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NUCLEAR
Senator Asks for Probe of Energy Official
Zambia Boasts New Copper Mine
World Bank to give $50 mln Chernobyl aid to Belarus
Russia seeks to build new Bulgaria nuclear plant
Czech CEZ launches second nuke reactor at Temelin
Kashmir: Hype and Reality
Pakistan Seeks Talks With India
Japan Scrambles to Contain Fallout From Nuke Remark
What to Say to North Korea?
Russia's Role in Iran and Iraq
U.S. Orders Design of New Weapons Plant
Peacekeeper Missile Launched in Test
Ex-Gov. Accused in Nuke Waste Case
Senator hits Bush's 'pre-emptive' plan
A Preview of the Coming Congressional Sept. 11 Probe
Cost Anti-Terror Bill Could Grow
MILITARY
Sen: Kashmir May Hurt Afghan Mission
Summit targets India, Pakistan
In Search of Antiterror Drugs
FEDERAL CONTRACTS
CACI Wins Electronic Warfare Countermeasures Work
DEA chief sees shifting of agents as 'new challenge'
U.N. Inspectors May Return to Iraq
Weighing an Attack on Iraq . . .
Israel Beginning Land Seizures
Military Raids Are Best Path to Security, Israelis Say
NATO Plans New 'Military Concept' for New Threats
NATO seen as Europe's top gun
Along Afghan Border, Pakistan Finds It Hard to Assert Control
500 FBI agents operating in Pakistan
Fatigue dogged U.S. pilots
POLICE / PRISONERS
Study Shows Building Prisons Did Not Prevent Repeat Crimes
CIA Failed To Share Intelligence On Hijacker
FBI woes put cracks in case against Moussaoui
The end of privacy
C.I.A. Was Tracking Hijacker Months Earlier Than It Had Said
CIA failed to share info on hijackers with FBI, INS
Only CIA knew hijackers were here
A Witness Against Al Qaeda Says the U.S. Let Him Down
OTHER
Pioneer Brazil seeks to crank up alcohol motor again
UK generators may burn wood, straw at coal plants
Climate Changing, U.S. Says in Report
ACTIVISTS
Vigil Stands 7,665 Days and Nights Outside the White House
9-11 and the Public Safety
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- business
Senator Asks for Probe of Energy Official
Reid Says Undersecretary's Former Companies May Have Benefited From Nuclear Waste Moves
By Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 3, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49383-2002Jun2?language=printer
The Senate's second-ranking Democratic leader has called for an ethics investigation to determine whether Undersecretary of Energy Robert G. Card violated conflict-of-interest rules by acting to benefit two nuclear-waste companies where he once was a high-ranking official.
Senate Majority Whip Harry M. Reid (Nev.) said in a letter to the Office of Government Ethics last week that Card's "escalating public activities" affecting his former companies -- Kaiser-Hill Co. and CH2M Hill Cos. -- appear to violate the Bush administration's conflict-of-interest guidelines and a federal criminal statute.
Reid, a sharp critic of the Energy Department's plans to build a nuclear waste repository beneath Nevada's Yucca Mountain, wrote: "As a senator who is particularly concerned about the stewardship, integrity and objectivity of the nation's nuclear policy decision-making process, I am troubled by the unanswered ethical questions relating to a central figure in this important process."
On Friday, Energy Department officials called Reid's letter part of a "desperate" political effort to derail the Yucca Mountain project, which faces a key Senate vote this summer.
"The opponents of Yucca Mountain have failed on the science and they have failed with their fear-mongering," said Joe Davis, a department spokesman. "Now they are trying to rehash old and unfounded allegations to justify their last-minute character assassination in the desperate hope that they can influence" the upcoming vote. Card was out of town Friday and could not be reached.
Card, a former corporate executive and Republican Party contributor, has been at the center of a government ethics controversy since taking charge of the Energy Department's nuclear waste cleanup operations and environmental programs last June. As part of his transition to government, Card sold his stock in CH2M Hill, a Denver-based engineering and construction firm, but retained a vested interest in a company pension plan.
South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges (D), Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.), Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.) and other officials have raised concerns that Card may be trying to shape policy to benefit his former companies -- a charge that Card and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham deny.
Card, 49, spent 20 years as an executive of CH2M Hill until 1996, when he took over as president and chief executive of Kaiser-Hill, a joint venture with a Fairfax engineering firm. At Kaiser-Hill, Card negotiated a multibillion-dollar Energy Department contract to decontaminate the old Rocky Flats nuclear weapons factory near Denver by 2006. The contract includes substantial financial incentives for finishing the job on time.
Since Card joined the Bush administration, his government subordinates have been involved in plans to ship Rocky Flats radioactive waste to the Energy Department's Savannah River processing facility in South Carolina.
South Carolina officials want legal guarantees that the waste will not stay there indefinitely. One of Card's top aides, Troy Timmons, simultaneously worked for five months last year as a paid consultant to the department and as a Kaiser-Hill project official at Rocky Flats before becoming a full-time federal employee.
In December, Hodges asked Abraham to remove Card from the cleanup project. He said Card's service at Kaiser-Hill "at a minimum constitutes an appearance of a conflict of interest" and suggested that Card might try to step up the pace of shipments to enhance his former company's profits.
Department officials said last week that Card and Timmons recused themselves last year from decision-making affecting the planned shipments of nuclear waste from Colorado to South Carolina, and other matters affecting Kaiser-Hill and CH2M Hill.
"The department's legal counsel has reviewed all [of Card's] critics' charges and has found no basis to them," Abraham said Friday.
In all, Card's two former companies hold six contracts with the Energy Department, including one involving a major cleanup of nuclear waste in Hanford, Wash. Although the demand for cleanup funds is great nationwide, the department has agreed to use more than half of an $800 million discretionary environmental cleanup fund for CH2M Hill's plutonium cleanup activities in Hanford.
Officials say the decision was made by Jessie Hill Roberson, the assistant secretary for environmental management, and not by Card.
"Undersecretary Card has not been involved in any fashion directing work or contract actions involving CH2M Hill's contract at Hanford . . . or any other work by the company that they are performing for DOE," said Davis, the department spokesman. "He has recused himself and remains recused from any of those actions."
However, Reid, citing a Feb. 28 Wall Street Journal report, said Card was involved "in numerous decisions relating to the CH2M Hill Hanford project, including the settlement of fines relating to prior poor performance under the contract."
Card says he has maintained social contact with employees of CH2M Hill and Kaiser-Hill and has attended meetings of the Energy Department's Office of Environmental Management that included officials of his former companies as well as of other major contractors, according to Susan F. Beard, a department lawyer.
As a condition of being confirmed by the Senate, Card signed an agreement recusing himself permanently from specific issues he "personally and substantially" had worked on for the two companies and, for two years, from "any particular matter" involving either company in which his participation "would raise a question in the mind of a reasonable person" about his impartiality.
In his letter Tuesday to Office of Government Ethics Director Amy Comstock, Reid sought a list of meetings held by Card from the day he took office, as well as copies of financial disclosure statements, certificates of divestiture and copies of department contracts with Card's former companies.
Responding to department charges that his letter was designed to try to derail the Yucca Mountain project, Reid said Friday: "This administration has a penchant for secrecy, hiding things."
----
Zambia Boasts New Copper Mine
By Mildred Mulenga
Associated Press Writer
Monday, June 3, 2002; 4:12 PM
KITWE, Zambia -- Phelps Dodge Corp., the world's second largest copper producer, is considering joining a joint venture with Australian minerals explorer Equinox Resources to start a new copper mine in Zambia, Equinox managers said Monday.
Equinox managing director Craig Williams said his company and its partners were considering creating a new copper mine in Solwezi, in the northwest of the country.
According to Williams, the group could invest up to $13.5 million in the project where they would hope to mine 100,000 tons of copper and about 18,000 ounces of gold a year in addition to uranium and cobalt.
Phelps Dodge, based in Phoenix, Ariz., is the world's second largest producer of copper with operations in mines and manufacturing facilities in 27 countries.
[It would be helpful to know how much uranium these partners are mining, from where, and to whom it's going, for what. et]
-------- europe
World Bank to give $50 mln Chernobyl aid to Belarus
REUTERS BELARUS:
June 3, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/16226/story.htm
MINSK - The World Bank said it would lend $50 million to ex-Soviet Belarus to support people living on swathes of land contaminated by fallout from the Chernobyl disaster, the world's worst civil nuclear accident.
The loan is a first for the country that has received little from international lending bodies after the International Monetary Fund and World Bank stopped lending in protest against Belarus's reluctance to introduce reforms.
"We worked out a strategy to support the regions. The project envisages a loan worth about $50 million and we expect it will unlock other funds," Liliya Burunchuk, a World Bank programme coordinator for Ukraine and Belarus, told reporters.
Serhiy Kulik, a World Bank representative in Minsk, said the money would go to farmers and private businesses in the regions.
The blast at Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986 badly hit Belarus, contaminating large areas of land and is believed to have left a legacy of health problems.
Over 80 percent of the radioactive dust expelled from Chernobyl is estimated to have landed in Belarus, with the rest spreading over Ukraine, Russia and large parts of western Europe.
The United Nations says millions of people still live on contaminated land in Belarus, 16 years after the explosion. The World Health Organisation says thyroid cancer rates among children in Belarus are 100 times higher than they were before the accident.
The bank did not make clear how it expected Belarus to pay back the loan.
----
Russia seeks to build new Bulgaria nuclear plant
REUTERS BULGARIA:
June 3, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/16227/story.htm
SOFIA - Russia said it would offer to complete the construction of Bulgaria's second nuclear power plant at Belene, aimed at compensating for a planned early closure of old reactors at its existing plant in Kozloduy.
Bulgaria, the main power exporter in the Balkans, seeks to keep its leading position after shutting as promised four of the Soviet-design Kozloduy's six 3,760-megawatt reactors, which produces 45 percent of the country's power.
"Russia is interested in the counstruction of the new power plant and we will offer our projects to the Bulgarian side. We are aware that there will be competition," Russia's Atomic Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev told reporters.
Bulgaria said last month it planned to resume building the plant in Belene, 250 km (160 miles) north of Sofia, and was in talks with Canadian, Russian and U.S. companies, trying to secure the investment of $2.0 billion needed to finish the job.
"We are builing new reactors in China, Iran and India, all of which are in full compliance with the international (safety and technical) requirements. Once Bulgaria announces its parametres, Russia will be ready to take part," said Rumyantsev, who is on a brief visit to Sofia.
The decommissioning of the old reactors at Kozloduy, dubbed by the European Union as unsafe, is a key pledge in Bulgaria's accession talks with the Union, which it is striving to join.
Bulgaria bowed to the EU pressure in 2000 and agreed to shut down Kozloduy's two oldest 440-megawatt reactors, number one and two, before 2003.
It is still not clear when it would close the other two 440 MW reactors, numbers three and four.
According to a 1999 deal with the European Commission, Bulgaria should close them before 2008 and 2010, respectively, but in the last two annual reports on Bulgaria the commission insisted it should be in 2006 at the latest.
Most officials in Sofia say the two reactors have been modernised to be safe and Bulgaria, which covers 45 percent of the region's power deficit, cannot afford to close them so early.
A final decision over the closure of Kozloduy's reactors number three and four will be taken after negotiations with the European Commission by the end of this year.
The building of the 1,000-megawatt Soviet-designed Belene plant started in the 1980s and 40 percent of the construction works worth $1 billion has been completed.
Forty percent of the main equipment, including a reactor, have been supplied to Belene.
But work was halted in 1990 due to a lack of cash and environmental protests.
----
Czech CEZ launches second nuke reactor at Temelin
REUTERS CZECH REPUBLIC:
June 3, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/16228/story.htm
PRAGUE - Czech power utility CEZ said it had launched a nuclear reaction at the second block of its controversial new Temelin nuclear power station.
CEZ's key asset, the plant has been fiercely opposed by strongly anti-nuclear Austria, the Czechs' southern neighbour. With two Russian-designed VVER-1000 reactors, Temelin stands some 60 km (37 miles) from the Austrian border.
The plant's spokesman Milan Nebesar told Reuters Friday's launch would be followed by a series of tests while the reactor's output gradually rises.
"At 10.25 (0825 GMT) the nuclear fission reaction was launched and the reactor is being kept at the minimum sustainable output," Nebesar told Reuters.
Temelin's first reactor is now running at a full capacity of 1,000 megawats. Austria has fiercely opposed the launch of Temelin, saying a number of glitches after the start-up of the first reactor in 2000 show the station is unsafe.
The row over the plant long blocked the Czech Republic's talks on joining the European Union, until the two countries agreed earlier this year on a plan to monitor the station.
CEZ, the Czech Republic's dominant energy producer, operates six nuclear reactors, all Russian-designed - two in Temelin and four in Dukovany with a combined capacity of 3,760 megawatts.
The Dukovany plant accounts for around 20 percent of CEZ's installed output.
CEZ is eastern Europe's largest electricity producer with ambitions to further penetrate western Europe to offset losing a share on its domestic liberalised market.
Nuclear power plants are CEZ's cheapest source of electricity, and are thus key assets.
CEZ spent around 100 billion crowns on the construction and repairs at Temelin and the launch of the two reactors should allow it to close some of its aging coal-burning plants in the northern Czech Republic.
The Czech government failed to privatise the energy firm earlier this year, as it could not find a buyer for CEZ who would pay at least 200 billion crowns ($6.15 billion) for the majority stake on offer.
The government plans to equip the utility with money-generating distribution assets later this year in an attempt to boost the group's value before it reopens the sale.
The structure of the privatisation, however, will depend on the which will emerge from general elections in mid-June.
-------- india / pakistan
[To reply - mailto:OPED@washpost.com]
Kashmir: Hype and Reality
William M. Arkin,
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, June 3, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52021-2002Jun3.html
I'll go way out on a limb here, but the world should stop hyperventilating about nuclear war between India and Pakistan. It isn't going to happen, and the current crisis is not some modern day Sarajevo that will start World War III.
Just because Washington is filled to the brim with attention craving nuclear arms control professionals thrilled by the South Asian crisis doesn't mean that the Beltway warnings and the ridiculous estimates being bandied about of millions dead have any basis in insight or fact. In fact, there is no evidence whatsoever that either country is really preparing for nuclear confrontation.
The truth is that these two countries have been fighting since they were carved out of colonial Britain and have been in constant confrontation as nuclear powers. Now, although they posture over Kashmir, they are politically driven weaklings governed by their own domestic needs.
Nuclear Powers?
The joke in India goes: Why did it take Pakistan six weeks longer than India to develop its nuclear weapons? Because it needed to translate the manuals from Chinese.
India's 30 year-old nuclear weapons program was not originally aimed Pakistan but China. New Delhi initiated its nuclear weapons program following its defeat in the Indo-Chinese War of 1962. India conducted its first nuclear test in 1974 but the program largely remained dormant until the mid-1980's.
In a perfect example of a mindless arms race, India's local competitor just had to join in. Pakistan's Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was reputed to have said in 1972 that his countrymen would "eat grass," if necessary, to get the bomb. Later Bhutto mused that: "We know that Israel and South Africa have full nuclear capability -- a Christian, Jewish and Hindu civilization have this capability ... The Islamic civilization is without it, but the situation (is) about to change."
With Chinese backing Pakistan gained a nuclear capability. When India tested five nuclear weapons in 1998, Pakistan followed with two tests of its own two months later. The West was alarmed, but throughout the Muslim world, there were congratulations for Pakistan. The Central Intelligence Agency's counter-proliferation center has consistently voiced concern that individual Pakistanis might sell their knowledge abroad to Islamic renegades, a fact uncovered as the U.S. went to war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Domestic Pressures
According to a 1999 U.S. intelligence assessment of India's nuclear program: "It should be noted that although the India government describes its nuclear weapons program in terms of the Pakistani threat, China is the real strategic concern. The Pakistani threat is emphasized for domestic consumption and to engender popular support for the nuclear program. The Indian people see Pakistan as the more immediate and passionate threat. The government and ruling elite see China as the more serious and long-term threat."
As India's domestic political picture became increasingly nationalistic in the 1990's, U.S. intelligence concluded that the only unifying domestic consensus political parties could use to rally public opinion was Pakistan, with Kashmir being the central issue.
Pakistan has equally followed domestic appeasement in the recent development of its nuclear arsenal. Gen. Pervaiz Musharraf ousted the elected president in Oct. 1999, bringing to office a pro-Western stance, which is to say, service in support of U.S. policies towards the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and years of involvement with the Afghan Mujahadeen.
Though Musharraf came to power with the justification that the government was not doing enough to quell the fundamentalist tide "to the detriment of public order and national unity," he clearly presides over a country that has independent and destructively militant Islamic factions, and frontier areas that Islamabad barely controls. The Taliban clearly continue to have a great number of sympathizers inside Pakistan, and Al Qaeda has regrouped there, possibly even in Kashmir.
India and Pakistan's 1998 tests and the current posturing must thus be seen not just in the context of three wars fought since 1947 and constant military skirmishes over Kashmir, but also a 30-year record of Islamic fundamentalism that has been used by the Pakistani government (and most important, its renegade intelligence service) to infiltrate into disputed territory.
Enduring Problems
Last Friday, when the U.S. government urged some 60,000 Americans to leave India, it warned of al Qaeda terrorists operating along the Line of Control in disputed Kashmir, and along the Indian-Pakistani border.
"We are now pressing General Musharraf . . . to shut down terrorism [and] attacks that kill innocent people," Secretary of State Colin Powell said last week.
"We remain very concerned about the infiltration across the line of control," Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said in Singapore on Saturday. "That is at the heart of the problem."
If the Indians attacked, says Powell, "it would affect U.S. interests . . . and our war against terrorism, against al-Qaeda and the Taliban."
Wolfowitz may say that "our concern in preventing . . . war goes far beyond simply the effect it would have on our efforts against al Qaeda." But the truth is that as the U.S. has become more and more mono-focused on its terrorism war, Pakistan's linchpin position has conferred upon it not only freedom to operate but legitimate nuclear status.
The real issue isn't nuclear war but U.S. priorities. Which is more important for America? That Pakistan is given respect and deference as the host of U.S. forces continuing to fight in Afghanistan? Or that it is host to the worst international terrorist forces in the world, forces that continue to not only grow, but seem happy to fight "over" Kashmir and take advantage of two flawed and weakened states for an even larger destructive cause?
----
Pakistan Seeks Talks With India
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 3, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-India-Pakistan.html
ALMATY, Kazakhstan (AP) -- Russia ratcheted up pressure on Pakistan on Monday, criticizing Islamabad's alleged aid to terrorists. Pakistan's president said he was willing to meet India's prime minister without conditions to defuse their conflict over Kashmir.
Asked by reporters about what would be his preconditions for such talks, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf said, ``You need to ask this question of Prime Minister Vajpayee. What are his conditions? I don't have any conditions,'' referring to the Indian leader.
The Pakistani leader spoke at a news briefing in Almaty after arriving here Monday for a regional security summit among 16 nations. Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who arrived in Almaty on Sunday, has refused to talk with Musharraf until infiltration of Pakistan-based Islamic militants, and attacks in Indian territory, are halted.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was due to arrive later Monday to try to mediate between the Indian and Pakistani leaders.
Meanwhile, there was heavy cross-border shelling Monday in three areas of Kashmir -- Batalik, Kargil and Dras, an Indian Defense Ministry statement said. Indian officials said that three people, including a policeman and a Muslim guerrilla, were killed in shootings in India's portion of the disputed Himalayan region.
Indian shelling along the frontier killed seven civilians and injured 16 others, including three women, said Brig. Saulat Reza, spokesman for the Pakistani army.
India said its army hit and destroyed 13 Pakistani bunkers across the other side of the line from Dras, which is 95 miles north of Srinagar, the summer capital of India's Jammu-Kashmir state.
Scores of people piled belongings onto trucks Monday in a mass exodus from Kotli in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, after officials imposed an overnight blackout throughout the region. Witnesses spoke of Indian artillery shells landing just a mile from the city, about 25 miles away from the frontier separating Pakistan and India. Farther south, in Khoiratta, residents said almost 10,000 of the village's 15,000 people have fled.
Hours before Putin was due to arrive in Almaty, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov accused Islamabad of allowing ``terrorists'' from Afghanistan to cross into India. He assailed Pakistan for conducting missile tests that further exacerbated the crisis.
``Armed terrorists and extremists from Pakistan keep infiltrating into Indian territory,'' Ivanov said, according to the Interfax-Military News Agency. ``This is a fact you can't turn a blind eye to. Moreover, terrorists who are entering India previously have been ousted from Afghanistan.''
Ivanov also said the recent test-firing of nuclear capable missiles by Pakistan had further escalated tension over Kashmir.
