy losses, and in this war it is one of the few ways to measure success.

Despite the marvels of modern day television, the American people have little knowledge of what is actually happening on the ground in Afghanistan. Secrecy was understandable in the early days of our intervention when Special Forces were clandestinely working with the Northern Alliance. But now that conventional Army soldiers are openly engaged in the ground fighting, the American public deserves more than ambiguous briefings dispensed at the Pentagon.

It is time for the country to get a verifiable accounting of our progress.

Bernard F. Trainor is a retired Marine lieutenant general and a military analyst at MSNBC.


-------- POLICE / PRISONERS

Police cameras stir debate

By Brian DeBose
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 17, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/metro/20020317-87408710.htm

The American Civil Liberties Union won't be satisfied with citywide camera surveillance unless there are legal restrictions, with civil and criminal penalties for abuse.

The ACLU was prompted to hold a round table yesterday on civil liberties after D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams said he wants neighborhood surveillance cameras - similar to those in Sidney, Australia, and in London - in the District. Executive Assistant Chief Terrance W. Gainer, who attended the session, told The Washington Times yesterday that D.C. police completed on Friday a preliminary list of restrictions on camera surveillance.

"I did get the first draft of policy and regulations yesterday, and they are very similar to what the ACLU recommendations were," said Chief Gainer.

He said neither he nor the Metropolitan Police Department Chief Charles H. Ramsey support constant monitoring of the city via cameras. But, he said, two years ago the cameras helped nab several men who were breaking into cars.

Forcing the city to draft bills to restrict police use of cameras, Chief Gainer said, is too time-consuming. "I think that trying to force constitutional changes or legislative changes for a policy issue is inefficient."

Civil liberties groups disagreed.

Johnny Barnes, ACLU executive director for the National Capital Area, said that guidelines and regulations often are ignored.

"We need laws and we will call on the D.C. Council over the next few weeks to come up with legislative restrictions," Mr. Barnes said.

He said there is a danger in relying on policy restrictions. The penalties handed out to police using the cameras to spy on people, in the manner of voyeurs, could be handled in-house and the public would never know of it.

Without a law, "there is also no guarantee the officer will be punished by his superiors," Mr. Barnes said.

Other civil liberties activists offered as examples of possible misuse corrupt motor vehicle workers selling licenses and corrupt police officers using wire taps to spy on people.

Chief Gainer urged people not to use extremes to make their cases. He said the civil libertarians' "notions of extremes" - such as officers watching women or using cameras to spy on their girlfriends - is leading to stereotyping, making discussion on camera-related issues and privacy concerns difficult and slanted.

"The people need to make up their minds and let us know what it is they want from us in monitoring and enforcement," Chief Gainer said.

Jeffrey Rosen, a George Washington University law professor, said "systematic camera surveillance" will only be useful for petty crimes and will do nothing to stop terrorism.

But Chief Gainer said the argument went against the premise of community law enforcement.

"No one is telling me to stop international terrorism. They want crime stopped in their neighborhoods," he said.

The chief added that the usefulness of the cameras should not be judged on catching a "terrorist putting a bomb on a doorstep."

"What can't be seen is that the camera may have prevented them from doing it [in the first place]. You can't quantify that," he said.

----

Court to Weigh Drug Testing by Schools
Justices to Decide if Choir, Club Members' Privacy, Like Athletes', May Be Breached

By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 17, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38744-2002Mar16?language=printer

Lindsey Earls remembers vividly the day in the fall of 1998 when a teacher called her and several other students out of choir class at Tecumseh High School in rural Oklahoma and told them it was time to take a drug test.

The girls went to a restroom and urinated in cups while teachers stood outside the stalls listening for sounds of cheating. Afterward, the teachers examined each cup to make sure it contained a liquid of the requisite color and temperature.

"It was really awkward," Earls, now a first-year student at Dartmouth College, said in an interview. "The potential that four or five kids may use drugs is not a good enough reason to invade the privacy of all the other kids."

Earls was found drug-free, but she felt the experience was so unpleasant that she and her parents contacted the American Civil Liberties Union. Aided by ACLU lawyers, they launched a federal lawsuit in 1999, saying the Constitution prohibits the local school board's policy of requiring random drug testing of all students who wish to participate in extracurricular activities such as choir and Future Farmers of America.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case, which has turned into a major battle about the degree to which the war on drugs should take precedence over student privacy concerns.

The court's decision in the case will provide crucial guidance to public school systems across the country contemplating whether to implement policies like Tecumseh's. Given the importance of extracurricular activities to students' college applications, the implications are potentially significant to many American families.

School officials in Tecumseh, supported by friend-of-the-court briefs from a wide array of anti-drug organizations, school boards and the Bush administration, say the policy is a minor intrusion on student privacy intended to deter drug use, not punish it. They say the program is justified by the threat to health and safety posed by illegal drugs.

"This school district developed its policy out of care and concern for its students," said William H. Bleakley, a lawyer for the Tecumseh school district.

But opponents of the policy, including not only the ACLU, but also such groups as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the libertarian Cato Institute, which have filed friend-of-the-court briefs on Earls's behalf, say that students in choir and the like are already drug-free, and that, if anything, the prospect of a drug test actually might drive some students away from supervised after-school activities that help them resist drugs.

"The single best way to prevent drug use is to get students into choir and band and the rest," said Graham A. Boyd, the ACLU-affiliated attorney who will argue Earls's case before the court. "The last thing you want to do is set up barriers to that."

At the heart of the legal issues in the case is a 1995 Supreme Court ruling that authorized public high schools to require student-athletes to take random drug tests as a condition of playing on teams.

The court reasoned that there was substantial evidence of a major drug problem in the school in question -- to which football players and others were contributing heavily. Also, the court held that athletes have less expectation of privacy because they already consent to disrobing in locker rooms and showering together.

As a result, the court held, there could be an exception to the usual constitutional requirement for a search warrant.

In the Lindsay Earls case, a federal district court agreed with the school district that the 1995 Supreme Court ruling could apply to nonathletic activities. But a year ago, the Denver-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit reversed the district court 2 to 1. School authorities had not shown enough evidence that drug use by participants in nonathletic activities was a major problem, the court held.

The 10th Circuit's divided ruling added to a conflict among lower courts, and the Supreme Court agreed to sort it out by hearing the school district's appeal.

Tecumseh school authorities point to the fact that students who participate in extracurricular activities also voluntarily surrender much of their privacy, for instance, when they travel to out-of-town singing competitions and must sleep in crowded dormitory rooms.

The school authorities argue in their brief that even Future Farmers of America could be put at risk by drugs if the students use them during animal shows where they have to keep control over animals weighing hundreds of pounds.

School authorities note that police are never notified of positive test results.

The ACLU counters that the health risks are not nearly comparable to those that drug use adds to contact sports such as football.

Indeed, the ACLU vigorously disputes the school district's portrayal of Tecumseh as a community where parents and teachers report that marijuana use has grown despite the measures -- including surveillance cameras and drug-sniffing dogs -- that are already in place at the schools.

"The kind of unsubstantiated anecdotal evidence of drug use that the district puts forth in support of a special need for drug testing could be conjured from the halls of every high school in America," the ACLU says in its brief.

In its friend-of-the court brief supporting the school district, the National School Boards Association says that "many" of the nation's 14,700 school systems adopted drug testing in some form after the 1995 Supreme Court case.

Testing has not become the norm, however, partly because of the lingering legal uncertainty over how far that rule applies, the association said.

"When the court signs off on a form of drug-testing, it plants a seed in school boards that might have not otherwise considered it," said Boyd, the ACLU-affiliated lawyer.

--

You Haven't Lived Here if You Haven't . . .

Sunday, March 17, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39192-2002Mar16?language=printer

. . . taken in a session of the people's court. The U.S. Supreme Court opens all oral arguments, which will recommence tomorrow, to the public. Visitors can sit in on an entire two-hour session or grab a brief glimpse. Seating is limited, so join one of the two lines that form on the plaza in front of the court early. One other tip before you go: Dress conservatively. It seems certain justices have objected to some visitors' fashion sense, asking one woman to remove a deep orange bandanna she had tied in her hair and telling another to find a jacket to wear over her outfit.

U.S. Supreme Court
1 First St. NE
Building is open from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, except federal holidays. Public lectures are offered every hour on the half-hour when the court is not sitting.

www.supremecourtus.gov

----

Cloudy, With a Chance of Terror

By Andrew Marlatt
Sunday, March 17, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35963-2002Mar15?language=printer

Abandoning the color-coded warning system it unveiled only days ago, the White House yesterday said it will issue five-day terror forecasts instead.

Tom Ridge, director of the Office of Homeland Security, predicted the new format will be a marked improvement over both the five-color system announced on Tuesday and the sporadic alerts the government had been issuing previously.

"After 9-11, our initial tactic was to come out withvague warnings whenever we got wind of something. But that only panicked people," said Ridge. "So we developed the graduated color scheme, but it quickly got depressing. I mean, it was yellow every day, and who wants to walk around in a continuous state of 'significant but unspecified danger?' Wednesday, yellow. Thursday? Yellow. By Friday, it was like that movie, "Groundhog Day." I didn't even want to get out of bed."

The new forecast system, Ridge said, should make it easier for Americans to stay vigilant and plan ahead. Around the country, however, reaction was mixed. Critics questioned the ability of the government's AccuThreat forecasters to predict terror several days in advance, and some Americans complained that five days wouldn't be enough.

"I understand that terrorism is unpredictable, like the weather, but I've booked the Elks Club for June 15," said bride-to-be Sarah Hanozion of Keene, N.H. "What I need is a long-range forecast. Will that be a good day or bad day? Should I wear white or Kevlar?"

Andrew Marlatt is the oligarch of SatireWire.com.

-------- death penalty

Nigerians Hopeful Woman Will Escape Stoning Death

March 17, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-religion-nigeria-sharia.html

SOKOTO, Nigeria (Reuters) - Nigerian human rights activists and lawyers say they are cautiously optimistic an Islamic appeals court will reverse a sentence of death by stoning passed on a Muslim mother convicted of adultery.

A sharia court in the northwestern city of Sokoto is due on Monday to resume hearing the appeal by Safiya Hussaini Tungar-Tudu, a mother of five whose case has sparked a storm of international outrage.

``I am optimistic that Safiya will be set free,'' said Ifeoma Ihenacho, a representative of the Civil Liberties Organization.

Ihenacho, one of several human rights campaigners who have arrived in the conservative Islamic city to hear the appeal, said she based her optimism on a presentation by Hussaini's lawyer, Abdulkadir Ibrahim, at a recent workshop.

``His argument is that the lower sharia court lacked jurisdiction to hear the case. This means that the death sentence passed on her is invalid,'' she said.

The defense argues that a lower sharia court is not competent to hear capital charges.

European Union leaders urged Nigeria on Saturday to show clemency toward Hussaini. In a statement after a two-day summit in Barcelona, the 15 leaders said: ``The European Union is deeply concerned by information received on the potential stoning of a woman in Nigeria.

``It urges the Nigerian authorities to fully respect human rights and human dignity with particular reference to women.''

PRESIDENT RAISES HOPES

President Olusegun Obasanjo, whose volatile country is facing a dangerous split over the introduction of sharia law in the north, hinted last month that Hussaini would win a reprieve, saying the outcome of her appeal would ``gladden hearts.''

