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NUCLEAR
Online Library For Gulf War-Related Medical Research
Small Study Finds Uranium in Gulf War Vets
UNLIMITED DAMAGE
Iraq Lacks Material for Nuclear Bomb, Study Says
U.S. evidence against Iraq: Nothing new
U.N. chief inspector: No evidence Iraq has nuclear arms
Weapons Development Called Iraq's Priority
Iraq wants business, not war, with US
Mandela: U.S. a threat to world peace
Japan Likely to Cut Aid to China
Westchester Votes Against Indian Point
Private consortium picks Tennessee for uranium fuel plant
New Uranium Plant Will Be in Tennessee
U.S. Lawmaker Going to Iraq to Cool 'War Rhetoric'
Focus on Iran and Syria, Not Iraq, Graham Says
MILITARY
Qaeda Fighters Said to Return to Afghanistan
Feds still stumped by source of anthrax in Boca
U.S., Citing Better Human Rights, Allows Aid to Colombia Military
Colombia Allows Warrantless Arrest, Army Control
Police find cocaine on Florida Governor Bush's daughter
Use of Drug Khat Up in Some Cities
Saddam's rival sons
intelligence chief says U.S. attack on Iraq is `foregone conclusion'
Arafat urges end to killing civilians
Israeli Armored Force Moves Into Northern Gaza
Paraguay disillusioned with democracy
More than 400 al-Qaeda suspects rounded up in Pakistan
U.S. Navy says sunken ship off Vieques isn't radioactive;
Navy Detains 2 Priests on Vieques
Glimpse of Readiness to Fight Iraq at U.S. Copter Base in Afghanistan
Service Chiefs Say Afghan Battle Will Help Military
POLICE / PRISONERS
Secret Appellate Court Meets
Justice Dept. says ruling impedes spying
Administration Pares Cyber-Security Plan
The protesters are coming - again
Reporters find cracks in UK national security
Senator Shelby Faults the Intelligence Agencies
Secret Court Weighs Wiretaps
U.S. Rift With Allies on World Court Widens
U.S. Raises Terror Alert Level
F.B.I. Warns Local Agencies to Be Aware
On Path to the U.S. Skies, Plot Leader Met bin Laden
ELF admits to arson
OTHER
Honeywell Fined for Chemical Reporting Violations
Biodegradable Plastics Could Reduce Landfill Need
China admits 'blood stations' caused steep rise in Aids
ACTIVISTS
EU 'has used September 11 to curb dissent'
Washington Seeks Comment on Mercury Reduction Plan
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Online Library For Gulf War-Related Medical Research
From: "Steve Taylor" Steve@miltoxproj.org
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2002 12:31:34 -0400
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Veterans Affairs announce the launch of a centralized Internet site, known as Medsearch. The site is designed to provide Gulf War veterans, their families and member of the public easy access to Gulf War-related medical research.
To access the Medsearch Web site, log onto
http://www.GulfLINK.osd.mil/medsearch
Steve Taylor
National Organizer Military Toxics Project
(207) 783-5091 (phone) (207) 783-5096 (fax)
P.O. Box 558 Lewiston, ME 04243-0558
----
Small Study Finds Uranium in Gulf War Vets
Tue Sep 10, 2002
By Merritt McKinney
Reuters Health
From: uranium@t-online.de
NEW YORK - A small study of British, Canadian and US veterans with Gulf War ( news - web sites) illness found that just over half tested positive for depleted uranium.
Whether exposure to depleted uranium--used in munitions fired in the Persian Gulf War as well as in conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo--is a factor in Gulf War illness is uncertain, but the findings highlight the need for more research on its health effects, Leonard Dietz, a co-author of the study, told Reuters Health.
"This is the first measurement of Gulf War veterans for depleted uranium using the best current scientific analytical methodology," Dietz said. Although he noted that it would be premature to say that depleted uranium is a factor in Gulf War illness, he added, "this limited sample of veterans isn't even the tip of the iceberg."
It is possible that many soldiers were exposed to depleted uranium during the Gulf War, but the study does not provide enough information on the extent of this exposure, according to Dr. Brian G. Spratt of Imperial College in London, who led a Royal Society expert panel that drafted a report on the health risks of depleted uranium.
"If the data in the paper are reliable, they are telling us that a substantial proportion of veterans from the Gulf War were exposed to depleted uranium," Spratt told Reuters Health. "This may be politically important to the veterans, but the key question is not whether they were exposed, but to how much were they exposed."
He noted that the study did not include a "control" group of people who were not veterans of the Gulf War.
"It is therefore not clear whether people who never went to the Gulf sometimes show signs of depleted uranium in urine," he said. "There are those who claim that depleted uranium is increasingly in the environment, and this makes a control group important."
The health effects of exposure to depleted uranium, a heavy metal used in armor-piercing munitions, is a hotly debated topic. Depleted uranium emits low levels of radiation, and there are concerns that exposure to the metal may increase the risk of leukemia, lung cancer and other illnesses.
According to the Royal Society panel led by Spratt, soldiers or civilians who breathe in or are otherwise exposed to high levels of depleted uranium may be at increased risk of kidney damage. Exposure may also lead to a small increase in the risk of lung cancer, but not leukemia, the panel notes. The panel recommended continued study of the health effects of depleted uranium, but concluded that the health risks were very low for most soldiers.
In the new study, led by Col. Asaf Durakovic of the Uranium Medical Research Center in Washington, DC, researchers analyzed the urine of 27 British, Canadian and US Gulf War veterans. According to a report in the August issue of the journal Military Medicine, all of the participants had Gulf War illness and all had inhaled depleted uranium during their service in the Persian Gulf 8 to 9 years before.
Fourteen of the urine samples tested positive for depleted uranium. The researchers also detected depleted uranium in the lung and bone of one Gulf War veteran who had died.
The results underscore the need for further study on how exposure to uranium dust may be harmful to human health, the authors conclude.
In his comments to Reuters Health, Dietz said that the extent of exposure to depleted uranium during the Gulf War has not been well examined.
"Many tens of thousands of veterans were exposed to depleted uranium aerosol fallout particles during the 4 days of ground battles in Kuwait and Iraq," Dietz stated. "Additional tens of thousands were exposed because they entered, crawled on, sat on, touched or kicked up dust by walking around Iraqi tanks and other vehicles destroyed by depleted uranium metal penetrators used in cannon rounds."
SOURCE: Military Medicine 2002;167:620-627.
Copyright (c) 2002 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon. Copyright (c) 2002 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
MEDLINE:
IS - 0026-4075
VI - 167
IP - 8
DP - 2002 Aug
TI - The quantitative analysis of depleted uranium isotopes in British, Canadian, and U.S. Gulf War veterans.
PG - 620-7
AB - The purpose of this work was to determine the concentration and ratio of uranium isotopes in allied forces Gulf War veterans. The 27 patients had their 24-hour urine samples analyzed for 234U, 235U, 236U, and 238U by mass spectrometry. The urine samples were evaporated and separated into isotopic dilution and concentration fraction by the chromatographic technique. The isotopic composition was measured by a thermal ionization mass spectrometer using a secondary electron multiplier detector and ion-counting system. The uranium blank control and SRM960 U isotopic standard were analyzed by the same procedure. Statistical analysis was done by an unpaired t test. The results confirm the presence of depleted uranium (DU) in 14 of 27 samples, with the 238U:235U ratio > 207.15. This is significantly different from natural uranium (p < 0.008) as well as from the DU shrapnel analysis, with 22.22% average value of DU fraction, and warrants further investigation.
AD - Department of Earth Sciences, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. Johns, Canada. horan@morgan.ucs.mun.ca
FAU - Horan, Patricia
AU - Horan P FAU - Dietz, Leonard
AU - Dietz L FAU - Durakovic, Asaf
AU - Durakovic A
LA - eng
PT - Journal Article
CY - United States
TA - Mil Med
JID - 2984771R
SB - IM
EDAT- 2002/08/22 10:00
MHDA- 2002/08/22 10:00
PST - ppublish
SO - Mil Med 2002 Aug;167(8):620-7.
-------- india / pakistan
UNLIMITED DAMAGE
It is very likely that the nuclear taboo may soon be broken
Achin Vanaik,
Calcutta Telegraph (India),
September 10, 2002
(The author is currently visiting professor at the Academy of Third World Studies, Jamia Milia Islamia, New Delhi)
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1020910/asp/opinion/story_1177740.asp#
There are genuine fears that the anticipated American war on Iraq might lead to such an explosion of hostility towards the United States of America that somewhere down the line, over the next few years or decades nuclear weapons might be used by terrorist groups or by the US itself. Such a prognosis no longer seems unreal. The world remains very much under the nuclear shadow. Barring the first few years after the end of the Cold War (when genuine steps tow- ards actual nuclear disarmament and not just arms management were being taken), in the post-Cold War period now unfolding, the dangers of nuclear war are even greater, albeit different, from what they were during that past. Then the justified fear was of a global holocaust. Now it is of a regional or "limited" nuclear war or exchange.
Supporters of nuclear weapons in India do not want to believe this. On the contrary, they want to use the example of that Cold War past as reassurance that we need not fear the use of nuclear weapons now. Deterrence assured peace then, so it will do so now! Actually, the world came close to nuclear use on a number of occasions during the Cold War, especially in the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962.
Nuclear peace was not the result of deterrence but much more that of the existence of a nuclear taboo established by the very horror of what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki 57 years ago. Despite US governments contemplating the use of nuclear weapons during the Korean and Vietnam wars, as well as on other occasions, the White House was fully aware that even the American public would not condone such use except in circumstances where the homeland territory itself was threatened.
The longer this taboo lasted - and credit here must go to the much derided peace movements and to the general public sentiment that viewed these instruments of war as uniquely evil - the more difficult it became to break the taboo. Now, it is a very different situation. There are four possible contexts in which this taboo might finally be broken. Moreover, were this to happen the world would not come to an end. There would most likely not be a nuclear winter and much of the advanced and prosperous world would escape the consequences of these regional or "limited" holocausts were they, as is most likely, to take place in the "third world".
As much as the Indian bomb lobby, in particular, might wish to deny it, the first scenario of such possible use involves south Asia and the India-Pakistan face-off. The US and the former Soviet Union were not territorially contiguous. They did not have a foundational dispute (like Kashmir) existing from their very inception as independent states. They never suffered from the growing ascendance of communal or religious extremist forces promoting the kind of hatreds and demonizations of the "other" that are so prevalent in south Asia today. They never had direct conventional wars, or the near-wartime situations that belong to the history of India-Pakistan relations and which create the most favourable contexts for escalating hostilities to the nuclear level. Their respective military-technology systems were never as ramshackle as those in south Asia, that make the chances of an accidental triggering of nuclear exchanges so much greater here.
There are three possible positions one can take regarding the prospects of a nuclear war in south Asia arising from an India-Pakistan conventional military conflict escalating into a nuclear exchange. The first view, widespread outside India and Pakistan among both pro-nuclearists and anti-nuclearists, is that such an exchange sometime in the future between the two countries is almost inevitable. A second view is that the danger of this is so small it is negligible. This is certainly the position of most of those in India who supported India going nuclear. Interestingly, among Pakistani supporters of the bomb there is a greater degree of pessimism, who even as they support Pakistan's acquisition of the bomb are fearful that there could well be a nuclear exchange between the two countries. The difference in perspectives between these two bomb lobbies is not difficult to understand. Pakistan's tests in 1998 were a reaction to India's tests. The Pakistan bomb has always been India-specific, motivated by fear of India. India's tests, however, were not motivated by fear of Pakistan (no matter what the occasional rhetoric) but was motivated by more grandiose visions of enhanced global and regional status and the desire to be taken more seriously as a major power.
Prospects of growing regional insecurity or nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan have always been more casually dismissed on the Indian side. There is, of course, a third position that is far and away the most sober one - the possibility of a nuclear exchange is not negligible or inevitable but in-between; that is to say, it is a real-case scenario, not just a worst-case one, and that its likelihood varies depending on how serious conjunctural tensions are between the countries.
The second context in which a "limited" or regional nuclear conflict might break out is easy enough to visualize. India and Pakistan have "got away" with having nuclear weapons. This inspires others. In a few more years, Iran could well do the same and this would certainly be followed by an open declaration of nuclear status by Israel dramatically raising nuclear dangers in west Asia, with nuclear-capable countries like Egypt aiming to follow suit. Does anyone, even among those worshipping at the altar of nuclear deterrence, think west Asia would become safer were this to happen?
In the third scenario, terrorists attack the US with a "suitcase" nuclear bomb or a dirty bomb (explosive dispersion of radioactive materials but no nuclear chain reaction) or attack a nuclear reactor plant. Such is the mindset of the US elite and much of its population after September 11, that the first would be virtually certain to lead to a serious nuclear retaliation somewhere by Washington, while even the second or third kind of terrorist attack might push it to break the taboo against the use of tactical nuclear weapons.
In the fourth scenario, the US deliberately initiates the use of tactical nuclear weapons. The US today is much more aggressively unilateralist in its behaviour and nuclearly ambitious than ever before. Its nuclear policies and practical preparations (for example, the ballistic missile defence systems) aim at establishing a unilateral dominance over all other countries; at developing a range of tactical weapons, even mini- and micro-nukes; at extending their possible use (against selected countries deemed to have biological and chemical weapons); at completely blurring the distinction between such weapons and conventional ones. The latest nuclear posture review makes both part of the same military operational strategy to support the US's general foreign policy perspectives and ambitions.
There are a great many powerful people in and around the US government who want to break the taboo against the use of nuclear weapons, since these would be "confined" to places far away from the homeland and against forces that have no capability to retaliate against it. As for the threat of a possible nuclear terrorist attack against the US, the prior use of tactical nuclear weapons against some perceived enemy is, itself, seen as providing the most powerful deterrent example to prevent such an attack happening in the future.
Short of again creating a disarmament momentum, it will be folly to think that over the next 57 years, nuclear weapons will not be used.
-------- iraq
Iraq Lacks Material for Nuclear Bomb, Study Says
Biological Capacity Cited, But Report Stops Short Of Backing Military Action
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, September 10, 2002; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59200-2002Sep9?language=printer
LONDON, Sept. 9 -- Iraq could produce a nuclear weapon "in a matter of months," but only if it manages to acquire fissile material from an outside source, according to a report issued today by an independent military and security research group here.
The report also said Iraq has an extensive biological weapons capability, a smaller chemical weapons stockpile and a small supply of missiles to deliver such weapons.
The report called Iraq's development of weapons of mass destruction "the core objective of the regime," and said Baghdad had pursued this goal relentlessly for the past 11 years -- in defiance of commitments it made in agreeing to a cease-fire to end the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
But the report, issued by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, stopped short of endorsing military action against Iraq along the lines being proposed by the Bush administration and its allies here.
"Wait and the threat will grow; strike and the threat may be used," John Chipman, director of the institute, said at a news conference. "Clearly, governments have a pressing duty to develop early a strategy to deal comprehensively with this unique international problem."
Analysts said the report's findings largely echo those of previous studies. But its timing and comprehensiveness, and the authority accorded the institute, which produces an annual study of the world's military forces, made it certain to feed the intensifying debate over what to do about Iraq and its leader.
A spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has backed President Bush's Iraq policy despite opinion polls showing strong opposition here and elsewhere in Europe, said the report "paints a powerful picture of a highly unstable regime" that is pursuing dangerous weapons. "We're obviously not talking about washing powder here," the spokesman said. Blair has pledged to release the British government's report on Iraq's weapons capabilities in the next few weeks.