``Against the background of the conflict, the nuclear missile tests conducted by Pakistan were a provocative gesture,'' Ivanov said.
``Any nuclear weapons tests conducted in an atmosphere of extreme tension and suspicion ... is wrong and provocative,'' he said. ``This will definitely push New Delhi to take proportionate retaliatory measures.''
India conducted a similar test in January.
Meanwhile Monday, the Indian Defense Ministry tried to calm international concern about the danger that the conflict could erupt into nuclear war.
``The government makes it clear that India does not believe in the use of nuclear weapons. Neither does it visualize that it will be used by any other country,'' the ministry said in a statement released in New Delhi. ``India categorically rules out the use of nuclear weapons.''
Pakistani Information Minister Nisar Memon refused to say why Pakistan would not rule out the first use of nuclear weapons as India has.
But, he told reporters in Almaty, ``Pakistan's president has clearly said ... that no country will be thinking of this kind of thing to settle the dispute.''
The India-Pakistan crisis revolves around Kashmir, a mostly Muslim region claimed by both countries. The dispute has led to two of the three wars between the nations since they won independence from Britain in 1947.
Putin and Chinese President Jiang Zemin, both of whose countries belong to the 16-nation Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia, were scheduled to meet separately with Musharraf and Vajpayee on Tuesday to encourage them to talk face to face. So far, Vajpayee has refused.
``We don't need to come all the way here to have a meeting. We could meet in our country or his (Musharraf's), if the circumstances were right,'' Omar Abdullah, the deputy Indian foreign minister, told reporters in Almaty on Monday. ``There will be no secret parleys, no dialogue, no discussion.''
But Memon, the Pakistani information minister, expressed hope that the mediation efforts would make progress. He said Pakistan's first choice would be dialogue, the second mediation, and the third proximity talks or shuttle diplomacy. He would not describe the meetings scheduled Tuesday with Putin and Jiang as proximity talks.
India says Islamic militants crossing the border from Pakistan have carried out terror attacks, including a deadly assault on the Indian Parliament in December and on an Indian army base in Kashmir last month, which left more than 30 dead.
Pakistani officials have insisted they are cracking down. They say Pakistan provides only moral and diplomatic support for Kashmiris who want either independence or a merger with Islamic Pakistan.
More than 30 civilians have been killed in cross-border shelling since firing along the frontier intensified two weeks ago, security officials in India-controlled Kashmir said Monday.
The United States and at least 12 other countries as well as the United Nations have issued travel warnings about India and Pakistan.
-------- japan
Japan Scrambles to Contain Fallout From Nuke Remark
By REUTERS
June 3, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-japan-politics.html
TOKYO - China reacted angrily Monday after Japan's top government spokesman hinted that the only nation to suffer a nuclear attack could abandon its hallowed ban on nuclear weapons.
The fuss was the latest headache for Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, struggling to enact key laws amid a precipitous slide in his public support due to doubts over his leadership and commitment to reform.
The furor threatened to broaden into a diplomatic row after China blasted the comments. Ties between the two Asian neighbors were strained last month over North Korean asylum seekers seized by Chinese police from a Japanese consulate.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda told a news conference that he was responsible for remarks attributed to a senior official that Tokyo could review its ban on nuclear arms.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan said the comments violated Japan's promises to the international community, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
``At the present time when peace and development have become the main themes of the times and continued progress is being made in international nuclear disarmament, it is shocking to hear remarks like this from a senior Japanese official,'' Kong said.
LATEST HEADACHE
Fukuda downplayed his comments, saying: ``I only said there is a chance the government could take another look at the three non-nuclear principles in the future.
``There is absolutely no chance that this cabinet will discuss revising these principles.''
Opposition parties, however, called for Fukuda's head and boycotted parliamentary debate on key legislation.
Conservative politicians have become more outspoken in challenging Japan's postwar pacifism, but fears over domestic and diplomatic fallout have meant they are usually forced to retract suggestions Japan should drop its ban on nuclear weapons.
Koizumi said there was no need for the political tempest.
``Why are they making waves when I have said we are not going to revise (the principles)?'' he told reporters.
Saturday, local media quoted an unidentified senior government official as saying Tokyo could review its self-imposed ``three principles,'' which ban the possession, production and import of nuclear arms.
``The principles are just like the Constitution. But in the face of calls to amend the Constitution, the amendment of the principles is also likely,'' Kyodo news agency quoted the senior government official as saying.
Fukuda told the news conference, however, that media interpretations of the remark were incorrect.
It was the latest remark from a series of hawkish officials and politicians seeking to challenge Japan's postwar pacifism.
Opposition Liberal Party leader Ichiro Ozawa drew a sharp response from Beijing in April when he said Japan could easily make nuclear weapons and surpass China's military might.
Ozawa later said his remarks had been distorted and misreported.
Experts say Tokyo does have the wherewithal to put together a nuclear bomb in short order, but talking about the issue has been politically taboo.
Parliamentary Vice Defense Minister Shingo Nishimura had to resign in 1999 after suggesting parliament should debate the nuclear ban -- a sentiment analysts say many lawmakers in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and other parties share.
``Every once in a while, someone in the LDP says what they really think -- that Japan should rearm and have nuclear weapons,'' said Steven Reed, a political science professor at Chuo University. ``It is not a new departure.''
A new row is the last thing Koizumi needs as he struggles to enact key pieces of legislation in the current session of parliament, set to end on June 19.
An extension appears all but inevitable, since Koizumi has yet to enact key legislation including his pet project of postal service reform and controversial bills that officials say are needed to improve Japan's ability to defend itself.
Koizumi has already seen his public support plummet since his January sacking of the popular Makiko Tanaka as foreign minister and a series of scandals in his long-ruling LDP.
A survey released Monday by the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper put Koizumi's support at 40 percent -- neck and neck with his disapproval rating and a far cry from the 90 percent he enjoyed when he took office last year.
------- korea
What to Say to North Korea?
Officials Divided Over How to Move Nation Off 'Axis of Evil'
By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 3, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49415-2002Jun2?language=printer
One month after North Korean leader Kim Jong Il broke a stalemate with the United States by offering to hold talks, the Bush administration has agreed to attend, but is still working out what to say.
The administration wants North Korea and its unpredictable regime -- a member of President Bush's "axis of evil" -- to become a less threatening force in world affairs. U.S. diplomats expect to visit Pyongyang, perhaps within weeks, to explore Kim's willingness to reduce military deployments and weapons sales.
Yet policymakers find themselves in disagreement about how to win better behavior from a Stalinist government exposed repeatedly as an unpredictable partner. What do you do, they are asking themselves, to move North Korea beyond the evil axis?
"Fundamental questions still have not been answered" about how to respond to Kim's recent overture, said one official involved in the discussions. "The problem is, people are operating from different assumptions. Some people think North Korea is sincere. Some don't. The way forward is not clear."
For a White House that has vowed to change the behavior of the Pyongyang government and other rogue regimes by being less forgiving than the Clinton administration, the upcoming talks will provide a real-life test of strategy.
Some commentators are calling the toughened approach "hawk engagement" even as the administration debates how tough to be.
"Hawks are skeptical that North Korea can be induced to cooperate, but are willing to use engagement to call Pyongyang's bluff," Georgetown University associate professor Victor D. Cha writes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. If North Korea responds favorably, all the better. If not, he contends, the policy lays the groundwork for punishing the regime later.
Administration officials said in interviews that they intend to offer North Korea pledges and demands designed to limit such practices as Pyongyang's missile development and weapons proliferation in return for economic aid and other assistance from the United States and its Asian allies.
Without concrete actions, they said, the North Koreans won't get the extra help.
"We envision a series of reciprocal steps, across a range of issues, that are verifiable. It's not clear they are ready to go that far," one U.S. official said of the North Koreans. "We'll seek verification from them, and we'll know it when we see it."
He added, "The approach comes from years of being burned."
The danger, skeptics of the administration's policy say, lies in offering Kim so little and demanding so much that he loses face. One analyst who has spent more than two decades in Korea believes Bush must demonstrate a spirit of mutual accommodation while making clear that the United States will not take hostile action.
But South Korean envoy Lim Dong Won warned the North Korean leader in March that the Bush administration might be prepared to use force in its worldwide fight against terrorism and that "North Korea could be on the list."
The Bush administration wants "the North Koreans to move back from the demilitarized zone before we give them anything, based on our promises," said the analyst. "But that's unilateral surrender, as far as the North Koreans are concerned. They aren't willing to do that without further inducements."
Similar divisions in approach have marked the administration's internal debate since a North Korean emissary notified the State Department on April 27 of Kim's invitation. Officials report intensive talks within the State Department and among the State Department, Pentagon and National Security Council. Agency deputies are to meet again this week.
The hardest line in the State Department is being taken by John R. Bolton, the department's senior arms control official, whose position is shared by the Defense Department leadership, sources said. Those favoring a more measured approach include Jack Pritchard, the administration's special envoy to Pyongyang.
One official, who declined to be identified by name because of the delicacy of the discussions, joked that the interagency process "has aged me." He cited consultations with the Japanese and South Koreans that will continue June 18, and he said the administration has "an interest all the way up and down the chain here in making sure the message is right."
Among decisions to be made are whether to offer compensation to North Korea if it halts its weapons sales -- and, if so, what form of compensation, including food, energy or credits. Another choice is whether to put on the table a reduction or repositioning of the 37,000 U.S. forces in South Korea.
A visit to Pyongyang by Pritchard's team would be the first high-level meeting between the Bush administration and Kim's government. The Clinton administration dispatched Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and nearly arranged a presidential trip to Pyongyang, but Bush arrived in office deeply skeptical of the Clinton opening and of Kim Jong Il.
After a policy review, Bush announced in June 2001 that he would "help the North Korean people, ease sanctions and take other political steps." But first, he said, Kim must agree to a comprehensive approach to issues from the military to humanitarian affairs.
Bush said Kim must establish verifiable limits on missile development and a ban on sales, do more to implement a 1994 nuclear accord, and develop a less-threatening conventional military posture toward South Korea.
In January, Bush lumped North Korea with Iraq and Iran as nations belonging to an "axis of evil." In March, the administration for the first time refused to certify that Pyongyang was abiding by the 1994 Agreed Framework, despite assertions to the contrary from official monitors. The administration remains frustrated that North Korea has refused to allow inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
In April, North Korean diplomats offered to meet American emissaries in Pyongyang, and the White House said talks would be scheduled. But the North Koreans asked the administration for a delay in early May, saying they needed "more time to get organized," a U.S. official said.
A timetable is still being developed for an encounter that the Americans are calling a cautious beginning.
"Our initial meetings will be a presentation of where we're coming from, how we came to this position, why we are asking for what we're asking, and where we expect any negotiations or talks to go," said the official. "It's not jumping right into negotiations."
-------- russia
Russia's Role in Iran and Iraq
New York Times
June 3, 2002
By STEPHEN SESTANOVICH
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/03/opinion/03SEST.html
President Bush and President Vladimir Putin of Russia made a little history when they signed the Treaty of Moscow to cut the nuclear arsenals of both nations. Yet the principles they agreed on were little different from what Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin had agreed on countless times in the past: nuclear arms reductions, cooperation between Russia and NATO, solidarity against 21st century threats, increased trade and investment, and so on. What the new leaders add is the political strength and authority to make these ideas real. Seventy-percent approval ratings have their uses.
Now Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin have to turn to problems on which their predecessors could not agree. Iran and Iraq top the list. Mr. Putin is politically stronger than Mr. Yeltsin ever was, and he may be more willing to accommodate the United States on these issues, too. But it won't be easy. Organized Russian trade and economic interests - as powerful a force in Russian policy today as ideology was in the past - stand in his way.
Iran and Iraq have created problems in Russian-American relations for years. In the last decade both have had good relations with Russia while the United States has considered them enemies. American officials have long complained that Russian diplomats shield Iraq from pressure in the United Nations. And George Tenet recently told Congress that Iran still gets "significant" Russian help on long-range missiles and nuclear weapons.
President Bush has two advantages in pushing for Russian cooperation that President Clinton did not have. The new amity between Moscow and Washington, which Mr. Putin surely wants to preserve, gives him reason to help us. And Mr. Bush's strong rhetoric makes plain that for him Iran and Iraq stand above all other problems.
So Mr. Putin is repositioning himself - but only a little. Russian diplomats, who last year blocked revisions to the international sanctions imposed on Iraq, have joined with the United States to put a revised program in place. Where they used to say Iraq needs assurances that sanctions would be lifted if Iraq met international demands, the Russians now emphasize Iraq's obligation to show that it has no weapons of mass destruction. Russian commentators say the Kremlin knows how stupid it would be to wait too long to switch sides.
Russia's handling of Iran also hints at change. After Mr. Bush's "axis of evil" speech in January, Mr. Putin quickly canceled a visit to Moscow by the Iranian foreign minister. Recently he broke with Tehran on territorial control of the Caspian Sea, siding for the first time with other energy-producing states in the region. And in Moscow, Mr. Putin offered what President Bush called "comforting" assurances about safeguards for the nuclear reactor Russia is building in Iran in the Persian Gulf city of Bushehr.
These steps are a start, but they do not wrest control from Russian domestic interests that benefit most from keeping Russian policy on Iran and Iraq as it is.
Russian companies have by far the largest share of Iraqi trade under the United Nations' oil-for-food program, and Iraqi officials admit this favoritism has only one purpose: to buy Russian support. Saddam Hussein has also offered Russian companies the rights to vast future energy development projects - worth, Russians boast, as much as $60 billion.
That's why Russian oil and gas companies and major exporters to Iraq want Mr. Putin to maintain Iraq's favor by making sure that inspections do not threaten Saddam Hussein. Meanwhile, the Russian nuclear-power industry wants him to keep Iran's favor by making sure restrictions at Bushehr do not block covert nuclear cooperation. So far both groups are getting what they want.
Russian officials tell Americans they are ready to discuss ways to insure that the Bushehr reactor doesn't help Iran's nuclear weapons program. But the offer is irrelevant as long as Russia provides Iran dangerous nuclear assistance outside of the Bushehr project - and denies it. The Bush administration may not be willing to put up with double-dealing on this issue for very long.
Mr. Putin can't be happy with the box he is in. If he yields to pressure from Mr. Bush, he gives an opening to critics who say he lets Washington push him around. But rejecting American concerns, which some of his advisers clearly favor, takes the shine off a relationship that is now the centerpiece of Russian foreign policy.
Still, he may feel a little less squeezed by Mr. Bush than he did before the recent summit. In Moscow, President Bush showed that he is not demanding an immediate solution on Iran and won't berate Mr. Putin about it in public. And Russia is under less pressure on Iraq while the United States weighs its options for dealing with Saddam Hussein.
Yet Mr. Putin can't draw much comfort from this reprieve. Having seen the Clinton-Yeltsin relationship decline, he knows the difference between a real partnership and one that limps along with key geopolitical issues unresolved.
There is a way to ease Mr. Putin's predicament that could help him avert a clash with Washington without seeming to embrace American policy outright: He can close the gap between Russian actions and Russian rhetoric.
If Russian diplomats became unyielding advocates of an exhaustive and unconditional inspections regime in Iraq - and showed they meant it - they would not be doing Washington's bidding but carrying out their own stated policy. And if Mr. Putin stopped letting the Russian nuclear-power establishment provide dangerous technology to Iran - something he says he opposes - he would only be enforcing official Russian policy.
Neither Tehran nor Baghdad will like Russian policies that mean what they say. Saddam Hussein may retaliate by ending the favoritism Russian companies now enjoy. The Iranians may say that if the flow of illicit technology is cut off they'll cut back their legitimate trade with Russia, too.
Standing up to Russian business interests will carry political costs for Mr. Putin. But by doing so, he can enhance American confidence in the new partnership with Russia - perhaps enough to get Washington to discuss how Russia's economic sacrifices should be recognized.
Iran and Iraq have taken a toll on Russian-American relations for a long time. Mr. Putin has a chance to break this pattern. Unless he does, we may remember the summit for its promise of an alliance that might have been - but wasn't.
Stephen Sestanovich is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and professor of international diplomacy at Columbia.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
U.S. Orders Design of New Weapons Plant
Nuclear Triggers to Be Made
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 3, 2002; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49321-2002Jun2?language=printer
The Bush administration has ordered conceptual design work started for a new $2 billion to $4 billion plant that would produce plutonium triggers for the U.S. nuclear weapons force beginning in 2020, according to the National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages the U.S. nuclear weapons program.
The triggers will be needed even though President Bush last month signed an agreement with Russia to reduce the number of U.S. deployed nuclear warheads by two-thirds, from 6,000 today to 1,700 to 2,200 over the next 10 years. That is because the plutonium in the current triggers on the thermonuclear weapons is expected to decay. The United States has announced that many of the approximately 4,000 warheads taken out of operational status under the U.S.-Russia agreement will be kept in a ready reserve.
The triggers, called "pits," provide a small atomic burst that creates the nuclear fusion explosion in the more powerful thermonuclear weapons. Pit production, which took place at Rocky Flats, Colo., ended in 1989.
A small pit capability is being developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, but the administration's Nuclear Posture Review completed earlier this year said that "having the ability to produce pits is important to ensure the future viability of the nation's nuclear deterrent."
A nuclear expert, Dale E. Klein, vice chancellor of the the University of Texas System, once described pits as resembling "bowling balls encased in stainless steel or beryllium."
"We need to have the capacity to manufacture certified pits to maintain the safety, security and reliability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent into the future," Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said Friday.
Although the administration is planning to produce new pits, debate is still taking place on how to dispose of the thousands of old pits removed from dismantled nuclear weapons. The Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League of Aiken, S.C., located near the Energy Department's Savannah River site, has complained about the danger of shipping 7,000 old pits there for dismantling.
"Plutonium disposition facilities have been sold as nonproliferation missions at the same time DOE [the Department of Energy] has secretly been planning and upgrading its capabilities to fabricate 100-500 new plutonium pits per year at Savannah River," the environmental group said in a report last year.
Plans call for site evaluation for the pit production facility to begin in September.
----
Peacekeeper Missile Launched in Test
June 3, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-BRF-Missile-Test.html
VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (AP) -- An unarmed 70-foot Peacekeeper missile was launched early Monday in a routine test of the country's intercontinental ballistic missile system, the Air Force said.
The 198,000-pound missile lifted off from the central California coast at 1:01 a.m. and sent nine unarmed re-entry vehicles toward a target 4,800 miles away on the Kwajalein Missile Range in the Marshall Islands.
The missile used in the test was randomly selected from missiles at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyo., as part of the routine program to verify the reliability of the country's intercontinental ballistic missile force, the Air Force said in a statement. The test was considered successful, the statement said.
The most recent previous such launch from Vandenberg was of an unarmed Minuteman III missile April 8.
The U.S. arsenal of land-based long-range nuclear missiles includes 50 Peacekeepers, each of which is armed with 10 warheads, and 500 Minuteman IIIs, with three warheads apiece
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- nebraska
Ex-Gov. Accused in Nuke Waste Case
By Kevin O'hanlon
Associated Press Writer
Monday, June 3, 2002; 9:13 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54627-2002Jun3?language=printer
LINCOLN, Neb. -- Former Gov. Ben Nelson ordered subordinates to try to derail efforts to build a regional radioactive waste dump in Nebraska, despite the state's entering a compact to host the facility, a lawyer charged.
The allegation came Monday as a trial began in a federal lawsuit accusing Nebraska of wrongly refusing to issue a license in 1998 for the storage site near Butte, along the South Dakota border.
Lawyers for the state said the rejection was "based on sound science and compelling facts."
The dump was intended to store low-level radioactive waste from Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana. Such waste includes contaminated tools and clothing from nuclear power plants, hospitals and research centers.
Besides telling aides to "create noise and difficulties" and stall the project in court or administratively, attorney Alan Peterson said Nelson, now a U.S. senator, enlisted the help of grass-roots opponents of the dump.
"They became his allies," Peterson said.
Brad Reynolds, who is leading Nebraska's defense team, rejected allegations that Nelson and other officials conspired to thwart the dump.
"The answer, your honor, is not simply 'No,' it's 'Hell, no,'" Reynolds told U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf. "That bad faith card will not play."
Rather, Nebraska denied the license because of pollution concerns and a high water table near the proposed site, the defense said.
The trial began the same day that four Southeastern states and a regional commission charged with building a similar dump sued North Carolina, asking for $90 million in sanctions. In 1999, North Carolina withdrew from a regional pact and ceased work on a planned waste site south of Raleigh.
In Nebraska, taxpayers could be ordered to pay up to $200 million if the state loses its case.
The lawsuit there was filed by utilities that generate radioactive waste. They were later joined by the four other states slated to use the dump. Nebraska joined Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana in 1983 in forming a regional waste compact. The other states voted in 1987 to locate the dump in Nebraska.