``Safiya has appealed and I believe based on that appeal we should expect that justice will be done,'' Obasanjo told a news conference during a brief visit to Italy.

The five appeals judges who were to rule on Hussaini's appeal on January 14 adjourned the case, saying they needed more time to consider new grounds of appeal filed by the defense.

Defense lawyer Ibrahim said then that the law used against Hussaini was not in force when the alleged offence was committed. He also said the lower court failed to investigate whether Hussaini was married. Hussaini says she is divorced.

Hussaini, 33, was sentenced last October after she asked the court to force a man she said raped her to pay for her infant daughter's naming ceremony.

She has said that when her family pressured her to charge the man with rape, the court dismissed the charges against him, citing a lack of evidence because she was the only witness.

The case could re-ignite tensions between Christians and Muslims in northern Nigeria, where hundreds of people have died in sectarian clashes over the past two years, largely over the introduction of sharia law in 1999.

Non-Muslims oppose sharia because of what they say are its harsh sanctions such as amputations for theft. They also say it is unconstitutional in a secular state.

But Obasanjo is powerless to stop state parliaments adopting sharia law because of Nigeria's complex American-style federal constitution.

-------- terrorism

Al Qaeda believed to be shifting money

ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 17, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20020317-5505599.htm

Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network has stepped up its financial activity markedly in recent weeks, suggesting some leaders are reasserting control and may be seeking to finance more attacks against American interests, a U.S. official says.

The increased flow of money corresponds with a recent increase in communications between surviving al Qaeda members, the official said, speaking only on the condition of anonymity.

The communications, detected by U.S. intelligence, have occurred between small groups of al Qaeda fighters and some Taliban allies, officials said. Much of the activity is centered in northwestern Pakistan - near the Afghan border - although some money and communications are going elsewhere, one official said.

The activity suggests some known al Qaeda leaders are re-establishing control over surviving elements of the terrorist network, the official said, declining to name the leaders.

U.S. intelligence has detected a significant boost in money transfers within al Qaeda to people who could use it to prepare attacks on American interests, although the official offered no specifics on potential attacks.

"There's lots of signs al Qaeda is reconstituting itself," said Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorist chief. "Internet traffic has picked up enormously. Money is moving around. There is some evidence leadership is active."

The fate of many of al Qaeda's top commanders is unknown. While several have been killed in the Afghan war, and a few captured, many are believed to have hidden in caves in Afghanistan to wait out the U.S. bombing campaign.

Bin Laden has been silent for months. U.S. intelligence has had vague hints he remained in the Afghan-Pakistan border region. Officials have few doubts he is still alive.

President Bush last week called him "marginalized," and intelligence officials, during classified briefings to congressional leaders, suggested he had been wounded and may be quietly recovering somewhere. But they acknowledge there is no hard evidence on his condition.

Mr. Cannistraro said finding bin Laden remains as important as ever.

"It's pretty clear they don't know where he is, which is why they are de-emphasizing the importance of him," he said.

Other senior leaders capable of masterminding attacks, such as Ayman al Zawahri and Abu Zubaydah, remain at large. Al Zawahri, bin Laden's doctor and spiritual adviser, survived bombing in Afghanistan that killed his family. Zubaydah, previously based in Pakistan, had contacts with al Qaeda cells around the world.

The U.S. official said that while there is some evidence of al Qaeda's leadership at work, many of its cells are capable of conducting attacks independent of top commanders.

The hijackers who conducted September 11 attacks received money from bin Laden's financial chief, also known as Mustafa Ahmed al-Hisawi and Shaikh Saiid. He fled the United Arab Emirates for Pakistan on Sept. 13, and his whereabouts are unknown.

The global financial crackdown on terrorist money has hindered al Qaeda's ability to finance attacks, officials said. But it never stopped.

On Friday, a top Treasury Department official said more than 150 countries have joined the United States in helping to freeze accounts and block transactions between suspected terrorists - including al Qaeda operatives.

Overall, the United States has frozen more than $35 million, while the combined effort of other countries has halted about $70 million, said Mike Romey, special assistant to the treasury secretary for national security, who was speaking to students in Kentucky.

Al Qaeda's money is believed to come from a number of sources - bin Laden's personal fortune, donations of seemingly legitimate Islamic humanitarian concerns, and honey and gold trading.

The activity in Pakistan is one of the strongest signs yet that al Qaeda is attempting to reconstitute itself. U.S. intelligence has been watching in dozens of countries for the arrival of al Qaeda fighters from Afghanistan. Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and Indonesia are top prospects, officials and experts said.

The U.S. government also is tracking a new Taliban-like group in Kurdish-controlled parts of northern Iraq, although officials say they have no evidence it is tied to either the Taliban or al Qaeda. The group, Ansar al-Islam, professes an extremist Islamic philosophy and has some foreign members, the official said.

----

UK warned of new al-Qaeda threat

ALLAN HALL IN BERLIN,
The Scotsman,
March 17, 2002
http://www.news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=295182002

CIA officials have warned British and German intelligence of possible suicide bombing attacks in both countries from al-Qaeda fanatics following a terror summit in Pakistan.

German news magazine Focus reports in its issue on sale today that the information was passed directly to the chancellery in Berlin.

Germany and Britain are being targeted because of the high-profile military roles both countries have assumed in Afghanistan.

Europe has so far been spared any of the kamikaze attacks that have become a hallmark of al-Qaeda in particular.

German officials however now believe the decision to deploy SAS-trained KSK special forces troops inside Afghanistan to fight alongside Americans in the recent large-scale assault on a Taliban and al-Qaeda redoubt has increased the likelihood of revenge being taken in Europe.

According to the magazine, two high-ranking al-Qaeda officials were at the terrorist meeting in Peshawar, northern Pakistan. One of the men comes from Qatar and, according to Focus, "is known to the CIA for being behind unspecified suicide explosions in foreign countries".

The report also states that German intelligence agencies have listened in to telephone calls inside Germany between followers of Osama bin Laden prepared to make "murderous attacks".

The CIA alert was passed on to the Federal Criminal Office, the BKA, on March 8.

The BKA described the CIA warning as "vague" without specific references to targets, timings or methods.

It is not clear when Britain was informed by the Americans about the latest terrorist threat. But the magazine states that al-Qaeda sleepers are thought to be in both countries, waiting for orders for revenge for the assault on the group and its erstwhile protector in Afghanistan, the Taliban.

--------

'American Jihad': Suspect Thy Neighbor

New York Times
March 17, 2002
By ETHAN BRONNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/17/books/review/17BRONNET.html

In 1995, Steven Emerson got into a Washington taxi and noticed on the seat an Arabic-language newspaper bearing his picture with a bull's-eye superimposed on it. Shortly thereafter, with death threats from Islamic militants multiplying, Emerson went underground. He changed apartments, varied his routes and stayed away from windows.

This is a routine he continues to this day, although since Sept. 11 he has sharply increased his profile. It is rare to turn on a cable news program devoted to Islamic extremism without being confronted with Emerson. After a decade of relative obscurity, he now enjoys the status of a prophet no longer without honor. Since the early 1990's, Emerson, who began as a newsmagazine and television reporter and now runs an independent research project on militant Islamic activities, has been asserting that Muslim extremists are a growing danger to Americans. They are a collection of loosely linked, well-rooted groups coordinating and flourishing in places like Oklahoma City, Tampa and Brooklyn. He has warned that if we fail to intervene in this abuse of American freedoms, the groups will carry out brutal attacks against us.

In a 1993 Op-Ed page article in The New York Times, for example, Emerson complained that the World Trade Center bombing earlier that year had been wrongly dismissed by the F.B.I. as the work of local amateurs without links to external groups. Instead, he wrote, the bombing ''is evidence of a more frightening development: Hundreds of radical operatives live in the U.S., making up a possible loose terrorist network that includes highly trained Islamic mercenaries.'' This was the message of a documentary Emerson produced called ''Jihad in America,'' which was broadcast on PBS in late 1994. Now comes ''American Jihad,'' a book that tells how he stumbled on militant Islam in America, saw things that others refused to see and was vilified for it.

In truth, it is hard even now to know exactly what to make of Emerson's contentions. He was certainly right that the first World Trade Center bombing was not the work of a few freelancers, and he was also right that there has been greater coordination between militant groups than was long officially acknowledged. But he has not yet been vindicated in his larger claims. The Sept. 11 attacks were the work of foreign-based terrorists, and there is hardly any evidence of links between the September hijackers and the Islamic charities and centers in this country that Emerson believes are terrorist fronts. Nonetheless, there is no longer any question that his concerns and data deserve serious attention. The government's decision to place some of the groups he identifies on lists whose assets are to be frozen is evidence of newfound respect.

Emerson was never exactly lonely -- conservatives and some Jewish organizations took him quite seriously. But many others dismissed him as an obsessive crusader. This was especially true after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which he initially suggested was the likely work of Muslim radicals. Islamic groups, activists of the left and some journalists derisively dismissed him, labeling him a bigot and a tool of the Jewish right. ''American Jihad'' brings together his research, predictions and accusations, those that have been shown to be essentially true and those about which the jury is still out. It is no masterpiece of prose but it gets the job done. It even offers, on occasion, real insights.

For example, Emerson recounts how a year ago he took part in a government seminar in Washington that focused on worst-case terrorist scenarios. One participant put forward the possibility of a Chinese nuclear attack, and many thought this likely. Emerson said he expected a low-level attack by Islamic militants. Few supported him. He gloomily sent an e-mail message to a friend saying, ''There is an underlying assumption that we are such good people that nobody would ever want to attack us here.'' He was right. He also tells us about his early focus on the ''Afghan Arabs,'' the mostly Middle East fighters who helped defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan and then searched for the next goal of their jihad.

We also learn about how he believes Hamas, the militant Palestinian group, has raised money in the United States. Using groups like the Islamic Association for Palestine and the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, he says, Hamas has held conventions and fund-raising drives that make no distinction between charity for schools and clinics in the Gaza Strip and money to ''carry out operations to escalate the intifada on behalf of the Hamas movement.'' This, Emerson says, very likely included arms purchases and suicide bombings. By gathering the videos and newspapers of the groups and recording speeches at their conventions, Emerson makes a pretty convincing case that they have been promoting a vicious anti-Israel agenda and raising money for groups that engage in terrorism. His footnoted accounts tell of videos showing terrorists boasting of their killings plus interrogations of ''collaborators'' just before their executions at the hands of Palestinians. He quotes what he heard at the meetings, lines like ''Jews are the enemies of humanity even before they are the enemies of Muslims, therefore it is necessary to remove them from power.'' In December, the assets of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development were frozen by presidential order.

Emerson also seeks to show that an engineering professor at the University of South Florida near Tampa used a research group and a nonprofit organization as a base for the American leadership of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a sister organization to Hamas. Again, Emerson cites some troubling evidence -- speeches, letters, visiting professors who later engaged in terrorism against Israel. Sami al-Arian, the professor in question, is fighting dismissal from the university in what has become a celebrated case. Oddly, the university has not publicly focused on Emerson's accusations, only on its contention that al-Arian's presence has ''disrupted'' the campus. Based on the evidence in this book, al-Arian owes an explanation. Emerson cites one videotape in which he says al-Arian refers to Jews as ''monkeys and pigs.''