But critics said the findings released today were far too conditional to justify an invasion. Menzies Campbell, foreign affairs spokesman for the Liberal Democrat party, which has been skeptical about military action, said the report contained "nothing startling." While it confirmed that the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, was pursuing weapons of mass destruction, Campbell told reporters, "Where is the evidence of his intention to use these weapons?"
Chipman said that although U.N. inspections had produced a tremendous amount of technical information on Iraq's weapons programs, the Baghdad government engaged in systematic concealment and obstruction to preserve its programs and develop new ones. Ever since U.N. inspectors left Iraq in December 1998 -- just before allied airstrikes to punish Baghdad for its refusal to cooperate -- the task of monitoring Iraq's weapons capabilities has been even more difficult.
Following a weekend meeting between Bush and Blair at Camp David, the United States and Britain appear prepared to push for a U.N. Security Council resolution requiring Iraq to readmit weapons inspectors immediately and unconditionally. But the report concludes that such a step by itself cannot assure Baghdad's compliance. Inspectors would need "an imaginative and carefully coordinated counter-concealment strategy" to cope with Iraq's determination to obstruct and outwit them. "It would take them considerable field experience to develop the necessary tradecraft to deal with Iraqi obfuscation," Chipman said.
The report said Iraq does not currently possess facilities to produce enough fissile material to make nuclear weapons, but might be able to obtain such material on the black market. If it did, the report said, it could produce nuclear weapons "on short order, perhaps in a matter of months."
The report's editor was more cautious in assessing Iraq's progress on nuclear weapons than many of the Bush administration aides who have spoken publicly in recent days.
Even if Iraq intends to build a factory for making enriched uranium -- and recent reports about Iraqi purchases of specialized metal parts suggest that it does -- it would take "several years" and extensive outside help, said Gary Samore, editor of the report and a National Security Council official on proliferation issues during the Clinton administration.
The possible "wild card" -- buying or stealing nuclear fuel abroad -- would also pose formidable challenges for Iraq, Samore said.
"We rate the chance of Iraq acquiring fissile material as low, even though you can't rule it out," Samore said. "It would be difficult for Iraq or any other group to obtain enough fissile material to build a weapon."
Concerns that Iraq may be intensifying its quest for a nuclear weapon have been spurred by reports of its recent efforts to acquire equipment used in making nuclear fuel. Over the past year, Western intelligence officials have reported several foiled attempts by Iraqi agents to purchase specialized steel and aluminum tubes used in gas centrifuges that enrich uranium for bombs.
But the significance of the reports is a matter of debate. Experts familiar with the history of Iraq's weapons program note that similar tubes are also used in making conventional artillery rockets.
"This is actually a weak indicator for suggesting centrifuges -- it just doesn't build a case," said David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector and director of the Institute for Science and International Security. "I don't yet see evidence that says Iraq is close."
The report today said biological weapons remained the most threatening element in Iraq's likely current arsenal. It said Baghdad may have retained thousands of liters of lethal anthrax from before the Gulf War, and could resume producing biological and chemical weapons at existing civilian facilities within weeks. It could also have produced substantial supplies of anthrax, botulinum toxin, mustard gas and nerve agents since the inspectors left in 1998.
Iraq probably still possesses about a dozen Scud missiles with a range of up to 400 miles that could strike Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran or Kuwait with chemical or biological warheads, according to the study.
In some ways, said Samore, the argument for military action against Iraq is stronger now than before the Gulf War because Hussein has proven so resistant to military and political pressure. "We have tried a lot of means -- sanctions, inspections, airstrikes -- to force Iraq to cooperate, and that has not happened," he said.
Staff writer Joby Warrick in Washington contributed to this report.
----
U.S. evidence against Iraq: Nothing new
By Sharon Otterman
From the Washington Politics & Policy Desk
9/10/2002
UPI
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20020910-125706-2015r
WASHINGTON, Sept. 10 -- Top Bush administration officials took to the airwaves for a week to explain why immediate action against Iraq is vital, but experts on Iraqi military capabilities said there is nothing new in these reports.
"What we have here is an appallingly bad job of public diplomacy," said Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a conservative Washington think-tank. "It takes months or even years to build an effective case -- and they haven't done that; they haven't taken the time."
Cordesman said there is a case to be made, but President George W. Bush and his team haven't made it. He also said the administration has not offered any strong new evidence against Iraq in its push over the past few days -- only "petty details."
"The problem you have in analyzing any new evidence is that we haven't had any," he said.
The irony of the administration's failure to make its case, said Cordesman and other experts, is there is no shortage of evidence that Iraq poses a mortal threat to regional and U.S. interests. Declassified documents compiled in reports this year by Cordesman and other military analysts show that Iraq is working to rebuild its conventional, biological and nuclear capabilities.
To the extent that they have made it, the administration's case, as given on television talk shows Sunday and Monday by Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, is so far based on the same information that has been publicly available for months or years, experts said.
Most of that information has been cobbled together from declassified intelligence reports more than a year old, U.N. Special Commission weapons inspection reports from before 1998, reports from Iraqi defectors, foreign intelligence reports and independent military analyses.
"The administration has done a wonderful job of quoting things that have come up in other sources -- such as The New York Times," said Kenneth Allard, a former Army colonel and CSIS expert. "But they have not yet made the case, and I do not expect them to before Bush's address to the U.N. on Thursday."
Bush officials' core argument against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein is that he is a risk due to his brutality as a dictator who has used chemical weapons against his enemies both inside and outside Iraq, his possession of weapons of mass destruction, and his history of deception and evasion of U.N. weapons' inspections.
Iraq is considered a state sponsor of terror by the U.S. State Department and has close ties to Palestinian militant groups. Saddam is known to award $25,000 to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Iraq has provided bases to several militant groups including the Palestine Liberation Front, and the Abu Nidal organization, and those involved with its own Kurdish minority -- the Mujahedin-e-Khalq and the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, the State Department says.
But making the case that Iraq has close ties with al Qaida and the Sept. 11 attacks has been more difficult. Cheney repeated an administration assertion on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday that the alleged Sept. 11 head terrorist Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague, the Czech Republic, in April 2001, but this assertion has recently been challenged. Cheney has also said that al Qaida has operated in Iraq since Sept. 11, but details have not been released.
The Washington Post Tuesday quoted unnamed intelligence officials who said they had scrutinized photographs, communication intercepts and information from foreign informants and have concluded they cannot validate links between Saddam and al Qaida members who have taken refuge in northern Iraq. They also told the Post they could not definitively confirm the meeting between Atta and the Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague.
The Post said CIA officials scrutinized the source of the report of the Atta-Iraq meeting -- an Arab student not considered particularly reliable who relayed the information to the Czech government -- and concluded there is no evidence to support the claim.
Iraq's continued possession of weapons of mass destruction puts it in clear violation of post-Gulf War U.N. resolutions, providing the most compelling legal rationale for action. Bush officials also say that Iraq has actively been seeking to expand its biological and nuclear capabilities, especially since U.N. inspections ended in 1998. However, little hard evidence on this front has been made available by administration or intelligence sources.
On Sunday, Cheney said Iraq is only being held back from making a nuclear bomb by a shortage of nuclear fuel. This is the same conclusion reached by a number of independent analyses released about Saddam's nuclear capabilities in the past year.
A report released Monday by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, for example, states that Iraq could assemble nuclear weapons within months if it could obtain enriched uranium from foreign sources. Iraq is still years away from creating such materials itself, the report stated.
While Iraq's nuclear weapons program was heavily damaged by the Gulf War, it was not completely devastated, a number of Iraq threat assessment reports agree. Most importantly, Iraqi nuclear scientists and technical know-how still exist in the country, and Iraqi nuclear teams have been kept in place working on civilian projects.
Iraq had two workable nuclear bomb designs at the start of the Gulf War, and was less than a year away from making a workable bomb in 1991, according to publicly available analyses. While Iraq does not appear to be capable of putting a nuclear warhead on a missile, it can design large bombs to be dropped by an Iraqi military bomber or fighter jet, reports state.
Cheney said Sunday that additional urgency has been added to the fight against Saddam because he "is now trying through his illicit procurement network, to acquire the equipment he needs to be able to enrich uranium to make the bombs."
The vice president confirmed a Times report that U.S. intelligence had intercepted a shipment of aluminum tubes used in the creation of enriched uranium. He also mentioned an Iraqi media report, quoted in U.S. newspapers, that top Iraqi nuclear scientists had recently met with Saddam.
Cordesman, who recently updated his assessment of Iraqi war fighting capabilities for CSIS, said both administration revelations were "of the 'so-what' variety," without more context to make them meaningful.
Cheney also said that Saddam is actively working to develop his existing stockpile of biological weapons. He said new evidence had arisen in the area in the "last 12 to 14 months." However, he did not give details.
Iraq is widely thought to have retained significant stores of biological weapons materials since the end of the Gulf War, according to analyses and reports from Iraqi defectors. The London-based IISS assessment, for example, states that U.N. inspectors failed to account for all of Iraq's pre-Gulf War stocks and adds that Iraq has the capability to produce thousands of liters of biological weapons agents, including botulinum toxin and anthrax, with its existing facilities, equipment and materials.
Reports also indicate that Iraq can deliver biological agents by short-range munitions and sprayer planes. Its long-range delivery capability, however, is less certain.
The great unknown in the biological weapons field is whether Iraq is in possession of viral agents or smallpox. The Bush administration has not offered additional details.
In the area of chemical weapons, Iraq is known to have used mustard gas and other chemical weapons in its battles against Iran and the northern Kurdish minority. Airstrikes during the Gulf War devastated Iraq's chemical weapons capabilities, and U.N. weapons' inspection teams also destroyed many of its surviving stock, reports say.
However, Iraq has continued to smuggle in precursor chemicals for weapons during the inspection period and since 1998, said Cordesman in his report for the CSIS. It is widely thought by analysts that Iraq may have retained materials necessary to make hundreds of tones of sarin and cyclosarin nerve gas, as well as the ability to make and weaponize the advanced nerve agent VX.
As with biological weapons, Iraq's key challenge appears to be in the area of long-range delivery, reports state. While Iraq is believed to be in possession of at least a dozen Scud long-range missiles, it is not believed to have the ability to effectively deploy chemical agents in their warheads.
"Iraq still presents a major threat in terms of proliferation. It is all too clear that Iraq may have increased this threat since active UNSCOM and IAEA efforts ended in December 1998," Cordesman's report states. "It is known to have continued to import precursors for chemical weapons and increased its holdings of biological growth agents."
Overall, though evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is compelling, major questions remain. However, perhaps the most important thing to come out of the administration's recent comments on Iraq is that irrefutable evidence, or a proverbial "smoking gun," will not be a necessary part of an administration case to justify an invasion.
When asked if the administration would hold off until a smoking gun of Iraqi nuclear capability is uncovered, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, speaking on ABC's "Good Morning America" Monday, said no.
"That implies that what we are doing here is law enforcement, that what we're looking for is a case that we can take to a court of law and prove beyond a reasonable doubt," he said. "The problem is that the only way one gains absolute certainly as to whether a dictator like Saddam Hussein has a nuclear weapon is if he uses it -- and that's a little late."
----
Who's afraid of the N-word?
Iraq's only got a few dud Scuds, and even if it does get the bomb somehow, we're just not scared of that any more
Zoe Williams
Tuesday September 10, 2002
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,789209,00.html
Apart from the crushing blow to democracy and all that, one of the hardest things to accept about the imminent war against Iraq is the relentless dimwittedness of its fuglemen.
Dick Cheney said on a weekend talkshow that Saddam was "aggressively and actively" pursuing the ingredients to make uranium, which he'd need if he were ever to fulfil his fabled nuclear threat. He may as well have said, "Chill out, folks, the man doesn't even have the wherewithal to do us any harm," but that isn't, clearly, what he meant.
Condoleezza Rice, asked about the extent of Iraq's nuclear capacity, said, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." She may as well have said, "If this person, who doesn't have any nuclear weapons, should come upon some, and then launch an attack upon us, with no care for the probable ramifications, well, that would be bad, wouldn't it?" Too right. It would be terrible, in a hypothetical kind of way.
Mr Cheney carried on with "I suppose we could be optimistic and say that [Saddam] is going to change his spots, but I doubt it," despite the fact that the leopard in question has never before launched a nuclear attack upon anyone and therefore, strictly speaking, would have to change his spots just to go for us in the first place.
Mr Blair said, "I am not saying it will happen next month, or even next year, but at some point the danger will explode," evidently dallying with the Mystic Meg school of political discourse.
It's astonishing, really, that these people are even making the effort to explain themselves, given the evident contempt in which they hold their voting public. The only real information that they are giving out about Saddam Hussein is that he is not yet in possession of a nuclear bomb. This doesn't seem like a watertight reason for going to war with him.
These hawks are putting an awful lot of faith in the emotional impact of the word "nuclear". If they were to report the facts they actually knew about the Iraqi military capacity, it would be all dud Scuds and ancient tanks with a rubbishy respray.
This being insufficiently frightening, they fall back on the N-word as if the whole concept is so horrifying that it doesn't matter whether the weapon's real or imagined, now or in the future, top-of-the-range or cobbled together with hand-me-downs. It will chase us into submission like the good, 80s H-bomb scaredy-cats that we are. Except we aren't - in this country, at least, the right and "left" of our political spectrum have spent the past 30 years persuading us that nuclear weapons aren't a bad thing, unless you don't have any. They didn't so much cry wolf, as insist the wolf was actually quite a nice bloke. They're going to have quite a job getting us all to play Red Riding Hood.
There were many injustices perpetrated against the CND movement (their phones were bugged; the Daily Mail - chortle - said they were run by the Kremlin), but Michael Heseltine explained the main thrust of anti-CND propaganda not so long ago. Asked how he triumphed over the peace movement, he replied: "By changing the questions. So long as the questions were about cruise missiles, the peace movement always won; if the questions changed to 'Do you want to be totally undefended?', then the ground shifted."
So, the peace movement would say, "These weapons will destroy the world" and the pro-nuclear movement would say, "Exactly! That's why we need them, because nobody in their right mind would attack a nation that could fight back in kind." Neil Kinnock did pretty much what the Tories are doing now - moved on to the government's grounds, rather than shift the grounds back again. By 1983 there was suddenly no major party in favour of unilateral disarmament.
The unanimous adherence to the deterrence line has forced a change in the culture. With no options about the nuclear defence strategy, the debate effectively ended, and with it all talk of the worst-case scenario.
Children no longer get the willies that every plane flying over is carrying a nuclear bomb. (Everyone born between 1970 and 1980 thought this at least once. I've checked.) There is no market for rallies to Hyde Park, where a kindly vicar explains what happens to your gums in the event of nuclear attack. Martin Amis (a quintessential cultural weathercock - rearrange that sentence as you wish) no longer fears its grim realities (perceiving a greater threat, these days, from the ghost of Joseph Stalin). Kids aren't reading When the Wind Blows in primary school. Protect and Survive adverts look like 70s kitsch. If you watch the famous Panorama in which Jeremy Paxman describes 700mph winds shooting down Vauxhall bridge in a nuclear war, all you can think is, "God, doesn't he look young." The fright years are over.
And now, Tony Blair would have us believe that deterrence doesn't work after all; that the existence of nuclear weaponry on the wishlist of an unfriendly nation is reason enough to launch a pre-emptive strike; that nuclear war is so bad as to be outside the bounds of reason. Well, it's a nice try - but so passé.