In 2000, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said there appeared to be evidence that Nebraska officials tried to thwart plans to build the storage site.
The court also rejected the state's argument that it is protected from such lawsuits under the U.S. Constitution's 11th Amendment, which gives states immunity from most lawsuits seeking monetary damages. The court upheld a ruling that Nebraska had protection from the utilities, but not the other states.
In the Southeast, North Carolina was originally among eight states that made up a waste compact. South Carolina dropped out in 1995, and the group now includes Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee and Virginia.
North Carolina officials have said the state was not treated fairly by the group, and they were within their rights to withdraw.
But the other states and the Southeast Compact Commission allege the state violated the law that created the compact.
"North Carolina did not live up to its promise," commission chairman James Setser said Monday.
On the Net:
Central Interstate Low Level Radioactive Waste Compact Commission: http://www.cillrwcc.org/
-------- us politics
Senator hits Bush's 'pre-emptive' plan
June 3, 2002
By Joyce Howard Price
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020603-13910032.htm
A key Senate Democrat said yesterday that she's disturbed by President Bush's call for "pre-emptive military strikes" against nations or groups that threaten this country.
"I think this is a predicate for an attack on Iraq, and I'm very concerned about it," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
"I think it would be a terrible mistake for the United States unilaterally to attack Iraq and to do so without any congressional authorization," she said yesterday on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer."
Mrs. Feinstein was responding to remarks by Mr. Bush Saturday in a commencement address at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., when he said "unbalanced dictators" must be stopped before they develop weapons of mass destruction or provide them to terrorist groups.
The president said the United States must "take the battle to the enemy, disrupt its plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge."
On CNN, Mrs. Feinstein said such a move would go beyond the authority Congress granted Mr. Bush after the September 11 terrorist attacks.
"The authorization we gave the president with respect to 9/11 was precisely crafted to connect the use of force with those who either perpetrated or were connected to 9/11. Iraq was not. And, therefore, I think a pre-emptive attack without full debate in the Congress would be a terrible mistake," she added.
Mrs. Feinstein added that the "whole Muslim Middle East" will turn against the United States if it attacks Iraq and "leaves unsettled the Israeli-Palestinian crisis."
"We don't need this because we haven't won our own war yet in Afghanistan or in other places," she said.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, Texas Republican, who also appeared on "Late Edition," was more sympathetic to the president's remarks. But she said she does "not think the president was specifically referring to Iraq."
"I think it is time for us to seriously look at a congressional mandate in a war on terrorism," she said. "I think we are in the process of making the case with Iraq."
---
A Preview of the Coming Congressional Sept. 11 Probe
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 3, 2002; 10:32 AM
ttp://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A51626-2002Jun3?language=printer
The Senate Select Committee of Intelligence's recent report on the intelligence authorization acts for fiscal year 2003 provides a glimmer of how contentious upcoming hearings could be on Capitol Hill into intelligence failures associated with last September's terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. While the committee applauded the Bush administration for exceeding its spending recommendations in every single intelligence program, it noted that prior to Sept. 11, intelligence challenges had "for too long, received inadequate attention and insufficient resources."
In language that could foreshadow a personality clash during the hearings, the committee repeatedly criticizes George J. Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, for a "dismal" performance in providing Congress with over 70 reports on aspects of intelligence activities, including 10 that were required by law.
The main problem now that the money is available to the intelligence community, the committee said, is whether the CIA and its sister spy agencies can "absorb" those increases and make effective use of the funds. Indeed, the committee found it hard to figure out from existing budget documents precisely how much has been spent on counterterrorism. What's more, it said that recent reports by the CIA and Defense Department Inspector Generals indicate that the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency are all unable to produce "auditable" financial statements.
In the authorization act, the committee mandates creation of a database called the Terrorist Identification Classification System, finding that the CIA and FBI lacked a common system and were not "well configured" to provide information about terrorists to those in the government who needed it. The committee also found that the U.S. military has failed to fill 3,000 intelligence jobs annually, including 70 analytic positions at the U.S. Central Command, responsible for executing the war on terrorism in Afghanistan.
"In light of the contributions of intelligence to the ongoing war against terrorism, the committee believes that filling intelligence billets...should be a top priority of the Defense of Defense," the SSCI report states.
Retaliatory Strike
As if the FBI doesn't have enough to do these days, a special agent contacted former CIA case officer John Spinelli out of the blue last month and told him that he was under investigation for possible unauthorized disclosure of classified information. Spinelli's offending behavior: he talked to me_with caution, seven years after the fact about his service as deputy station chief in Somalia in support of U.N. peacekeepers in 1993.
It was quite a tale. Spinelli, an Italian-American born in Italy, was shot in the neck and shoulder at a roadblock ambush as the U.S. military stepped up its manhunt for Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed, just weeks before 18 American soldiers were killed in the "Blackhawk Down" battle in south Mogadishu.
Less than a month after his story appeared in The Post's Sunday mgazine in February 2000, Spinelli joined a lawsuit of current and former CIA officers claiming that the agency had systemically deprived them the right to legal counsel in administrative proceedings. In the suit, Spinelli alleged that the agency had denied his attorney access to medical and personnel files he needed to pursue a claim for disability compensation arising from his gunshot wounds.
He is now seeking to add another claim, alleging that latest FBI probe was requested by the CIA in retaliation for participating in the lawsuit. "Had the CIA or FBI actually considerd the subject article to be a genuine threat to national security, a delay of more than two years in commencing an investigation is inconceivable," Spinelli's attorney, Roy W. Krieger, said in court papers.
One U.S. official said the CIA referred what it considered a possible disclosure of classified information to the FBI and the Justice Department in May 2000. CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield declined to comment on the investigation or Spinelli's lawsuit, other than to call his claim of CIA retaliation "ridiculous."
Bamford's Latest
While a steady stream of leaks flowed from the Bush administration about CIA heroics in Afghanistan following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the National Security Agency remained tight as a drum. That fact was reinforced reading a new Afterward to the paperback edition of James Bamford's Body of Secrets, the best-selling sequel to his groundbreaking first NSA book, The Puzzle Palace. Bamford is a superb reporter--the best in the world when it comes to reporting on the NSA. Yet in three months following the terrorist attacks, even he failed to come up with anything about the agency's operational successes or failures against al Qaeda in a low-tech war that had to be a SIGINT bonanza.
Bamford does report that the NSA had no idea where al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden or any of his key lieutenants were for two years prior to the Sept. 11 attacks and three months afterwards, thanks in part to President Bill Clinton's cruise missile attack on terrorist training camps in Afghanistan in August 1998. The barrage convinced bin Laden, according to Bamford, to abandon his satellite telephone. Fort Meade had the number.
Bamford also quotes a senior intelligence official as saying that, on Sept. 10, the number of NSA linguists proficient in the two primary languages spoken in Afghanistan, Pashtun and Dari, "could be counted on one hand with fingers left over."
"For half a century, NSA had fought a war against a giant nation with fixed military bases, a sophisticated communications network, a stable chain of command, and a long history from which future intentions could be anticipated," Bamford writes. "Now that has all changed. Terrorists are stateless and constantly on the move, their organizational structures are always in flux, and the only thing that is predictable is that they will be unpredictable. And when they do communicate, their infrequent messages join with billions of other pieces of communication_e-mail, cell phones, data transfers_zapping around the world at the speed of light in a complex digital web of bits, bytes, and photons."
Vernon Loeb can be reached by email at loebv@washpost.com
-----
Cost Anti-Terror Bill Could Grow
By Alan Fram
Associated Press Writer
Monday, June 3, 2002; 5:10 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A53516-2002Jun3?language=printer
WASHINGTON -- The Senate on Monday began debating an anti-terrorism bill with a $31 billion price tag that could balloon despite President Bush's objections that it is already too expensive.
The measure is already crammed with money for the Pentagon, intelligence, airport security, food safety and similar programs, and senators from both parties were lined up with amendments, including many having nothing to do with the fight against terror.
These included a long-shot effort for $8.9 billion to help fiscally struggling states pay for Medicaid and other social services; a likelier $1 billion for drought-afflicted farmers; and money to combat AIDS overseas and rebuild the Oklahoma bridge that an errant barge toppled last month.
The bill's chief authors, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., and Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, the panel's top Republican, are expected to oppose many add-ons unless they are paid for with cuts in other programs.
Even so, the bill was already heftier than the $27.1 billion version President Bush sent Congress in March. Byrd has said the White House proposal under-financed efforts to combat bioterrorism and bolster security at nuclear facilities, water systems and other areas.
"We know where those gaps are," Byrd said Monday. "And if we know where those gaps are, you can be sure that the terrorists know."
The House approved a $29 billion package May 24. Senate debate is expected to last at least a week.
No Republican spoke during Monday's brief debate on the measure, which is called a supplemental spending bill because it would cover the last four months of the federal fiscal year. But last week, Bush again warned the Senate against producing a costly bill, though he avoided directly threatening a veto.
"The supplemental ought to focus on emergency measures, measures that are needed to fight the war, to button up the homeland," he said. "But the supplemental shouldn't be viewed as an opportunity to load it up with special projects."
As written, the measure contains strikingly fewer home-district projects than usual for a bill of its size. It does include $3 million for the Interior Department to drill five water wells in Santa Fe, N.M., and $16 million to help Northeastern fishing interests hurt by legal restrictions on fishing.
Likely amendments include:
-Sens. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, want to give the states $8.9 billion for Medicaid and a new social services block grant. That would restore some of the funds states lost due to a business tax cut Congress enacted earlier this year, which reduced revenue for states whose tax systems are linked to federal law.
-Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., plans to seek nearly $1 billion to help farmers hit by recent drought conditions.
-Sens. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., and Bill Frist, R-Tenn., will seek to add $400 million to the $100 million already in the bill to fight AIDS abroad; Sens. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa., prefer a $600 million addition.
-Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., would add $15 million to restore the Interstate 40 bridge over the Arkansas River that was destroyed by a barge, killing 14 people.
The bill may also be used to resolve broader budget issues.
Partisan differences have prevented Congress from approving a budget for the coming fiscal year. If the two sides can agree, the measure may eventually set an overall spending level for 2003, renew expiring laws used to enforce tax and spending targets, and extend the government's borrowing limit, which the Bush administration says will otherwise be breached by June 28.
Without a bipartisan agreement, the bill may become a battleground for some of those fights.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Sen: Kashmir May Hurt Afghan Mission
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 3, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-India-Pakistan.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States may need to reassess its military mission in Afghanistan because of the threat of nuclear war between India and Pakistan, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Sunday.
Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., and other leaders of Congress' intelligence committees said there was a real possibility that the current standoff over the dispute province of Kashmir could lead to the use of nuclear weapons.
India's defense minister said Sunday that India would not be ``impulsive'' and he sought to ease fears of a nuclear war. Pakistan's president said Saturday that no ``sane individual'' would let tensions between the two nations escalate into a nuclear confrontation.
``I think it's the most dangerous place in the world,'' said Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, top Republican on Senate committee. ``I hope it will not get to desperation. ... If it does, I'm afraid we'll have a nuclear exchange. The worst of all scenarios is an explosive, incendiary place like we've never seen.''
Graham said the United States was at fault because it ``sat on the sidelines for over 50 years and let this Kashmir situation get to this point that it is now exploding on us at a time of real crisis.''
The divided Himalayan province is claimed in its entirety by both India and Pakistan. The region has been the flashpoint of two of the three wars India and Pakistan have fought since independence 55 years ago.
Graham said on NBC'S ``Meet the Press'' that the United States has to be ``prepared to reassess our military operation in Afghanistan. Can we keep thousands of American troops in the theater when there is a threat of nuclear war?''
GOP Rep. Porter Goss of Florida, chairman of the House intelligence committee, said he does not think ``there is sufficient understanding of the people who have nuclear capability of the consequences of using that nuclear capability. That's the danger.''
This week, the United States is sending Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to the region to try to ease tensions.
India's ambassador to the United States, Lalit Mansingh, said the two sides are running out of diplomatic options. ``This is why it's important for Pakistan to listen to what President Bush and other world leaders are saying: stop the export of terrorism into India,'' the diplomat said on ``Fox News Sunday.''
Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, Maleeha Lodhi said her country would keep its word to stop the launching from Pakistani soil of terrorist attacks into Indian-held Kashmir.
``We came through, we delivered,'' when the war on terrorism began, she said on Fox. ``The United States, as well as the rest of the international coalition, could not have achieved the significant gains that were achieved in Afghanistan without our help.''
-------- asia
Summit targets India, Pakistan
By Christopher Pala
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
June 3, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020603-84172980.htm
ALMATY, Kazakhstan - Russian and Kazakh diplomats are working feverishly to broker some kind of peace negotiation between the leaders of India and Pakistan, who will be in Kazakhstan today and tomorrow for a pan-Asian summit dedicated to regional peacekeeping.
Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who arrived in Almaty yesterday, dashed hopes for a meeting with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, telling reporters aboard his plane there was "no such plan."
But reports persisted that some kind of "proximity" talks may take place, perhaps through the mediation of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who would welcome a diplomatic victory after a long period of meeting U.S. goals.
"Everybody is trying hard" to find a way to get the two nuclear-armed powers to pull back from the brink of war, said Kazakh Vice Foreign Minister Kairat Abusseitov.
A reduction of Indian-Pakistani tensions also would be a major coup for Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev at a time when he is under international scrutiny for his tough treatment of political opponents.
The 16-nation summit was called to formalize the creation of a new Asian security organization roughly comparable to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, an idea first broached by Mr. Nazarbayev in a speech to the United Nations in 1992.
For the new peacemaking body to resolve an international crisis at its founding meeting would lend legitimacy to the new organization - to be called the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA) - and to Mr. Nazarbayev.
Violence continued yesterday along the India-Pakistan border, where more than 1 million soldiers have been massed with tanks and missiles for months.
News agencies reported exchanges of mortar and machine-gun fire and quoted officials as saying four Pakistanis and an Indian woman had been killed in the disputed Kashmir region.
India said eight civilians were hurt when Pakistani troops began a mortar attack on a village. Pakistan said four soldiers were injured by Indian shelling in nearby Punjab province.
In Almaty, the former foreign ministry building, a sleepy place since the capital was moved to Astana several years ago, was a beehive of activity as Kazakh diplomats conferred with their Indian, Russian and Pakistani counterparts.
China also was expected to play a role. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, speaking during a visit to Ukraine, said he was "confident [Mr. Putin] and the Chinese president [Jiang Zemin] will be able to be dissuade" India and Pakistan from escalating their conflict.
Gen. Musharraf, who was in Tajikistan before arriving today in Kazakhstan's commercial capital, said yesterday that he had proposed a meeting with Mr. Vajpayee several times and still hoped to "establish a peaceful dialogue."
But if the Indian leader does not want to talk, "I think that in the future there is no point in raising this question again," he said.
India's ambassador to Kazakhstan, Vidya Sagar Verma, meanwhile told Agence France-Presse there "would be no talks or secret meetings at any level" between officials from the Indian and Pakistani delegations.
Nevertheless, Mr. Putin has scheduled talks with Gen. Musharraf and perhaps with Mr. Vajpayee, and there were reports that the Russian president and Mr. Nazarbayev would serve as intermediaries between the Indian and Pakistani leaders as they sat in different rooms.
Kazakh Foreign Minister Kasymzhomart Tokaev declined to comment on those reports, saying only that "there will be bilateral consultations and meetings within the framework of CICA here in Almaty."
"As far as Kazakhstan is concerned, we, being a host country, are ready to arrange everything necessary for holding either bilateral or multilateral meetings within the framework of CICA," he said.
A breakthrough "will be very important for Kazakhstan because it will strengthen our record as a peaceful country that is really interested in enhancing security in the region."
Mr. Vajpayee is staying at the Ankara Hotel, where the signing ceremony creating CICA will take place tomorrow morning. He held a private dinner there last night, with no foreign participation, Indian officials said.
Gen. Musharraf arrives this afternoon and will be staying at the Hyatt, about a mile away.
Kazakh officials noted that Mr.Vajpayee's decision to stay an extra day, leaving on Wednesday instead of tomorrow afternoon, is a positive sign.
They also noted that Mr. Vajpayee will officially be on a bilateral visit until this afternoon, according to Mr. Tokaev. Thus, Mr. Nazarbayev will have an extra day to persuade his guest to change his mind.
Gen. Musharraf, like the other heads of state and delegation, is due to leave tomorrow afternoon.
The other founding CICA members are Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Iran, China, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Turkey and Uzbekistan. Ten other nations, including the United States, Australia and Japan, will have observer status.
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.
-------- biological weapons
In Search of Antiterror Drugs
New York Times
June 3, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/03/opinion/03MON2.html
In an effort to come up with drugs and vaccines to protect people against biological, chemical or nuclear attacks, the Food and Drug Administration adopted new rules last week that will allow it to approve some medicines without requiring clinical trials to determine their efficacy in humans. The agency will rely instead on animal tests and other measures to determine if the substance is likely to be effective.
That could leave the American public in an uncomfortable position. Should a devastating attack occur or be imminent, people could be betting their lives on unproven remedies, with no assurance that they will really work in humans. Even so, the new policy seems the best way to proceed in an age of terrorism. There is simply no ethical way to conduct the clinical trials that are traditionally required to prove a drug's efficacy.
The problem is not that the drugs or vaccines themselves cannot be taken. They can be and will be given to human volunteers in the traditional tests that are designed to demonstrate that a substance is safe for human consumption. Rather, the problem arises at the next step, when the effectiveness of the medicines would have to be tested by exposing human volunteers to lethal agents like smallpox, nerve gas or intense radiation.
In a practical sense, it would be hard to find many volunteers eager to test an experimental vaccine against, say, the Ebola virus, by potentially subjecting themselves to a gruesome death should the vaccine fail. But practicalities aside, the F.D.A. has concluded that it would be unethical and unsafe to conduct such trials. The risks to the volunteer would be very high, and the possible benefit, in the absence of a terrorist attack, would be nonexistent.
The agency will rely instead on animal testing buttressed by whatever supporting data is available. The agency expects that potential drugs and vaccines would be tested in more than one animal species unless there is a single species deemed especially good for predicting human effectiveness.
The agency's carefully drawn rules also require that the pathways by which a drug and a germ operate in the body are understood well enough that reasonable predictions can be made. But none of this is foolproof. As the F.D.A. acknowledges, "There are countless examples of treatments with favorable effects in animals that did not prove effective in humans."
Even consumer advocates who serve as watchdogs over the F.D.A. agree that the new rules make sense. They simply urged that the rules be sparingly applied and not become a loophole to weaken the drug approval process. The F.D.A. swears it will move cautiously and estimates that the new rules might be invoked only once every three years. If that proves the case, the real problem might not be too many approvals, but too few new medicines to cope with terrorist attacks.
-------- business
FEDERAL CONTRACTS
States News Service
Monday, June 3, 2002; Page E09
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49525-2002Jun2?language=printer
Pragmatics Inc. of McLean won a share of a $1 billion contract from the Defense Information Systems Agency for engineering services.
QSS Group Inc. of Lanham won a $104 million contract from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency for network management, systems administration, telecommunications and information-technology planning services.
AMSEC LLC of Virginia Beach won a $62.22 million contract from the Navy for fleet support of the carrier engineering maintenance assist team.
AT&T Business Communication Services of Washington won a $49.9 million contract from the Navy for telecommunications services for the State Department.
Northrop Grumman of Newport News, Va., won a $22.92 million contract from the Navy for engineering and technical services to remove and install safe antenna systems onboard nuclear submarines.
Oceaneering International Inc. of Chesapeake won a $17.52 million contract from the Navy for engineering and technical services to remove and install safe antenna systems onboard nuclear submarines.
Bell-Boeing Joint Program Office of Patuxent River, Md., won a $13.9 million contract from the Navy for work on the V-22 Osprey upgrade/restructure program.
Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Co. of Newport News, Va., won an $8.35 million contract from the Navy for dry-docking of the USS Vella Gulf.
CACI Technologies Inc. of Chantilly won an $8.07 million contract from the Air Force for warfighter intelligence and signals enhancement.
Norfolk Shipbuilding & Drydock Corp. of Norfolk won a $7.47 million contract from the Navy for work on the USS Bataan.
New Maryland Clothing Manufacturing of Baltimore won a $5.93 million contract from the Defense Supply Center for coats for men and women in the Air Force.
Price Waterhouse Coopers LLP of Arlington won a $5.8 million contract from the Agency for International Development for services related to the capital market development program in Armenia. Centennial Contractors Enterprises Inc. of Vienna won a $5.61 million contract from the Navy for renovating barracks at the Oceana Navy Station.