But other evidence requires an explanation from Emerson. In October 2000 an immigration judge issued a 56-page report concluding that there was no evidence that either al-Arian's research group, World and Islam Studies Enterprise, known by the acronym WISE, or his nonprofit group, the Islamic Concern Project, was a front for terrorists. Moreover, in seeking to show that the two groups were essentially identical organizations, Emerson refers to the matchup in leadership between them. He states, for example, that Khalil Shikaki was an executive member of both and adds, ''Shikaki, one of the first directors of WISE, was also the brother of Fathi Shikaki, secretary general of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.''

This is unfair. Khalil Shikaki is indeed the brother of the founder of Islamic Jihad and did spend a year as a fellow at WISE, although he says he was never a director and never had anything to do with the Islamic Concern Project. One might view this as merely a dispute between interested parties except that Shikaki is one of the most widely respected independent scholars of Palestinian politics today. A frequent guest of Israeli universities and moderate pro-Israel groups in the United States, he is quoted often by the Israeli news media and has never shown the slightest inclination toward Islamic militancy. To suggest that his being the brother of Fathi tells you where his loyalties lie is so misleading as to raise questions about Emerson's general reliability. There are other, small errors in the book -- like describing the site of a 1995 attack in Riyadh as a barracks when it was a training center and asserting that Hamas calls its military wing the Abdullah Azzam Brigades when it is the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades. The chapter called ''A Brief History of Islamic Fundamentalism'' is scattered and uninformative.

Emerson may not be a scholar, and he may sometimes connect unrelated dots. He may also occasionally be quite wrong. But he is an investigator who has performed a genuine service by focusing on radical Islamic groups in this country. His information should be taken seriously -- just not at face value.

Ethan Bronner is assistant editorial page editor of The Times.

--------

THE JIHAD FILES
Al Qaeda's Grocery Lists and Manuals of Killing

New York Times
March 17, 2002
By DAVID ROHDE and C. J. CHIVERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/17/international/asia/17DOCU.html?pagewanted=all

In Aug. 17, 1995, Amir Maawia Siddiqi, the son of a bookshop owner in a small village in Pakistan, set down his oath of allegiance to the jihad.

"I, Amir Maawia Siddiqi, son of Abdul Rahman Siddiqi, state in the presence of God that I will slaughter infidels my entire life," he wrote. "And with the will of God I will do these killings in the supervision and guidance with Harkat ul-Ansar."

He accepted a code name, Abu Rashid, signed his name and concluded, "May God give me strength in fulfilling this oath."

The oath, found in a house in Kabul used by a Pakistani Islamist group, was part of an extensive paper record that fleeing Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters left behind last fall at sites across Afghanistan. Reporters for The New York Times collected over 5,000 pages of documents from abandoned safe houses and training camps destroyed by bombs.

It is a rare collection, the raw, unmediated stuff of the jihadis' lives. Individually, the documents are shards - as mundane as a grocery list and as chilling as notes for the proper positioning of a truck bomb. But taken together, they tell a rich inside story of the network of radical Islamic groups that Osama bin Laden helped assemble in Afghanistan.

The documents show that the training camps, which the Bush administration has described as factories churning out terrorists, were instead focused largely on creating an army to support the Taliban, which was waging a long ground war against the Northern Alliance.

An estimated 20,000 recruits passed through roughly a dozen training camps since 1996, when Mr. bin Laden established his base of operations in Afghanistan, American officials say. Most received basic infantry training that covered the use of various small arms, as well as antiarmor and antiaircraft weapons and, in some cases, basic demolition, the documents show.

"The vast majority of them were cannon fodder," a United States government official said.

A smaller group of recruits was selected for elite training that appeared to prepare them for terrorist actions abroad. "Observing foreign embassies and facilities," was the subject of one Qaeda espionage course. Another taught "shooting the personality and his guard from a motorcycle."

Above all, the documents show how far Mr. bin Laden progressed in realizing his central vision: joining Muslim militants, energized by local causes, into a global army aimed at the West. From the mid- 1990's on, recruits came to Afghanistan from more than 20 countries, as varied as Iraq and Malaysia, Somalia and Britain.

The young men arrived in Afghanistan under the auspices of several different militant groups, each of which ran training camps. But once there, they received strikingly similar courses of religious indoctrination and military training. Parts of the same Arabic-language terrorist manual were found in houses of three of those groups: Al Qaeda, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and Harkat ul-Ansar, the Pakistani group that changed its name to Harkat ul-Mujahadeen and has been linked to the killing of the American journalist Daniel Pearl.

Commingled under that umbrella was a mix of spoken and written languages; in the documents translated by The Times, there were more than half a dozen: Arabic, Urdu, Tajik, Dari, Pashto, Uzbek and Russian. A few documents were in English.

This community of militants had progressed so far that it took on the feel of a bureaucracy. There were forms to keep track of ammunition, spending and more. Al Qaeda commanders, like middle managers everywhere, griped about the bosses. In one letter, a commander commiserated with another about their boss's lack of support, and tried to bolster his friend's flagging morale, reminding him, "Jihad is, by definition, surrounded by difficulties."

Reporters came upon the documents in musty basements and yards strewn with trash and grenades and mines. Some were streaked with mud, others partly burned. They hardly present a complete picture of Al Qaeda. They show no specific plans for terror operations abroad, and while hinting at an ambition to use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, they contain no evidence that the groups possess them.

They are a decidedly eclectic amalgam. In a house used by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, an Islamist publication inveighed against "the phenomena of the Beatles and the hippies," which had "caused a great danger against the security of America and Europe." A National Rifle Association target was found in a Harkat house in Kabul. A few miles away, in a Qaeda house, a sign implored, "My brother the mujahid, my brother the visitor, please keep the guest house clean."

Résumés of Holy Warriors

The letter, dated Feb. 26, 1995, was addressed to "respected emir for ministry of ammunition" and it announced the arrival at a Harkat safe house of another recruit.

"Brother, Muhammad Afzal, who is with this letter, is coming for the training," said the letter from a Harkat official in Pakistan. "He is master in karate. You can try to take full advantage of him, very hard-working fellow. Blessings to all other fellows."

Throughout the late 1990's, young men streamed through the Khyber Pass and on to dusty training camps operated by Al Qaeda and other Islamic radical groups. Many carried letters of introduction as proof of their trustworthiness.

Lists found in houses around Afghanistan show that the men came from countries in the Islamic world and beyond: Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Bosnia, Bangladesh, China, the Philippines, Russia, Britain, Canada and the United States.

The imported military force turned middle-class homes in Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kandahar and other cities into headquarters and guest houses, crammed with recruits. Derelict Afghan military bases and fallow fields became training grounds.

A variety of documents, mostly handwritten, offer glimpses of the young men, and of what drew them to the jihad. One document, found in a Kabul house used by Harkat, contains short biographical sketches of 39 recruits. They were all unmarried. Few had gone beyond secondary school. But quite a few, the interviewers noted, had studied the Koran. Several had previously been connected to fundamentalist groups at home. Many, it appears, were asked if their parents had given them permission to join the jihad. Twelve, the document noted, had permission. Fifteen did not.

The list gave this information about a man with the code name Sultan Sajid: "Son of Mr. Muhammad Anwar, owner of sweet store. Age: 18 years. Status: Unmarried. Education: Matriculate and learned Koran by translation. Knows how to make sweets, and can hunt birds and fish. Five brothers and four sisters. Address: Kamoke District Gujranwala, at Saboki dandian. Got permission from home happily."

Of a man code-named Hafiz Abu Muhammad, the document says: "Education: Matriculate, memorized Koran. Knows how to embroider. Served in military for three and a half years. He is fond of jihad; that is why he came to us."

Sixteen-year-old Hafiz Muhammad Arif was the son of a customs officer and had five brothers and four sisters, one in medical school. "No permission from home," the list says. "His [family] wanted to send him to America. Impressed by the speech of Mr. Maulana Fazal-ur-Rehman Khalil," Harkat's leader.

Across Kabul, near the Intercontinental Hotel, an ornate, two-story home with a fireplace in the living room had been converted into a Qaeda safe house. There, the lists revealed less personal information; code names were primarily used. But they did record the weapons the men carried.

A man from Yemen, code-named Abu Labath, was armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle and three hand grenades. He arrived on May 7, 1999. Abu Qatada al- Madani, a code name suggesting he came from the Saudi city of Medina, arrived on Nov. 29, 1998, armed with a Kalashnikov, an ammunition pouch and hand grenades. He had memorized through the "second part" of the Koran and completed "half of the foundational course."

Afghanistan was the embodiment of Mr. bin Laden's vision of a global jihad. Radical leaders and foot soldiers met there, networked and bonded, sharing military tactics and religious tracts. The abandoned houses and camps were strewn with inspirational pamphlets, books, videos and CD's, all sounding the call to arms. Central to their message was the re-establishment of the Caliphate, the era of Islam's ascendancy after the death of Muhammad in the eighth century.

The Caliphate "is the only and best solution to the predicaments and problems from which Muslims suffer today and indubitable cure to the turbulence and internal struggles that plague them," said one English- language treatise. "It will remedy the economic underdevelopment which bequeathed upon us a political dependence on an atheist East and infidel West."

There was a publication for every count in Mr. bin Laden's indictment of the West.

The cover of a magazine called The Window shows a woman weeping as a cobra bearing the Star of David looms over Muslim protesters at the Dome of the Rock, the holy Islamic site in Jerusalem. A pamphlet with an American soldier superimposed over the holy city of Mecca urges readers, "Fight until there is no discord and all of religion is for God." A yellow paperback book, "Announcement of Jihad Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Holy Places," shows a map of Saudi Arabia encircled by American, French and British flags. Its author was "Sheik Osama bin Laden."

Diverse Muslim groups joined Mr. bin Laden's global jihad. Sometimes, they also came seeking help in pressing their own causes back home.

In a Qaeda house in Kabul, there was a public statement from the "Islamic Battalion, Kurdistan, Iraq," dated Nov. 20, 1999, calling on "the movement for Islamic unity" to help in the jihad against President Saddam Hussein. There was also a handwritten letter to Mr. bin Laden from an unidentified Russian who said his group needed training for two attacks in Russia.

Harkat members fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, but their true obsession was India's control of the disputed territory of Kashmir. In the moldering basement of the group's Kabul house, amid rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition boxes and land mines, sat boxes of glossy green labels for a recruiting cassette featuring "sermons of distinguished Muslim scholars" and "jihadi poems."

Fighters from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan had a different agenda: installing an Islamic government in Uzbekistan, and ultimately uniting Central Asia and Xinjiang, a predominantly Muslim region of western China, into an sprawling Islamic theocracy called Turkestan.

"All the Muslim people of Turkestan have lost their patience and have chosen the holy road to emigration for preparing for jihad- in-the-way-of-God," said a flier found in the headquarters of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan in Mazar-i-Sharif. "Thank God that all these new immigrants have completed jihad training and are prepared for practical jihad."

Push-Ups and Sit-Ups

A sprawling training camp in the serene farming village of Rishkhor, 20 miles south of Kabul, is mostly rubble now. Walls are still painted with Koranic verses and slogans invoking the jihad. "All the Christians, Jews and infidels have joined hands against Afghanistan," one poster begins. Bombing by American fighters last fall destroyed all but two of the dozen or so buildings and turned fields into a landscape of craters. The ground is littered with unexploded mines and unspent ammunition. Everywhere there is paper.