· zoe.williams2@ntlworld.com
--------
U.N. chief inspector: No evidence Iraq has nuclear arms
09/10/2002
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2002-09-10-iraq-weapons_x.htm
UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The U.N. chief weapons inspector said Tuesday there is no evidence from aerial photos or other sources that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction or is trying to build them.
But Hans Blix said there are still "many open questions" about Iraq's weapons programs that need to be answered.
He urged Iraq to allow U.N. inspectors to return and reiterated that if Baghdad cooperates fully with inspections he could recommend that the Security Council suspend sanctions within a year.
U.N. inspectors left Iraq ahead of U.S. and British airstrikes in December 1998 to punish Saddam Hussein for not cooperating with inspections. Under council resolutions imposed after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, sanctions cannot be lifted until inspectors certify that Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons have been destroyed, along with the long-range missiles to deliver them.
The United States is trying to win international backing for action against Iraq, claiming it is rebuilding its weapons programs. President Bush is expected to make his case to the U.N. General Assembly on Thursday.
Speaking to reporters Saturday, Bush cited satellite photos released by a U.N. agency Friday that show unexplained construction at Iraq sites that weapons inspectors once visited to search for evidence Saddam was trying to develop nuclear arms.
The president said the photos provided sufficient evidence for the U.S. to invade Iraq. "I don't know what more evidence we need," Bush said.
Speaking to reporters after a closed-door council meeting on his latest report, Blix said the satellite photos show that Iraq has rebuilt at sites that were bombed in 1998, "but this is not the same as saying there are weapons of mass destruction."
"The satellites don't see through roofs," he said. "So we are not drawing conclusions from them. But it would be an important element in where, maybe, we want to go to inspect and monitor."
"If I had solid evidence that Iraq retained weapons of mass destruction or was constructing such weapons I would take it to the Security Council - report to them," Blix said.
He said it was in Iraq's interest to invite inspectors to return, and he reiterated his readiness to hold discussions on practical arrangements for resuming inspections to avoid the conflicts that arose during past inspections.
----
Weapons Development Called Iraq's Priority
New York Times
September 10, 2002
By WARREN HOGE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/10/international/middleeast/10LOND.html
LONDON, Sept. 9 - Iraq has sizable stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and could quickly expand their production, but will be unable to build a nuclear weapon for years unless it obtains radioactive material on the black market, a leading research organization said today.
The group, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, which is based in London, said that while many doubts remained about the quantities of Saddam Hussein's war matériel and its capacities, there was no question that his government's priority was developing weapons of mass destruction.
"War, sanctions and inspections have reversed and retarded but not eliminated Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and long-range missile capacity, nor removed Baghdad's enduring interest in developing these capabilities," John Chipman, the institute director, said at a news conference.
"The retention of weapons of mass destruction capacities by Iraq is self-evidently the core objective of the regime. Sooner or later, it seems that the current Iraqi regime will eventually achieve its aims."
While the report explicitly took no sides in the current debate over the urgency of blocking Mr. Hussein's ambitions, Gary Samore, the author, said the argument for taking action now was stronger than it was before the Persian Gulf war because Mr. Hussein had proved over the 11 years since that he would not respond to political and military pressure.
Mr. Chipman noted that both approaches under discussion held risks. "Wait, and the threat will grow," he said. "Strike, and the threat may be used."
Mr. Chipman cast doubt on the ability of inspectors to make quick determinations of what weapons of mass destruction Iraq now holds unless they develop "an imaginative and carefully coordinated counter-concealment strategy."
The report said United Nations inspectors would need an unspecified period of time to develop and refine their techniques and accumulate the "necessary tradecraft to deal with Iraqi obfuscation efforts."
While today's report put forward no arresting new conclusions, it was praised by experts for its thoroughness and immediately fueled comment in the intensifying debate over Iraq.
Sources for the report include government documents, the testimony of Iraqi defectors, interviews with former inspectors and technical experts to digest all this material.
A spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair, a vocal proponent of swift action, said the report painted a picture of "a highly unstable regime, with access to biological and chemical weapons." He suggested that a dossier on the Iraqi weapons buildup to be issued later this month by Mr. Blair would be even starker because it would have access to classified intelligence.
Menzies Campbell, a Liberal Democrat who opposes attacking Iraq, dismissed the report, saying it contained "nothing startling, nor anything that could not have been inferred from Iraq's previous behavior." Paul Beaver of Jane's Defense Weekly, said: "This report is a very good document, the best compilation of the facts I have seen. But there's nothing new here, no killer fact that makes me believe that we should go to war tomorrow."
The report said Iraq had probably retained substantial amounts of biological warfare agents from pre-gulf-war stocks undetected by inspectors. It said production could resume on short notice and could have produced thousands of liters of anthrax, botulinum toxin and other agents since the departure of the inspectors in 1998.
As for chemical weapons, the report said Iraq probably had a "few hundred tons" of agents to make mustard and sarin nerve gas. Mr. Samore said that amount was less alarming because any invading soldiers would come protected.
In neither case, biological or chemical, has Mr. Hussein developed the means of delivering weapons that could cause vast loss of life, the report concluded. But it warned that Iraq had retained about a dozen short-range missiles that could be fitted with chemical and biological warheads for striking Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran or Kuwait.
Mr. Chipman said had it not been for the gulf war, Iraq would have probably developed "a dozen or so" nuclear weapons by the end of the 1990's. "Most importantly," the report concluded, "the scientific and technical expertise of Iraq's nuclear program survived, and Baghdad has tried to keep its core nuclear teams in place working on various civilian projects."
Mr. Chipman said Mr. Hussein did not have the radioactive material he would need to build a nuclear device and would be unlikely to get the necessary components soon because of strict monitoring.
----
Iraq wants business, not war, with US
AP
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2002
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=21777367
BAGHDAD: Iraq wants business, not war, with the United States, its foreign minister said, while Saudi Arabia on Tuesday joined European countries in saying Washington should work through the United Nations to contain any possible Iraqi threat.
US President George W Bush's administration, trying to build world support as it considers military action to oust Saddam Hussein, says debate among its allies has shifted from a question of whether the United States should confront Iraq to how.
Arab nations have staunchly opposed any military action against the Iraqi leader, saying it would throw the Middle East into turmoil. The Saudi foreign minister on Tuesday expressed fears an attack would lead to the dismemberment of Iraq -- but he suggested his country would follow the United Nations' lead.
"If there is an operation, the decision has to be taken by the United Nations," Prince Saud al-Faisal said in Paris after a meeting with French President Jacques Chirac.
Al-Faisal said an approach through the world body was "absolutely not contradictory" to US wishes to see a resumption of weapons inspections in Iraq or to prevent the breakup of the country.
Iraq "is an important country of the Middle East and it can be feared that military action would undermine Iraq's territorial and national integrity," he said.
Leaders from France, Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands denounced Saddam in exceptionally blunt terms this week, saying he poses a threat with his alleged drive to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. But the leaders suggested Washington first seek UN backing for any action.
Russia and China oppose any attack on Baghdad and both hold veto powers on the UN Security Council. Russia's First Deputy Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Trubnikov said in an interview published Tuesday that an American strike could split the international anti-terrorism coalition.
European Commission President Romano Prodi, speaking to Portuguese radio station TSF Tuesday, said he opposes unilateral US military action against Iraq and wants Washington to ensure the support of the Security Council and the United States' allies.
Senior US administration officials said Bush, in an address Thursday to the UN General Assembly, planned to urge the United Nations to demand that Saddam open his weapons sites to unfettered inspections or face punitive action. But he was not expected to set a deadline, as Chirac has reportedly proposed.
Iraq says reports that it holds chemical and biological weapons and is seeking to develop nuclear weapons are lies spread by the United States and its closest ally, Britain, to justify an attack.
"Inshallah (God willing), we shall fight," Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri told reporters Monday.
Then he quickly corrected himself and said: "We do not want to fight anybody, we do not hope that a war is waged against our country. We'd like to live in stability. We'd like to live in peace."
He said Iraq was hoping to revive the good trade ties it enjoyed with the United States before Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. The United States led the 1991 Gulf War that forced Iraq out of Kuwait.
"We've been doing this with the United States up to 1990, we've been importing one-fourth of all American exports of rice ... Americans were importing more than 60 per cent of our oil exports," Sabri said. "We can do business again."
Sabri said Iraq has denounced terrorism and expressed condolences for the American people who lost loved ones in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack last year.
The United States accuses Saddam of sponsoring terrorism as well as possessing weapons of mass destruction. Iraq has launched a campaign trying to refute the claims.
Reporters in Baghdad Monday were escorted on a tour of a site Iraqi defectors say was a terrorist training camp. The Iraqi government claims the camp 25 miles east of Baghdad was used to train security forces to respond to hijackings.
On another tour Monday, reporters were show new buildings at a site Iraq said corresponded with construction visible in satellite photos that had concerned UN nuclear weapons inspectors. Reporters were told the new buildings were devoted to peaceful research at what was once a nuclear facility.
In a report released Monday, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a leading independent center for strategic analysis, said Iraq could assemble a nuclear weapon within months if it could steal or buy radioactive material, and it is working to develop equipment to make bomb components.
Sabri said such assessments "are pretexts for ... aggression against our country, they know very well that these are false pretexts, false accusations."
"We challenge them to present one piece of evidence, a single piece of evidence for these accusations," Sabri said.
Iraq agreed to weapons inspections after the Gulf War, but the inspectors left in December 1998 complaining of lack of Iraqi cooperation ahead of US and British airstrikes. Baghdad has not allowed them back.
Sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council on Iraq for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait cannot be lifted until the inspectors certify Baghdad has surrendered nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them.
Iraq has denied it still has weapons of mass destruction and has offered to continue dialogue with the United Nations about the return of inspectors. But the United Nations refuses Iraq's position that the issue be tied to ending sanctions and says inspectors must be allowed to return first.
----
Mandela: U.S. a threat to world peace
September 10, 2002
UPI
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20020910-062332-6963r.htm
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, Sept. 10 -- In a rare interview released Tuesday, former South African president Nelson Mandela took the opportunity to criticize the Bush administration and U.S. foreign policy, and he called the United States a "threat to world peace."
Mandela told Newsweek magazine that President George W. Bush's decision to seek regime change in Iraq was motivated by the desire to please the U.S. arms and oil industries.
Mandela said the message the U.S. is sending to the rest of the world is that "if you are afraid of a veto in the (U.N.) Security Council, you can go outside and take action and violate the sovereignty of other countries."
He called on the United States and Britain to use the United Nations to reach a compromise that would avoid a confrontation.
Mandela, who stepped down in 1999 after a single 5-year term, also criticized Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair for not producing evidence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's government has produced weapons of mass destruction.
"Neither Bush nor Tony Blair has provided any evidence that such weapons exist," he told the magazine. "But what we know is that Israel has weapons of mass destruction. Nobody talks about that."
Mandela added: "Why should there be one standard for one country, especially because it's black, and another one for another country, Israel, that is white?"
The 84-year-old statesman also expressed his concern about U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.
"He opposed the decision to release me from prison," Mandela said with a laugh. The majority of the U.S. Congress was in favor of my release, and he opposed it. But it's not because of that. Quite clearly, we are dealing with an arch-conservative in Dick Cheney."
Mandela was sentenced to life in prison in 1964 for advocating armed resistance to apartheid in South Africa. He was released in 1990.
-------- japan
Japan Likely to Cut Aid to China
Economic, Military Rivalries Pushing Two Nations Apart
By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, September 10, 2002; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58833-2002Sep9?language=printer
BEIJING, Sept. 9 -- Japan will likely cut its aid to China significantly for the second consecutive year because the Japanese public is increasingly suspicious of China and Japan's government is concerned about China's military buildup, Japanese officials said today.
The announcement, made as Japan's foreign minister, Yoriko Kawaguchi, ended a three-day trip to Beijing, was an indication of a growing distance between faltering Japan, whose economy has barely grown in 10 years, and emergent China, which dreams of replacing Tokyo as Asia's foremost economic and military power.
The countries plan to commemorate 30 years of diplomatic relations on Sept. 29, but with subdued ceremonies. It is unclear whether the Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, whom China had informally invited to attend the ceremonies, will take part. Many Japanese now see China as the chief threat to their country's position in Asia. China still views Japan as largely unrepentant for World War II atrocities.
For decades, Japan has been China's biggest bilateral donor, funding tens of billions of dollars worth of projects, from airports to forests. But partly because of Japanese press reports questioning China's gratitude, and partly because of a more general anti-Chinese shift in Japan, aid for China has become a hot-button topic in Tokyo.
Japan cut its overseas development aid to China by 25 percent during fiscal 2001, which ended March 31. It was the largest cut since Japan began providing China with development assistance in the early 1970s. The drop was more than twice the 10 percent cut in overall Japanese foreign aid.
Overseas development assistance (ODA) to China "is very much debated by politicians," said a spokesman for the Japanese Foreign Ministry at a briefing here. He said this year's cut was a result of Japan's weak economy, the "strong feelings" of the Japanese people toward China and Beijing's 13th straight year of double-digit increases in defense spending.
Kawaguchi told Chinese Vice Premier Qian Qichen today that Japan would require transparency in China's military spending and its aid to third countries if such assistance is to continue, the Foreign Ministry spokesman said. This was not a threat, he added, but "since Japan is a democracy, the Japanese government needs to show the Japanese people that ODA is money well spent and that it is used appropriately." There is "a strong criticism within Japan, which insists on the reduction of ODA to China," he said.
"This year we can predict again substantial cuts in ODA to China," he said.
China's relations with Japan are bedeviled by mistrust.
Some Japanese politicians blame China's pollution for acid rain in Japan's forests and Chinese criminal gangs for the easy availability of amphetamines, among other problems. Until Japanese officials complained to China's Premier Zhu Rongji, Chinese research and military vessels routinely entered Japan's exclusive maritime economic zone on trips believed to be focused on mapping the sea bottom for submarines in case of the need to blockade Taiwan. In May, Chinese security personnel forcibly entered Japan's consulate in Shenyang, China, and dragged away North Korean asylum-seekers in what Japan charged was a violation of the Vienna Convention protecting foreign missions.
For their part, many Chinese view Japan as a society where militarism and a desire to conquer Asia lurk just beneath the surface. They view Prime Minister Koizumi's controversial visits to the Yasukuni war shrine as an insult to China and to other victims of Japan's World War II aggression.
In an effort to put the wartime past behind them, Chinese and Japanese experts teamed up last week to start removing chemical weapons abandoned after Japan's 13-year occupation of northern China.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new york
Westchester Votes Against Indian Point
New York Times
September 10, 2002
By WINNIE HU
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/10/nyregion/10NUKE.html
WHITE PLAINS, Sept. 9 - The Westchester County Board of Legislators passed a resolution tonight calling for the eventual closing of the Indian Point nuclear power plant, a move that both the plant's supporters and opponents were quick to claim as a victory.
More than 150 people turned out for the hearing on the resolution, an issue that has drawn overflow crowds to three public hearings in the past year and spurred a loud, vigorous debate over the future of the nuclear power plant, which is in Buchanan, N.Y., about 40 miles north of Midtown Manhattan.
Still, the resolution is largely symbolic because county legislators do not have the authority to close the plant. Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Rockland County Legislature and scores of towns and villages in both counties have passed similar resolutions, with little effect.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal agency that oversees Indian Point, announced last month that the plant's owner, the Entergy Corporation, had made recent improvements that were significant enough to raise the plant's dismal safety rating, if slightly. It no longer has the worst safety rating of the nation's 103 commercial nuclear plants, but instead, is listed among the 6 worst in terms of safety.