F.C. Business Systems Inc. of Springfield won a $3.29 million contract from the Army for contracting services.
Federal Resources Corp. of Fairfax won a $2.98 million contract from the Navy for technical support services.
Innovative Decisions Inc. of Herndon won a $2.5 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Logistics Management Engineering Inc. of Annapolis won a $2.27 million contract from the Navy for parts for the TH-6B helicopter.
Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide of Washington won a $2.25 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Downtown Partership of Baltimore Inc. of Baltimore won a $2.15 million contract from the Bureau of the Public Debt for shuttle services in Baltimore.
Marine Hydraulics International Inc. of Norfolk won a $1.84 million contract from the Navy for electrical, mechanical and structural repairs.
Federal Resources Corp. of Fairfax won a $1.6 million contract from the Army for video teleconference support.
Wright Solutions Inc. of Lanham won a $1.25 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Integrated Resource Technologies Inc. of Springfield won a $1.25 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
PowerMax Inc. of Silver Spring won a $1.09 million contract from the Army Corps of Engineers for heating, ventilation and air-conditioning upgrades at Dunbar Senior High School.
Rieger Communications Inc. of Gaithersburg won a $1.04 million contract from the Patent & Trademark Office for plant patent photo reproduction services.
Sterling Cleaners of Washington won a $939,225 contract from the Secret Service for dry-cleaning and laundry services.
Rustler Construction Inc. of Herndon won a $653,087 contract from the Federal Highway Administration for work on the George Washington Memorial Parkway project.
Tri-State Utilities Co. of Chesapeake, Va., won a $644,817 contract from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for repair of storm drainage systems.
AMF Mechanical of Upper Marlboro won a $595,317 contract from the General Services Administration for mechanical operations and maintenance services in Indianapolis.
Legacy Title & Escrow Inc. of Hyattsville won a contract worth up to $568,875, from the Department of Housing & Urban Development for closing agent services.
Crown Title Corp. of Baltimore won a contract worth up to $450,550, from the Department of Housing & Urban Development for closing agent services.
Vinnell Corp. of Fairfax won a $400,000 contract from the General Services Administration for recreational, hospitality, law enforcement, facilities, industrial and environmental services and products.
Booz Allen & Hamilton Inc. of McLean won a $300,000 contract from the Air Force for a proof of concept.
Enersys Inc. of Jessup, Md., won a $239,760 contract from the Defense Supply Center for storage batteries.
Telescience International Inc. of Vienna won a $227,290 contract from the Department of Health & Human Services for nursing services.
DHC Title Co. of Silver Spring won a contract worth up to $208,000, from the Department of Housing & Urban Development for closing agent services.
AEPCO Marine of Virginia Beach won a $194,486 contract from the Navy for work on the USS Teddy Roosevelt.
Alliant Techsystems Inc. of Radford, Va., won a $130,539 contract from the Army for operations and maintenance of a government-owned facility.
P&J Contracting Co. Inc. of Baltimore won a $119,545 contract from the Navy for demolition of various buildings.
Automated Precision Inc. of Gaithersburg won a $102,906 contract from the Air Force for a laser tracking system.
ITT Industries Inc. of Roanoke, Va., won a $92,000 contract from the Defense Supply Center for battery compartments.
Northrop Grumman Systems Corp. of Linthicum Heights won a $79,800 contract from the Air Force for back plane assemblies.
Kaydon Corp. of Baltimore won a $77,009 contract from the Defense Supply Center for metal seal rings.
Nurad Technologies Inc. of Baltimore won a $74,750 contract from the Defense Supply Center for antennas. Richcon Inc. of Chesapeake won a $70,000 contract from the Department of Veterans Affairs for replacing a steam line.
Genex Tech Inc. of Kensington won a $69,983 contract from the Navy for a feasibility study to investigate small business innovative research.
Digital System Resources of Fairfax won a $69,464 contract from the Navy for a feasibility study to investigate small business innovation research.
Dela Technology Corp. of Rockville won a $66,340 contract from the Defense Supply Center for thermal brake piston insulators.
Comptech Corp. of Rockville won a $58,313 contract from the Defense Supply Center for electrical fuel pumps.
John M. Street Jr. & Co. of Richmond won a $54,702 contract from the Navy for multimedia installation services.
Davis Interior of Norfolk won a $54,000 contract from the Navy for renovating a mess deck.
Ibide International Corp. of Woodstock, Va., won a $53,805 contract from the Defense Supply Center for alternating current motors.
Tek-Lite Inc. of Union Bridge, Md., won a $97,000 contract from the Defense Supply Center for aircraft navigational lights.
Litton Systems Inc. of Blacksburg, Va., won a $90,243 contract from the Defense Personnel Support Center for electrical contact brushes.
Kollmorgen Corp. of Radford, Va., won an $84,796 contract from the Defense Personnel Support Center for special motors.
Pioneer UAV Inc. of Cockeysville, Md., won an $80,433 contract from the Navy for electronic test sets.
Matrix Technical Solutions Inc. of Norfolk won a $79,680 contract from the Navy for latches.
Omni Shoreham Hotel of Washington won a $79,679 contract from the Drug Enforcement Administration for renting space for a conference.
Comptech Corp. of Rockville won a $79,495 contract from the Defense Supply Center for helical compression springs.
Israel Aircraft Industries International Inc. of Arlington won a $69,900 contract from the Navy for crash attachments.
Comptech Corp. of Rockville won a $69,260 contract from the Defense Personnel Support Center for generator rotors.
Progeny Systems Corp. of Manassas won a $69,241 contract from the Navy for a feasibility study to investigate small businesses.
Northrop Grumman Systems Corp. of Linthicum Heights won a $69,150 contract from the Defense Supply Center for radar modulators.
Lombart Instrument of Norfolk won a $65,106 contract from the Defense Personnel Support Center for horizontally mounted, ophthalmic, slit lights.
ITT Industries Inc. of Roanoke won a $63,865 contract from the Navy for night-image converters.
Mail-Well Graphics of Cambridge, Md., won a $59,998 contract from the Government Printing Office for an electronic debit account.
Comptech Corp. of Rockville won a $55,564 contract from the Defense Supply Center for vehicle-mounted winch drums.
Delancey Printing of Alexandria won a $55,159 contract from the Government Printing Office for printing services.
Tactical & Survival Specialties Inc. of Harrisonburg, Va., won a $58,800 contract from the Navy for inspection mirrors.
Newport News Shipbuilding & Drydock Co. of Newport News won a $300,000 contract from the Navy for hatch actuators.
Encompass LLC of Bethesda won a $250,000 contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Salmi & Co. of Pasadena, Md., won a $183,150 contract from the Coast Guard for dockside repairs to the Coast Guard cutter Bristol Bay.
Northrop Grumman Systems Corp. of Linthicum Heights won a $170,910 contract from the Air Force for repairing test adapters and circuit card assemblies.
Flagship Investigations Inc. of Columbia won a $125,000 contract from the General Services Administration for recreational, hospitality, law enforcement, facilities, industrial and environmental services and products.
Small Wonders of Rockville won a $125,000 contract from the General Services Administration for recreational, hospitality, law enforcement, facilities, industrial and environmental services and products.
Aerial Machine and Tool Corp. of Vesta, Va., won a $118,388 contract from the Defense Supply Center for aircraft safety belts.
ITT Industries Inc. of Roanoke won a $100,000 contract from the Defense Supply Center for battery compartments.
Maurer Bea Inc. of Sterling won a $96,165 contract from the Defense Supply Center for protective mask carrier assemblies.
Comptech Corp. of Rockville won a $75,738 contract from the Defense Industrial Supply Center for light indicating panels.
VNA International of Stafford, Va., won a $65,550 contract from the Army for secondary batteries.
FDGM Inc. of Chesapeake, Va., won a $60,574 contract from the Defense Supply Center for military supplies.
Marzik Inc. of Lanham won a $59,530 contract from the Treasury Department for media tape cartridges.
Northrop Grumman Systems Corp. of Annapolis won a $57,000 contract from the Navy for circuit card assemblies.
Digital System Resources Inc. of Fairfax won a $7.46 million contract from the Navy for engineering services and material support services.
Social & Scientific Systems of Silver Spring won a $7.07 million contract from the National Institutes of Health for technical and administrative support services.
California Microwave of Belcamp won a $7.04 million contract from the Army for logistical contractor support services for the ARL-M aircraft program.
Kellogg Brown & Root of Arlington won a $7 million contract from the Navy for construction of a detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
General Dynamics Robotic Systems Inc. of Westminster, Md., won a $6.17 million contract from the Army for five M56 smoke generator systems and five gas turbine engines.
Adnet Systems Inc. of Potomac won a $5.74 million contract from the Agriculture Department for data entry services.
Winbourne & Costas Inc. of Washington won a $5 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Communications Solutions Inc. of White Marsh won a $4.94 million contract from the Navy for high-band direction-finding monitoring systems.
Signal Corp. of Fairfax won a $3.8 million contract from the Pentagon Renovation Office for information-technology services.
Precon Marine Inc. of Chesapeake won a $3.78 million contract from the Army Corps of Engineers to retrofit a bridge.
Kunitz & Associates Inc. of Rockville won a $3.2 million contract from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke for management resources.
Packard Construction Corp. of Newington won a $3.18 million contract from the Army Corps of Engineers for an imagery and analysis facility.
Bin Tech Inc. of Vienna won a $2.99 million contract from the Office of Naval Research for software engineering and technical support services.
Williams Scotsman Inc. of Baltimore won a $2.5 million contract from the General Services Administration for recreational, hospitality, law enforcement, facilities, industrial and environmental services and products.
TechLaw Inc. of Chantilly won a $2.25 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
The contracts listed were awarded by the federal government to companies and other vendors in Virginia, Maryland and the District. For more information, contact states2001@aol.com, or 202-628-3100, ext. 266.
----
CACI Wins Electronic Warfare Countermeasures Work
Patience Wait
Washington Technology
Monday, June 3, 2002; 4:52 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54084-2002Jun3?language=printer
CACI International Inc. has been awarded a five-year, $24 million contract with the Naval Research Laboratory to support the Offboard Countermeasures branch of its Tactical Electronic Warfare Division, the company announced June 3.
The one-year contract, which provides for four option years, is the second major award CACI has won with the NRL this year. In January, the company was awarded an $22.3 million contract with the Central Target Simulator branch.
CACI, based in Arlington, Va., will research, develop, test and analyze Navy electronic warfare capabilities designed to counter and decoy missile and related threats to U.S. tactical aircraft. The company's engineers will work onsite at NRL to provide fabrication and engineering services in support of Navy requirements for offboard countermeasure systems. The systems include decoys to deceive anti-aircraft missiles and unmanned air vehicles used for a multitude of missions, including electronic warfare.
"Our long-standing partnership with the Naval Research Laboratory was instrumental in our winning this contract," said Ken Johnson, president of CACI's U.S. operations.
-------- drug war
DEA chief sees shifting of agents as 'new challenge'
June 3, 2002
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020603-14959720.htm
An FBI decision to divert 400 agents assigned to narcotics investigations to counterterrorism offers new challenges for the Drug Enforcement Administration that DEA chief Asa Hutchinson says the agency is willing and able to undertake.
"Our nation needs the full attention, expertise and focus of the FBI on preventing terrorism against United States citizens. This is the right priority for the FBI," Mr. Hutchinson said.
"The DEA stands ready to accept this new challenge that comes from the FBI reorganization. We know how to fight drugs, do it very well, and are recognized worldwide for our expertise and results. This is a new opportunity for the courageous men and women of the DEA to do even more for our country," he said.
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III announced last week a massive FBI reorganization designed to make the prevention of terrorist attacks the bureau's top priority. As part of the reorganization, Mr. Mueller will reassign 400 agents from drug investigations to counterterrorism operations.
"We have to be able to develop the ability to anticipate attacks," Mr. Mueller said, noting that more than a quarter of the FBI's 11,600 agents will be assigned to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States.
The FBI reorganization includes a new Office of Intelligence headed by an executive detailed from the CIA, who started work last week. It also includes a terrorism prevention and counterintelligence branch to be headed by an FBI deputy assistant director.
Mr. Hutchinson, a former federal prosecutor and Republican congressman from Arkansas, noted it may be necessary for the DEA to work with the Justice Department, Congress and the Bush administration on getting additional resources, but he remains assured the agency will have "all the necessary tools to continue doing our job well."
The DEA, the only single-mission anti-drug agency in the country, has 9,000 agents, intelligence analysts, chemists and support staff. The DEA's 4,600 drug agents are stationed around the United States and in more than 56 nations.
The DEA mission is to enforce the controlled-substances laws and regulations of the United States and bring to justice those organizations and drug traffickers involved in the growing, manufacture or distribution of controlled substances appearing in or destined for illicit traffic in this country.
The DEA also manages a national drug-intelligence program in cooperation with federal, state, local and foreign officials, and is responsible for the seizure and forfeiture of assets derived from illicit drug trafficking.
In addition, the agency coordinates foreign governments and federal, state and local law-enforcement officials on mutual drug-enforcement efforts - including programs designed to reduce the availability of illicit drugs in this country through crop eradication, crop substitution and training of foreign officials.
-------- iraq
U.N. Inspectors May Return to Iraq
By Edith M. Lederer
Associated Press Writer
Monday, June 3, 2002; 7:24 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54209-2002Jun3?language=printer
UNITED NATIONS -- U.N. weapons inspectors are preparing for a possible return to Iraq, studying satellite photos, looking at possible sites to visit, and working on a list of disarmament issues that Baghdad still must answer, the U.N. inspection agency said in a report Monday.
The quarterly report to the U.N. Security Council by chief weapons inspector Hans Blix indicated that the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission is gearing up for business ahead of a new round of U.N.-Iraq talks next month aimed at returning the inspectors.
When the last round of talks ended on May 3, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan reported progress but no breakthrough and said he hoped that in the next round of talks Iraq would have "some positive news." That meeting has now been scheduled for July 4-5 in Vienna.
Under council resolutions, sanctions imposed after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait cannot be lifted until U.N. inspectors certify that the country's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons have been destroyed along with the long-range missiles to deliver them. The inspectors left Iraq in December 1998, just ahead of allied airstrikes launched to punish Iraq for blocking inspections.
In December 1999, the Security Council created the commission, known as UNMOVIC, to replace the previous inspection agency, which had been tainted by allegations that its inspectors spied on Iraq on behalf of the United States. But Iraq has barred U.N. inspectors from returning to the country.
Until March, when Annan and Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri held their first round of talks, the Iraqis would have nothing to do with Blix. But Annan brought the chief inspector to that meeting and a subsequent meeting in early May which focused on U.N. inspections.
Blix said in the report that he explained how UNMOVIC would operate in Iraq and how it was working to identify unresolved disarmament issues that the country must answer before sanctions can be suspended.
As part of its readiness for resumed inspections, Blix said UNMOVIC's experts continue to work on classifying sites that have been inspected in the past and may be in the future. The agency also continues to use satellite photos provided by governments and purchased commercially.
In addition, he said, expert consultants have further analyzed Iraq's declarations on its biological weapons activities - which have raised the most questions in the past - and prepared a guide to identify Iraqi chemical and biological weapons munitions.
The return of U.N. inspectors is a key demand of the Security Council and especially of the United States, which has accused Iraq of trying to rebuild its banned weapons programs and of supporting terrorism.
President Bush has warned Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that he faces unspecified consequences if he fails to allow inspectors into Iraq to verify whether it has dismantled its weapons of mass destruction. Bush has made clear that the United States wants Saddam removed from power.
Since 1996, the United Nations has been running a humanitarian program meant to ease the sanctions' impact on Iraqi civilians. The program has allowed Iraq to sell oil to buy food, medicine and other humanitarian goods. On Monday, the U.N. appointed Ramiro Armando de Oliveira Lopes da Silva of Portugal to head that program. He takes over from Tun Myat of Myanmar.
----
Weighing an Attack on Iraq . . .
By Fred Hiatt (fredhiatt@washpost.com)
Washington Post
Monday, June 3, 2002; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49507-2002Jun2?language=printer
On a Sunday morning talk show, the defense secretary was blunt about the danger posed by Saddam Hussein and his possession of anthrax, a five-pound bag of which could destroy, he said, half the population of Washington.
"Days may go by without posing a threat immediately, but weeks or months, and then he's able to reconstitute his capacity to develop large amounts of chemical and biological weapons," the Pentagon chief said. "We're well aware of the ticking of the clock."
Donald Rumsfeld, speaking yesterday? Not quite. The warning came from President Clinton's defense secretary William Cohen in November 1997 -- some 236 weeks ago. It's been that long since U.N. weapons inspectors were able to do their job effectively and almost as long -- since December 1998 -- since they were in Iraq at all. Saddam Hussein has been free to seek nuclear weapons and add to his stock of chemical and biological arms.
David Albright and Kevin O'Neill, nonproliferation experts, explained it this way in a paper last June: "The lack of inspections and monitoring in Iraq makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to detect, let alone assess, Iraqi efforts to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program and other WMD [weapons of mass destruction] programs. Given Saddam Hussein's long-standing commitment to obtain nuclear weapons, it is likely that Iraq continues this quest. . . . [R]esearch and development efforts for the nuclear weapons program, which may have been small and dispersed before the end of 1998, could have proceeded more openly and with little fear of discovery since then."
Back in 1998 there seemed to be consensus about the danger of leaving Saddam Hussein unchecked in this way. National security adviser Sandy Berger noted that, unlike any other living dictator, Iraq's leader had used chemical weapons repeatedly. "And I have no doubt he will use them again if his capacity to rebuild his arsenal is left unchecked," Berger said.
President Clinton agreed that the United States could not stand by while the Iraqi dictator flouted the international community. "If we fail to respond today, Saddam [Hussein], and all those who would follow in his footsteps, will be emboldened tomorrow by the knowledge that they can act with impunity, even in the face of a clear message from the United Nations Security Council and clear evidence of a weapons of mass destruction program," Clinton said.
Since then Saddam Hussein has acted with impunity; the United States has suffered an unsolved attack-by-anthrax; the president has eloquently explained why Iraq belongs on the axis of evil; and yet, the only change in Iraq is that it is selling more and more oil. The debate about Iraq has shriveled to the question of whether Mohamed Atta traveled to Prague. Why?
The answer is that doing something about Saddam Hussein and his anthrax is difficult. It was difficult for President Clinton, which is why he stopped pushing and delivering rousing speeches after 1998, and it is difficult for President Bush today.
It's unlikely that U.N. inspectors could uncover what Saddam Hussein has had 3 1/2 years to hide. In any case, Iraq refuses to let inspectors in. Economic sanctions have not succeeded in modifying his behavior. Which leaves force, with all its risks and uncertainties.
It should not come as a surprise that the Joints Chiefs of Staff are reluctant. Institutionally, they are designed to worry about present dangers: first, that many people would die in a war, but also that allies would not cooperate or offer staging grounds; that Saddam Hussein would use his weapons of mass destruction when attacked; that he would prove as difficult to locate as Mullah Omar; that Iraq would fracture, or find itself ruled by someone just as odious; that U.S. forces would be stretched and vulnerable in other parts of the world.
It is the president's unenviable job to think further ahead -- to balance all those dangers against the even less quantifiable, but no less prodigious, risk of allowing a known war criminal and sponsor of terrorism to continue to accumulate these fearsome weapons. It's not a choice that can be made with certainty ahead of time, and even in retrospect you may not be sure.
It's possible, that is, that Saddam Hussein already has attacked with anthrax, and will do so again, more lethally, and we will not know the source. As far back as 1997, the ever-playful Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein's deputy prime minister, told Time magazine that his government did not engage in terror attacks ("You know that") but that others did, and that as a result of U.S. attacks on Iraq, "more people would be in that mood."
So it is a quandary. If Bush continues to do nothing, and Saddam Hussein dies quietly in his sleep, to be succeeded by a peace-loving and democratic government, the reluctant generals will be proven right. If he acts to unseat Saddam Hussein, we will never know whether the resulting casualties and disruptions prevented something worse. And if Saddam Hussein slips some germs or toxins out of Iraq in a diplomatic pouch to loosely allied terrorists who distribute them over Washington, the most ardent hawks, even those who survive, may never be sure enough to say I told you so.
(fredhiatt@washpost.com)
-------- israel / palestine
Israel Beginning Land Seizures
By Dafna Linzer
Associated Press Writer
Monday, June 3, 2002; 10:25 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A51600-2002Jun3?language=printer
SALFIT, West Bank -- The Israeli army is quietly taking over West Bank land privately owned by Palestinians in what it says is a temporary move to protect its citizens from militants. But Palestinians - mindful that similar tactics were once used to establish Jewish settlements - fear they will never get their land back.