Documents from Rishkhor - where Afghans, Pakistanis and Arabs trained - along with records, notebooks and manuals found elsewhere in Afghanistan, show that recruits received the kind of regimented, demanding basic training that infantry soldiers get in much of the world, but with steady infusions of Islamic fervor. This is reflected in the "Rules for the Day" found at a Harkat house. It declares:

"Follow all Islamic principles.
"Pray five times a day.
"Punctual for food.
"No ammunition training without the permission of the teacher.
"Cleanliness.
"Clean beds and tents once a week.
"Clean the environment.
"Do not leave compound.
"No political discussions.
"No arguments.
"No drugs.
"Go to bed early."

Physical training began at 6 a.m., according to a schedule found at the house. Calisthenics performance was scrupulously monitored. One morning, a recruit named Abu Turab led his class of 38, knocking off 45 push-ups and 40 sit-ups and crawling 25 meters in 21 seconds, according to a chart.

Abu Rashid was in the middle of the pack, with 30 push-ups, 30 sit-ups and 35 seconds in the crawl. Even injured men took part. Abu Hanza, who the chart noted had a wounded hand, and Asad Ullah, with a wounded leg, did 30 sit-ups each and crawled 25 yards in 23 seconds. (They skipped push-ups.)

Others struggled to make the grade. Saif Ullah took a full 60 seconds to crawl those 25 yards. Others labored to complete a group run. Khalid was "slightly behind," Abdullah "cannot run along," and Asad Ullah "stopped three times," according to the chart. Tipu Sultan appeared to be the worst of all, managing only 11 push-ups and 10 sit- ups and skipping the group run. His name was scratched off the list.

After their workout, recruits took a break, presumably for breakfast, and returned for basic infantry classes from 8:30 to 9:10, 9:15 to 10:40 and 11:10 to 12:35. After lunch and prayers, the afternoon was for Koran study, sports and lectures. Students answered essay questions. "It is not easy to write on martyrs such as these," one said in answering a question on the lives of the great Muslim martyrs. "The pen does not give them their due."

Classes at the different camps followed the same basic infantry lesson plan. A training notebook from a recruit named Muhammad Rashid Arghany moved through the use of the Kalashnikov, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, map reading and celestial navigation. The course was highly detailed, and the recruit appears to have taken handwritten notes every step of the way.

Military instruction drew on religious doctrine. "Without a sign from the leader you should not retreat," read the notes of a student in a class on ambush tactics. "Because the Koran says: `Do not retreat, but stay steady; in time of war there is no death. My only power is the power of Allah.' "

The instructor emphasized the importance for gunmen to remain completely still while laying in wait. "This is very difficult work, and therefore in order to save oneself from melancholy, and selfishness and confusion, you must remain in prayer and meditation on Allah," the class notes say.

The notebook goes on to describe how to carry out a coordinated infantry assault, a carefully timed maneuver in which infantrymen advance while support troops on their flank fire directly in front of them. If the timing is off, the advancing soldiers can be killed by the fire of their comrades.

"If he is hit by their own bullets or if the enemy's fire becomes intense, do not become upset, but do your work with patience and care," the notes say. The lecturer explained that a soldier killed by his own forces would still be considered a "shahid," or martyr, and be granted immediate entrance to heaven.

Like any army, though admittedly with its own religious and political vernacular, the jihadi network was constantly indoctrinating and building esprit de corps. A quick summary of the "Goals and Objectives of Jihad" was found in a Qaeda house:

"1. Establishing the rule of God on earth.
"2. Attaining martyrdom in the cause of God.
"3. Purification of the ranks of Islam from the elements of depravity."

Another document described the two "illegitimate excuses for leaving Jihad" - "love of the world" and "hatred of death."

The Qaeda Media Committee made sure past victories were remembered. A flier from one guest house advertised a screening of a new film, "The Destruction of the American Destroyer Cole."

"Please let us know your comments and suggestions," the committee wrote.

Other notebooks depicted an entirely different type of training: espionage and explosives classes, perhaps for more advanced recruits or those headed to terror cells abroad. (Ahmed Ressam, a Qaeda member convicted of plotting to blow up Los Angeles International Airport during millennium celebrations, testified at a trial in New York last year that he first attended a basic infantry camp and then received advanced training.)

An espionage class notebook, written in neat Arabic but not signed, had the following headings: "How to use a code, security of operations, security plan, intelligence, intelligence gathering, surveillance, methods of communication, methods of opening envelopes, persuasion, planning for intelligence operations, recruitment, managing assets, choosing an asset."

"Persuasion," for instance, involved "obtaining information from a person through conversations with him without his realizing the importance of what he is saying."

There were step-by-step instructions on surveillance: "Get complete description of person, his habits, his daily errands, his children and his wife, his standing in the community, his skills and educational goals, his income, when he wakes, the best times for inspecting his house, places he goes regularly."

An Arabic-language explosives curriculum found in the Harkat house gave detailed instructions on how to make and handle a range of substances: nitroglycerin, HMDT, RDX, C-4, C-3, dynamite and ammonium nitrate.

A final section dealt with "major poisons and poison gasses," which "can be extracted in various ways, and we shall, God willing, review these various ways later." The document listed the toxins - including ricin, botulism and cyanide - and described how to manufacture and use them.

There were syllabuses for a variety of advanced classes. For one class, a Harkat document listed these "standards to be achieved":

"1. Follow the armed person, and kill him quietly.
"2. To be able to patrol closely.
"3. To penetrate at enemy positions with expertise."

Another Harkat class, this one 65 days long, involved instruction in such matters as "hit teams" and "hijacking of air, bus, ship." For yet another, the fourth item on the syllabus was "Movie, `Great Escape.' "

Among the students at one elite 10-day program was a Qaeda recruit named Atta al-Azdi. On his first day, a Sunday, he learned "shooting the personality and his guard from a motorcycle," his class schedule shows. On Monday, he moved along to "shooting at two targets in a car from above, front and back."

The training, which included strict limits on the range and number of bullets he could use, wound up with lessons in "killing personality using R.P.G.," a rocket-propelled grenade, and "killing personality and guards from car."

An instructor scribbled a one-word evaluation of Mr. Azdi's performance during the final two sessions: "Good."

Bureaucracy and Paperwork

Behind the sprawling network of camps lay an extensive bureaucracy. And like every bureaucracy, it churned out paper: expense forms, finance notebooks, computer parts inventories, lists of rented houses.

"Twenty-Second Jihad Division - Kabul Front" had its own forms for tracking soldiers and expenses, with the name of its commander, "Abdul Wakil from Somalia," printed in the lower left-hand corner. "Al Qaeda Ammunition Warehouse" forms kept an inventory of weapons and munitions.

Officials were hounded to monitor spending. In a testy note dated June 19, 2001, a Qaeda official named Abdel Hadi el-Ansary wrote to a colleague, "El Shaikh Abu Abdalla had personally emphasized for the second time the necessity of absolutely sending the budget expenditure tables."

Even the most common expenditures were recorded. "Bread, vegetables, cooking oil, medicines," one expense form read. "Potatoes, onions, tea, rice," read another. One document accounted for an assistant chef's salary of $20 a month.

There were even inventories of martyrs. A computer-generated list found in the Harkat house enumerated each man's "time of death," "place of death," "cause of death," "where buried," and "number of grave."

The groups even produced organizational guidelines, including a 28-page Arabic-language document, "Forming Military Units at the Behest of the Ministry of Jihad," found in a Qaeda house.

One page devoted to command structure listed three divisions under the "executive officer": "administrative affairs," "personnel issues" and "social work." It went on to enumerate various administrative responsibilities, including "monitoring young men," "attention to administrative affairs of brothers staying for periods of longer than six months," and "undertaking basic services - food, cleaning clothes, making sure meals are served on time."

Another page showed how to set up a camp for a battalion of soldiers, with a diagram showing placement of the entrance gate, sleeping quarters, ammunition warehouse, water tank, mosque and headquarters. The camp, the document said, "is like a beehive," where soldiers should "check and maintain their weapons," "train for combat," receive "moral guidance" and have "pure, clean competitions between the various units for excellence."

There were equipment specifications. Each "mujahid," according to a Harkat document, should get "uniform, boots, army belt, hat, handkerchief, flashlight, batteries, soap, pencil, jackets, gloves, medicines."

Mr. bin Laden, who has effectively used the media to fashion an image and spread his message, was also quite interested in what the press was saying about him and his cause. The March 2001 issue of the Qaeda Media Committee's monthly press packet included news articles culled from the Internet with these headlines:

"Taliban Halt Production of Opium."
"Belgian Intelligence Service Stops Bin Laden Smuggling of Russian Missiles."
"Jordan: 9 Indictments Against 2 Leaders of Bin Laden's Organization."
"Taliban Execute 2 Women Accused of Prostitution."

Under a headline that read "American State Department: Israel Used Excessive Force" was a picture of a Israeli soldier picking up the body of an Arab man. The soldier resembled former Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel. Under the picture was a note: "Barak murdering a Muslim."

If the jihadi army operated like other organizations, it also displayed much of the usual internal bickering.

Recruits complained about their instructors. "Thank God for the opportunity to take this course," a recruit named Rami wrote in what appeared to be an evaluation of one of his classes. But then he pointed out that "I'm not sure about the requirements of this course, since the trainer pressures the trainees and stresses their nerves."

Commanders griped about their bosses. In an Aug. 27, 2001, letter, a commander named Abd al-Hadi al-Ansari commiserated with a colleague, Abd al-Wakil, about how their superior did not support them. He said he had noticed a recent loss of morale in Mr. Wakil and counseled him on how to navigate the frustrations of the bureaucracy.

"Don't let anyone put pressure on you. Don't accept an assignment you cannot implement," he wrote. "Whenever you are given a new assignment, try to create your own team and never choose brothers that are older than you."

Even the big bosses carped.

"I think that there are no more people who truly trust in good any more," said a memo dated June 15, 1998, from a Qaeda house. "Everyone has trained his followers so that they are only concerned about their own status, name and rank, that they have forgotten everything about following orders and respecting their main leader."

It was signed "the servant of Islam Mullah Muhammad Omar."

Chain of Command

Mr. bin Laden's dream took shape on the desolate Shamali Plain, a broad plateau just north of Kabul where years of trench warfare have turned a belt of vineyards into a maze of wilted vines and jagged stumps. Hundreds of young Muslim men who came from around the world for indoctrination and training in Afghanistan were sent to the front to fight for the Taliban in a grinding war with the Northern Alliance.

Defending the Taliban's hold on Afghanistan was the primary mission of the jihad, and Northern Alliance soldiers spoke with awe of the willingness of Arabs, Pakistanis and other volunteers to die for the cause.

Mr. bin Laden, in a long dispatch to the Muslim faithful found in a house used by Al Qaeda in Kabul, urged them to recognize Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban, as "the leader of the faithful."

But for many fighters, the deepest inspiration was Mr. bin Laden himself.