The Westchester legislators voted unanimously tonight for a resolution that had been amended from an earlier version calling for an immediate closing. The final version still calls for closing the plant "at the earliest possible time," and for federal, state and local officials to develop a transition plan that would provide for an alternative energy source, mitigate the impact of the plant's closing on local taxes and displaced workers, and protect the spent radioactive fuel rods.
"This is, I believe, a blueprint for all interested parties in coming up with a solution for the Indian Point problem," said Michael B. Kaplowitz, the Democratic legislator who proposed the resolution. "It's much more practical and reasonable if you work toward something."
Mr. Kaplowitz said that the resolution was worded in such a way that closing Indian Point did not depend on the prior implementation of a transition plan. He emphasized that "they're not dependent on one another."
But George Oros, a Republican legislator whose district includes Buchanan, said that he interpreted the resolution to mean that county legislators would call for the eventual closing of the plant - sometime in the future - only after the transition issues were completely addressed. He does not support an immediate closure.
"I'm supporting this resolution because, in my eyes, it does not call for the closing of the plant," he said. "The proponents who want to close the plant want to save face by putting out a very tepid resolution."
Jim Steets, a spokesman for Entergy, also pointed out that the resolution called for things like finding an alternative energy source that would be difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish in the immediate future. He said that Indian Point generated up to 2,000 megawatts of electricity for homes and businesses in Westchester and New York City.
"It seems to me that they're not anxious for the closing of the plant after all," he said. "I think they want to have it both ways, because they don't have the authority to shut down the plant so they can pass resolutions that are meaningless."
Indian Point's opponents, though, called the resolution a significant step.
"It demonstrates a lack of support for this plant in the very county where it operates," said Alex Matthiessen, executive director of Riverkeeper, an environmental group that has led efforts to close the plant.
-------- tennessee
Private consortium picks Tennessee for uranium fuel plant
Tuesday, September 10, 2002
By Tom Sharp,
Associated Press
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/09/09102002/ap_48375.asp
NASHVILLE, Tenn. - A private consortium picked Tennessee's Trousdale County as the site of a $1.1 billion high-tech uranium enrichment plant to make fuel for nuclear reactors, company officials announced Monday.
The site in Hartsville is on property where the Tennessee Valley Authority began building a nuclear power plant more than two decades ago before eventually abandoning construction.
Hartsville was selected by Louisiana Energy Services, a consortium of U.S. and European companies including Westinghouse and three major domestic power companies. The other finalist was another site adjacent to where TVA began building a nuclear power plant years ago near Hollywood, Ala.
LES said its next step is to buy the land, which is now owned by a regional development authority in a five-county region north of Nashville. LES officials said they hope to have a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by 2004, begin construction in 2005, and begin production in 2006 or 2007.
"We are delighted to welcome them to Tennessee and look forward to the new jobs and economic benefits that their $1.1 billion investment will bring to Hartsville," Gov. Don Sundquist said at the announcement.
LES officials said one of their first tasks will be to inform the public about the plant's function.
The Tennessee Environmental Council said it would fight the plant proposal.
"This type of uranium enrichment does not fit with U.S. policy, and the generation of tons of radioactive waste is not welcome in Tennessee," council director Will Callaway said in a statement.
LES President and CEO George E. Dials said about 400 people would be hired to build the new plant - at 4.6 million square feet about the size of 25 Wal-Mart Supercenters - and about 250 would be hired to work there permanently.
--------
New Uranium Plant Will Be in Tennessee
September 10, 2002
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/10/business/10ENER.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 - A partnership of American, Canadian and European nuclear companies that is seeking to build the first new uranium enrichment plant in this country in 50 years said today that it had selected a site, in Hartsville, Tenn., for the $1.1 billion project, state officials said today. Officials said the partnership hoped to apply to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license by the end of the year.
The Tennessee Valley Authority tried to build a nuclear reactor there but abandoned it in the 1980's because of high costs. Today's announcement was made by Tennessee's governor, Don Sundquist.
The consortium, Louisiana Energy Services, based in Washington, is made up of Urenco, a European enrichment company; Cameco, a Canadian uranium company; and three major nuclear power plant operators in this country: Exelon, Duke Energy and Entergy. The company that operates the only enrichment plant now running in this country, USEC, is also seeking to build a new plant.
Both planned enrichment plants would be similar in technology to the one that American intelligence experts say that Saddam Hussein is trying to build in Iraq. The American plants, however, would produce low-enriched uranium, suitable for power reactors but not bombs.
-------- us politics
U.S. Lawmaker Going to Iraq to Cool 'War Rhetoric'
Tue Sep 10, 2002,
By Joanne Kenen,
Reuters
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20020911/pl_nm/iraq_congress_rahall_dc_1
A U.S. lawmaker said on Tuesday he was joining an unofficial delegation to Baghdad this week to show support for the Iraqi people and try to "cool this war rhetoric."
Rep. Nick Rahall, a 13-term West Virginia Democrat, said he strongly opposes Iraqi President Saddam Hussein but wants the United Nations to deal with him and does not want any U.S. action that will damage the international coalition "that President Bush has so effectively put together to fight terrorism."
"I'm not going as Secretary of State. I'm not going as a weapons inspector. I'm going as an individual who'd like to cool this rhetoric and act in a calm matter, and show the Iraqi people that the American people are not warmongers," he told Reuters in a telephone interview.
Rahall, who is of Lebanese descent, is leaving on Wednesday for a week-long trip with a delegation from the Institute for Public Accuracy, a think tank with offices in Washington and San Francisco.
Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, said the trip is a "humanitarian effort." "We'll be involved in dialogue and I should emphasize that we're going as an independent delegation of Americans. There's no group position that we're taking," Solomon said.
Rahall, a descendant of Lebanese peddlers who made their way to West Virginia to sell their wares to coal miners, said he wanted to "help illuminate the plight of the Iraqi people."
He said he hoped to stress upon the administration the need for a much clearer explanation as to why there was a "ratcheting up of the war rhetoric at this particular time."
Rahall who backed the first President Bush during the Gulf War, said he agrees "Saddam must go" but he has "serious questions" about the current U.S. policy.
"Why now, two months before an election? Why was the threat so serious now that it wasn't a year ago. I've seen certainly no link of Iraq to 9-11 ... I just don't see a linkage there."
Rahall said the "true enemies" are al Qaeda, and that the focus should stay on that fight.
----
Focus on Iran and Syria, Not Iraq, Graham Says
By CARL HULSE,
September 10, 2002
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/10/politics/10GRAH.html?ex=1032673141&ei=1&en=69b7dbfeb2f8bd45
(These interviews are the seventh and eighth of a series in which national and world figures reflect on the terrorist attacks and their effect on a year of public life and policy.)
WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 - Senator Bob Graham, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, calls the Bush administration's focus on Iraq a distraction from the campaign against terrorism and lists Syria and Iran as countries that should be the first targets of any aggressive effort against state sponsors of terrorist activity.
In an interview reflecting on Sept. 11 and its consequences, Mr. Graham, a Florida Democrat, also said he feared that the United States was becoming "bogged down" in an unproductive manhunt in Afghanistan and that the nation needed an "aggressive war plan" to strike at terrorist organizations.
"Victory is going to be won on the offensive, going to where the terrorists are and aggressively taking them on," Mr. Graham said. The senator said Iraq should not be the priority, given President Bush's own criteria: countries that were accomplices in the Sept. 11 attacks or that provided a sanctuary for terrorist groups.
"By those two standards, Iraq does not make it very high on the list of a terrorist state," Mr. Graham said.
He said the antiterrorism effort should focus on countries that had a significant Qaeda presence or terrorist training camps. "Those are primarily in Syria, in the Syrian-controlled areas of Lebanon and in Iran," the senator said.
He added a warning: "Avoid the allure of distractions. At this point, I think Iraq is a primary distraction from achieving our goals or reducing the threat of international terrorism."
Mr. Graham, a longtime member of the Intelligence Committee that he now heads, was among the Americans who were not totally surprised by the attacks last year.
"September the 11th confirmed what many had been saying before that date and that is that in the post-cold-war era that terrorism was going to be our major security threat," said Mr. Graham, in his Senate office filled with colorful Florida landscapes.
Only a few days before the hijacked planes flew into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Mr. Graham had been on an intelligence assessment mission in Pakistan. He recalled learning of the attacks when he was back in Washington having breakfast with a top Pakistani intelligence official, talking about "the capabilities and the intentions of the Taliban and Al Qaeda."
But even the senator, privy to the top secrets of the intelligence community as the veteran of dozens of confidential briefings, said he was not prepared for the dimensions of the attacks.
"The fact that something like Sept. 11 occurred and that it occurred in the United States was not a stunning development," Mr. Graham said. "The fact that we were vulnerable to this had been anticipated. The actual details, the sophistication and the carnage, the loss of life that occurred were stunning."
Mr. Graham said there had been no briefing or analysis that gave a hint of the type of attack ultimately carried out by members of Al Qaeda. Now he and other members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees are trying to determine if there should have been.
Since the spring, the two panels have been conducting a confidential inquiry into whether the intelligence community failed the nation in the months before the terrorist attack and what changes need to be instituted. Some of the secret information under examination has already become public, enraging administration officials, who said the disclosures could hobble antiterror efforts. Mr. Graham and others leading the inquiry called for a Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry of the panel and its staff.
The disclosures said the National Security Agency had intercepted two cryptic communications on Sept. 10 referring to a major event to take place the next day.
Mr. Graham also said the inquiry by the intelligence committees had found evidence that information was available that might have prevented the attacks, had there been better coordination among intelligence agencies.
Panel members, whose deliberate pace has come under criticism from some committee members and people outside the committee, are expected to convene their first public hearings next week and conduct them twice weekly until Congress adjourns in October.
Mr. Graham said he did not want to get ahead of his own inquiry in making a final determination about any intelligence lapses. But in his comments he made clear that he believed that signals were missed.
"We had significant blocks of information," he said, "but those blocks never got before a single set of eyes who could analyze them and put them together and see the pattern that was emerging from those individual blocks."
Looking ahead, the senator said a chief concern was that Americans would become complacent again as security improves.
"In important areas we are more secure than we were a year ago," he said, singling out air travel and threats from bioterrorism. But he said that more work needed to be done on securing the nation's ports, among other areas, and that the United States must not "fall into the trap of waiting until a vulnerability has actually been assaulted before we start to harden against that assault."
Even while he pushed for more resources to protect the nation, Mr. Graham warned that aggressive offensive measures were also necessary, saying, "Victory in the war on terrorism will not be won on the defensive, by building castles around our vulnerabilities."
Mr. Graham said he believed future generations would still face a threat of terrorism - "hopefully a diminished threat." He said a concerted international effort to wipe out terrorism, which he compared to the post-World War II-push against organized crime, could bring results.
"Over the next generation or two you might see a diminution of their influence," he said of international terrorists.
Mr. Graham said the nation's intelligence apparatus was going to have to change, shifting to traditional methods from a heavy reliance on technology and satellites.
"In this war on terrorism, it is going to be back to the old human factor," said Mr. Graham, who said the nation's intelligence gathering had improved already. "We are going to have spies, either those that are our direct agents or people that we have hired for a particular job who can get inside these international terrorist organizations, find out what they are planning to do and give us enough lead time that other law enforcement and even military units can disrupt the terrorists before they can strike."
-------- MILITARY
------- afghanistan
Qaeda Fighters Said to Return to Afghanistan
New York Times
September 10, 2002
By JAMES RISEN and DEXTER FILKINS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/10/international/asia/10QAED.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 - United States intelligence officials say Qaeda operatives who found refuge in Pakistan are starting to regroup and move back into Afghanistan, less than a year after a successful American military campaign forced them to flee their onetime sanctuary by the thousands.
The movement back into Afghanistan is still relatively small and involves Qaeda members traveling in small groups, the officials say. Most of the thousands who escaped Afghanistan after American-led forces defeated the Taliban government are not seeking to return.
Instead, they remain scattered throughout South Asia and the Middle East, creating a terrorist diaspora that is now of deep concern to American counterterrorism officials. Some have found havens in Iran and Iraq, although American intelligence officials are divided over whether they are receiving active support from either country.
Still, American officials say the world's largest concentrations of Qaeda operatives are now in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the recent influx into Afghanistan is creating new dangers. Qaeda members are believed to have launched a series of small attacks against American forces in Afghanistan in recent weeks and may have been behind the attempted assassination of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, and the deadly car bombing in Kabul last Thursday, according to Afghan and American officials. The return of some Qaeda operatives thus represents a serious threat to the American-backed Karzai government, which has been unable to gain effective control of the Afghan countryside.
Until recently, Al Qaeda seemed to be trying to shift its base of operations to Pakistan, with many of its leaders finding sanctuary either in the country's remote tribal regions along the 1,400-mile border with Afghanistan or in Pakistan's cities. In the tribal regions, Qaeda operatives found support from sympathetic local leaders willing to defy the Pakistani government's efforts to crack down on Islamic radicals.
Indeed, Pakistanis interviewed recently in the tribal areas, where the government has only a nominal presence, recounted how hundreds of Qaeda men had streamed out of Afghanistan in the months after the Taliban's collapse. Local mullahs helped many to travel on to Pakistani cities like Karachi and Lahore or across the parched sands of Baluchistan and into Iran. Others were said to be hiding in refugee camps or in any number of Pakistan's 10,000 private Islamic schools.
But American officials say that the recent shift back into Afghanistan has made it difficult to continue to identify Pakistan as Al Qaeda's new central hub.
"A few months ago, I would have said that the new center of gravity of Al Qaeda was in Pakistan," said one senior American intelligence official. "Today, I don't think you can say that. I think you can see concentrations in both Pakistan and Afghanistan."
While American military might smashed Al Qaeda's training camps and terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan after last September's attacks on New York and Washington, officials throughout the American government say that Al Qaeda has quickly adapted. It is in the process of transforming itself into a more mobile, flexible and elusive force than ever before.
"Management books talk about learning organizations," said one American intelligence official. Osama bin Laden, the official said, "built something that is a learning organization. It is changing and adapting to the loss of its infrastructure."
Dead, Jailed or in Hiding
Still, the American campaign against the terrorist group since Sept. 11 has had some notable successes. Al Qaeda's leaders, including Mr. bin Laden himself, are either dead, in prison, in hiding or on the run. Some senior American counterterrorism officials are even willing to say they believe that the group - at least right now - lacks the ability to mount another terrorist operation on the scale of the Sept. 11 attacks.
"Could Al Qaeda mount four simultaneous operations against major targets in the United States today?" asked a senior law enforcement official. "I don't think so."
Of the 24 members of Al Qaeda's leadership identified by the Central Intelligence Agency before Sept. 11, 10 have either been killed or captured, officials said. Four are now in custody, including Abu Zubaydah, who was Al Qaeda's chief of operations. Officials identified the three others as Abu Zubair, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, and a man known by his nom de guerre, Riyadh the Facilitator. Abu Zubaydah has been extensively interrogated since his capture and has provided important information, American officials say. Interrogation of others in custody have provided new insights into Al Qaeda's structure and operations, they add.
Six other Qaeda leaders are presumed dead, most significantly Muhammad Atef, who was Al Qaeda's military chief last Sept. 11. He is believed to have been killed in an American bombing raid in Afghanistan in November.
The fate of Mr. bin Laden himself remains uncertain. A debate has been raging for months inside the American government over whether he is dead or alive, but the intelligence remains so fragmentary that officials say it is difficult to reach a definitive answer.