According to Israeli military documents, copies of which were obtained by The Associated Press, some of the land seized is in areas where officials want to build a fortified fence to keep Palestinian militants from entering Israel. Other documents indicate Israel is trying to create buffers between Jewish enclaves and Palestinian towns deep within the West Bank - including this town of Salfit, which is surrounded by 17 large and small settlements.
Critics say the scattered and in some cases sizable seizures could carve up the West Bank in a way that would make it difficult for the Palestinians to create a viable state on land Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast War.
The Israeli army says the seizures are necessary to counter suicide bombers. "There is a military need to command some areas for security reasons in order to control and observe areas where threats emanate from," said Lt. Col. Olivier Rafowicz, a military spokesman. "This is not annexation of territory."
Khalil Tufakji, the Palestinian Authority's chief cartographer, has mapped out recent seizures that include long, narrow strips of land along the invisible line dividing Israel from the West Bank.
West of Jenin, the Palestinian city that has produced more than 20 suicide bombers, another 27 square miles of land was taken. South of the Palestinian town of Tulkarem, 3 square miles was taken and army spokeswoman Capt. Sharon Feingold said the land would be used "in order to create barriers," or buffers between Israel and the West Bank.
She said the Supreme Court heard two appeals to block the confiscations but both were rejected.
The two patches, both close to the border with Israel, constitute just over 1 percent of the entire West Bank.
Dalia Rabin-Pelossof, Israel's deputy defense minister, said construction of a fence between Israel and the West Bank was under way. She did not provide specifics but said "in some areas, the work has already begun. There are many places where fences have been built."
Aside from the buffer areas, some confiscations have recently occurred deeper inside the West Bank, according to copies of documents provided to AP by Palestinian officials and lawyers and authenticated by the Israeli army.
Such is the case in Salfit in the central West Bank where Mohamed Salim Alkim's 15 acres were seized and his olive groves and apple orchards uprooted by bulldozers.
The town, ringed by 17 Jewish settlements, is suspected to be the home of Palestinian militants who target settlers. Recently, the Israeli army said it discovered a bomb-making factory here.
As a result, Salfit has been hit by missiles, tank shelling, gunbattles, house demolitions and arrests.
All its access roads have been sealed by the military. Soldiers, tanks and bulldozers encircle the area.
So to get to where his fields once were, the 66-year-old Alkim, whose face and hands have been weathered by the Middle Eastern sun and years of physical work, walks on foot for several hundred yards across a stretch of biblical land dotted with wild flowers and shrub.
Standing on a breezy hilltop, Alkim points to the commanding Jewish settlement of Ariel where suburban homes sprung up next to Salfit 25 years ago. Ariel is expanding, Salfit's acreage is shrinking. There is no relationship between the two communities - just animosity.
Land is at the center of this century-old dispute.
The West Bank was supposed to be the heart of a separate state for Palestinians under the 1947 U.N. partition plan that envisioned a Jewish and Arab state living side-by-side in what had been British-ruled Palestine. Instead, war broke out and the territory was annexed by Jordan.
In 1967, Israel captured the West Bank and began building Jewish settlements there. Today, some 200,000 settlers live in communities built on territory claimed by Palestinians.
Alkim, 66, wants his property back - he wants to leave it to his 12 children. But he doesn't think Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat will be able to get it for him. "The only way is by force," he said.
Salfit may look empty and worthless, but under the rocky, untamed surroundings lies a treasure in this thirsty land - water. Salfit, which means 'Basket of Grapes,' is situated near several aquifers that, according to Palestinian lore, have been a source of contention since 800 A.D.
Manal Hazan, of the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, is trying to help Salfit reclaim its land. So far, the army has responded favorably to a written appeal to freeze construction of a road on the seized land.
"To a certain degree this was a success, but I don't think the farmers will get their land back. It's true the orders have expiration dates but they are always renewed," she said.
In a separate case, the Israeli lawyer is suing the military commander of the West Bank over a land seizure near the city of Hebron. The case is before the Supreme Court.
Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian official in charge of local governments, said more than a dozen mayors and village elders have received land seizure notices from the army in recent months.
The AP obtained several letters, some dated as recently as April, and signed by Israel's military commander in the West Bank.
In some cases the one-page letters, written in Hebrew - which most Arabs cannot read - were posted at village entrances. They begin: "By the authority vested in me as the Israeli army commander of Judea and Samaria, and as I believe it is a military necessity given the special security circumstances now prevailing in the area, I hereby order the following: ... ."
The letters include the number of plots and the period - ranging from one to four years - they will remain seized.
Some of the notices dealt with the area south of Tulkarem, to be used for the new buffer zone.
In one letter, dated April 24, the army said it was taking a swath of land around Faron, Taibeh, al Ras and Kafr Sur - four West Bank villages close to Israel - that amounted to 4.74 miles by 56-66 feet. In a second letter, dated the same day, the army said it would be taking another tract of 1.35 miles by 56 feet from Faron.
"We have stacks of these letters," Erekat said. "They're taking land around Jenin, Salfit, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron and the Jordan Valley." He accused Israel of "racing to implement unilateral policies."
Researchers say the current seizures are reminiscent of the method Israel used to get land for settlements until the Supreme Court ordered it to halt the practice in 1979.
"After '79, Israel continued from time to time to take land for military purposes in order to build bypass roads, army bases or checkpoints, but not for settlements," said Yehezkel Lein, a researcher with the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem which documents land confiscations.
Recently, Lein said, the army has built checkpoints, security roads and bases on some of the seized land.
Since the latest Palestinian uprising began, he said, the army has had to build checkpoints to enforce their closure of towns and villages, and the settlers "need bypass roads for their bypass roads."
Landowners can challenge an order in a military court and the letters also say property holders "are eligible to request information on compensation and user fees."
But practically no one does.
"It's not a question of money for us," says Salfit's mayor, Shaher Eshteih. "This has been our land for generations."
Editors' note: Associated Press Writer Jamie Tarabay contributed to this report.
On the Net:
www.salfeet.org
www.idf.il
www.acri.org.il
----
Military Raids Are Best Path to Security, Israelis Say
New York Times
June 3, 2002
By JOEL GREENBERG
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/03/international/middleeast/03ISRA.html
JERUSALEM, June 2 - Israeli leaders asserted today that unilateral military action was the country's best path to security even as George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, headed here to promote an overhaul of the Palestinian security forces.
The Israeli leaders' remarks came as Israeli forces swept through the West Bank city of Nablus for a third day. The army said the forces uncovered a large explosives laboratory in the Balata refugee camp.
At the weekly meeting of his cabinet, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon asserted that Palestinian security agencies were not blocking attacks on Israel, so "responsibility for the security of Israel lies entirely with Israel," a cabinet statement said.
Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer said repeated intelligence-driven raids by the army into areas under Palestinian control were now Israel's preferred mode of operation.
"The method we are using today, entries and withdrawals on the basis of information available, is actually the optimal method, which also emphasizes our right to defend ourselves everywhere," he said.
Mr. Ben-Eliezer was responding to a suggestion by Avi Dichter, the chief of Israel's Shin Ben security service, that the army go further and remain in Palestinian cities until effective barriers are erected between the West Bank and Israel that would block infiltration into Israel by Palestinian suicide bombers.
The remarks by Mr. Sharon and Mr. Ben-Eliezer affirmed what had already become a reality created by the army raids: the blurring of boundaries between West Bank areas controlled by Israel and those nominally controlled by the Palestinian security forces.
With Israeli troops regularly invading Palestinian areas, the notion of cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian security forces, a foundation of the 1993 Oslo accords, has all but been abandoned. But it is precisely such cooperation that Mr. Tenet will try to revive through a consolidation of the Palestinian security agencies intended to make them more effective in blocking violence against Israel.
Mr. Tenet met in Egypt today with President Hosni Mubarak on the first leg of his Middle East visit. He is expected to meet on Monday with Mr. Sharon, and later with Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader.
Another American envoy, William J. Burns, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, traveled today to Jordan, where he told King Abdullah that the Bush administration would like to see a planned international conference on the Middle East take place this summer, Jordanian officials reported.
Javier Solana, the foreign policy chief of the European Union, said after a meeting with Foreign Minister Shimon Peres in Jerusalem that a conference at the level of foreign ministers could be held in the second half of July.
But there were few signs of conciliation on the ground, where Israeli forces continued their search-and-arrest operation in Nablus.
In the Balata refugee camp, on the southern outskirts of the city, Palestinians reported that Israeli troops blew up the family home of Mahmoud Titi, the local commander of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, who was killed last month by Israeli tank shells. The army said the house held a large explosives lab that contained chemicals, hundreds of pipe bombs, a dozen gas-canister bombs and an antitank charge. The Aksa Martyrs Brigades have claimed responsibility for several suicide bombings and shooting attacks in Israel.
Another bomb factory that contained explosives, detonators and mortar shells was found in a restaurant, an army spokesman said, adding that the building was also blown up.
Mr. Arafat, for his part, was reported to be in contact with leaders of the militant group Hamas in an effort to bring its representatives into a revamped Palestinian cabinet expected to be announced in several days. A Hamas spokesman said the group, which has so far stayed out of the Palestinian Authority, would give its reply later this week.
Mr. Arafat has been under intense international and domestic pressure to carry out reforms in the Palestinian Authority. Some analysts said his talks with Hamas and other militant factions were aimed at bring the militants under his control by awarding them a role in government in return for a suspension of their attacks in Israel.
-------- nato
NATO Plans New 'Military Concept' for New Threats
June 3, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nato-defense.html
BRUSSELS - NATO is drawing up a new ``military concept'' to define its role in the fight against global terrorism and put an end to the identity crisis which has plagued it since September 11, officials said Monday.
Sidelined by the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan, NATO is working to make itself relevant for threats and security challenges that may lie far beyond the borders of Europe that it guarded during the Cold War.
Defense ministers from the 19-nation alliance will jumpstart the process at a meeting in Brussels Thursday and the package of measures will be agreed at a summit in Prague next November.
They will consider plans to streamline NATO's cumbersome military command structure and start work on a shopping list of military hardware to defend against weapons of mass destruction and get boots on the ground quickly when crises erupt.
``The main function of this new military concept is to define NATO's role, and in particular the military role in relation to terrorism,'' a senior NATO official said.
It will consider what role NATO could play in attacks on non-member countries outside its traditional area of operations and how it can contribute to international coalitions.
The flurry of activity comes in response to fears that, by making a habit of unilateral action, the United States -- which is way ahead of Europe in military technology and defense spending -- could marginalize the alliance.
But instead of snubbing NATO, Washington is now leading efforts to revitalize it.
WASHINGTON SEEKS OVERHAUL The senior official said that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would propose a review of NATO's command structure, raising the question of whether it still needs a Supreme Allied Commander based in North America (SACLANT) as well as the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR).
And Britain's Sunday Telegraph reported this week that the Pentagon would also propose that NATO set up small, highly mobile units for risky missions.
NATO officials said such a plan would be in keeping with the alliance's push for ``smart'' forces that can be deployed quickly and sustainably to far-flung trouble spots.
The main concern for the defense ministers meeting this week will be the yawning gap in military capabilities between the United States and its allies.
The $48 billion increase planned for the U.S. defense budget in 2003 is larger than the total annual defense budget of its next biggest allies, Britain and France.
NATO Secretary General George Robertson has warned that if the gap continues to widen there will be a division of labor, with the United States providing logistics, smart bombs and intelligence and its lower-tech allies providing soldiers -- or simply wringing their hands on the sidelines.
European forces lack strategic airlift, precision-guided weapons and other key capabilities such as surveillance, air-to-air refueling and tactical missile defense.
The senior official said that the defense ministers will start work on a revamp of the hapless Defense Capabilities Initiative, a program of 58 tasks which was launched in 1999 to deal with shortfalls highlighted by the conflict in Kosovo.
``We will focus on a much more limited area of capabilities such as defense against chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons, deployability to theater and sustainability in theater and battlefield inter-operability,'' he said.
The new initiative, unlike its grander but less prescriptive predecessor, will set specific tasks for each NATO nation.
--------
NATO seen as Europe's top gun
June 3, 2002
By David Wastell
LONDON SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020603-1335464.htm
The United States is drafting plans for a NATO-run military unit to rival directly the European Union's much-criticized Rapid Reaction Force.
In a move that illustrates the Bush administration's distrust of EU military ambitions, the Pentagon is proposing that NATO set up small, highly mobile units to project the alliance's strength to trouble spots.
The new, multinational forces would be drawn primarily from NATO's European members but are likely to include U.S. troops. They would be sent on dangerous missions that the United States believes are unsuited to the so-called "European Army."
Washington envisages that the Europe-NATO force will quickly relegate the fledgling EU rival to peacekeeping duties.
NATO officials in Brussels confirmed that they were aware of the U.S. plan. They said any new response forces would be complementary to the European defense force and would not be intended to supplant it.
"They would have different purposes," one of the officials said. "There would only be a conflict if two different missions were going on at once, and both NATO and the EU wanted to draw on the same European forces."
One Washington defense analyst said: "The only people who could object to this are those Europeans who hoped that European security and defense policy could be entirely disconnected from NATO."
Pentagon officials have been working on the new proposals before a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels this week, where Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is expected to urge NATO's European members to increase defense spending.
Mr. Rumsfeld, a critic of the EU force, will also urge them to plug what the Bush administration regards as serious gaps in Europe's military capability.
U.S. military spending of $354 billion - 3 percent of economic output - is almost twice that of all European NATO members combined. Britain, which spends 2.5 percent of gross domestic product on defense, is one of the few countries to come anywhere close to what the United States spends.
Most EU members are cutting their defense apparatus and lack precision-attack weapons, electronic warfare equipment, intelligence equipment, missile defense and special forces.
Mr. Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, are concerned that the EU force will weaken NATO. The Pentagon plan has won support from within President Bush's National Security Council as well as from the White House's own defense and foreign policy advisers.
NATO already boasts Europe's only fully deployable mobile headquarters, the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, which is capable of directing up to 60,000 troops and was used in the Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo conflicts.
The Sunday Telegraph has learned that U.S. officials want to identify the components of five or six "mini task forces," each with its own command center and specialized purpose.
Their troops, much like the European Rapid Reaction Force, would train together but would not be permanently stationed in the same place. "It would be a capability, not an actual standing force," said one defense expert.
There are differences of opinion within the Pentagon. Some officials believe U.S. interests are best served by bypassing even NATO, and instead building "coalitions of the willing" to face individual crises, as in Afghanistan and during the Gulf war.
Others do not want U.S. troops involved in the small task forces, believing that the United States should operate with complete independence.
Since NATO's supreme commander is by tradition a U.S. general, any American troops committed to the new response forces would be ultimately under U.S. command.
But some U.S. officers would almost certainly find themselves answering to non-Americans just above them in command, another issue being debated within the Pentagon.
-------- pakistan
Along Afghan Border, Pakistan Finds It Hard to Assert Control
New York Times
June 3, 2002
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/03/international/asia/03STAN.html
GHULAM KHAN, Pakistan, May 30 - The rock-strewn wastelands that surround this border post are either one of the world's most carefully policed frontiers - or the sieve through which Al Qaeda's elusive fugitives are slipping into asylum.
In this remote mountainous region abutting Afghanistan, religious fundamentalism has long flourished and heavily armed tribesman, rather than the central government, have always defined the law. The United States suspects that these dusty badlands are the redoubt of the remnants of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and perhaps Osama bin Laden himself.
The United States has watched with dismay as Pakistan has appeared to take its time in posting soldiers and police officers in a region where no government, Pakistani or British colonial, has ever dared take on the flinty and quick-triggered natives.
That dismay increased in recent days, when Pakistan said the threat of war with India has forced it to shift some of the 8,000 men stationed here toward the tense eastern front.
The Pakistani officials who accompanied a reporter to the very edge of one of Afghanistan's most lawless regions say the outside world cannot realistically expect them to do more than they have. Troops dispatched by the government have been building small forts on hilltops, posting heavily armed sentries every few miles and conducting patrols in the towns, disarming bearded tribesmen whose AK-47's are integral to their wardrobe.
"The Americans want to have a presence here because of the madrasas," said Khalid Khan, a political officer, or civil representative of the government. He said there are more than 200 madrasas, Islamic religious schools, just in the small town of Miran Shah, five miles south of here.
"But although the sympathies of the people are sometimes with the Taliban," he added, "there are no Taliban or Al Qaeda here. We've been searching exhaustively."
This is not the first time this corner of the North-West Frontier Province has come to the attention of the United States. With the start of an Islamic insurgency against the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan in 1979, this region, North Waziristan, became a pivotal resupply point for the rebels, run jointly by the C.I.A. and Pakistan.
Indeed, as Mr. Khan pointed to the Afghan border in the near distance, where a huge white arrow is painted on a rocky mountainside to mark the Durand Line separating the countries, he stood in a sprawling cemetery for mujahedeen fighters from that period. The graves are marked with piled stones.
Young hawkers called out the name of Afghanistan's closest city - "Khost! Khost!" - as they competed with one another to fill their drivers' cars with passengers at the taxi and truck stop.
After 20 minutes or so, Mr. Khan said it was too dangerous for an American to linger any longer. This might be a well-policed crossing now, but it remains a smuggler's superhighway where opium, hashish and small arms are traded freely.
Maj. Ahmed Uppal, a Pakistani Army officer, leads a garrison in the closest city, Peshawar, that is now pushing into the tribal areas,
"The Americans would like everything to be done more quickly," he said. "North Waziristan is the last region for us to enter, and a place where the Pakistani Army has never been. We could have just gone in by force, but our commander thought it was better for us to negotiate."
As the Pakistan Army has moved gradually to establish its hold, the United States military has reportedly been demonstrating far less patience.
According to villagers and Pakistani officials, American Special Forces, whose presence in Pakistan remains an official secret, have raised the hackles of many tribal residents - and occasionally sparked deadly gunfights with them - by tramping through mosques and madrasas with their boots on, arresting people and seizing weapons.
In Miran Shah, the Pakistani Army showed up for the first time on May 15, promising roads, schools and hospitals in exchange for local cooperation. The Americans followed a couple of days later, officials and villagers said, ransacking a large religious school. Neither documents nor people connected to Al Qaeda were found, the Pakistanis said.
Thousands of tribesmen turned out to protest the incident the next day.
"We are a religious people and we know how to sacrifice lives for religion," said Maulana Abdullah, a local imam, or prayer leader, who issued a stern warning: "We will never allow the Americans, or even the Pakistani Army and intelligence agencies, to damage our religious ethics. If this continues, we will start to kidnap Pakistani officials."
In South Waziristan, villagers and Pakistani officials said, the Americans killed a man on May 19, followed by an ambush and two-hour shootout a few days later that reportedly killed several coalition soldiers. Although their reports cannot be confirmed, tribesmen say American helicopters revisited the area at night and strafed a village.
Pentagon officials have repeatedly declined to comment on what American forces might be doing here. But they stress that Special Operations forces receive extensive training in local customs, to balance the need to carry out military operations effectively with respecting religious sensitivies.
In Washington, one military officer said on Sunday that it would be impossible to respond to the general charges raised by the villagers without specific details.
For Pakistani officials, reports like the ones from the villagers are the best recommendation for their more gingerly approach. Cooperation is won here through palaver, irrigated with countless cups of green tea, and backed up only implicitly by lots of muscle.
Palaver Central for North Waziristan is the office of the political agent of Miran Shah, whose civilian role is a holdover from the days when Britain ruled these parts indirectly, allowing the local tribes wide berth in running their own affairs. The political agent and his staff operate from a small fort of high thick stone walls. Their writ scarcely extends beyond it.
Miran Shah, where foreigners have rarely ventured, lies a grueling five-hour drive up and down tortuous mountain roads and across broad desert. Pakistani soldiers required a foreign visitor to don a shalwar kameez, the baggy cotton trousers and long overshirt worn by Pakistani men, and to hire tribesmen along the way as armed guards. In Miran Shah, the heavy iron gates to the fort of the political agent, Ahmed Khan, open for a vehicle only after an inspection by a clutch of men with machine guns.
Mr. Khan's job is to consult, and consult he does, from behind a huge wooden desk with three telephones and a tall stack of dossiers.
"I will tell you all about my job," he promises. "We will find time to talk." But he never does. The door to his office is never shut, and the flood of constituents is too heavy. The buzzer underneath his table, which he pushes to order more tea, is sounded constantly.
The large courtyard of Mr. Khan's headquarters courses with activity, scores of tribesmen from Miran Shah and points beyond who come to affix their fingerprints to property titles, use the fort's bank, catch up with the news of weddings and feuds or pray at the small mosque.
The Pakistani Army has promised the people of the area many more services like those if they will agree to stop bearing arms in public and cooperate with the search for Al Qaeda. From the talk of the courtyard, it seems the bargain has begun to catch on.