In a handwritten Arabic letter from the trenches north of Kabul, a commander named Oma al-Adani described a dream "one of the brothers" had about Mr. bin Laden. "I was in my bedroom, and I saw the Prophet Muhammad," he wrote. "He looked to his left and saw Fahd, the king of Saudi Arabia, and said, `Those are not from me, and I am not from them.' "

"Then he walked and saw Sheik Osama and the martyrs," a reference to Mr. bin Laden and his followers, "and said, `Those are from me, and I am of them.' "

The machinery that Mr. bin Laden had assembled answered his call to defend the Taliban. Ledgers, notebooks and letters found in houses used by Al Qaeda and Harkat detailed the movement of soldiers to units stationed north of Kabul. A notebook entitled "Kabul front" and written in Arabic appeared to record fighters sent to the front: Bilal, 20, who went to Afghanistan in 1998, and Amir, 23, who arrived in 2000.

Left behind in the trenches of the Shamali Plain are crumpled scraps of paper that reflect the diversity of fighters Mr. bin Laden had drawn to the jihad. In one bunker, Lufti, an Arab recruit, left a note written by two friends, imploring, "Don't forget us in your prayers while you're gone." Pakistani newspapers and cassettes with sermons by radical Pakistani clerics were found a few hundreds yards away. A pay stub for a young Pakistani man named Ahmad Bakhtair lay on the ground outside one bunker. His job title was "helper," according to the stub, and his net salary in May 2001 was 2,655 rupees, or roughly $40.

In another trench, a volunteer left another scrap: a page from Newsday, the Long Island newspaper, dated April 19, 2001.

Today, the young men of Mr. bin Laden's jihad are again in combat, this time against American troops.

The end of their story has not yet been written, but the words of a Harkat recruit who fought against the Northern Alliance in an earlier battle may suggest one.

"I was wounded," he wrote in a diary found in a Harkat house. "Out of four of us, three of us were wounded and the fourth one, Brother Muhammad Siddiq, was martyred. . . . We were taken to the hospital, and there we said farewell to Brother Siddiq. We three are still in search of our home."


-------- ENERGY AND OTHER

-------- energy

Proposed Calvert Budget Calls for No Tax Hike

By Raymond McCaffrey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 17, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35969-2002Mar15?language=printer

... The county anticipates $136.5 million in revenue during the next fiscal year. That includes $6.1 million in anticipated state reimbursements for revenue lost because of state deregulation of electrical utilities, according to Shannon.

However, the county is awaiting a final decision from the state on that money, which is intended as compensation for tax revenue lost from Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant after deregulation, Shannon said....

[This certainly raises some questions. Anyone able to explain further? mailto:prop1@prop1.org (NucNews). et]

-------- environment

[What happens to the toxic household chemicals that are mixed in with the "sludge"? et]

Waste Not, Says Maker of New Fertilizer
Leesburg Utility to Sell Sewage Sludge Turned Gardening Product

By Jennifer Lenhart
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 17, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39198-2002Mar16?language=printer

The guys who run the brand-new sludge-drying machines at Leesburg's sewage treatment plant are talking boldly these days about a grand future for their new product -- Tuscarora Turf Builder.

Heat-dried sludge, that is. Turned into pellets and bagged, it will, if all goes as planned, be available in neighborhood garden centers for spreading over flower beds, lawns and vegetable patches this year.

The plant operators' dreams don't stop there. Tuscarora Turf Builder could, they say, one day be the soil supplement of choice for the nation's most famous grass: the White House lawn. After all, the groundskeepers at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. spread Washington's earlier home-grown fertilizer ComPRO on the president's greensward. But that lawn additive bit the dust in 1999, a victim of complaints about the smell involved in making it.

"It'll be more popular than that, because that stuff was more odorous," said Randolph W. Shoemaker, Leesburg's director of utilities.

The Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission made ComPRO the old-fashioned way -- outdoors, by composting with wood chips added to sludge. Tuscarora Turf Builder, named after a creek flowing through town, is being manufactured indoors, in Leesburg's water-pollution-control plant four miles east of the historic town center.

Leesburg is the first town in the region and one of an estimated 20 utility departments nationally to use a heat-drying technology that turns wastewater residue into fertilizer pellets. Two plants in Baltimore and one in Hagerstown use a form of the process, Leesburg officials said.

They prefer the method because it reduces fumes, retains nutrients and does not involve spreading sludge on the ground, where it can run off into streams and groundwater. Public opposition to sludge-spreading is on the rise in Virginia and many other states, but U.S. Environmental Protection Agency research has indicated that the process is safe if done according to regulations.

Leesburg received a $1.5 million grant through the Virginia Water Quality Improvement Fund as part of $11 million in start-up costs for the heat-drying method, including machinery and computer programs needed to run it.

The manufacturing process involves piping wastewater to the Leesburg plant, where it is treated. Moisture is extracted from the resulting sludge, which is then reduced to pellets that are heat-dried in giant drums to kill bacteria.

Ninety percent of the air used in the drying is recycled, or "reburned," and doesn't leave the building. "We don't anticipate any complaints as far as odor," Shoemaker said.

The finished pellets, measuring 1 to 4 millimeters, are coated in mineral oil to reduce dust. The product, rich in nitrogen and phosphorous, could receive certification as a Class A biosolid as early as April 15 from the Virginia Department of Health. The certification would guarantee that Tuscarora Turf Builder is free of disease and safe to use on household plants, in vegetable gardens and on other crops intended for human consumption.

Leesburg plans a staged introduction of Tuscorora Turf Builder. The first batch, made in December, and subsequent sample batches were given to area farmers, as permitted by the state Health Department.

There's likely to be a lot of the stuff. The plant processes about 3 million gallons of sewage per day, enough to produce about 1 1/2 tons of Tuscarora Turf Builder daily. In April, Leesburg will begin giving it to utility customers who are town residents. Customers will be invited to swing by the water-pollution-control plant for a free 50-pound bag of pellets. Anyone who shows up at the plant in a pickup can ask to have it loaded with Tuscarora Turf Builder.

Then it's on to the retail market, where Leesburg's fertilizer will have to compete with established products.

Shoemaker hopes that area residents will want to use a home-grown product, which is expected to wholesale for about $3 per 25-pound bag.

"Ours will just be for a local market since we don't produce as much as major metropolitan areas," said Shoemaker, who dreamed up the name Tuscarora Turf Builder during a brainstorming session with his staff.

Tuscarora Turf Builder might have a difficult time distinguishing itself, said Zac Reicher, associate professor of agronomy at Purdue University's Turfgrass Research Center.

"It's an environmentally positive way of getting rid of the sludge," Reicher said. "On the other hand, in terms of saying it's a better fertilizer than we have today, I would be very surprised."

Leesburg's utility people are looking forward to the product's debut. On a bookshelf in the Leesburg plant, a half-dozen glass jars are neatly lined up. They are filled with black blobs of heat-dried sludge.

"Want to smell some?" Shoemaker asked, unscrewing the lid of a jar containing rice-size pellets. "It virtually has no odor."

-------- health

Chemists trick Alzheimer's enzyme

3/15/2002
UPI
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=15032002-055637-2087r

LA JOLLA, Calif. -- Chemists at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla said Friday they have tricked an enzyme essential in Alzheimer's disease into blocking its own debilitating action.

A team led by Nobel laureate K. Barry Sharpless developed the chemical trick, called "click chemistry," to make a molecule that blocks neurotransmitter destruction caused by the brain enzyme acetylcholinesterase.

The destructive enzyme catalyzes the so-called "click reaction" that creates its own worst enemy -- its most potent inhibitor.

"Think of this as a Trojan Horse approach for battling disease, but this horse goes the Greeks one better," Sharpless, W.M. Keck professor of chemistry at Scripps, said in a prepared statement. "We create the pieces that can be clicked together to make the horse."

Once the disease-causing enzyme assembles the horse, Sharpless explained, out march the inhibitors, chemical soldiers who stop the enzyme cold. By assembling its own inhibitor, the enzyme actually designs the drug that will best halts its progress.

"This is indeed a revolutionary method in rational drug design," neuroscientist James Olds, director of the Krasnow Institute for Neurobiology at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., told United Press International. "It may have great applicability to improving the specificity of drugs, particularly those currently used in the treatment of neurological and psychiatric diseases."

Molecular drug designers make inhibitor molecules that fit snuggly into the active sites of target enzymes, blocking their action on other molecules. Many diseases -- cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's, arthritis and anthrax, for instance -- induce unnatural functions in enzymes. Inhibiting enzyme action can treat these diseases.

Enzyme active sites are also highly specific, so drugs react only with the sites and nowhere else.

"A major problem of current drugs is that they are 'dirty', that is, they have side effects -- often untoward -- because they interact with proteins or enzymes other than the ones planned for," Olds, an expert on neurological diseases, told UPI.

"In addition, Sharpless' method may have great import in designing drugs to interact with proteins for which we presently have no good compounds," he said.

The enzyme selected for the click chemistry test, acetylchonlinesterase, was one of the first brain enzymes identified. It breaks down acetylcholine, the neurotransmitter that propagates nerve signals. Inhibitors of acetylcholinesterase treat the dementia associated with Alzheimer's disease by increasing the amount of acetylcholine in the brain.

Sharpless and his team synthesized molecular building blocks that, when pieced together, create a single larger molecule with no by-products -- an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor. With the blocks in place, the essential ingredient -- the enemy enzyme itself -- goes to work. The trick -- active spots on the acetylcholinesterase surface act like hands that grab and orient the click components of the inhibitor, snapping them together.

"The building blocks react only with each other, and not with anything else in the mixture," Scripps Research Institute chemistry professor and study co-author M.G. Finn told UPI from La Jolla.

"Furthermore, the reaction occurs only when the pieces are held by the target enzyme -- acetylcholinesterase -- next to each other, not when they happen to bump into each other in solution."

In other words, the disease-causing enzyme welds the bars of its own prison.

(Reported by UPI Science Correspondent Mike Martin in Columbia, Mo.)

---

Invisible Armies 'Secret Agents:
The Menace of Emerging Infections' by Madeline Drexler

Reviewed by Nicols Fox
Sunday, March 17, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29950-2002Mar14?language=printer

SECRET AGENTS - The Menace of Emerging Infections,
By Madeline DrexlerNational Academy/Joseph Henry 316 pp. $24.95

Any lingering doubt that the release of pathogenic organisms posed a potential terrorist threat vanished last autumn in the anthrax attacks. The siege roused from dark recesses of collective memory the image of uncontrollable, spreading, life-threatening disease: of plague. While the individual chance of being infected with anthrax was statistically slight, the dangers were real, serious, astonishingly disruptive and unpredictable. Assumptions of modern safety and control vanished in a puff of powder; along with them went cozy illusions about the certainties of modern medicine, the adequacy of the public health infrastructure, and the ability of government to organize an effective and efficient response to a novel and unexpected threat.

Anthrax is not an emerging pathogen. It has been around a long time, but in the wrong hands it poses a new threat. Madeline Drexler includes it in Secret Agents, her timely survey of emerging infections, but she focuses chiefly on the many other microbial troublemakers with the potential to upset whatever assumptions about safety and security we have left.

The period between the 1950s and '70s was one of complacency about the dangers of infectious diseases and overconfidence in our ability to combat them. Smallpox was on the verge of being vanquished -- at least to the basements of Soviet and American laboratories. Antibiotics and vaccines kept the remaining infectious diseases under control, or so we thought.