The last hard evidence obtained by United States intelligence came in December when Mr. bin Laden was overheard on a short-range radio giving orders to Qaeda fighters during a battle with American and anti-Taliban forces in the Tora Bora region of southeastern Afghanistan.
The Mystery of bin Laden
Just what happened to him at Tora Bora is a mystery. One of the most plausible explanations, offered by an Afghan commander, was that Mr. bin Laden and several hundred Qaeda fighters were smuggled out of Tora Bora by forces loyal to Yunis Khalis, the leader of a radical Islamic group called Hezb-i-Islami. It was Mr. Khalis who gave Mr. bin Laden sanctuary in his Afghan fief near Jalalabad when Mr. bin Laden fled Sudan in 1996.
Mr. Khalis and his men fought with the Taliban for years, but, according to the Afghan commander, switched sides just before its collapse. A group of Mr. Khalis's fighters were manning the front lines for the American-led coalition when the battle at Tora Bora reached its climax, he said.
But the possibility that Mr. bin Laden was killed at Tora Bora cannot be discounted. American planes dropped an extraordinary number of bombs there, and several villages in the mountainous area were flattened based on reports that he had passed through.
In one of the last videotapes of Mr. bin Laden released in the past year, he appeared to be speaking two or three months after the Sept. 11 attacks. If true, that would mean he had survived at least the first round of bombing at Tora Bora. The tape showed the Saudi-born Mr. bin Laden looking pale and emaciated, with his left arm motionless by his side.
Dale Watson, the F.B.I.'s counterterrorism chief, said this summer that he believed Mr. bin Laden was dead, and some commanders of the elite Special Operations units hunting Qaeda members in Afghanistan have expressed similar views.
But other senior intelligence officials disagree, noting the many reports from people in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region who claim to have information indicating that he is still alive. United States officials also say they believe that Qaeda members and Mr. bin Laden's family would be acting differently if they thought he was dead. "If he is dead, very few people in Al Qaeda know it," a senior official said.
The fate of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian radical who is considered Mr. bin Laden's mentor and top deputy, is also unknown. If Mr. bin Laden is alive, officials believe Mr. Zawahiri is probably hiding with him.
Where Iran Stands, and Iraq
Other Qaeda members, meanwhile, made their way into neighboring Iran in the weeks and months after the Taliban's defeat. Some simply traveled through Iran to other countries while others have stayed, but United States officials say they are not sure how much support these men are receiving from the Iranian government.
Iran's border with Afghanistan is a major drug smuggling route, and American officials recognize that Tehran does not have complete control over that region. Iran strongly opposed the Taliban's rule in Afghanistan and provided limited support to the American-led military campaign last year.
Still, Iran's government is badly split between reformers and anti-American religious hard-liners, and it is possible, United States officials say, that Iran's intelligence apparatus, controlled by hard-line clerics, may be giving sanctuary to Qaeda members.
The possibility of Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda has become a much more sensitive political issue in Washington, where the Bush administration is seeking to make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein. Senior intelligence officials say that much of the evidence of a presence of Al Qaeda in Iraq stems from the fact that some Iraqi extremists who were trained in Afghanistan have now returned home.
Many of them are affiliated with an Iraqi extremist group known as Ansar al-Islam, but intelligence officials said there were differing views about Ansar's ties to Mr. Hussein's government. Senior intelligence and law enforcement officials say that they have found no evidence to prove that Iraq had any involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks. They add that they have not received any corroborating evidence to support an initial report from Czech intelligence that Mohamed Atta, one of the Sept. 11 hijackers, met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001. Many intelligence and law enforcement officials now say they do not believe the meeting took place.
But even as some Qaeda members have eluded the American net, the group's losses have still been piling up, and have clearly damaged its ability to wage a terrorist war against the United States.
United States officials say that approximately 2,700 known or suspected Qaeda operatives have been detained or arrested around the world since Sept. 11.
Large Donors Think Again
American intelligence officials say that they also have information that large financial donors to Al Qaeda, either frightened by the scale of the Sept. 11 attacks or dispirited by the swift military defeat of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, have abandoned their support. "Some of their donors saw what happened and said, `Hey, I didn't sign up for this,' " said one intelligence official.
The international campaign to freeze the assets of Islamic charities and other organizations suspected of providing money to Al Qaeda has also made it much more difficult for the network to gain access to the international financial system. "The flow of funds is much harder for them now," one official said.
Of course, the single heaviest blow against Al Qaeda came with the Taliban's ouster from Afghanistan. Since the late 1990's, Al Qaeda and the Taliban had fed off of one another, with Al Qaeda offering its help in the Afghan civil war in exchange for the freedom to create a terrorist sanctuary in Afghanistan.
The Afghan haven provided by the Taliban was critical to Al Qaeda's emergence as a large and deadly international force.
The extent of the two groups' cooperation was not fully clear until after the Taliban's collapse, but there were a few early clues: in the late 1990's, as the Taliban inched closer to victory in Afghanistan, radio chatter in Arabic could be overheard on the other side of the front lines. Refugees fleeing the northern cities, where fighting in the civil war was heaviest, told of the fearsome 055 Brigade, a group of hard-core foreign fighters assembled to fight the Taliban's toughest battles.
The immediate effect of victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan revealed itself in what Al Qaeda suddenly no longer had: dozens of safe houses in which to plan deadly attacks like the hijacking of an Indian Airlines jet in 1999 and the Sept. 11 attacks themselves, and the more than 500 of its fighters, drawn from 43 countries, who were taken prisoner. Some of the foreigners were killed, among them Juma Namangani, the leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which threatened to spread its radical version of Islam throughout Central Asia.
Once the Taliban fled Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, on Nov. 13, and surrendered Kandahar, their spiritual home, on Dec. 7, Al Qaeda's leaders and soldiers were on the run. Instead of living, as they once did, in the better neighborhoods in Kabul under government protection, they have since been forced to live by their wits, flitting from house to house and cave to cave, hounded by agents of virtually every government in the world.
'Terror University' a Casualty
American officials believe the disruption has helped prevent about half a dozen - and possibly many more - Qaeda plots in the last year. Officials say that when Abu Zubaydah, Al Qaeda's operations chief, was captured in Pakistan in March he had several plots in the works, including at least one that was imminent.
"When they are on the run and afraid to get on the same communication lines that they used before, it has gotten harder for them to talk," one official said. "We know that they now spend a significant portion of each day just worrying about their own security." The group now also lacks a major training center and a magnet for disaffected Islamic extremists. American officials have estimated that between 1996 and last September approximately 20,000 radicals from around the world were trained in Al Qaeda's Afghan camps.
"When they lost their Afghan infrastructure, they also lost Terror University," said a senior official. "They had a very organized approach to training in the camps, but that has been dismantled."
The loss of their Afghan haven also damaged Al Qaeda's fledgling research and development program to develop weapons of mass destruction.
In the face of the worldwide pressure applied by the American-led counterterrorism campaign, United States officials say, Al Qaeda has shown remarkable resilience, and retains a lethal capacity to mount attacks against American interests.
In addition to small strikes inside Afghanistan, Al Qaeda has almost certainly been behind others, including recent attacks in Pakistan and Tunisia since Sept. 11.
United States officials say they have reports showing that Qaeda operatives are still trying to develop rudimentary chemical weapons, even while they are on the run, using their training in how to make weapons out of commercially available goods.
New Leaders Fill the Gaps
Many American officials are also reluctant to say that the organization now lacks the potency to launch another strike on the scale of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
They caution that in the past Al Qaeda has shown great patience in planning its large-scale terrorist operations, and often had several operations going at once. American officials say it possibly had another major operation in the planning stages before Sept. 11.
Al Qaeda has adapted not only by seeking new ties with other Islamic radicals, but also by promoting from within, finding new leaders to step in for others who have been killed or captured. While 10 of the 24 Qaeda leaders identified by the C.I.A. last year have been accounted for, American intelligence officials say that they have identified about 20 people who can now be described as active Qaeda leaders, meaning that the 14 who have eluded capture from last year have been joined by at least six others.
The United States military has identified the three leaders it now deems to be the most important besides Osama bin Laden, designating as "Tier One" leadership figures Mr. Zawahiri, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Saif al-Adel.
Mr. Mohammed is a Kuwaiti who American officials now believe was one of the central planners of the Sept. 11 attacks. American officials said last week that they believed that he had emerged as the closest thing Al Qaeda now has to a chief of operations.
Mr. Mohammed provides a direct link between the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and Sept. 11. He is the uncle of Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first bombing, and worked with Mr. Yousef on an abortive, 1995 plot to bomb a series of American passenger planes over the Pacific.
Mr. Yousef was captured in Pakistan in 1996, but Mr. Mohammed remains at large, on the F.B.I.'s most wanted terrorist list.
Saif al-Adel is an Egyptian radical who was chief of security for Al Qaeda, according to American officials.
Actions Hint at 'Real Depth'
"As people have been killed or captured, we have seen temporary blips in Al Qaeda operational activity, but not an overall decline," said one American official. "They continue to conduct operational planning even after a leader has been removed, which suggests that they have real depth. We believe that Al Qaeda will have reached a critical mass of casualties when we start seeing a drop off in operational planning, but we don't see that yet."
Al Qaeda's new links with other extremists appear to be informal and based largely on personal relationships. Those connections have helped Al Qaeda mount small terrorist strikes even while many of its leaders remain in hiding. Of seven attacks launched against Westerners in Pakistan in 2002, Al Qaeda is believed to have been involved in most of them, usually in tandem with local groups.
Alliances formed with leaders of other Islamic radical groups before Sept. 11, including members of the Philippines-based Abu Sayyaf group, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, also helped Al Qaeda weather the American counterterrorist assault this year.
"It used to be that Al Qaeda was the big brother, but once Al Qaeda's leaders went on the run, the relationships between these groups was reversed," said an American intelligence official.
American intelligence officials say they see little evidence so far that Al Qaeda has formed a new alliance with Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based terrorist organization that frequently launched attacks against American targets in the 1980's. But officials caution that reaching firm conclusions about Al Qaeda's current size and scope remains difficult.
American law enforcement officials say that the United States has recovered in Afghanistan what appears to be an official list of Qaeda members and that it contains only about 200 names - people who had actually sworn personal allegiance to Mr. bin Laden. However, even Abu Zubaydah had not sworn such an oath and was not included, and so the significance of the list is uncertain, American officials said.
The Biggest Concern of the U.S.
What most concerns American intelligence and law enforcement officials are the thousands of people who went through the Afghan training camps and are still at large. Most returned to their countries after training, but it is still unclear how many retain sympathy for or loyalty to Al Qaeda, and how many have remained in contact with it.
"Al Qaeda's real strength came from the personal relationships that developed among extremists who were together in the camps," one American official said. "My hope is that by losing Afghanistan, those relationships will eventually wear out."
-------- biological weapons
Feds still stumped by source of anthrax in Boca
BY DAVID KIDWELL, dkidwell@herald.com
Miami Herald
Tue, Sep. 10, 2002
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/local/states/florida/counties/broward_county/4039114.htm
Nearly a year after the first man died from a series of anthrax-laced mailings, an army of frustrated federal sleuths has come full circle and is right back where it started -- inside the Boca Raton headquarters of the tabloid publishing giant AMI.
Apparently no closer to an arrest than they were on Oct. 5 -- when Sun photo editor Bob Stevens became the first of five to die from the posted spores -- some federal sources suggest the return to Boca Raton is the equivalent of football's Hail Mary pass, a last-ditch effort in an extensive probe some insiders now compare to the two-decade-long hunt for Unabomber Theodore Kaczyanski.
Few hold out much hope they will find the first elusive anthrax-laced letter inside the building that once published supermarket tabloids such as The National Enquirer and Weekly World News.
And, sources say, even if they get lucky and do find the missing letter, no one can predict how it might help.
''It's a fair assessment,'' said one senior-level federal law enforcement source familiar with the probe. ``I think many of us are resigned to the fact this could be another Unabomber case.
''The only way we may ever find this guy is if he says the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time,'' the source said. ``That could be next week. It could be eight years. It could be two decades.''
Hector Pesquera, special agent in charge of the Miami FBI office, declined comment, an office spokesman said.
COSTLY SEARCH
The investigation of the anthrax attacks has cost millions and historically, according to the FBI, it ranks second in intensity only to that of the Sept. 11 terrorist hijackings.
Nearly 2,000 subpoenas have been served, hundreds of polygraphs taken, new science has been developed. Agents throughout the country have attempted to trace every single prescription to antibiotics that could be used to immunize the culprit from anthrax infection.
The result: A refined theory of the type of person they are looking for and a wide list of suspects that many in federal law enforcement believe may very well include the name of their man.
''There is a limited list of suspects,'' one federal source said. ``The thinking is the person could be on that list, and now it's a process of elimination.''
The size of the list changes, sources say. At its smallest, it had fewer than 50 names.
Many of the people on it live in the United States. Many are disgruntled former government employees or people who had access to anthrax in private agricultural companies or universities. They are men with some level of scientific knowledge, perhaps even capable of developing the anthrax bacteria on their own.
In recent weeks, the FBI has publicly confirmed the name of one person on that list -- Dr. Steven Hatfill, a germ warfare specialist who worked at the Army's biological weapons defense laboratory in Fort Detrick, Md., for two years ending in 1999. He lost his security clearance two months before the attacks, in part because of inconsistencies in his résumé.
Hatfill has voluntarily submitted to two FBI searches of his home and has offered to give blood samples and take lie detector tests. Since the disclosure of his name as a ''person of interest'' by the FBI, Hatfill has gone on the offensive.
He even staged a news conference last month to declare his innocence. Earlier this month, Louisiana State University fired him after the federal government told the school it would bar him from working on U.S. programs.
Sources have acknowledged that they have no physical evidence to suggest Hatfill is the anthrax attacker.
MILITARY STRAINS
But scrutiny has closely followed former employees of two military facilities where the particular strain of anthrax, the Ames strain, was stored and researched -- Fort Detrick and the Dugway Proving Grounds in the Utah desert.
The type of anthrax powder mailed to U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy and Sen. Tom Daschle last fall bears remarkable similarities to anthrax developed and stored in those facilities. But some within the academic community say the minute biological differences between the anthrax mailings and the military anthrax open a world of different possibilities.
''I don't think it's possible to say beyond a doubt that this anthrax came from those facilities,'' said Dr. Martin Hugh-Jones, a leading anthrax expert at LSU in Baton Rouge.
Federal authorities also base their prevailing theory that the attacker is domestic on their extensive and failed effort to link it to foreign biological warfare research. There is no evidence that Iraq, or any other country considered hostile, ever obtained the Ames strain, government sources have told The New York Times.
SEARCH RESUMED
Last month, the FBI announced plans to re-enter the AMI headquarters to look again for the letter or letters that prompted the death of Stevens and near death of mail room worker Ernesto Blanco.
Federal authorities theorize that because no anthrax spores were found in garbage receptacles that led out of the building, there is a strong likelihood it remains in the building, although, so far, the searches have yielded no smoking gun.
It is only by chance that federal authorities are able to conduct the search. The government released the building to AMI last year with the proviso that it not be occupied until a thorough cleanup approved by the Environmental Protection Agency.
AMI executives have been trying to get rid of the building ever since, company spokesman Gerald McKelvey said. He said AMI was unable to find a private company either willing or qualified for such a cleanup.
The company has been so frustrated by its efforts to deal with the problem they have even offered to give the building to the government.