"We are a poor people and we support the reforms and services being brought by the government," said Hajji Bahram Khan, a member of the Gurbaz tribe with an immense henna-died beard, speaking through a translator. "We've been warned not to allow outsiders asylum in our lands, and we have understood the message. In fact, we are eager for the authorities to come and search quickly, because right now it is like living under siege here and there is no peace."
Muhammad Yakub Khan, another Gurbaz elder, agreed. "It wasn't so long ago that no one here had even heard of Al Qaeda," he said. "Now we realize that it is the Arabic-speaking people who have wandered through here. We are happy to see them swept up, so that finally we can be left alone."
Asked how he felt about America's most recent war in his region, Muhammad Khan said: "America helped us fight a war against Communism, which was a threat to Islam. As long as they do not threaten Islam, we will support their fight against terrorism."
--------
500 FBI agents operating in Pakistan
Fakhar-ur-Rehman
6/3/2002
http://frontierpost.com.pk/main.asp?id=7&date1=6/3/2002
ISLAMABAD: Around 1500 US Federal Bureau of Investigation agents are working along with their Pakistani counterparts in war against terrorism in the different cities of Pakistan, diplomatic sources said revealed here Sunday.
Sources said that around 1500 FBI agents are operating against AL Qaeda and Taliban forces in Peshawar, Islamabad, Lahore, Quetta, Karachi and in Tribal areas.
However, government functionaries claimed that there were few FBI agents working jointly with the Pakistani Intelligence agencies.
President Musharraf in one of his recent Interviews with the media had stated that a dozen of FBI agents were present on the soil of Pakistan.
In the recent past the FBI agents have carried out operations in Lahore, Faisalabad and Peshawar where they had arrested number of people alleged to have link with Al Qaida and Osama Bin Laden.
FBI agents have also carried commando operations in Miranshah the chief place of Northern Waziristan agency.
Pakistan has already signed an agreement with the United States to provide logistic support, air corridor and Intelligence sharing in war against terrorism.
-------- us
Fatigue dogged U.S. pilots
Crews urged to use amphetamines days before Canadian troops killed
Glen McGregor
Vancouver Sun
Monday, June 03, 2002
http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/story.asp?id=333872FC-939F-48B2-B7B7-FAF7832DF93D
OTTAWA -- Pilots from the U.S. fighter squadron that mistakenly bombed Canadian troops in Afghanistan had told their commanders shortly before the fatal accident that they were exhausted and needed more rest between missions.
The informal meeting between pilots of the 183rd Fighter Wing and their commanding officers was convened after the unit misidentified a bombing target during a previous mission over Iraq. The 183rd, an Air National Guard unit currently stationed in Kuwait, was flying patrol missions in the no-fly zone in Southern Iraq as well as sorties over Afghanistan.
In the meeting, held in the week before Canadian soldiers were shelled by American bombs in Afghanistan, at least one F-16 pilot complained that requirements for crew rest were not being observed and that many of the pilots were overtired. The pilot was told, however, that further questions about crew rest would not be looked on favourably by the wing command.
Instead, pilots were advised to speak to a flight surgeon about so-called "go/no pills" -- amphetamines used to help stay awake on long missions, and sedatives to help sleep.
Then, on April 17, a fighter from the 183rd flying a patrol mission a ccidentally bombed Canadian troops conducting a live-fire exercise south of Kandahar. Four soldiers from the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry were killed and eight injured.
Pilots are supposed to get 12 hours of rest between missions, but that can be changed when the unit is in a state of alert. The 183rd has been flying missions in the no-fly zone since March. Although U.S. air force rules allow flight surgeons to prescribe dextro-amphetamine (dexe-drine), the drug is supposed to be used for long transoceanic transport flights, not combat missions.
"If they can't work around the scheduling, and people have to work extended hours, then dextro-amphetamine is approved," said Betty-Anne Mauger, a public affairs officer with the U.S. air force surgeon general.
The flight over Afghanistan that led to the bombing may have taken as long as 10 hours, not including the three to eight hours of briefings that are standard before combat missions. Most of the pilots in the 183rd Fighter Wing are part-time members who also work as commercial airline pilots.
Because of the strict requirements of civil aviation, they are acutely aware of the importance of proper crew rest. Commercial pilots are not allowed to use amphetamines.
The Canadian and U.S. military have convened their own boards of inquiry to find out why the F-16 dropped a laser guided-bomb on the Canadians. Canada's board, led by retired General Maurice Baril, said in a preliminary report last month that Canadian troops did nothing to provoke the incident.
It is still unclear whether Baril's board will be able to interview the F-16 pilot, whose identity has not been publicly disclosed.
The exact date of the 183rd's failed bombing mission in Iraq is not known, but U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in Tampa, Florida, confirmed that U.S. fighters dropped bombs in the Southern no-fly zone just two days before the Canadians soldiers were killed in Afghanistan.
On the morning of April 15, two U.S. F-16s flying over Thi-Qar province used laser-guided bombs to attack a radar installation after it locked onto the aircraft. CENTCOM did not say if the attack was successful, and there is no indication that Iraqi civilians or military personnel were killed or injured.
It was the first bombing of ground targets in Iraq since January, according to CENTCOM.
The Iraq News Agency reported that "civil and service installations" were attacked by U.S. fighters flying from Kuwait that day. Iraqi officials said that the coalition forces had flown 37 sorties in the southern no-fly zone the morning of the bombing.
Citing security concerns, CENTCOM will not say which U.S. unit was involved in the Iraqi incident, nor will it confirm any subsequent meeting between pilots and commanders in the 183rd Fighter Wing.
There is no evidence that the pilots involved in either bombing had taken any of the stimulants offered. But the use of amphetamines was common among American fighter pilots in the Gulf War, according to journalist Rick Atkinson, author of Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War.
"There was concern in some squadrons that the pilots were becoming psychologically, if not physically, addicted to the pills," he told PBS's Frontline last year.
Atkinson estimates two-thirds of all pilots in Desert Storm used dexedrine at least once. "Some commanders became concerned enough to ban the flight surgeons from issuing further 'go' pills. It became remarkably divisive within some squadrons."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS
Study Shows Building Prisons Did Not Prevent Repeat Crimes
New York Times
June 3, 2002
By FOX BUTTERFIELD
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/03/national/03CRIM.html
The rate at which inmates released from state prisons commit new crimes rose from 1983 to 1994, a time when the number of people behind bars doubled, according to a Justice Department study released yesterday.
The report found that 67 percent of inmates released from state prisons in 1994 committed at least one serious new crime within three years. That is 5 percent higher than among inmates released in 1983.
Criminologists generally agree that the prison-building binge of the last 25 years, in which the number of Americans incarcerated quadrupled to almost two million, has helped reduce the crime rate simply by keeping criminals off the streets. There has been more debate about whether longer sentences and the increase in the number of prisoners have also helped to deter people from committing crimes. The new report, some crime experts say, suggests that the answer is no.
"The main thing this report shows is that our experiment with building lots more prisons as a deterrent to crime has not worked," said Joan Petersilia, a professor of criminology at the University of California at Irvine and an expert on parole.
A likely reason for the increase in recidivism, Professor Petersilia said, is that state governments, to save money and to be seen as tough on crime, cut back on rehabilitation programs, like drug treatment, vocational education and classes to prepare prisoners for life at home.
Only about 15 percent of state prison inmates are enrolled in academic or rehabilitation classes, she said.
The report was prepared for the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the statistical branch of the Justice Department, by Patrick Langan and David Levin. It is the first major study of recidivism in more than a decade. The report examined 272,111 former inmates in 15 states during the first three years after their release.
The report indicates that the first year after an inmate is released is critical to his or her success in returning to civilian life. For example, the study found that two-thirds of the inmates who were rearrested were rearrested within 12 months of their release.
In addition, the report found that the number of times prisoners had been arrested was the best predictor of whether they would commit more crimes after being released and how quickly they would return to their criminal ways.
Prisoners who have one prior arrest have a 40.6 percent recidivism rate three years after being released, the study said. With two prior arrests, the rearrest rate within three years climbs to 47.5 percent. With three prior arrests it rises again, to 55.2 percent within three years. Then, with each additional prior arrest, it continues to rise, reaching a rearrest rate of 82.1 percent for inmates with more than 15 prior arrests.
Prisoners with a greater history of previous arrests are likely to be rearrested faster. Prisoners with one prior arrest have a 21 percent rearrest rate within a year of their release. But inmates with 16 or more prior arrests have a 74 percent recidivism rate within the first year after their release, the study found.
Professor Petersilia said the finding about the recidivism rate reaching 67.5 percent in three years was particularly striking because earlier studies, dating to the 1960's, have all found that rearrest rates of American prisoners tend to hover at about two-thirds within the first three years after release.
These findings have occurred even as the prison philosophy of the day has shifted from rehabilitation to getting tough on crime to deterrence, with seemingly little difference in the outcome.
Jeremy Travis, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, said the report showed that "the population getting out of prison continues to pose a high risk of reoffending." This is true, at least in part, Mr. Travis said, because state prison departments, with a few exceptions, have done a poor job of managing the critical period when an inmate is released.
Often, Mr. Travis said, inmates are released having received little or no job training, drug treatment or education in how to be a better parent. Many are unable to find jobs and are barred by law from living in public housing projects, so they quickly return to crime, said Mr. Travis, a former director of the National Institute of Justice and deputy police commissioner in New York City.
The report found that people who commit crimes involving money are more likely to be rearrested than those committing homicide or rape, with a recidivism rate of 70 percent for robbers and 74 percent for burglars compared with 41 percent for those whose previous crime was homicide and 46 percent for those whose previous crime was rape.
----
CIA Failed To Share Intelligence On Hijacker
Data Could Have Been Used to Deny Visa
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 3, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49366-2002Jun2?language=printer
The CIA possessed disturbing information about one of the Sept. 11 hijackers months before it was previously disclosed and could have used that knowledge to prevent him from renewing his visa to enter the United States prior to the attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, a senior administration official said yesterday.
Khalid Almihdhar, who was on Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon, could have been put on a watch list earlier, a government official said. The list is used by the government to hold up visa applications or prevent individuals from entering the United States.
The CIA in late 2000 or early 2001 received information from another intelligence service that would have deepened their suspicions about Almihdhar and likely caused them to decline his visa extension.
It has been previously reported that the CIA knew Almihdhar had attended a January 2000 meeting of suspected terrorists in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. At that time there was not enough information to put him on the watch list, used by the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service to screen visa applications.
The CIA now acknowledges that Almihdhar went from Kuala Lumpur to the United States in January 2000, left in June 2000, and was outside the United States when the CIA counterterrorism center learned that in addition to associating with possible terrorists in Kuala Lumpur, Almihdhar had more than once entered the United States.
Frequent reentry into the United States is a factor that causes authorities to take a second look at a visa applicant. When combined with his attendance at the Kuala Lumpur meeting, his reentries would have put him on the watch list and prevented him from getting a new visa in June 2001. There are hundreds of people on this list.
"At best, we could have prevented his return," the senior official said.
Instead, the senior official said, the CIA did not tell other agencies, and it was not until Aug. 23, 2001, that Almihdhar was put on the watch list. By then, the State Department had granted Almihdhar another visa and he reentered the country on July 4.
Yesterday, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft said that better coordination of such intelligence would not likely have halted last year's attacks. "The information we now have does not indicate that there was a substantial likelihood of detecting this," he said on ABC's "This Week."
Nonetheless, there are increasing signs that leaks emanating from the CIA, FBI, other government agencies and Congress raise questions about how much the government knew before the Sept. 11 attacks killed more than 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
This week, congressional hearings will try to determine what failures or shortcomings took place before Sept. 11 and what reforms may be needed to prevent another tragedy.
Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, yesterday warned that such leaks could lead investigators and public opinion "down the wrong path." Goss, a former CIA intelligence officer, said, "This is serious business, and we want to go on the basis of fact, not on opinion or spin."
Newsweek reported yesterday that the CIA identified two of the eventual hijackers, Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, immediately after they attended the Kuala Lumpur meeting. The magazine also reported that the CIA did not inform the INS or the FBI of the two alleged terrorists, who flew to the United States after the Malaysia meeting. It quoted unnamed "U.S. counterterrorism officials" saying that the agency's failure "may be the most puzzling and devastating intelligence failure in the critical months before September 11."
Last week, the FBI drew heavy criticism for its failure to respond to two memos from its own agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis. They were seeking permission to investigate Islamic fundamentalists who were trying to take pilot training, one of whom was Zacarias Moussaoui, since indicted as a conspirator in the attack.
The CIA did not comment on the Newsweek report.
But a senior U.S. intelligence official said yesterday that although the CIA had the names of the attendees, the Malaysia meetingdid not take on significance until months after the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. The FBI investigative team in Yemen identified Tawfiq bin Attash, aka Tawfiq Attash Khallad, as one of the leading Cole bombing suspects. Khallad had also been at the Malaysia meeting.
Authorities sought to find out who else Khallad had met with, and Almihdhar and Alhazmi turned up. It was not until Aug. 23, 2001, that the CIA alerted other agencies, including the INS and FBI, about the two men, who by then were already in the United States.
CIA Director George J. Tenet ordered up a review shortly after the CIA on Aug. 6 gave President Bush an intelligence analysis that discussed possible attacks by Osama bin Laden's organization in the United States and mentioned a previous al Qaeda discussion of hijacking a U.S. plane.
He "ordered the counterterrorism center to go back and see if anything could be pieced together from the material received from the FBI on the Cole investigation." Kuala Lumpur photos of Khallad and Almihdhar were found along with the additional visa information.
Newsweek notes that if Almihdhar and Alhazmi had been on the INS watch list in early 2000, the FBI could have kept track of them and identified the others "given their frequent contact with at least five other hijackers." The magazine quotes an FBI official as saying, "There's no question we could have tied all 19 hijackers together." It also says FBI officials have prepared a chart showing how that would have been done.
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said yesterday he did not know such a chart had been prepared. Asked about it on CBS's "Face the Nation," he said, "I am unaware of any document that would fit that description."
Mueller also said that with new cooperation among intelligence agencies "we have prevented a number of terrorist attacks around the globe since September 11th," but he refused to identify them.
He also discussed his daily morning meeting with Bush during which he and Tenet discuss the "threat matrix." He described that as a "listing of the threats that have come in the night before and the day before." He said that Bush generally asks what the two agencies had done "in the last 12 hours to assure the safety of the American public."
Mueller also gave new details on what led to a warning within the United States last week about the possibility of aircraft being attacked by portable hand-held antiaircraft missiles such as Stingers. The United States gave the Afghan fighters Stingers in the 1980s when they were fighting the Soviet Union.
He said there was a report indicating that a broken-down missile, called a "man pad," for man portable, was found near an airfield overseas, said by others to be the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.
The alert was only over one missile that was found overseas, Mueller said, but other sources said there were also exchanges on an Islamic Internet chat room indicating that some had been smuggled into the United States.
On NBC's "Meet the Press," Mueller said he believed there would be other attacks on U.S. soil, but that "we are working together in ways that we hadn't previously, and we are absolutely safer."
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FBI woes put cracks in case against Moussaoui
06/03/2002
By Toni Locy,
USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/2002/06/03/moussaoui-usat.htm
WASHINGTON - The FBI's admission that it missed possible chances to thwart the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks could damage the U.S. government's efforts to seek the death penalty against terrorism suspect Zaccarias Moussaoui, legal analysts say.
Prosecutors have indicated in court that Moussaoui, the only person charged in the USA in the Sept. 11 plot, not only knew about the hijacking plan in advance but also was the key to any hope that U.S. agents had of uncovering and stopping it.
Under that theory, Moussaoui's refusal to reveal the plot after his arrest on immigration charges in August helped to ensure the attacks would be carried out.
But in recent weeks it has become clear that FBI agents in Minnesota, Arizona and Oklahoma had picked up enough clues on their own before Sept. 11 to suspect the possibility of attacks by terrorists using planes.
FBI Director Robert Mueller, responding to criticism that bureau headquarters did not adequately react to field agents' concerns, said last week that the FBI failed to connect information that might have helped it stop the attacks.
That acknowledgement, legal analysts say, could undermine prosecutors' contention that Moussaoui, if convicted on terrorism conspiracy charges, should be executed because he essentially chose not to prevent the attacks that killed more than 3,000 people.
"This could be very potent evidence for the defense," says Robert Precht, University of Michigan Law School's assistant dean of public service.
There could be more. This week, congressional committees will begin hearings into whether U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies could have done more to prevent the attacks.
In court, the FBI's woes "really (open) the door to questioning about how much (Moussaoui) knew, and how much the government knew," says Charles Weisselberg, a law professor at the University of California-Berkeley.
Legal analysts say that if Moussaoui is convicted this fall, his attorneys could cite the FBI's problems to try to convince a jury not to impose a death sentence. Among other things, the attorneys could argue that:
The FBI might have learned about the Sept. 11 plot had it done more to follow leads already in its files. These included field agents' memos dating to 1998 that expressed concerns about rising numbers of Middle Easterners at U.S. flight schools, and notes from a Minnesota agent who interviewed Moussaoui in August. The Minnesota agent wrote that Moussaoui might want to fly a jet into the World Trade Center.
Supervisors at headquarters did not grant the agents' pleas for a search warrant against Moussaoui until after the attacks. In Phoenix, an agent's call for a probe of Middle Eastern flight students was rejected by headquarters last July.
It is debatable whether the FBI - given its poor record in following some terrorism leads -would have done much with any information Moussaoui would have provided.
Moussaoui, 34, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, is "a scapegoat" who was arrested to cover up the FBI's bungling.
In challenging the quality of the FBI's probe, Moussaoui's attorneys would have to persuade U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema that evidence regarding the bureau's problems is relevant. Judges tend to give defense attorneys wide latitude in death-penalty cases because the stakes are so high, says Frank Bowman, a law professor at Indiana University at Indianapolis.
Moussaoui's attorneys would also have to avoid offending jurors with an attack-the-FBI plan, legal analysts say. Bowman doubts it would work. "What it boils down to," he says, "is (a defendant saying), 'The police could've caught me quicker if they'd done a better job.' "
Other analysts say that such an approach by Moussaoui's attorneys could work - if Moussaoui were to allow it. Moussaoui wants to fire his court-appointed attorneys and represent himself. Randal Hamud, a San Diego lawyer, tried last week but failed to meet with Moussaoui. Hamud has been hired by Moussaoui's mother to try to convince him to cooperate with his court-appointed lawyers. "If Mr. Moussaoui tries to represent himself, he will be buying himself a one-way ticket to the death chamber."
For now, his attorneys have signaled that their defense will be that Moussaoui did not know about the Sept. 11 plot.
When he was arrested in Minnesota, Moussaoui allegedly told FBI agents that he was taking flight lessons for enjoyment and that he planned to go sightseeing in New York City and Washington, D.C. He also allegedly denied that he was an extremist who wanted to take part in terrorism.
Prosecutors contend that Moussaoui was lying to buy time for the 19 hijackers. They say the lies amount to "an act" that aided the Sept. 11 conspiracy.
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The end of privacy
June 3, 2002
Washington Times
Nat Hentoff
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20020603-13959396.htm
Schoolboys used to learn what William Pitt said in the English Parliament, in the 18th century, when the king was ordering more searches of private homes and businesses: "The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the Crown."
Pitt said the roof of his cottage "may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England may not enter - all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement."
But that was before J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI and cyberspace. In Attorney General John Ashcroft's USA Patriot Act, there is a sneak-and-peek provision, which resembles what in Hoover's time was called "black bag jobs." Last October, Congress overwhelmingly passed the bill. Most members didn't have time to read the lengthy document.
With a warrant, FBI agents may now enter homes and offices of citizens and non-citizens when they're not there. The agents may look around, examine what's on a computer's hard drive and take other records of interest to them.
These surreptitious visits are not limited to investigations of terrorism, but can also be used in regular criminal investigations. Unlike many parts of the USA Patriot Act, these searches are not subject to the "sunset clause," which requires Congress to examine in four years whether the new law's incursions on American liberties have gone too far. This section of the USA Patriot Act is now a permanent part of American criminal law.
While in the office or home, the FBI can plant a "Magic Lantern" in your computer. It's also called the "sniffer keystroke logger." The device creates a record of every time you press a key on the computer. Unless you are very technically savvy, it's hard to know where the Magic Lantern resides.
"What the 'Magic Lantern' records is saved in plain text," says Jim Dempsey of the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology - someone I've consulted repeatedly on advanced technological invasions of privacy. "During the next FBI secret visit to a home or office, that information is downloaded while the agents look for other papers and records they might want to take along."