But the '80s saw the emergence of a swarm of new pathogens and exotic diseases. The public could hardly keep track of the names: Legionnaires' disease, toxic-shock syndrome, E. coli O157:H7, Ebola, Cyclospora, Marburg, Campylobacter, Listeria and of course HIV. The complacency shuddered and cracked, but held.

The random nature of the anthrax infections, the very ordinariness of handling the mail, the idea that there might be no place to hide finally brought the danger of emerging infections to the forefront of public awareness. Pathogens, with or without the help of terrorists, are opportunistic, and in a rapidly changing world we have unwittingly created new niches they find agreeable. A global system of trade and transportation has proven just as convenient for disease as for humans.

Drexler's book begins too slowly, but in the second chapter, she gets down to business. Any outbreak of unknown cause is a mystery waiting to be solved, and the best outbreak stories have the quality of a good detective yarn. Drexler pieces together the interplay of bungles, the barriers of ego and ambition, and the lucky breaks in the investigation into New York's 1999 encephalitis outbreak, which eventually proved to be caused by the exotic West Nile virus.

She goes on to warn of newly antibiotic-resistant "superbugs," she relays recent evidence suggesting the infectious causes of some chronic diseases, she explores the changing nature of foodborne infections, and she illuminates, to the extent possible, the terrifying world of bioweaponry. She tells us that of the 50 or so pathogens developed as weapons, only 13 can be combated with vaccines or treatments.

She also follows the work of investigators who attempt to unravel the buried secrets of the influenza pandemic of 1918 that killed between 40 and 80 million people. The researchers hope that the particulars will help fend off a similar threat from a virus that continues to mutate and jump species threateningly. We are overdue for an influenza pandemic, living today in a rare era that public health officials call "inter-pandemic." That, Drexler writes, "is a gloomy locution, rather like calling good health the inter-disease period, or marriage the inter-divorce period."

Nevertheless, the outbreaks will surely come, she says, whether from influenza or West Nile virus or plague or Ebola or terrorist-introduced smallpox or something as yet unnamed. Drexler's strongest message: We are not ready. We are not prepared medically, psychologically, economically or politically to respond well to the epidemics that will surely occur. Scattered authority, competition, even ordinary fear and basic survival instincts will tend to undermine effective response. At an emergency planning session in one state, an epidemiologist says, participants trying to decide who would be vaccinated first in the event of attack nearly came to blows. Humans will be humans.

Thus, the anthrax attacks were a valuable warning of the challenge ahead and the difficulties of devising a system fully prepared to cope -- raising the question of whether a perfectly efficient, totally logical, authoritarian approach to such a disaster is most desirable. Some might prefer to simply take their chances. That is our dilemma.

Secret Agents is a well-written, well-researched and balanced effort, but almost nothing it reports is reassuring. Drexler describes the urgent threats facing a system ill-prepared to cope. The situation warrants prompt and serious attention, and yet the loudest message of all may be that not everything is controllable -- which sounds like heresy but isn't.

One criticism: The inexplicable lack of footnotes diminishes this book's value and undermines its usefulness. A 1996 study by Department of Agriculture scientists, for instance, found that one infected cow could contaminate 16 tons of hamburger meat. Drexler says it can contaminate eight tons. Has the study been revised? Is she referring to another study? Has she simply made an error? We will never know because there are no citations, which is too bad, as this is otherwise a fine and valuable effort. •

Nicols Fox is the author of "Spoiled: Why Our Food Is Making Us Sick."

----

Many Doctors Say They Are Refusing Medicare Patients

New York Times
March 17, 2002
By ROBERT PEAR
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/17/health/policy/17HEAL.html

WASHINGTON - For the first time, significant numbers of doctors are refusing to take new Medicare patients, saying the government now pays them too little to cover the costs of caring for the elderly.

Medicare cut payments to doctors by 5.4 percent this year. The government estimates that under current law, the fees paid for each medical service will be reduced in each of the next three years, for a total decrease of 17 percent from 2002 to 2005.

For years, doctors have expressed frustration with Medicare, grumbling about reimbursement and complex federal regulations. But the latest reaction appears to be different. Doctors are acting on their concerns, in ways that could reduce access to care for patients who need it.

For example, some doctors are purposely limiting the number of their Medicare patients. The American Academy of Family Physicians says that 17 percent of family doctors are not taking new Medicare patients.

Mark H. Krotowski, 54, a family doctor in a working-class neighborhood of Brooklyn, said: "My expenses go up and up and up every year. For the government to lower what it pays me when my expenses are rising - that doesn't make sense. It's an insult."

Dr. Krotowski said that about 25 percent of his current patients were on Medicare, but that he was not taking any new Medicare patients.

"I love my elderly patients," Dr. Krotowski said. "But they are very sick. They need a lot of attention, a lot of medications and a lot of time. Medicare reimbursement has not kept up with inflation or the cost of providing care to the elderly."

The government is continually struggling to control Medicare costs. Total Medicare spending rose 24 percent in the last five years, to $238 billion in 2001, and the Congressional Budget Office predicts that it will grow faster in the next five years, to $310 billion in 2006.

Spending for doctors' services accounted for nearly $41 billion of last year's total.

Dr. Baretta R. Casey, 48, a family physician in rural Pikeville, Ky., near Ashland, did exactly what the government encouraged doctors to do, setting up practice in an area where doctors were in short supply.

"For the last five years," Dr. Casey said, "I've watched my income go down and my expenses go up. About 60 percent of my practice is Medicare patients. I decided not to take any more Medicare patients in January, when the reimbursement rate was cut."

Dr. Casey, like many doctors, said the impact of the cut was magnified because many private insurers link their payments to the amounts paid by Medicare.

Health policy experts said the cuts could make it more difficult for elderly people to find doctors just as the need increases with the aging of the population. Medicare covers 40 million people, and the number of beneficiaries is expected to double by 2030.

Scores of lawmakers have endorsed legislation to increase Medicare payments to doctors, but the outlook for the legislation is unclear. Other health care providers - hospitals, nursing homes, home health care agencies, health maintenance organizations - are also demanding more money.

Though Medicare can barely afford all the benefits promised under current law, Congress is seriously considering expansion of the program to add prescription drug benefits. The Bush administration says that any increases in payments to some providers must be offset by cuts in payments to others. Moreover, it says, any new money should go to Medicare beneficiaries, for drug benefits, or to the uninsured, in tax credits to buy private insurance.

Dr. Paul E. Buehrens, 50, medical director of a clinic with 22 doctors in Kirkland, Wash., near Seattle, has taken specialized training in geriatrics and was medical director of a nursing home for more than 10 years. But he said the group no longer took new Medicare patients, because the financial losses were unsustainable.

Medicare pays his group an average of $60 for an office visit, he said, but the costs average $100: about $70 for rent, utilities, malpractice insurance and salaries and benefits for the staff, plus $30 for the doctor.

Dr. Buehrens said he continued to treat his "established patients" - those already on Medicare and those who turn 65 while under his care. But, he said, it is painful to inform other people who ask him to be their doctor that "we have closed our practice to new Medicare and new Medicaid patients."

At current payment rates, he said, "Medicare is almost charity care."

Medicaid, which provides care for poor people, usually pays less than Medicare. Many doctors refuse to participate in Medicaid. In some poor urban and rural areas, Medicaid recipients have trouble finding doctors.

Many H.M.O.'s have left Medicare or curtailed their participation, dropping 2.2 million patients in the last four years, after concluding that the federal payments were inadequate.

Martha A. McSteen, president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, an advocacy group for the elderly, said, "Many of our members across the country have told us that they are having difficulty finding a physician who accepts Medicare."

Medicare patients sometimes seek care at doctor-training programs like one affiliated with the University of Colorado in Fort Collins.

"Colorado advertises itself as a great place for seniors to live," said Dr. Austin G. Bailey, director of the family medicine residency program in Fort Collins. "But it's a difficult place for seniors to find family physicians or general internists. When Medicare patients come to us, they often tell us they've called 15 to 18 doctors' offices in an unsuccessful effort to get appointments."

Dr. Stephen C. Albrecht, 46, who practices with three other doctors in Olympia, Wash., said he stopped taking new Medicare patients about six months ago.

"It impedes the economic viability of my practice to have a large Medicare population," Dr. Albrecht said. "When you own and run a small business, you have to make sure it's economically viable."

Dr. Michael J. Marcello, a family doctor in Mathews, La., 40 miles from New Orleans, said he had decided not to accept new Medicare patients starting in January, when Medicare payments were cut 5.4 percent.

"Our instinct would be to offer services, but it's just not fiscally justifiable," Dr. Marcello said. "There's no evidence of any reduction in the cost of living, utilities or supplies. Malpractice insurance premiums are not being reduced 5.4 percent."

In fact, many doctors report that malpractice premiums have shot up. The St. Paul Companies, one of the nation's largest commercial insurers, raised premiums an average of 27 percent last year. One reason, insurers say, is that they have had to pay out large sums for jury verdicts and settlements of lawsuits.

Dr. Samuel I. Fink, 44, of Los Angeles, a specialist in internal medicine, expressed the opinion of many doctors: "I fear for when I become a senior. It will be harder for seniors to find good care. Across the country, Medicare patients are becoming less and less desirable to physicians."

Dr. Deborah G. Haynes, 48, a family practitioner in Wichita, Kan., said her seven-doctor group decided three months ago not to take new Medicare patients. "We hated to do it," Dr. Haynes said, "but we have a responsibility to pay our staff."

Dr. Conrad L. Flick, 39, of Raleigh, N.C., said: "We don't take new Medicare patients. We want to, but as a business, we really can't afford to."

In the past, Dr. Flick said, "private insurers used to subsidize our Medicare practice," but they are no longer willing to do so. "Private insurers have cut back their reimbursement, so there's less opportunity to use those payments to cover the losses on Medicare patients," he said.

Dr. Abraham Rogozinski, 47, an orthopedic surgeon in Jacksonville, Fla., said he decided last year not to operate on Medicare patients or see them in his office. "It was not economically feasible to continue our participation in Medicare," he said.

In an interview, Dr. Rogozinski read a letter from a woman whose knee he replaced 10 years ago. The woman, now 68, needed her other knee replaced and wanted him to do it.

"It breaks my heart, as a doctor and a healer, that I had to limit her access to me," he said. "These are the patients that I love to see the most. They bake you pound cakes for Christmas because they are so happy with the care you give them."

Dr. Robert L. Hogue, 51, president- elect of the Texas Academy of Family Physicians, said: "I have a hard and fast rule. I don't take any new Medicare patients. In fact, I don't take any new patients over the age of 60 because they will be on Medicare in the next five years."

-------- human rights

Security worries UN human rights panel

By John Zarocostas
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
March 17, 2002
http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/17032002-090435-7543r.htm

GENEVA, Switzerland -- The U.N. Human Rights Commission will open its annual session here Monday amid fears by advocacy groups over the primacy of anti-terrorism security measures in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The six-week session in Geneva will see the absence of the United States as a full member of the commission for the first time since the panel's creation in 1946. This could hinder global efforts to redress serious abuses.

"Governments around the world are cynically using the banner of anti-terrorism to justify crackdown's on internal opposition, and as other countries are happy to turn a blind eye to the brutality of their allies in the anti-terror cause," Reed Brody, advocacy director with Human Rights Watch, told a news conference here Friday.