-------- colombia
U.S., Citing Better Human Rights, Allows Aid to Colombia Military
New York Times
September 10, 2002
By TODD S. PURDUM
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/10/international/americas/10COLO.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 - The Bush administration released about $42 million in aid to the Colombian military today after determining that there was enough improvement in its human rights record to meet Congressional requirements for such aid.
Administration officials said the certification, made by Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, did not mean the United States endorsed Colombia's overall human rights record. It meant only that the country's armed forces had met the limited conditions set when Congress approved $104 million in aid for the current fiscal year.
"I think what I would say generally is that we have seen the Colombian armed forces taking effective action in some of these areas, particularly in severing links between military personnel and paramilitary units," said the State Department spokesman, Richard A. Boucher. "We think more needs to be done in that regard."
Mr. Boucher said the decision was based on discussions with Colombian officials, reports from American diplomats there and "a wide range of international and Colombian nongovernmental organizations active on human rights." But some human rights groups criticized the administration's move, saying Colombia had not made significant progress.
The appropriations bill made such military aid contingent on Colombia's suspension of military forces suspected of violating human rights, or of helping the right wing paramilitary group called the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia.
Last spring, the State Department released the first $62 million, or about 60 percent of the total for the current fiscal year, and the certification today releases the rest. Officials said that since May, the Colombian armed forces had suspended more than a dozen people and dismissed 29 others suspected of trying to cover up civilian deaths.
But William Shultz, executive director of Amnesty International U.S.A., said in a statement, "To say that Colombia has complied with human rights conditions is nothing short of a farce."
-------
Colombia Allows Warrantless Arrest, Army Control
September 10, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-colombia-emergency.html
BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - Colombia's new government, which has promised a crackdown on leftist rebels, said on Tuesday it had authorized arrests without warrants and could put parts of the country under military control.
The new measures, announced by state news agency CNE, were decreed using the power of a 90-day state of emergency that President Alvaro Uribe declared just days after taking office in early August -- when his inauguration ceremony was targeted by rebel mortars that killed 21 people on nearby streets.
The government has argued that civil rights must be restricted if it is to come to grips with a 38-year-old civil war and gain control over the half of Colombia's national territory that is in the hands of Marxist guerrillas or far-right paramilitaries. The war has claimed thousands of lives a year.
The new measures enable Uribe to put areas of the country under control of military commanders, who will be able to restrict residents' movements and declare curfews. Under the measures, foreigners will need special permission to enter such ``Zones of Rehabilitation and Consolidation.''
The new rules allow security forces to arrest suspects without a warrant anywhere in the country and hold them for 24 hours before they have to be taken before a public prosecutor. The rules also make it easier to tap phones.
``We are concerned about the use of these kinds of decrees to restrict civil liberties without adequate oversight into how these new powers will be used,'' said Robin Kirk of Washington-based lobby group Human Rights Watch.
Kirk expressed particular concern about the Colombian military, saying the military has not succeeded in breaking its links to paramilitary groups.
ESTABLISHING LAW AND ORDER
Uribe, a 50-year-old lawyer whose father was killed by Marxist rebels about 20 years ago, won election with 53 percent of the vote in May as Colombians opted for his hard-line message that the only way to bring peace to the country was to build up the armed forces and reassert law and order.
The United States, which has provided more than $1.5 billion in mainly military aid to Colombia in recent years to fight the cocaine trade, is enthusiastically backing Uribe -- who says that his war against the guerrillas is part of the worldwide U.S. war on terrorism.
The United States also recently authorized the Colombians to use their military aid directly against the rebels or paramilitaries, and not just against the drug trade.
The latest announcement came just one day after the U.S. government cleared $42 million in aid to the Colombian armed forces after deciding that they were doing enough to prevent human rights abuses.
Human rights groups argued that sectors of Colombia's armed forces still were cooperating with far-right paramilitary outlaws, who wage a bloody war against leftist rebels and have killed hundreds of civilians this year alone.
Human rights groups also are worried that Uribe's plan to set up a million-strong network of civilian informers could lead to abuses and cause the conflict to escalate.
But opinion polls have shown Uribe's approval rating as high as 70 percent.
Uribe was a fierce critic of former President Andres Pastrana's attempts to negotiate peace with the 17,000-strong leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia -- known by the Spanish initials FARC. The talks collapsed in February.
Up until now, he had used his emergency powers only to impose an assets tax on better-off Colombians to pay for his defense build-up.
The government of President Julio Cesar Turbay imposed similar emergency measures in the late 1970s and early 1980s in a successful crackdown on the now-defunct M19 guerrilla force.
-------- drug war
Police find cocaine on Florida Governor Bush's daughter
09/10/2002
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2002-09-10-cocane-bush-daughter_x.htm
ORLANDO (AP) - Gov. Jeb Bush's 25-year-old daughter was found with crack cocaine at a rehabilitation center, police said Tuesday. If confirmed, it would be her second lapse since entering court-ordered drug treatment.
Police were called to the Center for Drug Free Living in Orlando late Monday, where workers gave them a "white, rocklike substance" they said they found in Noelle Bush's shoe, Police Sgt. Orlando Rolon said.
The 0.2-gram rock tested positive for cocaine in a police field test, but Bush wasn't immediately arrested because police couldn't obtain sworn statements from people at the center, Rolon said.
Police said staffers at the center tried to persuade the officer to let the matter be handled in-house and didn't cooperate by providing statements. The officer originally had been summoned by a patient, police said.
A spokeswoman for the center, Joan M. Ballard, refused to comment.
Possession of any amount of cocaine is a felony.
The investigation will continue, said Rolon, who added that police hadn't interviewed Noelle Bush as of late morning.
The governor, asked about his daughter before going into a Florida Cabinet meeting in Tallahassee, said he wouldn't discuss her situation.
"This is a private issue as it relates to my daughter and myself and my wife," he said. "The road to recovery is a rocky one for a lot of people that have this kind of problem. I don't have any details about what happened. I just found out."
Noelle Bush was arrested in January at a Tallahassee pharmacy drive-through window for allegedly trying to buy the anti-anxiety drug Xanax with a fraudulent prescription.
She was admitted to the treatment center a month later, with the possibility charges would be dropped if she completed the program.
But in July, she was found to be in contempt of court because a worker at the treatment center found her carrying prescription pills, which belonged to another worker and had been taken from a cabinet. Circuit Judge Reginald Whitehead sent her to jail for three days.
Karen Levey, a spokeswoman for the court, said if Noelle Bush violates a drug court contract, Whitehead could sanction her with more jail time.
But State Attorney's Office spokesman Randy Means added that if Bush is charged with drug possession, she could be kicked out of her treatment program. She could then face punishment for the Tallahassee crime as well as any Orlando case.
Drug prescription fraud, as in the Tallahassee case, is a third-degree felony that carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $5,000 fine if convicted. As a first offender, she could face far less than the maximum, however.
Bush's lawyer, Dean Cannon, did not return calls seeking comment.
At a brief hearing last month, Whitehead encouraged Bush to "hang in there" after she expressed concerns about the treatment program, adding, "You're getting that much closer to completing the program." The nature of her concerns was not made public.
--------
Use of Drug Khat Up in Some Cities
September 10, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Chewing-Khat.html
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- An influx of immigrants from Somalia and other African and Middle Eastern countries has led to increased use in some U.S. cities of the illegal drug khat, a leaf that is chewed for its amphetamine-like high, authorities say.
Khat has been seen in cities such as Detroit and New York since the 1980s. But it was virtually unknown in Columbus and Minneapolis until the late 1990s, law enforcement authorities say.
Use of the drug appears to be confined largely to immigrant communities, police in Columbus and Minneapolis say.
Khat has been illegal since 1993 in the United States. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, chronic use can cause violence and suicidal depression similar to amphetamine addiction, though the agency said it was unaware of any examples.
Khat has increased in prevalence in the past several years with an influx of immigrants from countries such as Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Yemen where khat is widely used, authorities say.
``What coffee is to Americans is what khat is for Somalis,'' said Omar Jamal, executive manager of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in St. Paul, Minn. ``The whole thing about khat being addictive is very strange for Somalis. It's a completely different frame of thinking.''
Community groups say their people are being targeted and are not aware they are breaking the law. Police say they are confident immigrants know khat is illegal.
Khat leaves contain cathinone, which is chemically similar to amphetamine. The shiny, bright green or reddish-green leaves are sold attached to thin, rhubarblike stems. A bundle of 15 to 35 sticks costs about $40 in Columbus. Users often brew the leaves or stuff them into their cheeks like chewing tobacco.
``Like what you would get from two or three beers --that little feeling that lets people forget problems and troubles,'' said Ali Sharrif of Toronto, who is from Somalia and said he used to chew khat in his homeland. ``It makes talking and communicating a lot more easier somehow. You feel like you are suddenly very, very alert.''
Most khat that makes its way to the United States comes from East Africa, where it is a major export. Because khat's potency dramatically drops after 48 hours, it usually is delivered by air express or by courier, law enforcement officials say.
According to the DEA, the only known case of khat cultivation in the United States was in 1998 in Salinas, Calif., where authorities seized 1,076 of the plants.
In Hennepin County, which includes the Minneapolis area, khat-related charges have been filed against 10 to 20 people in the past year, said Dan Rogan, spokesman for the county attorney's office. St. Paul-Minneapolis has the nation's biggest Somali community, estimated at up to 50,000 members.
In Columbus, where community groups estimate there are more than 30,000 Somalis in the second-biggest concentration in the United States, police have seized 860 pounds of khat so far this year. Sgt. Ben Casuccio said that in all of 2001, Columbus police seized 633 pounds. In 2000, they confiscated about 8 1/2 pounds.
The number of khat-related charges in Columbus was not available because authorities do not classify charges by drug.
Nationally, DEA and Customs officials said they seized around 40 tons in 2001, more than double the amount confiscated in 1996.
Under federal sentencing guidelines, possession of more than about 45 pounds of khat is punishable by up 16 months in prison.
New York police have made no arrests related to khat, Detective Walter Burnes said. Police in Detroit did not immediately respond to a request for numbers of khat arrests and seizures.
Jamal said Minneapolis police have pulled over young Somalis in search of khat, which he considers racial profiling. DEA spokesman David Jacobson in Detroit said no ethnic community is targeted.
``We need to take a proactive stance on khat because there's a negative effect on the user and the family around them,'' he said.
Maryam Warsame, leader of the Somali Women's Association in Columbus, said khat is to blame for the breakup of many marriages.
Men go off to use khat, and ``it is the woman who has to stay with the children, take care of the house,'' Warsame said. ``And sometimes the paycheck does not come home. They have to pay whoever is selling the khat, instead of giving it to their family, to their children.''
-------- iraq
Saddam's rival sons
Tuesday, 10 September, 2002
BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2236137.stm
Qusay Hussein is reported to be the heir apparent Saddam Hussein's sons, Qusay and Uday, are powerful but rival figures in the Iraqi regime.
At different times, they have been tipped to succeed their father as head of state.
Both have built up rival power bases in different areas of the state machinery.
Qusay, 36, is the younger brother. He is currently presumed to be heir apparent and has reportedly gained wide-ranging powers over Iraq's military apparatus.
He runs the elite Republican Guard - Iraq's best trained and equipped army unit entrusted with the protection of the president.
He also controls the internal security and intelligence, including the Special Security Organisation, the secret police which has suppressed opposition to the Baathist regime.
Commentators also say Qusay has increasingly taken a leading role in the country's foreign affairs, and is thought to have spearheaded Iraq's attempts to rebuild ties with its Arab neighbours.
Running Iraq
In May 2001, Qusay was given a leading position in the ruling Baath party. Many commentators in the Arab world cited this move as a clear sign that the struggle for the succession had been decided in his favour.
Members of the Iraqi opposition recently went as far as to say that Qusay has control of the running of day-to-day affairs in Iraq.
Recent reports in the Western press claim that Saddam had considered formally handing over control to his younger son to counter the threat to his regime from the US administration.
For many years, Uday, 39, was widely regarded as heir apparent. But his profile is said to have diminished after an assassination attempt in 1996 that left him barely able to walk.
But the elder son still carries considerable influence. He controls a network of media organisations, including Babil, the most influential newspaper in the country.
He plays a more public role that his brother - he is often in the media spotlight and holds meetings with visiting dignitaries.
Wooing the youth
Before his injuries, he had a reputation for womanising and driving flashy sports cars.
He is well known among Iraqis as a playboy, whose extravagant lifestyle and violent reputation has won him little popular support.
In recent years, however, he has tried to woo the hearts and minds of the country's youth. He is behind the increasingly popular Voice of Iraq FM radio station, which broadcasts an eclectic mix of American and British music.
He is also head of the Iraqi Football Federation, the state's Youth Union as well as the Iraqi Journalists' Union and the National Union of Iraqi Students.
Over the years, he has faced a number of challenges to his most important role as head of the paramilitary Fedayeen Saddam organisation
Recent reports in the London-based Arab press say he was finally ousted from the militia that has played a key role in crushing internal dissent in favour of Qusay.
Smuggling business
Both brothers are involved in the lucrative oil-smuggling business.
With George W Bush insistent on a regime change in Iraq, it is likely that Saddam Hussein's sons would also be targeted in the event of a US-led war against the country.
Charles Tripp, a Middle East expert at London's School of Oriental and African studies, says that in the event of an invasion Uday and Qusay would likely be killed.
In the event of their father's capture or death, it would be unlikely the sons would fight to the death, Mr Tripp says.
They would more likely try to flee to Jordan, Iran or Syria.
Iraq has recently established good relations with Damascus and it would be difficult for the Syrians to turn members of Saddam's clan over to the Americans.
Similarly, there would be public pressure in Iran not to hand over any Iraqis.
-------- israel / palestine
Report: intelligence chief says U.S. attack on Iraq is `foregone conclusion'
Tue Sep 10, 2002
AP World Politics
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020910/ap_wo_en_po/israel_us_1
JERUSALEM - Israel's chief of military intelligence told the Cabinet on Tuesday that a U.S. attack on Iraq is a `foregone conclusion' and is expected to take place soon, Israel Army Radio reported.
Aides to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon were not available for comment.
The intelligence chief, Aharon Zeevi-Farkash, briefed Cabinet ministers on Tuesday regarding the U.S.-Iraq showdown, the radio report said.
----
Arafat urges end to killing civilians
September 10, 2002
By Joshua Mitnick
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020910-56368171.htm
RAMALLAH, West Bank - Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat yesterday condemned attacks against Israeli citizens, but he stopped short of demanding a complete end to violence as some of his colleagues had urged.
"In order to maintain a positive view among the international community, we must condemn any operation against civilians," Mr. Arafat said in a widely anticipated speech to a gathering of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
"The opposition is giving an excuse to the government of Israel to lay siege to Palestinian cities and reject all international agreements between us," he said.
Press reports, citing a draft text of the Arafat speech, had raised hopes that the Palestinian leader was ready to make a major policy shift after almost two years of violent confrontation with Israel and call on the legislature to outlaw suicide bombings against civilians.
Instead, he repeated previous criticisms of militant Palestinian groups, saying their actions weakened the Palestinian cause among allies abroad while strengthening the hand of Israel.
The appeal didn't soften the line of members of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's ruling Likud Party, which refuses to restart peace talks with the Palestinians as long as Mr. Arafat remains in power.
"These are empty words," said Israeli Environment Minister Tzachi Hanegbi. Mr. Hanegbi said the Palestinian leader "hasn't fought, not even one time" groups committed to violent struggle, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, far more open to negotiations with the Palestinians than Mr. Sharon, also took a cautious line.