It is worth noting that a precursor to the Magic Lantern was being used during the Clinton administration. I have a copy of a May 9, 1999 application to a U.S. District Court in New Jersey from a U.S. attorney that authorizes a "surreptitious entry" to search and seize "encryption key-related pass phrases from a computer by installing a specialized computer program . . . which will allow the government to read and interpret data that was previously seized pursuant to a search warrant."
Under previous criminal law, when the FBI made a furtive search of homes and offices, the agents had to leave notice that they'd been there, and list what they'd taken. That way the person whose records were taken could immediately challenge the search. The agents may have had a bad lead or gone to the wrong address or may have exceeded their legal authority.
Now, the FBI is entitled to give what is called "delayed notice." For up to 90 days, the agents don't have to inform the occupant of their break-ins, and the FBI can delay notice even further by going to a judge and getting extensions of that 90-day provision. Also, if they don't find anything the first and second times, they can keep coming back, hoping they may yet hit pay dirt. Eventually, they will have to give notice.
Meanwhile, according to a Reuters dispatch, the FBI is developing a way that will allow it to plant the Magic Lantern without having to break into a home or office. " 'Magic Lantern,' " says Reuters, "would allow the agency to plant a Trojan horse keystroke logger on a target's PC by sending a computer virus over the Internet, rather than require physical access to the computer, as is now the case."
In 1928, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis predicted that "ways may be developed, some day, by which the government, without removing secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home." Or of the office.
Who knew how chillingly prophetic Justice Brandeis would be?
Nat Hentoff is a columnist for The Washington Times. His column runs on Mondays.
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C.I.A. Was Tracking Hijacker Months Earlier Than It Had Said
New York Times
June 3, 2002
By DAVID JOHNSTON and ELIZABETH BECKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/03/national/03TERR.html
WASHINGTON, June 2 - The Central Intelligence Agency says in a classified chronology submitted to Congress recently that it picked up the trail of a Qaeda operative who turned out to be a Sept. 11 hijacker months earlier than was previously known, government officials said today.
The officials said the C.I.A. learned in early 2001 that Khalid al-Midhar, who died in the attack on the Pentagon, was linked to a suspect in the bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole in October 2000. The agency had said previously that it did not learn of Mr. Midhar's connections to Al Qaeda or his multiple visits to the United States until the month before the hijackings, when an increase in "chatter" about terrorist threats prompted a review of the C.I.A.'s terrorism files.
C.I.A. officials also neglected to advise the F.B.I. and other agencies when it learned of Mr. Midhar's connections to the terrorist group, the officials said. As a result, he was not put on any government watch list until after the August review, enabling him to enter the country unhindered. The State Department routinely renewed his expired visa in June 2001.
The performance of agencies like the F.B.I. and C.I.A. is under intense scrutiny as the House and Senate intelligence committees prepare for hearings, starting Tuesday, into the lapses that became known only after the Sept. 11 attacks. Much of the criticism to date has focused on the F.B.I.; today's disclosures about the C.I.A.'s knowledge, reported in this week's issue of Newsweek, are the first to draw questions about the C.I.A.'s actions.
In separate appearances on television news programs today, Attorney General John Ashcroft and the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, defended their handling of their own investigations and said they were cooperating fully with Congress, passing tens of thousands of documents to the committees.
But Mr. Mueller acknowledged on the CBS program "Face the Nation" that "we have to do a better job pulling these pieces together, analyzing them and disseminating them."
The C.I.A.'s finding that Mr. Midhar could be tied to Al Qaeda terrorism was an important one, the government officials said. If other agencies had known it, the information might have led to the discovery that Mr. Midhar and an associate he lived with in California, Nawaq Alhazmi, another hijacker, had attended flight schools in the United States.
As a result, when an F.B.I. agent in Phoenix warned his headquarters in July 2001 that Osama bin Laden's followers might be studying at flight schools in this country in preparation for terrorist attacks, the agency did not realize that Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi had taken such flight training.
One intelligence official said the C.I.A.'s sharing its information would most likely not have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks.
"The notion that this would have changed history or rolled up the hijacking plot is highly speculative," the official said.
But such communications breakdowns in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks have led some officials, including Mr. Mueller, to say that a better sharing of information might have led the authorities to thwart the attacks.
The C.I.A. first learned of Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi in 2000, after the men were identified as participants in a January meeting of terrorist suspects in Malaysia. Sometime in 2000 the agency also learned that both men had visited the United States, Mr. Midhar on several occasions. But it did not understand the men's significance until after the Cole bombing in October 2000. By late that year or early the next, it had connected Mr. Midhar with a Qaeda suspect in that attack. The C.I.A. then learned that Mr. Midhar had entered the country multiple times before the Cole incident.
Yet it was not until Aug. 23, 2001, after the C.I.A.'s review of its terrorism files, that the names of the two men were passed on to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. By then, the immigration agency found, they had already entered the country. The F.B.I. began an investigation and was still searching for the two men when the hijackings occurred.
With Congressional hearings beginning this week, the intelligence agencies are preparing their cases to show why they failed to detect the Sept. 11 plot.
Mr. Ashcroft said that officials who missed or discounted clues would be held accountable.
"Yes, I believe they will be, if in fact it's merited and appropriate," Mr. Ashcroft said on the CNN program "Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer."
Members of Congress have criticized the F.B.I. for failing to understand or follow up on warnings from the Phoenix agent about Middle Eastern men taking flying lessons and for blocking an investigation by its Minneapolis office of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was later indicted on charges that he conspired in the Sept. 11 attacks.
"They don't have any excuse because the information was in their lap and they didn't do anything to prevent it," Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on the NBC program "Meet the Press."
In their hearings, which are expected to last through the summer, Congressional leaders said they would press for a full documentation of intelligence failures and for finding out who was responsible for those failures.
Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, discounted recent calls for the resignation of Mr. Mueller, who took office only a week before Sept. 11. Instead, Mr. Grassley said on the ABC program "This Week," the actions of the senior members of the F.B.I. should be examined, and if those senior members had failed to warn Mr. Mueller properly of the threat, then "their heads should roll."
Congressional leaders also warned today that there should be no retaliation against Coleen Rowley, the Minneapolis agent who wrote Mr. Mueller complaining that F.B.I. officials in Washington had rebuffed agents in Minneapolis who sought greater authority to investigate Mr. Moussaoui before Sept. 11. She also wrote that Mr. Mueller had misrepresented the Minneapolis complaints.
Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said on "Face the Nation," "I will watch very carefully to make sure she is given all the whistle-blower protection."
"I don't want, because she raised problems, that she then be made a scapegoat herself," Mr. Leahy said.
While Mr. Mueller said last week that Ms. Rowley would suffer no reprisals for her criticism, the attorney general promised only that she would not lose her job.
When pressed to give his personal assurance that there would be no retaliation against Ms. Rowley, Mr. Ashcroft said: "She will not be fired for doing this. It's just that simple."
Later, Mr. Ashcroft's spokeswoman said that his answer had been incomplete.
"The attorney general has made it clear that there will be no retaliation against Ms. Rowley," said Barbara Comstock, the spokeswoman. "Both he and Mr. Mueller welcomed Ms. Rowley's letter."
Mr. Leahy said his committee would call Ms. Rowley to testify this week.
Mr. Mueller also said that since Sept. 11 the F.B.I. has prevented terrorist attacks overseas and in the United States, but he only discussed those foiled attacks that have already been made public.
For his part, Mr. Ashcroft defended himself against charges by Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Republican of Wisconsin, that he had gone too far in changing rules on domestic spying.
Last week the Justice Department and the F.B.I. announced an expansion of the agency's authority to track potential terrorists by monitoring the Internet, political groups, libraries and religious organizations, including places of worship like mosques. The attorney general said he was only giving the F.B.I. permission to visit places and attend events open to the public and to use the Internet.
"A 12-year-old, 13-year-old kid can go anywhere he wants to on the Internet looking for things like bomb-making sites," Mr. Ashcroft said. "Shouldn't the F.B.I. be able to go to those public places in the same way?"
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CIA failed to share info on hijackers with FBI, INS
06/03/2002
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/attack/2002/06/03/cia-attacks.htm
WASHINGTON (AP) - The CIA first learned of two of the eventual Sept. 11 hijackers at a meeting in Malaysia in early 2000 but didn't alert domestic authorities to watch for them until three weeks before the attacks, U.S. officials acknowledged Monday.
Malaysian authorities monitored the meeting, which was attended by Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, two of the hijackers who flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, and passed on the information to the CIA.
At the time, the significance and subject of the 2000 meeting were not clear, said a U.S. intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. But CIA informed FBI headquarters, as well as FBI agents in the CIA's counterterrorism center, that the meeting took place.
But the names of Almihdhar and Alhazmi didn't make it onto a watch list - used by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and State Department to deny entry into the United States - until Aug. 23, when the two were already in the country. It's unclear when their identities were confirmed, and whether the FBI learned their names from the CIA.
Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., complained Monday of "massive failures of intelligence at the CIA."
"Assuming it's true - I can't confirm that on this program - I believe you are going to see a lot more instances like this where, if they had acted on the information they had and followed through, maybe things would be different," Shelby said on ABC's Good Morning America."We don't know."
He said CIA Director George Tenet "is in denial. But I believe he is totally wrong."
Also at the January 2000 meeting in Malaysia was Tawfiq Attash Khallad, lately identified as one of the U.S. top 25 targets in the war on al-Qaeda, the intelligence official said. The current status of Khallad is unclear.
The meeting gained much greater significance at some point after the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000. Investigators learned that Khallad was one of the masterminds of the plot, and his known associates - including Almihdhar and Alhazmi - suddenly took on new importance.
But it's unclear if this new information was transferred to other authorities, such as the FBI, State Department and INS, until months later, the official said. These agencies remained unaware of the new significance given to Almihdhar and Alhazmi by the CIA.
On Aug. 23, 2001, the CIA, worried that a large al-Qaeda operation was in the offing, put out an alert on Almihdhar and Alhazmi, adding them to a watch list. By that time they already had entered the United States.
"We have no way of knowing what would have happened if these individuals had been put on a watch list earlier," the intelligence official said.
At least one other al-Qaeda operative now thought to be a potential Sept. 11 hijacker - Ramzi Binalshibh - was denied access to the United States before the attacks. He was not arrested or interrogated, and remains at large.
Failure of the CIA to share its information on Almihdhar and Alhazmi was first reported by Newsweek magazine.
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Only CIA knew hijackers were here
June 3, 2002
By Joyce Howard Price
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020603-68231361.htm
The CIA was tracking two of the September 11 hijackers for nearly two years and knew they had entered the United States, but didn't inform the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service or the State Department, key federal officials say.
In interviews yesterday on network news talk shows, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, confirmed a report in Newsweek magazine that said the CIA waited more than a year and a half after two al Qaeda terrorist suspects entered this country before sharing their names with other agencies.
The magazine reported that the CIA was closely watching Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar - who were aboard American Airlines Flight 77 that flew into the Pentagon - when the two attended a "summit" meeting of al Qaeda terrorists in Malaysia in January 2000.
On CNN's "Late Edition," Mrs. Feinstein told host Wolf Blitzer this report was "not new news" for her or others involved in an inquiry jointly conducted by the House and Senate intelligence panels into mistakes leading up to the September 11 terrorist attacks.
"I gather the information [about the two terrorists being in the United States] wasn't transmitted until August between the CIA and the FBI," a month before the attacks, said Mrs. Feinstein, California Democrat. She said the matter will be a focus of a hearing by the joint intelligence committees that begins tomorrow.
"I don't think this is the only revelation that's going to come forward," said Mrs. Feinstein.
On NBC's "Meet the Press," Mr. Mueller said, "I have not read the [Newsweek] article yet. I am aware that we were notified in August 2001 of two individuals who had links to a meeting in Kuala Lumpur [Malaysia]" in January 2000. Newsweek said that meeting was a summit of the al Qaeda terrorist network, which was responsible for the hijackings on September 11.
Sen. Richard C. Shelby, Alabama Republican and vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said the report "goes right to the heart of communication between the various intelligence agencies, CIA, FBI, [National Security Agency], immigration, you name it. It has not been a flow of information when people needed it between all the agencies.
"We've got to do better. And, I believe, coming out of this hearing, you're going to see some specific recommendations," he added.
Mrs. Feinstein said yesterday she believed "racial profiling" was a factor in the "reticence of the FBI" to follow up on some leads that indicated young Muslim men with ties to al Qaeda were being recruited for U.S. flight schools. "I believe it played a role in the [agency´s] reticence to move ahead" on a memo with that information submitted by an FBI agent in Phoenix in July, she added.
Mrs. Feinstein said she believed racial profiling was a "real issue here," noting that the FBI recognized it was not "going to be looking for blond Norwegians."
"I think the racial-profiling debate has created a kind of disservice in the terrorism area, particularly with respect to the FBI. I believe it has had a chilling impact," the California Democrat said.
Mr. Shelby has been a vocal critic of the FBI's mishandling of intelligence information that could have provided clues about the September 11 hijacking plans by followers of Osama bin Laden. "All along, however, the CIA's counterterrorism center - base camp for the agency's war on bin Laden - was sitting on information that could have led federal agents right to the terrorists' doorstep," the report in this week's issue of Newsweek says.
The Newsweek report by Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman said the two terrorists flew to the United States a few days after the Kuala Lumpur conference. But the CIA failed to inform the INS, which could have barred them at the border, or the FBI, which "could have covertly tracked them to find out their mission."
Instead, the article said, for a year and nine months after the CIA had identified them as terrorists, Alhazmi and Almihdhar lived openly in this country, used their own names, and took flight training. It said the State Department issued Almihdhar a new visa in June 2001, when his expired. Newsweek said State did not know the CIA had linked him "to one of the suspected bombers of the USS Cole" in Yemen in October 2000.
"This was probably the biggest intelligence failure of all" before September, Mr. Isikoff said yesterday in an interview on CNN.
In multiple talk-show appearances yesterday, Mr. Mueller and Attorney General John Ashcroft acknowledged intelligence agencies could have better analyzed information that pointed to September 11, but probably could not have prevented the attacks.
On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will be hearing from Mr. Mueller and Coleen Rowley, an FBI agent in Minneapolis who sent Congress a letter accusing the FBI director of misrepresenting the facts when he told Americans his agency did not have probable cause to search the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui. Officials believe Moussaoui, a French terrorist, would have been among the September 11 hijackers had he not been arrested in August by FBI agents in Minnesota. The field agents sought a search warrant to examine Moussaoui's computer, but were turned down by officials at FBI headquarters in Washington.
Mr. Ashcroft, interviewed on ABC's "This Week," pledged that Miss Rowley would not be fired for her congressional testimony.
But Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, who also appeared on that show, said Mr. Ashcroft needed to do more than say Miss Rowley would not be dismissed. "Most whistleblowers are not dismissed they are put off in the corner, their work taken away from them, and they go nuts, and they resign," he said. "I want to hear from the attorney general that she won't suffer economically or professionally."
On NBC, host Tim Russert pointed to an editorial in the Wall Street Journal on Friday that recommended Mr. Mueller resign. Asked if he planned to do so, Mr. Mueller said, "No, I'm just getting started in the job. I don't feel embattled." President Bush and Mr. Ashcroft have made it clear they think Mr. Mueller is the right man for that job. Most lawmakers interviewed yesterday - especially prominent Democrats - agreed.
But Mr. Shelby indicated he was not sure. "I believe he's got a lot to learn. He's an able man. He's got to be determined to turn the bureaucracy around and make the FBI more agile, more analytical. I hope he can do it, but we have to see," he said on "Meet the Press."
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A Witness Against Al Qaeda Says the U.S. Let Him Down
New York Times
June 3, 2002
By JUDITH MILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/03/national/03WITN.html?pagewanted=all&position=top
Essam Al Ridi, an Egyptian-American pilot, has seen Osama bin Laden and his world of militant Islam up close, and he is one of the few people who helped prosecutors penetrate it long before Sept. 11.
Early last year, his testimony was crucial in convicting Mr. bin Laden's former personal secretary for conspiring in the 1998 plot by Al Qaeda to bomb two American embassies in Africa, in which more than 200 people died.
But Mr. Al Ridi says that since he described his dealings with Mr. bin Laden, his life has taken a harsh turn. Even though the Justice Department offered to protect him from reprisals by Egypt, he said, he was detained, kicked and held incommunicado for 24 hours during a trip to Cairo last May to see his parents. When the Federal Bureau of Investigation sought his help again after the Sept. 11 attacks, he was fired by a Middle Eastern airline that suddenly viewed him as a security risk.
Mr. Al Ridi, 43, sees his treatment as a sign of the potential perils facing Arabs and Muslims who help the F.B.I. in its war on terror. Justice Department officials acknowledge that he has suffered from the fallout. But they say that while they have tried to help him, there are limits to what they can do, especially with other countries.
"I said, `Help us, and we'll help you,' and it didn't work out," said Robert Miranda, an F.B.I. agent in Dallas dealing with Mr. Al Ridi. "It's been a whole ugly mess."
Law enforcement officials now worry that Mr. Al Ridi's complaints could create more problems when the F.B.I. is eager to recruit Arab and Muslim informants and remake itself with a much greater domestic intelligence capability.
"Things like this make recruitment 100 times harder," said Robert M. Blitzer, a former senior F.B.I. counterterrorism official.
At the trial, Mr. Al Ridi, who was born in Cairo and became an American citizen in 1994, helped convict Wadih El-Hage, who was once Mr. bin Laden's personal secretary. Mr. Al Ridi testified that he had bought a surplus United States military jet for Mr. bin Laden in 1992 and then flew the plane to Sudan, where Mr. bin Laden ran businesses while quietly building his Qaeda network.
Mr. Al Ridi testified that Mr. El-Hage had told him the plane might be used to move American-made Stinger missiles left from the Afghan-Soviet war.
Mr. Al Ridi, who was never part of Al Qaeda and was not charged with a crime, said recently that some of Mr. bin Laden's activities were suspicious. But he said that he viewed his involvement with Mr. bin Laden as a business deal, and that he never saw any sign of the terror to come.
Now, unable to find work in aviation, Mr. Al Ridi is living off his nearly exhausted savings with his wife and five children in a rented house near Dallas.
"I am at the end of my rope," he said in one of several interviews, the first by a major witness in the embassy bombings trial. "The government and I had a gentleman's agreement: Help us, they told me, and we won't forget you. But they have forgotten me, except when they need information."
Mr. Miranda, the F.B.I. agent, said he had twice recommended that officials at bureau headquarters give Mr. Al Ridi $50,000 for his help. He said they were considering the request.
Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who was the prosecutor in the embassy bombing case and is now the United States attorney in Chicago, confirmed that the government had tried to protect Mr. Al Ridi from reprisals in Egypt, which has long clamped down on Islamic militants.
But law enforcement officials said they could not guarantee that nothing bad would happen to him there. "We can control only what we can control," one federal official said.
Still, the officials say, Mr. Al Ridi's complaints provide a glimpse of how delicate and taxing it can be to maintain the confidence of vulnerable witnesses.
Like many other witnesses, in cases of organized crime or terror, Mr. Al Ridi says he now sees how hard it is to shake free of the shadows caused by old associations.
Mr. Al Ridi said he was living in the Dallas area in 1983 when he heeded a call from a Muslim scholar, Abdullah Azzam, to support the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union. He went to Pakistan, where he later met Mr. bin Laden, who became a leader in that fight. He met Mr. El-Hage, a student also in thrall to the jihad, during a return visit to the United States.
Mr. Al Ridi said he had once helped the Central Intelligence Agency obtain photographs of a downed Russian helicopter. He also arranged a shipment of 25 heavy-duty sniper guns to the Afghan resistance in 1987.
Though C.I.A. officials say they never supplied weapons to Mr. bin Laden, Mr. Al Ridi said the agency knew that Mr. bin Laden ended up with some of the guns. Still, he said, he later saw many of the guns "rusting away in their boxes."
After the Afghans expelled the Soviets in 1989, the jihad attracted a different kind of believer, Mr. Al Ridi said - "young Muslim kids, without passports, running away from who knows what."
Depressed by this, he said, he returned to Texas. When Sheik Abdullah was assassinated shortly after that, he said, "the Afghan chapter and jihad were closed for me."
But not entirely, as it turned out. In 1992, Mr. Al Ridi said, Mr. El-Hage called, asking him to buy the plane. Mr. Al Ridi agreed - purely, he said, because he needed cash.
Mr. Al Ridi said he paid $210,000 to a dealer in Arizona for a T-39 passenger jet that had been retired by the United States military, earning a $25,000 fee. He flew it to Sudan and handed the keys to Mr. bin Laden.