Similarly, Amnesty International's representative at the U.N., Melinda Ching, told reporters "human rights are being undermined in the post Sept. 11 security overdrive."

She added that double standards "must not take precedence over human rights standards."

Foreign affairs and justice ministers from over 40 countries plus the U.N. secretary-general, Kofi Annan, are scheduled to address the commission.

The session will also hear chilling reports from special experts on a long list of abuses including torture, summary executions, and disappearances, to trafficking in women and children, racial discrimination, and xenophobia.

The question of violations in the occupied Palestinian territories, say diplomats, will "politically" dominate this year's session.

The situation of rights breaches in Iraq; Myanmar; Colombia; the Congo; the Russian Federation and Chechnya will also feature prominently.

However, in a departure from earlier proceedings, Washington this year will not send a special ambassador for human rights to head the U.S. delegation to the session.

The United States is expected to overall take a "fairly reduced" stance, said high-level Western diplomats close to the Bush administration.

As an observer to the 53-member commission, the United States can propose or co-sponsor draft resolutions, and take the floor to outline its views on human rights issues, but has not got the right to vote.

The same sources said "it's unlikely" that the Bush administration will sponsor a resolution condemning China's poor human-rights record.

Senior Chinese officials insist, however, that should a resolution emerge, they have the numbers to defeat such a motion.

But with an eye on the November elections in Florida and the Cuban-American vote, the Bush administration is active behind the scenes trying to muster support for a resolution to censure the Castro regime in Cuba for rights violations.

Brody said the commission must show that human-rights standards apply to big as well as small countries.

"It cannot ignore the dismal human-rights situation in China or the brazen refusal of the U.S. to apply the Geneva Convention to prisoners of war at Guantanamo naval base in Cuba," he said.

Brody said that in the past the United States did the dirty work and stood up to China by tabling resolutions and called upon the European Union "to be as aggressive as the U.S. in the past."

But he castigated the EU member countries such as Italy and Germany for "soft peddling the human rights situation in Chechnya" and noted that in the last two years, Russia has "blatantly refused" to heed U.N. resolutions.

"Russian forces continue to commit atrocities in Chechnya," he said.

The Human Rights Watch director also argued that the United States should welcome a visit by U.N. monitors to the detention centers at Guantanamo and any place where Sept. 11 terror attack suspects are held.

Senior Western and Asian diplomats say Brussels is not expected to put forward a motion against China but will sponsor a new resolution against human rights abuses in Zimbabwe.

The same sources said the EU and the United States are not likely to take up calls by Amnesty and other human rights groups, to sponsor resolutions critical of human rights violations in Saudi Arabia.

The composition of this year's commission, which includes 16 countries with a long history of human rights violations such as Algeria, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, and Indonesia, is also considered a setback.

But senior Western diplomats said the United States is slated to be elected back into next year's commission after Italy and Spain withdrew their candidacies from the Western group list for the upcoming vote.


-------- ACTIVISTS

Calvert Residents Unite Against Dump
Group Fed Up With Controversial Projects

By Raymond McCaffrey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 17, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39879-2002Mar17?language=printer

The Rev. Mervin Gray can quickly point out the upside to living in his neighborhood: being part of a close-knit community centered around one of the oldest African American churches in Calvert County.

The downside, according to Gray, is just as clear. Beginning in the 1970s, residents have seen a spate of controversial projects come their way -- a nuclear power plant, a liquefied natural gas facility and the county landfill, all within three miles of where they live.

"We feel that we've had more than our share of this," said Gray, retired pastor of St. John's United Methodist Church in West Lusby.

Now, once again, Gray and his neighbors are confronted with another controversial development: a "stump dump" -- a landfill for organic debris cleared from building sites -- that would cover 24.6 acres on an 86.8-acre site.

But, this time, things are different. This time, Gray and his fellow residents in the West Lusby-Appeal neighborhood have banded together with relative newcomers who have moved to expensive homes south of the dump proposed by area businessman John T. Crane. In six months, the neighborhood association has succeeded in getting county commissioners to decide last Tuesday to block the plan by denying a necessary grading permit.

And in rallying around a common cause, the coalition has managed to straddle the social fault lines of race, class and natives vs. newcomers in Maryland's fastest-growing county during the past decade.

The association includes "a mix of people -- both professional, agriculture, black, white," said Marcia Olson, a marine biologist who moved to the neighborhood in 1988.

"We realized that we needed to join together. And, in fact, the issues were larger than John Crane's stump dump. The issues seemed to be a countywide problem."

The larger problem is one that is becoming more common in fast-growing rural counties such as Calvert. Residents -- many of them fleeing crowded suburbs -- are moving to rural areas, often to homes or subdivisions on land that once housed farms. Then they discover that the landscape might have changed, but zoning laws have not.

Hence, though the area is largely residential, it lies in a rural zone. That means stump dumps are permitted there. Residents had the same reaction as their counterparts in a northern Calvert neighborhood did in 2000 after discovering that a property owner could open a commercial tree and garden nursery in their subdivision because such an operation was permitted in a rural zone.

"We were reading about the nursery in Dunkirk and saying, 'Whoa! This is the same thing. The zoning regulations are inadequate,' " Olson said.

Those zoning regulations -- like the West Lusby-Appeal neighborhood itself -- have their roots in the county's agricultural heritage. For more than 350 years, tobacco powered Calvert's economy -- a tradition that continued long after the emancipation of the slaves who worked on large plantations.

Many of those former slaves continued to work in the fields, and they helped form St. John's United Methodist Church, one of the county's first African American congregations, according to Kirsti Uunila, a state historical specialist. The church and the neighborhood endured when racial hostility was rampant and African American schools were regularly burned, Uunila said.

Gray said: "They've lived here all their lives. There are three or four generations of family."

Meanwhile, tobacco production plummeted, a downward trend that culminated in state buyouts last year in which farmers gave up the crop in exchange for government funds. The county attempted to broaden itself economically in the 1970s by opening the nuclear power plant and the liquefied natural gas facility. At the same time, tobacco farmers struck lucrative deals with developers.

That meant that places such as Spout Farm, once one of the major tobacco plantations in what is now the West Lusby-Appeal neighborhood, were subdivided and new people moved in.

People such as Vankirk Fehr, a Washington-based real estate developer who bought the farmhouse at Spout Farm and a slice of waterfront property a little more than 20 years ago.

"I didn't know where Calvert County was," said Fehr, who lived in Georgetown at the time. "We drove by, and that was it."

His reaction was not a rare one. Calvert's population has doubled in the past 20 years. Olson couldn't afford waterfront property, so she bought a home on Sollers Wharf Road with enough property to keep her horse.

She was also enamored by the neighborhood's diversity.

"Coming from Philadelphia and Baltimore and those areas, I was used to actually living in a mixed, diverse community," she said.

Still, there was no central issue to bridge those diverse elements -- not even a central location where people gathered to talk about developments in their community.

By the time that the community had its first public meeting last summer after learning about the stump dump, members discovered that Crane had received county approval to operate the landfill -- and nobody in the neighborhood had heard about it.

"We all looked around at each other. . . . 'Did you know about this?' " Olson said.

Resolving that such developments would not be overlooked again, residents quickly formed the community association and had more than 170 members in no time. Then they found out what they were up against.

They learned that landfills for debris generated by land-clearing operations face the most lenient regulations of any kind of dump, according to the county, because material going in is biodegradable -- essentially stumps and limbs from trees cleared from building sites.

Like their counterparts in Dunkirk, who argued against the commercial nursery, the neighbors argued that Crane's proposal violated the intentions of the ordinance.

"It was intended for farmers to get rid of debris clearing the land," Gray said. "The ordinance didn't mean a commercial stump dump."

Moreover, they argue that such a landfill should not be permitted in an agricultural preservation district.

Six months after taking their argument to the county commissioners, the neighborhood association appears to have won. Unless Crane challenges the board's ruling that such a landfill should not be permitted in an agricultural preservation district, his plan has been defeated.

"It's not a location for a stump dump," said Commissioner Barbara A. Stinnett (D-At Large), who has opposed the proposal from the start.

Stinnett applauded the efforts of the community association in a neighborhood that has been the site of so many controversial projects. "They've been dumped on," she said.

For his part, Gray is not surprised that the community has bonded quickly.

"Of course, we're coming together," he said. "We have a common cause."

----

Arab cities erupt in protest

By Steve Negus in Cairo,
Sydney Morning Herald,
March 17, 2002
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0203/17/world/world1.html

Renewed hopes of peace after the bloodiest violence in the nearly 18-month-old Palestinian uprising failed to calm new demonstrations across the Arab world yesterday.

A woman, three of her children and a nephew were killed yesterday when their donkey cart struck an Israeli landmine in the Al-Boureij area of the central Gaza Strip, a Palestinian security source said.

Zina al-Wawada, 43, and three of her children aged between eight and 16, were killed, said Ahmed Rabah, director of the hospital in nearby Deir al-Balah, where the bodies were taken.

Meanwhile, there were protests in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Yemen against Israel's tactics in Palestinian territories, which saw the death toll soar this month.

Following weekly prayers, several hundred demonstrators gathered at Egypt's Al Azhar mosque to cap a week of protests after "Black Friday" on March 8, when 40 Palestinians were killed during clashes with the Israeli army.

The protesters assembled in the mosque courtyard, unfurled a Palestinian flag and declared their support for the uprising and their opposition to a US strike on Iraq.

More than 6,000 students also demonstrated at Alexandria University, north of Cairo, shouting "Jihad [holy struggle] is the solution".

The students demanded that US Vice-President Dick Cheney, who had been visiting as part of a tour of the Arab world, leave Egypt. They also called on Egypt and Jordan - the only two Arab countries to have peace treaties with Israel - to expel the Jewish state's ambassadors.

In Jordan, more than 1,000 people marched through the north-eastern town of Zarqa, near the capital Amman, after the weekly prayers, although another march organised by Islamists in the capital was banned by the government.

The protesters denounced Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as a "criminal" and a "coward".

In Amman, the opposition Muslim Brotherhood bowed to an order from the interior ministry and scrapped a planned march.

Jordan's professional unions and opposition parties were set to hold an authorised "march of anger" in Amman.

In Lebanon, 1,000 people gathered in the northern city of Tripoli.

"We will avenge you, O Palestine," the protesters shouted, after a cleric denounced the "silence and inaction" of Arab countries in a sermon.

The demonstrations came as Israel pulled back to the perimeters of occupied towns and said it was ready for negotiations after US envoy Anthony Zinni arrived in the region.

----

Thousands march against capitalism as summit ends

By Dan Trotta and Begona Quesada
Sunday March 17
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-95284.html

BARCELONA, Spain - Tens of thousands of anti-capitalist protesters marched through Barcelona on Saturday after a European Union summit in the city aimed at driving forward free-market economic reforms.

As a sea of people rolled forward from a central square towards the harbour, one Reuters correspondent watched the column of marchers pass steadily down a wide avenue for an hour. No police estimate of crowd numbers was available.

The crowd of mainly young people held up banners with slogans such as "Europe with peace and justice" and the 1960s mantra "Make love not war".

Anti-globalisation activists from across Europe have descended on the Spanish city for a march under the title "Against the Europe of Capital" to reject the liberal economic agenda espoused by Europe's leaders.