"I am not a fortuneteller. I will test [the speech] according to the results," Mr. Peres said.
Mr. Arafat has never explicitly called for a halt to violence against Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which most Palestinians see as the heart of a future independent state.
The disappointment was not just on the Israeli side, as at least some Palestinian analysts said there was little new in the speech.
"He didn't come with any new things," said Khader Shkirat, a Palestinian human rights activist. "He didn't respond to the questions being asked every day by the people."
The 73-year-old Mr. Arafat made the address at the first session of the Palestinian parliament in two years. The inaugural plenary session was held in Mr. Arafat's partially bombed-out headquarters after Mr. Sharon last week acceded to a Palestinian request to hold the convention. Israeli tanks surrounded the compound.
The lawmakers received Israeli military approval to travel from the Gaza Strip and from cities throughout the West Bank to attend the Ramallah meeting.
During the hourlong speech, Mr. Arafat at times deviated from his prepared text, rambling to repeat previous calls for peace negotiations and an end to Israel's occupation. He addressed the Israeli public, saying he recognized that many still support the idea of creating a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
"I would like to say that we want to achieve peace with you," Mr. Arafat said. "We want security and stability for us and for you. This peace is still ahead of us."
But Mr. Arafat's call came even as Israeli security authorities said they uncovered a Hamas cell in East Jerusalem that planned to poison the clientele at a popular cafe in the Ben Yehuda shopping mall by contaminating the food with powerful doses of over-the-counter heart medicine.
Mr. Arafat's address came after an unusual week of public criticism of his leadership from within Palestinian ranks.
During the weekend, Palestinian Interior Minister Abdel Razak Yehiyeh called for all Palestinian militias to end their attacks, saying that the decision to use violence in confronting Israel had been a mistake.
The comment followed a newspaper article last week by Nabil Amr, a Cabinet member who resigned in May, which criticized Mr. Arafat for rejecting the Camp David peace plan backed by President Clinton in the summer of 2000.
Mr. Arafat used the speech to ridicule Mr. Amr, a member of the parliament who was in the audience yesterday. Asking whether the former minister was in the room, Mr. Arafat said his critic had more important issues to work on.
The Palestinian leader, under pressure from the United States and Israel to reform his government before continuing with Middle East peace talks, also used the address to try to seize control of the Palestinian political agenda. During the four-day session, lawmakers are expected to voice the growing discontent with the government that has followed Israel's reoccupation of West Bank cities.
The meeting in Ramallah was held in a room the size of a small lecture hall, with sandbags still in the windows from the Israeli siege of the compound earlier this month. On a movie screen in one corner of the room, a videoconference system linked the proceedings with a gathering of Gaza lawmakers who stayed behind in solidarity with a dozen representatives who were not allowed by Israeli authorities to attend.
Mr. Arafat's Cabinet faces a vote of confidence today in the 87-member body. Since May, when he declared 100 days of government reform, the longtime Palestinian leader has appointed five new ministers.
--------
Israeli Armored Force Moves Into Northern Gaza
September 10, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast.html
GAZA (Reuters) - An Israeli armored force rolled into a Palestinian-controlled area of the northern Gaza Strip early Wednesday, Palestinian witnesses said.
About 25 tanks rumbled into the village of Beit Hanoun, north of Gaza City, under the cover of darkness, drawing fire from Palestinian gunmen, the witnesses said.
The Israeli army had no immediate comment on the operation and there were no reports of casualties.
Israeli forces have frequently mounted incursions into Palestinian-run areas in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to demolish homes of suspected militants or workshops where they believe weapons are being made.
-------- latin america
Paraguay disillusioned with democracy
By Reed Lindsay
SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 10, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020910-82952342.htm
ASUNCION, Paraguay - Angela Diaz lives in a shack across the street from the Senate.
In the morning, as the senators step out of their land rovers and Mercedes Benz sedans at the columned entrance, Mrs. Diaz emerges from her sheet-metal and plyboard hovel behind the pink building.
On the street, children fetch water at a spout jutting from the pavement, and women wash clothes in plastic basins outside their shacks.
Smoke rises from outdoor charcoal stoves. A policeman, holding an automatic rifle, sits in a chair in the shade of the Senate building.
Mrs. Diaz makes the equivalent of $2 per day as a chambermaid in a brothel. Her two sons, who share the one-room shanty with her, make half that washing cars and running errands for legislators at the Senate and the nearby Chamber of Deputies.
They are one family among thousands who live in the swelling Chacarita slum, which extends from the Senate to the marshy banks of the Paraguay River.
"Democracy is what ruined us," said Mrs. Diaz, 43, her eyes squinting against the midmorning sun. "It's what ruined Paraguay."
Throughout Latin America, people have given up hope in democratic governments that have brought them deepening poverty as politicians padded their bank accounts. But perhaps in no other country have the failings of democracy been so clear as in Paraguay, where many look back fondly to the days of economic stability and violent repression under Alfredo Stroessner, a dictator who ruled for 35 years before being deposed in a military coup in 1989.
Leading recent polls for the presidential election in April is Lino Oviedo, a former army chief exiled in Brazil. Gen. Oviedo was a leading actor in the coup that ousted Gen. Stroessner, but he is cut from a similar mold - a strong-armed populist.
As in much of Latin America, economic pain is blamed for the disillusionment with democracy in this largely agrarian nation of 5.8 million. After four years of recession, Paraguay's export-driven economy has nose dived this year, a victim of the regional decline accelerated by Argentina's financial meltdown.
Migrating to Argentina, a traditional escape for Paraguay's poor, has become unfeasible. More than a third of Paraguay's work force is jobless or underemployed as urban slums grow with new arrivals from the even poorer countryside.
"There are no jobs here," said Pastor Rojas, 46, a community leader in Banados Sur, one of the capital's poorest neighborhoods. "Either you work as a street vendor or you go to the trash dump" - to scavenge.
High unemployment and poverty have raised crime rates in the cities and countryside.
"During the dictatorship, our terror was the police and the army. Now we're afraid of everyone," Mr. Rojas said.
Like many Paraguayans, he blames the economic hardship on "corrupt politicians" - starting with President Luis Gonzalez Macchi.
In 1999, unidentified gunmen assassinated Vice President Luis Maria Argana, provoking street protests in Asuncion. The prime suspects were Gen. Oviedo, Mr. Argana's archenemy, and President Raul Cubas, elected a year earlier and considered to be Gen. Oviedo's protege. The protesters braved police repression and sniper fire from suspected Oviedo supporters, and seven people were killed. Within days, both Gen. Oviedo and Mr. Cubas fled the country.
Mr. Gonzalez Macchi, then next in the line of succession as president of the Senate, filled the void amid high hopes, backed by a multiparty coalition. Three years later, he has lost both.
Mr. Gonzalez Macchi's reputation has been stained by numerous scandals, including the revelation that he was using a stolen BMW as his presidential limousine. In recent months, his approval rating has dropped close to the single digits, and the leaders of his own Colorado Party have withdrawn their support.
In June, the Colorado-controlled Congress scrapped a bill to privatize the state-owned telephone company, the lynchpin of Mr. Gonzalez Macchi's economic plan, as campesinos blocked roads and joined unionists at protests in Asuncion.
Privatizing the government-owned telephone company would have freed a multimillion-dollar line of credit from the International Monetary Fund - the first such loan to Paraguay in more than 40 years. Now, the IMF is demanding that the Paraguayan Congress pass a series of belt-tightening measures to unlock the funds.
Luis Alberto Meyer, the Gonzalez Macchi administration's planning secretary, blames the Colorado Party for blocking the privatization to keep its support among the 200,000 or so government employees. The Colorados, a key institutional pillar of Gen. Stroessner's regime, dominate Paraguayan politics through their control over government resources and patronage.
"We've advanced, but we're still up against this party of the state," said Mr. Meyer, who belongs to the opposition National Encounter Party. "With this patronage system, there can be no reform. And with the economic crisis it's worse, because everybody is asking the government for something."
But some economists argue that it is not Paraguay's bureaucracy that is to blame for the country's economic woes but a weak state that has done little to protect local industry and invest in social services.
Compared with other countries in the region, Paraguay hardly participated in the free-market frenzy of the 1990s, during which import tariffs were slashed, government regulations streamlined and state-owned industries auctioned off. The region's economic downturn has fueled criticism of those policies, which are blamed for driving up unemployment and widening the gap between rich and poor.
But unlike Argentina and Brazil, Paraguay never had a strong, interventionist state, and therefore, there were relatively few trade barriers to knock down or state-owned companies to dismantle, argues Fernando Masi, co-director of the Asuncion-based CADEP think tank. Since the early 1980s, the government has played a relatively feeble role in stimulating economic growth and providing public welfare.
Spending on social services such as education and health has been consistently lower than in other Latin American countries, Mr. Masi said.
Paraguay also opened its borders long before the move to free trade swept across the hemisphere. Called triangular trade, finished products from the United States and Asia were imported, then re-exported - mostly illegally, meaning without added taxes - to Brazil and Argentina, which had highly protectionist regimes.
But the open-borders policy severely hampered industrialization in Paraguay.
The triangular trade blossomed under Gen. Stroessner, but in recent years it has collapsed as Brazil reduced its tariffs and cracked down on contraband, and demand has shrunk amid the regional economic decline.
The Paraguayan central bank's reserves have dwindled to half their 1998 levels, and the currency has lost 20 percent of its value against the dollar this year, causing inflation. At the same time, the government has struggled to pay its employees, provoking recent strikes and demonstrations at public hospitals and the courts.
But what most worries administration officials about the economic instability is Gen. Oviedo, whom they suspect of planning a takeover from his exile in Brazil.
In mid-July, Mr. Gonzalez Macchi declared a five-day state of emergency as pro-Oviedo demonstrators clashed with police in nationwide protests that left two dead and dozens injured.
Gen. Oviedo's tough anti-corruption rhetoric and populist image - he speaks fluent Guarani, the first language among most of Paraguay's poor - win favor in rural areas and Asuncion's slums. The Guarani lived as settled farmers in Paraguay long before the arrival of European colonists.
Gen. Oviedo is barred from running for president until he serves a 10-year prison term after being convicted of leading a 1996 barracks uprising. Analysts say a coup is unlikely because he no longer has enough support in the military but that he could seize power if social unrest forced the ouster of the president, as happened in Argentina in December.
"I like Lino Oviedo," said Mrs. Diaz, the maid who lives in the slum near the Senate. "He is a humble campesino like us. We need a president who will do things, who will put an end to crime."
Not everyone in Paraguay has given up on democracy.
When Eulalio Lopez was a child, his father disappeared for days, sometimes weeks, at a time, arrested and interrogated by Gen. Stroessner's feared police. His father, a campesino whose crime was attending meetings of the opposition Liberal Party, was one of the lucky ones. Countless others were tortured, maimed and killed.
Soon after the overthrow of Gen. Stroessner, Mr. Lopez joined thousands of other landless campesinos in takeovers of immense estates, called latifundia. Paraguay has one of the most unequal distributions of land in the world.
Now Eulalio Lopez, 33, leads an organization comprising more than 7,000 squatters who have won rights to land in the rural San Pedro province. They have formed cooperatives to negotiate better prices for their products and have invested in seeds and farm equipment.
In June, they also spearheaded the roadblocks that helped halt privatization. None of this would have been possible under Gen. Stroessner, said Mr. Lopez, whose organization opposes both Mr. Gonzalez Macchi and Gen. Oviedo.
But so far, social movements and a stronger civil society have not brought forth electoral alternatives. There are few new faces among the Colorados, and the opposition parties are widely seen as ineffectual and equally corrupt.
As elections approach, political apathy prevails.
"This is a stolen democracy," said the Rev. Francisco de Paula Oliva, a leading figure of the grass-roots protests that helped oust President Cubas after the assassination of Vice President Argana.
"We have freedom now, and that is a big difference. But when there is a lot of poverty, when those who govern are mafiosi, there are limits to this freedom," the priest observed.
-------- pakistan
Officials: More than 400 al-Qaeda suspects rounded up in Pakistan
09/10/2002
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2002-09-10-alqaeda-pakistan_x.htm
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) - Pakistani security forces have arrested 402 suspected al-Qaeda members during months of raids on hide-outs and heightened security along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, officials said Tuesday.
Most of the men are Arabs and were turned over to the United States, Interior Ministry officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Some of those arrested are still in Pakistani custody, the officials said.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of al-Qaeda and Taliban members are believed to have fled Afghanistan and sought refuge in Pakistan with the help of Pakistani extremist groups.
Pakistani and U.S. security forces have conducted a number of joint raids on suspected al-Qaeda hide-outs throughout the country, particularly in remote provincial areas that U.S. authorities describe as staging areas for many fugitives attempting to regroup in Pakistan.
Among those arrested was one of Osama bin Laden's top lieutenants, Abu Zubaydah, possibly the third-ranking figure in al-Qaeda. Zubaydah was shot and wounded March 28 during a joint U.S.-Pakistani raid on an al-Qaeda hide-out in the industrial city of Faisalabad. He is in U.S. custody.
U.S. officials have expressed concern that al-Qaeda and Taliban remnants from Afghanistan have been able to cross into Pakistan, despite the deployment of thousands of Pakistani troops in the semiautonomous border tribal areas.
However, Pakistan's interior minister said Tuesday there was no proof al-Qaeda operatives were involved in several recent terror attacks in Pakistan, including the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and the bombings of the American Consulate in Karachi and a church in Islamabad.
Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider also insisted the arrests had been carried out exclusively by Pakistani authorities, dismissing suggestions that U.S. forces had played a critical role.
"Soldiers of no country, including America, are taking part in ongoing operations against terrorists," Haider said. "Only our security agencies are involved in such operations."
Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has said the raids show that Pakistani authorities are capable of hunting down al-Qaeda and Taliban fugitives without cross-border "hot pursuit" operations by U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
However, limited numbers of U.S. special operations troops are believed working with Pakistani authorities in the search for al-Qaeda members who took refuge here.
Haider's comments came one day after two rockets hit a deserted area near a building in the country's remote tribal region, where U.S. special forces are believed to be staying.
According to officials at the border town of Miran Shah in northwestern Pakistan, both rockets missed their target and caused no damage. It was not immediately known who fired the missiles.
Late Tuesday, Pakistani authorities discovered three homemade hand grenades near a former naval compound in a residential neighborhood in the capital, Islamabad. It was unclear whether the grenades were hidden as part of a planned attack.
-------- puerto rico
U.S. Navy says sunken ship off Vieques isn't radioactive;
island legislature plans hearings
Tuesday, September 10, 2002
By Lilliam Irizarry,
Associated Press
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/09/09102002/ap_48377.asp
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - A ship once used in nuclear tests in the Pacific is stirring controversy in Puerto Rico three decades after the U.S. military sunk it off the outlying island of Vieques.
The Navy says the decommissioned USS Killen was used in nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in the late 1950s and was moved to the waters off Vieques in 1963, where for about 10 years it was used as a target ship during Navy bombing exercises.
When it was no longer useful, the 376-foot-long (113-meter-long) destroyer was sunk 300 meters (yards) off the Caribbean island in the early 1970s, Navy spokeswoman Lt. Cmdr. Kim Dixon said Monday. "Recent and past environmental studies of the site and the surrounding area have shown the Killen is in no way a threat," Dixon said. "The ship does not have any detected radioactivity."