The next day, Mr. Al Ridi testified last year, he told Mr. bin Laden that he objected to "the fact that you are a rich man and trying to be a military leader." He told Mr. bin Laden that his spurring of young Arabs into battle had amounted to their own "flat killing, not jihad."
He said Mr. bin Laden took the scolding in stride. He then offered him a job as a pilot, Mr. Al Ridi said, but he declined.
The two men also discussed starting a crop-dusting business in Sudan, Mr. Al Ridi said. He said he told the F.B.I. about this in 1999, but the bureau never asked him for a report he had written for Mr. bin Laden until after Sept. 11, when agents realized that one of the hijackers had inquired about crop-dusting planes.
Mr. Al Ridi said that as far as he knew, Mr. bin Laden never used the surplus jet to move the shoulder-mounted Stinger missiles from Pakistan to Sudan. Mr. Al Ridi also flew the plane to Nairobi from Sudan in 1993, taking five men who he thought were working on a business project.
Mr. Al Ridi later learned, he said, that one of the men was Muhammad Atef, Al Qaeda's senior military commander, who is believed to have died last fall in Afghanistan. He said he heard the men had gone to Somalia to stir tribal leaders against American peacekeeping forces.
Mr. Al Ridi said he flew the plane one last time in 1995, but the brakes failed and it crashed into a sand dune. The authorities said his co-pilot was Ihab Mohammed Ali, a member of Al Qaeda known as Nawawi who had attended flight school in Oklahoma and is in federal custody.
Given these connections, investigators say, Mr. Al Ridi's name came up once they started looking into the embassy bombings in 1998. Mr. Al Ridi was living in Bahrain, and he agreed to return to Dallas for an interview in late 1999.
He said he did not ask for money, and he told Mr. Fitzgerald, the prosecutor, that he did not want to be placed in the witness protection program. Records show that the government spent $1 million to provide two former members of Al Qaeda, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges and also testified at the trial, with new identities.
But on the stand in February 2001, Mr. Al Ridi did ask for one favor: protection from Egypt, which, having been victimized by Muslim-inspired terror, has dealt harshly with veterans of the Afghan campaign.
Mr. Fitzgerald responded by asking Mr. Al Ridi, "What is it that the United States government promised to do for you to aid in your situation?" Mr. Al Ridi replied that the Justice Department had pledged to tell Egyptian officials that "I'm not involved directly with Osama in any of his acts."
Before going to Egypt last May, Mr. Al Ridi said, he alerted F.B.I. officials in Cairo.
Nevertheless, he was detained. He said he managed to leave a message for Mr. Miranda, the agent in Dallas, before he was kicked while handcuffed near a urinal and deprived of sleep, food and water. After nearly a day, he said, the F.B.I. got him out of jail.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Al Ridi, who was a pilot trainer for Qatar Airways in Qatar, said F.B.I. agents went there to interview him again about Mr. bin Laden.
Mr. Al Ridi expressed concern that the airline might misconstrue why they were there. The agents assured him, he said, that Qatari security knew he was helping them. But shortly after their visit, he said, he was fired.
Egyptian officials and Qatar Airways executives did not respond to requests for comment. Justice Department officials said the F.B.I. tried unsuccessfully to allay the airline's concerns. Worried about further problems, Mr. Miranda and Mr. Fitzgerald also arranged for Mr. Al Ridi's brother to move from Cairo to the United States, officials said.
For weeks, though, Mr. Al Ridi said he also tried to call Mr. Fitzgerald, who was swamped with post-Sept. 11 investigative work.
Mr. Al Ridi said he wanted Mr. Fitzgerald to write a letter to counter fears among potential employers that it would be risky to hire him.
Mr. Fitzgerald said he would write a letter commending Mr. Al Ridi's service as a government witness. But he said no federal prosecutor would write what Mr. Al Ridi really wants - a letter that would give him a "clean bill of health."
New information about his past dealings could still emerge, Mr. Fitzgerald said. He said he also could understand why any airline would be wary of a pilot who had worked for Osama bin Laden.
Mr. Al Ridi countered that the prosecutors "tell me I did the right thing" in cooperating. But, he asked, "Would others do what I did if they knew the price I have paid?"
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- energy
Pioneer Brazil seeks to crank up alcohol motor again
REUTERS BRAZIL:
June 3, 2002
Story by Andrei Khalip and Peter Blackburn
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/16237/story.htm
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - Legend has it that when alcohol-powered cars became stranded during Brazil's 1989 alcohol fuel supply crisis, desperate motorists tried using strong sugarcane moonshine to keep them running.
They didn't run too well on the homemade liquor, and the "alco car" - one of Brazil's proudest inventions - had such a bad hangover that it nearly fell into oblivion. Sales of the eco-friendly cars, which once represented 90 percent of new passenger vehicle sales in Brazil, dwindled to 1 percent.
Turmoil on the world oil market this year due to conflict in the Middle East may prove to be the saving grace for the car that was rolled out after the oil crisis in the 1970s and runs on cane-based 96-proof hydrous ethanol, or alcohol.
Although memories of the 1989 shortage still make most Brazilians skeptical about alcohol-fueled cars, the Brazilian government hopes that signs of international demand for alcohol and prospects for a record harvest in the world's No. 1 sugar cane grower can bring the vehicle back from the junkyard.
"We want to revive the alcohol program. Japan, China and India are seriously thinking about importing alcohol and technologies from Brazil, which has the fame of (being both) pioneer and expert in this sphere," Trade, Industry and Development Minister Sergio Amaral told Reuters.
"It doesn't make sense starting it all over again just for exports. It has to be for consumption in our cars too."
Leading economies, including the three major Asian powers and the United States, are blending or planning to blend pure, clean-burning alcohol with gasoline in the wake of recent international treaties on greenhouse gas emission reduction.
The United States uses ethanol in 12 percent of its fuel, mostly at a blend of 10 percent ethanol. Brazil has been mixing anhydrous ethanol with gasoline for use in all cars for years.
CARMAKERS WANT TAX INCENTIVES
But Amaral may have to do some juggling of interests among carmakers and sugar millers to kick-start his ambitious plan.
Previous attempts by Latin America's largest country to revive the program failed due to alcohol price increases when crops were small, as well as the government's clumsy efforts to push automakers into raising output of alcohol-fueled cars.
Car producers, who are working at 60 percent of capacity due to a sluggish local economy, now say they are happy to make anything that would sell. But they say it will require tax incentives to overcome consumers' reluctance to buy the cars.
"The problem is that consumers have ceased opting for alco cars," said Ademar Cantero, director of the Anfavea automakers association. "We need a coherent, long-term policy that would guarantee supply and get the consumer interested via an attractive price, which can be done through tax incentives."
Amaral did not say if the government would offer any additional tax incentives for alcohol cars, which already enjoy what he said was a hefty discount compared with taxes levied on normal cars.
"Car makers have assured me that they will produce more if the government guaranteed alcohol supplies," he said.
Automakers say a hybrid alcohol-gasoline car would be ideal for the market. Fledgling technology known as flex-fuel allows motorists to choose the type of fuel to use depending on the price or other considerations.
U.S.-based Ford Motor Co , one of Brazil's top four carmakers, has already presented a prototype capable of using either gasoline, alcohol or any alcohol-gasoline blend.
Ford officials declined to say when regular production of these cars might begin in Brazil, adding that they are hoping for incentives to make the car attractive to customers.
Alcohol motors present some drawbacks. Even though alcohol is cheaper than gasoline, it burns more rapidly than the fossil fuel. That means cars fitted with alcohol engines are best equipped with oversize fuel tanks, which cost more. In addition, alcohol-fueled cars need special fuel pumps and injection systems, which make them more expensive to produce.
Alcohol cars also don't start well in cold weather.
Anfavea's Cantero said sales of alco-cars had doubled in the past four months to 12,500 units from year-ago levels, but that the rise was driven by tax incentives for taxis, motorists in alcohol-producing regions and government "green fleets".
SUPPLY SIDE LOOKS BRIGHTER AS SUGAR MILLERS SIGN UP
The government is focusing on the fuel supply side of the problem to ensure that planned strategic stocks of alcohol will bring back consumer confidence and kick-start a revival of the alco-car.
Eduardo Pereira de Carvalho, president of the Sao Paulo Cane Agroindustry Union, said sugar producers had agreed to finance a stock of some 10 percent of the market, where annual consumption now stands at about 10 billion liters.
"We've been working on it for two months and are now signing things," he said, adding that despite hopes for a market abroad, it would take years to set up and so the focus for the time being would be on the domestic market. "It is easier to recover a market than create a new one," he said.
Lyndsay Jolly, analyst at the London-based International Sugar Organization, expects production to rise to over 13.3 billion liters this year from 11.5 billion in 2001, adding that Brazilian producers would try to develop the alcohol market to minimize the impact on sugar prices from a massive cane crop.
Some experts say the tide began to turn against the alcohol program in the 1980s after the discovery of oil off Brazil's shores. That reduced the government's fervor for greener fuel and led to a phasing out of incentives for alcohol producers.
Others blame the crisis on cane millers who opted to sell sugar abroad instead of alcohol at home when sugar prices went up. The industry denies the charges and pins the blame on distribution problems and strikes by workers at the time.
Carvalho said producers could now guarantee sufficient ethanol thanks to idle capacity of 5 billion liters a year and a more flexible market. An alcohol blend in gasoline of between 19 and 26 percent means some 1.5 billion liters could be supplied or withdrawn from the market as the crop fluctuates.
He noted that ethanol prices had been stable over the past two years and were now 40 percent lower than those for gasoline, enough to win consumers over despite the need to buy more.
Amaral said the government could maintain the attractiveness of alcohol via taxes and could tax sugar exports if necessary to ensure ethanol supplies.
"So there's no possibility that ethanol production can't meet demand," Carvalho said.
Brazil still has a fleet of some 3 million aging alco-cars and a big alcohol distribution network. "We have a great national asset, which is the enormous network of ethanol filling stations that no other country has," Amaral said.
Even state oil giant Petrobras (PETR4.SA says it can benefit from the program via its fuel distribution network that includes alcohol pumps, and exports of excess oil abroad. "We think it's a good opportunity if there is a competitive market for alcohol," said Petrobras president Francisco Gros.
----
UK generators may burn wood, straw at coal plants
REUTERS UK:
June 3, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/16239/story.htm
LONDON - British generators are looking at burning wood and straw with coal at their power stations to cut greenhouse gas emissions and so get valuable green certificates, said company spokesmen last week.
"We are looking at the option of wood burning. It would be a mixture - less than 10 percent wood and the remainder coal," said a spokesman at Innogy.
The company is seeking permits to carry out trials at various power stations but the main one would be its Tilbury site in south-east England, he said.
Another utility Powergen, is also looking at co-firing with wood and straw and is considering growing energy crops like willow for fuel for its plants.
"We are looking at co-firing as a first step. It's early days," said a Powergen spokeswoman.
"A lot of work needs to be done to secure a reliable source of fuel," she added.
The plans follow government rules introduced in April which force suppliers to buy at least three percent of their power from green sources, a figure which rises to 10 percent by 2010.
Suppliers can prove they have met this target by showing they have renewable obligation certificates (ROCs), either from their own green power production or ones they have bought from renewable generators.
By co-firing, generators will be allowed to issue renewable obligation certificates (ROCs) for the amount of electricity produced by the wood and straw.
The government has said it will allow companies to claim ROCs for co-firing production until 2006.
Generators like Innogy and Powergen have retail businesses so need the ROCs to cover supplies to their own customers, but they could sell them on the open market.
The shortage of green power in the UK means ROCs are worth about 40 pounds ($58.67) per megawatt hour, more than double the value of wholesale electricity.
But industry watchers say if co-firing at coal power stations goes ahead it would lead to a huge increase the amount of ROCs available, resulting in a sharp drop in certificate prices.
-------- environment
Climate Changing, U.S. Says in Report
New York Times
June 3, 2002
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/03/science/03CLIM.html
In a stark shift for the Bush administration, the United States has sent a climate report to the United Nations detailing specific and far-reaching effects that it says global warming will inflict on the American environment.
In the report, the administration for the first time mostly blames human actions for recent global warming. It says the main culprit is the burning of fossil fuels that send heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
But while the report says the United States will be substantially changed in the next few decades - "very likely" seeing the disruption of snow-fed water supplies, more stifling heat waves and the permanent disappearance of Rocky Mountain meadows and coastal marshes, for example - it does not propose any major shift in the administration's policy on greenhouse gases.
It recommends adapting to inevitable changes. It does not recommend making rapid reductions in greenhouse gases to limit warming, the approach favored by many environmental groups and countries that have accepted the Kyoto Protocol, a climate treaty written in the Clinton administration that was rejected by Mr. Bush.
The new document, "U.S. Climate Action Report 2002," strongly concludes that no matter what is done to cut emissions in the future, nothing can be done about the environmental consequences of several decades' worth of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases already in the atmosphere.
Its emphasis on adapting to the inevitable fits in neatly with the climate plan Mr. Bush announced in February. He called for voluntary measures that would allow gas emissions to continue to rise, with the goal of slowing the rate of growth.
Yet the new report's predictions present a sharp contrast to previous statements on climate change by the administration, which has always spoken in generalities and emphasized the need for much more research to resolve scientific questions.
The report, in fact, puts a substantial distance between the administration and companies that produce or, like automakers, depend on fossil fuels. Many companies and trade groups have continued to run publicity and lobbying campaigns questioning the validity of the science pointing to damaging results of global warming.
The distancing could be an effort to rebuild Mr. Bush's environmental credentials after a bruising stretch of defeats on stances that favor energy production over conservation, notably the failure to win a Senate vote opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to exploratory oil drilling.
But the report has alienated environmentalists, too. Late last week, after it was posted on the Web site of the Environmental Protection Agency, private environmental groups pounced on it, saying it pointed to a jarring disconnect between the administration's findings on the climate problem and its proposed solutions.
"The Bush administration now admits that global warming will change America's most unique wild places and wildlife forever," said Mark Van Putten, the president of the National Wildlife Federation, a private environmental group. "How can it acknowledge global warming is a disaster in the making and then refuse to help solve the problem, especially when solutions are so clear?"
Scott McClellan, a White House spokesman, said, "It is important to move forward on the president's strategies for addressing the challenge of climate change, and that's what we're continuing to do."
Many companies and trade groups had sought last year to tone down parts of the report, the third prepared by the United States under the requirements of a 1992 climate treaty but the first under President Bush.
For the most part, the document does not reflect industry's wishes, which were conveyed in letters during a period of public comment on a draft last year.
The report emphasizes that global warming carries potential benefits for the nation, including increased agricultural and forest growth from longer growing seasons, and from more rainfall and carbon dioxide for photosynthesis.
But it says environmental havoc is coming as well. "Some of the goods and services lost through the disappearance or fragmentation of natural ecosystems are likely to be costly or impossible to replace," the report says.
The report also warns of the substantial disruption of snow-fed water supplies, the loss of coastal and mountain ecosystems and more frequent heat waves. "A few ecosystems, such as alpine meadows in the Rocky Mountains and some barrier islands, are likely to disappear entirely in some areas," it says. "Other ecosystems, such as Southeastern forests, are likely to experience major species shifts or break up into a mosaic of grasslands, woodlands and forests."
Despite arguments by oil industry groups that the evidence is not yet clear, the report unambiguously states that humans are the likely cause of most of the recent warming. Phrases were adopted wholesale from a National Academy of Sciences climate study, which was requested last spring by the White House and concluded that the warming was a serious problem.
A government official familiar with the new report said that it had been under review at the White House from January until mid-April, but that few substantive changes were made.
Without a news release or announcement, the new report was shipped last week to the United Nations offices that administer the treaty and posted on the Web (www.epa .gov/globalwarming/publications /car/).
A senior administration official involved in climate policy played down the significance of the report, explaining that policies on emissions or international treaties would not change as a result.
Global warming has become a significant, if second-tier, political issue recently, particularly since James M. Jeffords, the Vermont independent, became chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee last year. Mr. Jeffords has criticized the president's policy.
The new report is the latest in a series on greenhouse gases, climate research, energy policies and related matters that are required of signatories to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was signed by Mr. Bush's father and ratified by the Senate.
The convention lacks binding obligations to reduce gas emissions like those in the Kyoto Protocol.
Mr. Bush and administration officials had previously been careful to avoid specifics and couch their views on coming climate shifts with substantial caveats. The president and his aides often described climate change as a "serious issue," but rarely as a serious problem.
The report contains some caveats of its own, but states that the warming trend has been under way for several decades and is likely to continue.
"Because of the momentum in the climate system and natural climate variability, adapting to a changing climate is inevitable," the report says. "The question is whether we adapt poorly or well."
Several industry groups said the qualifications in parts of the report were welcome, but added that the overall message was still more dire than the facts justified and would confuse policy makers.
Dr. Russell O. Jones, a senior economist for the American Petroleum Institute who wrote a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency a year ago seeking to purge projections of specific environmental impacts from the report, said it was "frustrating" to see that they remained.
"Adding the caveats is useful, but the results are still as meaningless," Dr. Jones said.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Vigil Stands 7,665 Days and Nights Outside the White House
Today is the 21st anniversary of the Peace Park Antinuclear Vigil, which has stood 24 hours a day outside the White House since June 3, 1981. This adds up to 7,665 days and nights. Read about the vigil and the vigilers at http://prop1.org.
"9-11 and the Public Safety: Seeking Answers and Accountability"
Monday, June 10th from 2-5 PM at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.:
Press Release June 2, 2002
UnansweredQuestions.org
To members of the press and concerned citizens:
A national press conference and formal web site launch for UnansweredQuestions.org will be held on Monday, June 10th from 2-5 PM at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
The goal of this unprecedented press event and public inquiry is to pose pointed, as yet unanswered, questions regarding the failure of our national security infrastructure, and the response that has sacrificed civil liberties and rewarded failure as opposed to ensuring performance and guaranteeing freedom, now and in the future.
UnansweredQuestions.org is being launched by an independent, non-partisan network of citizens concerned about the growing number of issues surrounding September 11th that have yet to be addressed or resolved; and their related public safety and Constitutional implications. Invited panelists will offer statements, present well-documented research, and ask incisive questions relative to these issues while addressing how citizens can act now to ensure accountability from those in government directly responsible for public safety and upholding the Constitution.
The conference will be moderated by Catherine Austin Fitts, President of Solari and former Assistant Secretary of Housing during the 1st Bush administration.
Confirmed participants include:
Mary Schiavo, Esq., lawyer for 32 passengers' families from all 9/11 hijacked planes, former Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Transportation ('90-'96) and author of Flying Safe, Flying Blind.
Lorna Brett, Director of Media Relations, Nolan Law Group, representing 9/11 families on United Airlines hijacked planes.
Ryan Amundson, whose brother Craig was killed at the Pentagon; founder of Peaceful Tomorrows.org.
Tom Flocco, independent investigative journalist who has researched and written extensively about insider trading in the trading days immediately preceding September 11th.
Jared Israel, Investigative Journalist and author of forthcoming book on 9-11.
Peter Erlander, Professor of Constitutional Law, William Mitchell University and past President of the National Lawyers Guild.
J. Michael Springmann, a veteran of 20 years of foreign service, who worked at the Saudi Embassy during a two year period when visas were issued to suspected Saudi hijackers.
Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO), the foremost House proponent of U.S. border security.
--Other members of Congress have been invited to participate in the third hour of the conference. --Further panelists will be announced in the coming week.
Organizers maintain that it is the role of informed active citizens to insist upon standards of performance from our public officials in regard to the events surrounding 9-11 and ongoing threats. Organizers are calling for a complete and public investigation of the failures of government agencies (FBI, CIA, INS, FAA) uncovered recently. This, they insist, requires a fuller disclosure of the circumstances surrounding each case in order to effectively address documented misappropriation (or lack of appropriation), incompetence, negligence and possible corruption. Doing so will ultimately foster an intelligence and national security apparatus that is effectively committed to the public safety and a government worthy of trust and fully accountable to the American people.
Members of radio, television and print press are invited to attend. There will be ample opportunity for questions and follow-up, and one-on-one interviews with the panelists directly following the event.
Please contact Kyle F. Hence by Thursday, June 6th to register: 401-847-1963; kylehence@earthlink.net
Media Notes: 1) please reply if interested in receiving updates relative to additionally confirmed panelists and television coverage by C-SPAN or other media or check www.unansweredquestions.org later in the week 2) please look for audio and/or video archives of the event to be accessible at www.unansweredquestions.org following the event.
= Press credentials and registration required for admittance =
National Press Club Holeman Lounge 529 14th Street NW; [corner of 14th & F St.] Washington, D.C.
24-Hour Events Line: 202-662-7595 Event Reservations: 202-662-7501
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------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
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without profit or payment for research and educational
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in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107.