Ada Colau, a spokeswoman for a coalition of more than 100 groups staging the event, said there were "many, many thousands" of people taking part.

"It's a massive participation even though they (the authorities) tried to stop us with a fear campaign and stopped many buses at the (French) border," she said.

A French trade union said several hundred French and Italian anti-globalisation activists heading for Barcelona were turned back at the Spanish border on Friday.

Several small demonstrations in Barcelona on Friday ended in clashes with police and 29 people were arrested for disorder and damaging property. Police struck out with batons on two occasions to break up crowds of demonstrators.

Some 8,500 police officers were drafted in to Barcelona to guard the summit amid fears of a repetition of the protests against international meetings that culminated in the death of a young protester at the hands of Italian police at Genoa in July.

Police helicopters hovered over the demonstrators on Saturday but police kept a low profile on the ground. The march began in a jovial atmosphere with bongo drums and whistles.

French activist Jose Bove, a hero in the anti-globalisation movement, warned Spain on Saturday against cracking down on protesters, saying a heavy hand would only fuel greater demonstrations in the future.

Organisers said they had expected the march to be peaceful and said they had commitments from the most hardline groups not to cause trouble.

Complicating matters for police, one of the biggest Spanish soccer matches of the season, between bitter rivals Barcelona and Real Madrid, takes place in the city on Saturday evening.

---

Spanish police fire on EU protesters

World Scene
March 17, 2002
Combined dispatches and staff reports
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020317-9707544.htm

BARCELONA - Spanish police fired rubber bullets yesterday at demonstrators taking part in a massive anti-capitalism protest march in Barcelona after a European Union summit.

Some demonstrators had set fires in the streets after the march by around quarter of a million people. Baton-wielding police moved in to disperse the crowds, lashing out with sticks and boots.

A sea of demonstrators from a wide range of different groups had marched through city streets to reject the free-market agenda approved by the EU leaders in the city hours earlier.

---

EU Summit Ends With A Bang and A Whimper
15 Members Adopt Economic Package As Police Quell Riot

By T.R. Reid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 17, 2002; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39128-2002Mar16?language=printer

BARCELONA, March 16 -- European Union leaders today adopted a cautious package of economic changes aimed at building a transcontinental economy that could compete with the United States for global dominance. Outside their meeting, Spanish police fired rubber-coated bullets at a huge anti-capitalism demonstration that turned violent.

The EU leaders also talked informally about possible U.S. action against Iraq, with British Prime Minister Tony Blair acting as President Bush's chief advocate. But the Europeans were so far apart on that issue, with some adamantly opposed to any move against Saddam Hussein, that it didn't even arise in the formal sessions.

The leaders did condemn President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe for staging what they called flawed elections last week and said they would consider additional sanctions against his country.

They agreed unanimously on a resolution condemning Bush's recent decision to impose tariffs on steel imports but had more trouble dealing with home-grown forms of trade protection. On the summit's key economic issue, France agreed to open its electricity and gas markets to foreign firms -- but only partially, and not until 2004. Trade barriers in aviation, food and financial services survived the summit largely intact.

The summit was the first in which all 15 EU members plus the 13 applicant countries gathered as equals. While the leaders conferred amid swaying palms and gurgling fountains at Barcelona's pale yellow Royal Palace, tens of thousands of demonstrators paraded past closed and barricaded shops along La Rambla, the city's handsome main avenue.

The demonstration began peacefully but turned rowdy after nightfall when some protesters set fires in the street and smashed store windows, the Reuters news agency reported. Some of the 8,000 police officers and soldiers on hand moved in to disperse the crowds, lashing out with batons and boots. Some fired rubber-coated bullets, Reuters said. The news agency quoted police as saying 38 people were arrested.

With at least 10 more countries expected to join the EU and adopt its common currency over the next few years, by the end of the decade the EU could become a single market of a half-billion people -- bigger than the United States and Japan combined. The goal, as Roman Prodi, president of the European Commission, the EU's executive branch, said this weekend, is to create "a superpower on the European continent that stands equal to the United States."

For all its steps toward political union, though, the EU has lagged well behind the United States in productivity, innovation and economic growth. Two years ago, at a summit in Lisbon, the EU leaders set out an ambitious agenda to catch and pass the United States -- to build "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010."

The problem, many economists say, is that most European countries are still committed to strong regulations and high taxes to fund medical, financial and social benefits far more generous than those Americans expect. When a baby is born in some EU countries, for example, the mother or father can take up to 15 months of leave at full pay, with a guaranteed return to the same job.

Europe's strong trade unions are opposed to any restrictions on the cradle-to-grave government cushion. That was the key point of 50,000 union members who took part in the peaceful march. "We don't want the American model," said Tony Young, president of the Trades Union Congress, Britain's equivalent of the AFL-CIO. "We want to preserve the European social model."

But some important EU members are pushing for U.S.-style deregulation and lower taxes, notably Blair, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. For them, the summit had mixed results.

Although France agreed to allow foreign firms to sell gas and electricity to French businesses, the summit deferred action on the French residential market. And although the leaders agreed to a gradual market opening for some financial services throughout the EU, a discussion about plans to open air traffic to foreign carriers was not resolved.

As an unstated quid pro quo for the partial compromise on energy imports, the French won EU approval to go ahead with funding of Galileo, an ambitious new space program.

France has argued that Europe needs its own spy satellite so that it won't be dependent on the United States for intelligence.

Outside the formal sessions, Blair discussed Iraq with many of his fellow leaders. Blair has supported some kind of punitive action against Saddam, but he got a mixed response here.

Prodi said that some of the leaders felt "deep worry about a possible attack on Iraq, because of the potential expansion of the conflict."

And Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit -- who was present as leader of an applicant country -- said bluntly that "Iraq should not be the subject of military attack, because it would upset the whole Middle East."

----

Guatemala politician shot to death

World Scene
March 17, 2002
Combined dispatches and staff reports
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20020317-9707544.htm

GUATEMALA CITY - An elderly regional leader of a nascent Guatemalan political party that has fiercely criticized the government was shot to death by unidentified gunmen outside party headquarters yesterday, the party's chief said.

Jorge Rosal, who led the Patriot Party in the southern coast department of Suchitepequez, was gunned down yesterday morning shortly before a meeting, national party chief Otto Perez Molina told Reuters.

The newly formed Patriot Party helped organize a protest in Guatemala City on Wednesday in which some 3,000 demonstrators demanded President Alfonso Portillo's resignation over the latest in a stream of corruption charges against his administration.

----

Chinese Oil Country Simmers as Workers Protest Cost-Cutting
Thousands Laid Off, Benefits Reduced

By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 17, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39210-2002Mar16?language=printer

DAQING, China, March 16 -- Thousands of workers have surrounded a government building in the heart of China's oil country for the past two weeks, protesting the restructuring of one of China's biggest listed companies.

The demonstrations at the Daqing Oil Management Bureau in this northern city have ranged in size from several thousand people late Friday to 20,000 earlier this week, witnesses said. Protesters have spilled into Iron Man park, an adjacent square built to commemorate a working-class hero of the oil fields.

The peaceful protests in the center of Daqing illustrate the tensions that exist throughout the country as millions of workers are laid off by inefficient state-owned enterprises trying to adjust to global competition following China's entry into the World Trade Organization. On top of this already complex problem are persistent allegations that the restructuring process has been fraught with corruption. Furthermore it highlights the problems China has faced in creating a social safety net for laid-off workers. Despite claims by Premier Zhu Rongji on Friday that the net is almost complete, millions of China's workers are still without benefits.

Thousands of similar protests have erupted across China in the past several years. The one in Daqing is unusual because it has been so sustained and because news of it leaked out before it was over.

The situation is complicated by the fact that PetroChina Co., which owns most of Daqing's oil assets, is listed on the New York and Hong Kong stock exchanges so its actions, when dealing with the workers, could be subject to the scrutiny of its foreign shareholders.

Workers complained today that the city government and PetroChina, one of China's biggest listed oil companies with operating income of $30 billion last year, gave thousands of workers severance packages of less than $500 for every year worked. They said the protest started this month when the government announced it would stop paying heating bills and insurance premiums for people who had received severance packages. The protesters' ranks swelled last week when workers who still have jobs joined the demonstration to protest a tripling of their pension-plan contributions.

"The managers are getting huge packages and we are getting nothing," said one worker who identified himself only as Engineer Zhang. PetroChina officials denied his allegation.

Zhang, a father of two, said he could not support his family with the $6,000 severance package he received. "What happens when the money runs out? What happens if someone gets sick? What happens if my boys get into college?"

Zhang and others pointed to a scandal that roiled Daqing two years ago as evidence that the restructuring was tainted by corruption. Thirty-nine government officials were punished for rigging the listing of Daqing Lianyi Petrochemical Co. on the Shanghai stock exchange and handing out shares to their relatives and friends.

"Do you think anything has changed?" asked another worker who identified himself only as Chen. "They changed the mayor but they didn't change anything else, really."

Participants and witnesses said plainclothes security forces had detained several leaders of the ad hoc workers' movement in Daqing. China bans independent labor unions, and the Communist Party-approved All-China Federation of Trade Unions generally represents the interests of the security forces rather than China's laborers.

"Now no one dares to speak in public because of the arrests," said a witness who used to work for the oil bureau. She said she believed some of the workers had been roughed up while in police custody. "When those workers were released from the police station, some of them were in a daze." Daqing, in far northern Heilongjiang province, is the cradle of China's oil industry. When oil was discovered here in the 1960s, it was a state secret, because China's leaders feared an attack by the Soviet Union, just 220 miles to the north.

The town spawned a series of Communist legends about the superiority of China's workers, most notably "Iron Man" Wang, who is said to have jumped into a pit of cement to stir it with his body because of a lack of mechanical equipment.

During China's ultra-leftist Cultural Revolution, Daqing's reliance on heavy industry, despite its costs, was held up as a model for all of China. But the full-speed-ahead production techniques that once made Daqing the pride of China's oil industry have now made it one of China's laggards.

Mayor Wang Zhibin recently told the official New China News Agency that the outlook for his city was grim. He said that Daqing's aging wells would produce 1.5 million tons less crude oil this year than last. And, he said, Daqing's oil still costs too much to produce; the cost of oil development in China averages $1.50 a barrel, compared with $1.20 in most other parts of the world.

China began a large-scale restructuring of its oil industry in the 1980s, merging companies to create a few large, integrated oil concerns. In November 1999, China National Petroleum Corp. formed a subsidiary called PetroChina and gave it 480,000 of the parent company's 1.5 million workers and most of its best assets. PetroChina took over much of Daqing's industry. Crude output from Daqing reached 56.6 million tons.

By January 2001, 38,000 employees had been laid off. Many of them were from Daqing, workers said today.

In November 2000, the oil bureau arranged for 50,000 workers to receive severance packages of $375 to $500 for each year of service. All benefits supplied by the company -- such as medical care and pensions -- were stopped. Workers said the government had neither the funds nor the interest to step in and replace the cradle-to-grave security once offered by Daqing's state-owned firms.

The workers said their protest would continue until the government agreed to reconsider the severance packages. But that could be difficult. While still owned mostly by the state, PetroChina also has responsibilities to its shareholders.

"This is a tricky situation," said a PetroChina executive. "If the government orders us to back down, our shareholders will be angry. But if we don't modify the plan, there could be more unrest."


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