But some doubt the Navy's word in this U.S. territory, where decades of military training has bred resentment and suspicion. Puerto Rico's Senate is planning hearings later this month on whether the USS Killen should be raised to test for radioactivity and to determine the contents of several hundred drums aboard the ship.
The Navy maintains the drums contain only sand and that a survey last year confirmed the site isn't hazardous.
But Puerto Rican Sen. Roberto Prats said the public safety commission he leads will investigate whether the sunken ship poses any danger to human health or the marine environment. "If there is a problem with contamination or radioactivity, the proper thing to do would be to take all of it away," he said. "It shouldn't be contaminating Puerto Rican waters."
The Navy believes the ship, which rests 30 feet (9 meters) underwater on a sandy bottom, actually has helped the environment by serving as a reef, Dixon said.
The ship is likely to figure in future political debate about the Navy's presence on Vieques.
Opponents say the exercises harm the environment and health of the island's 9,100 residents. The Navy denies the claim.
President George W. Bush has promised the Navy will withdraw from Vieques by May 2003.
--------
Navy Detains 2 Priests on Vieques
September 10, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Vieques-Bombing.html
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- U.S. Navy security officers detained two Roman Catholic priests on Vieques for trespassing on Navy lands Tuesday as fighters jets dropped dummy bombs on the island during military exercises.
The arrests brought to 11 the number detained for trespassing since the latest round of exercises began Sept. 3 on the Puerto Rican island, Navy spokeswoman Lt. Cmdr. Kim Dixon said.
Activist Ismael Guadalupe said five other men entered the Navy's bombing range on the island's eastern tip Monday in an effort to prevent the exercises. He said they remained there Tuesday morning and were in contact by cellular phone.
The Rev. Nelson Lopez of Vieques identified the two detained priests as the Rev. Mauro Simpson, 77, and the Rev. Felix Montalvo, 58. Both came from the Sweet Name of Jesus parish in the town of Humacao on the main island of Puerto Rico.
Lopez, a Catholic priest who has participated in past demonstrations against the military exercises, said the two priests entered Navy lands through a hole in a fence.
A squadron of F-14s and F-18s launched from the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman were dropping 25-pound inert bombs, Dixon said. The current round of training is to last about two more weeks.
The military has used the bombing range for more than six decades. Opposition grew when a civilian guard was killed by two bombs dropped off-target in 1999. Since then, only inert bombs have been used.
Opponents say the exercises harm the environment and health of Vieques' 9,100 residents. The Navy denies the claims.
Hundreds of people have tried to thwart the exercises by invading the range and have been arrested, jailed and fined.
President Bush has promised the Navy will withdraw its forces from Vieques by May 2003.
-------- us
Glimpse of Readiness to Fight Iraq at U.S. Copter Base in Afghanistan
New York Times
September 10, 2002
By JAMES BROOKE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/10/international/10KAND.html
KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan, Sept. 9 - If Napoleon fought wars on his soldiers' stomachs, the United States is fighting this desert war on air-conditioned tents.
With 5,000 American soldiers bivouacking here to support helicopter sorties against Taliban and Qaeda stragglers, the wreckage that last year was an old Soviet air base has given way today to rows of triple-ply tents, with chilled air pumped through billowing cloth tubes.
"After 10 hours in the cockpit, our crews can come back and rest," said Lt. Col. Paul Bricker, the commanding officer here of the helicopter wing. With many of his Apaches, Chinooks, Hueys and Black Hawks flying daily, he said, "Now our crews are fresh when they hit that aircraft."
Looking back a decade to the war with Iraq, he said: "We had so many helicopter accidents in Desert Storm. How many of those were attributable to lack of rest?"
With the Bush administration talking of a second war with Iraq, tactics and technology used here at the largest American base in Afghanistan may give some insight into how a desert war could be fought.
The air-conditioned tents are just one aspect of what Colonel Bricker called "a little America," a base so self-contained that only a handful of the American troops here have made the 20-mile drive to Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city.
The American strategy of maintaining a limited and carefully defined profile in Afghanistan seems to have worked. Very few Afghans in Kandahar are aware that the airport south of their city is now home to the huge base.
Even after President Hamid Karzai narrowly escaped an assassination attempt on Thursday, the American show of force was limited to a few flyovers by helicopters and the use of one to take the slightly wounded governor of Kandahar Province to the base clinic.
In modern military jargon, everyone at this instant small city has his or her "lane."
Over dinner at the air-conditioned mess tent, where the choice on Sunday evening was ham slices or macaroni and ground beef, four Special Forces soldiers could be instantly identified by their dusty beards and deep suntans. Shunning press attention, those soldiers were back from extended operations in faraway villages, largely to gather intelligence.
A group of soldiers weary from daylong patrols through neighboring villages sat at another table.
"Everything here is on a need-to-know basis," said Capt. Travis L. McIntosh, the battalion adjutant, explaining the lack of socializing among tables of quiet men and women, their M-4 rifles propped against tables.
Except for two mortar rounds fired at the base two weeks ago, the biggest danger to soldiers here has been the discovery of many mines left over from the days when Soviet troops planted thousands of them to keep Afghan guerrillas away from their base.
Many of the Americans here have probably not met an Afghan. Although officers are sensitive to criticism that air-conditioned toilets and Internet rooms mean that the Army is getting soft, they also contend that for many American soldiers in support jobs here, they do not have to live in third world conditions to keep the helicopters flying.
"This dust here is like baby powder - it gets into everything," Stephen Killough, an Army National Guard aircraft electrician from Salem, Ore., said of his personal war against the fine desert dust that constantly threatens to infiltrate helicopter radios and on-board computers.
Brian H. Wilkins, another Oregonian, who is the pilot of a Black Hawk outfitted for medical evacuations, chimed in: "You walk through that dust and it splashes. We call it moon dust."
With many maintenance procedures performed here twice as often as normal, technicians credit air-conditioned tents with allowing them to carry the expanded workload.
"A lot of guys do maintenance at night," said Edward D. Rayne, a Black Hawk pilot from Delaware. "A lot of pilots fly nights. It is hard to sleep if it's 115 degrees outside. If you have to roll up the sides of the tent, you get all the dust and insects in."
During the United States operation in Iraq a decade ago, air-conditioned tents were largely restricted to field hospitals.
The American soldiers who do work beyond the base perimeter's barbed wire coils experience plenty of dust, heat and interaction with Afghans.
"We go out almost every day," Ruben Quinones, a member of an Army Force Protection unit, said this morning as Afghan boys swarmed around his armored Humvee, which was parked outside a village 10 miles north of here. "The threat around this area is low, but I am glad to help out if they don't have a police force here. Hopefully we can help get the government established here."
Putting 1,000 miles a week on its Humvees, the unit visits villages, identifying unexploded ordnance for disposal and listening to requests for food aid, barbed wire for livestock and new wells as this parched region enters its eighth year of drought.
Four soldiers and their interpreter sat cross-legged in their desert fatigues, sipping tea, nibbling on crackers and listening to village elders for 90 minutes. A bit miffed at the unexpected arrival of an American reporter, the soldiers at first declined to discuss their work.
But walking back to the Humvees after their meeting, one soldier said, "This village started out very anti-U.S., anti-coalition."
"They were not happy that we were here, because they thought we were another group of occupiers, like the Russians," he continued, as knots of small boys swarmed around, asking for ballpoint pens for school.
Noting that the unit had worked with aid groups to get projects going in the village, he added, "But they changed their attitude once they saw we were here to help."
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Service Chiefs Say Afghan Battle Will Help Military Get Smarter, Stronger and Faster
New York Times
September 10, 2002
By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/10/national/10MILI.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 - America's military is applying the lessons learned in Afghanistan, examining everything from whether the standard rifle cartridge fired by each soldier packs enough punch to whether floating oil platforms can be towed around the globe as secret bases for marines and Navy SEALs.
A number of urgent priorities already have emerged from studying after-action reports from Afghanistan, which could affect how billions in tax dollars are spent.
Some decisions promise to cut large silhouettes, such as determining how best to float a huge, mobile base so Special Operations forces and Marine expeditionary troops can strike targets with speed and secrecy even when no land base is available.
Their ocean-going camp could be an aging aircraft carrier without its jets; it could be a supertanker; it could be a series of oil platforms lashed together and pushed around the globe by barge. For the war in Afghanistan, the carrier Kitty Hawk served as a floating Special Operations base, but the decision took one-twelfth of the Navy's centerpiece battle platforms out of the usual rotation.
Other decisions are small but important, such as the realization that the 5.56 millimeter cartridge fired by the M-4 carbine, the standard assault rifle, may not carry sufficient punch. In Afghanistan, soldiers reported that it routinely took three bullets to drop an adversary. The Army is studying different rounds.
The Air Force is shopping for lighter, longer-life batteries to power the laser rangefinders that combat controllers use to pinpoint targets.
The war plan for Afghanistan may seem like a blueprint for victory, especially since the unexpectedly swift success was secured with just 19 American combat deaths.
While the four service chiefs who must organize, train and equip the military say Afghanistan was a battle laboratory for successful tests of new tactics and weapons, they add that the campaign illuminated weaknesses that must be addressed before the next offensive.
The Army and Air Force chiefs of staff, the chief of naval operations and the Marine Corps commandant all consented to rare, on-the-record interviews to reflect on the anniversary of a day when the Pentagon, their headquarters, became the front line. They discussed lessons learned and described how the past year changed the ways they would prepare for the next stage of combat against terrorism.
The service chiefs pointed to the need to focus on these major changes:
¶The Navy has to be even more places at once, and its planes will have to attack far beyond the shores to bring persistent, credible combat power around the globe.
¶The Marines have to think not of amphibious landings, but of expeditionary invasions hundreds of miles inland.
¶The Air Force will have to shorten the time it takes to identify images of potential targets captured by unmanned aircraft, like Predators and Global Hawk, send that information to command centers and ultimately dispatch attack orders to bombers loitering high above the battlefield.
¶The Army's light forces have to have some form of armored vehicles when they first arrive at the front, while heavy armor has to be faster to the battle.
In fact, the Army is already acting to meet one of those needs by transforming some units into Stryker Brigades as an interim step between today's tanks and the futuristic weapons of tomorrow. Built around a light armored vehicle called Stryker, the brigades can be flown in C-130 transports, as opposed to the massive C-17 required by tanks.
The face of battle, no doubt, changed forever after the United States quickly routed the Taliban and Al Qaeda in a landlocked Central Asian state that in decades past sucked the blood out of British and Soviet legions.
But speaking as one voice, the service chiefs Adm. Vern Clark of the Navy, Gen. James L. Jones of the Marines, Gen. John P. Jumper of the Air Force and Gen. Eric K. Shinseki of the Army all cautioned that future war may arrive as unexpectedly as Afghanistan.
"What does that mean to us?" asked Admiral Clark, posing a challenge to his service that applies to all four. "That means that we're going to have to be out and about, to keep the global terror network, to keep them on the run."
He added, "We are the service that is allowed to go out and scour around the largest maneuver space on the planet, and that's the oceans."
The task of the American military, he said, "is to keep them guessing. Where are we going to show up next? And we have the capability to do that."
The armed forces face a more complicated range of enemy capabilities, from shadowy terrorist cells that turn hijacked jetliners into missiles to countries like Iraq and North Korea that field traditional armies and would fight ferociously to defend complicated terrain - and are suspected of having arsenals of unconventional weapons. The services therefore must be more flexible, speedier and stealthier, even more lethal.
Gen. Jumper of the Air Force, who commanded American air forces in Europe during the 1999 air war in Kosovo, said: "What I saw was the need to decrease these timelines so you could deal with fleeting targets in timely ways and still give the decision makers in these very most sensitive situations time to assess and decide whether the target was worth striking or not, or valid, or too much of a risk."
Afghanistan was a war in which Air Force and Navy jets quickly dominated the skies, hurling a precise and persistent fusillade onto the deserts and mountains below.
But the axiom that wars are won on the ground was also confirmed. The air campaign became most effective when enemy forces were drawn onto the battlefield - forming a massed target - to confront ragged guerrilla forces organized by small teams of Army Special Forces troops who rode into battle on horseback to pick out targets with hand-held lasers.
Flexibility, ingenuity, creativity and adaptability became the priorities in Afghanistan, with an emphasis on finding new ways to use old military tools. Just as important as several revolutionary developments in military thinking that earned their stars in Afghanistan, the service chiefs said, was determining which aspects of their military planning were proven enduring.
The B-52 is an airframe older than most of the pilots in the cockpit and the soldiers who call in the bombs. It is best known for dropping carpets of dumb bombs on the rice paddies of Vietnam, but in Afghanistan it was armed with precision weapons and assigned the job of close air support - if an altitude of 39,000 feet can be called close. The task of bombing targets close to ground troops is usually assigned to small and nimble Air Force and Navy fighters.
"The battlefield of the future will be defined, if we do this right, by smaller units doing what larger units used to do in the 20th century," said General Jones of the Marines. "The rifle company of the 21st century will be doing what the rifle battalion of the 20th century used to do." A company has about 160 troops and a battalion about 1,000.
In Afghanistan, for the first time in history, marines were dispatched 400 to 600 miles inland. "There are still a lot of people scratching their heads and saying, `We didn't know the Marines could do that,' " he said.
The increased lethality comes from advanced communications among the fighters, faster and more accurate intelligence about an enemy's movements and more efficient ways to protect fighters in the field - but most of all because of the accuracy of modern weapons.
Precision is extraordinarily important to the ability to wage war with a smaller logistical trail when one smart bomb can do the job of dozens of heavy, dumb pieces of ordnance. The Air Force and Navy fired off a substantial percentages of their stocks of precision-guided munitions over Afghanistan, although the arsenals are just weeks away from being fully replenished.
The Army's Apache helicopter, designed to take out heavily armored Soviet tank columns at ground level deep behind enemy lines, was adapted to strafe the high alpine ridgelines of southeastern Afghanistan as troops scoured caves for Taliban and Al Qaeda. It was an unexpected mission that echoed the role of its ancestor, the Cobra gunship, in Southeast Asia.
The Navy's P-3 Orion, a four-propeller aircraft designed to lumber over the high seas for 16 hours at a time searching out enemy submarines with its sophisticated sensors, was just as useful over the scorching Afghan desert. It flew intelligence-gathering, surveillance and reconnaissance missions for the Navy's special warfare teams; SEALs were aboard the P-3s to radio enemy positions to counterparts carrying out missions against targets on the ground.
The war in Afghanistan pressed the military services toward a world in which parochial differences, while not eliminated, were filed down dramatically.
Air Force refueling planes routinely gassed up Navy and Marine fighter-bombers. Air Force ground spotters embedded in Army Special Forces units called in air strikes from carrier-based naval aircraft hours from their floating bases. The Navy and Air Force are now working to develop a new electronic-jamming aircraft that both services can use.
For all four armed services, the enduring lesson of this new campaign against terror is that, in the words of General Shinseki of the Army, the military is no longer fighting single-front battles against a clearly defined enemy.
"Over the last year, look where we've been: everything from on borders to protecting airports and ports and bridges, and going forward with very competent and highly skilled soldiers to fight the war in Afghanistan without dropping any of the other balls - in Bosnia, Kosovo, Sinai, Southwest Asia," he said.
"Handling this broad spectrum of responsibilities has brought an understanding that the battle space extends from Afghanistan all the way back, at least, to New York City and Washington," he added. "It's a far more expanded battle space than in some time, maybe in 60 years, when we were in a world war."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS
Secret Appellate Court Meets
By Jesse J. Holland
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, September 10, 2002; 12:11 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61810-2002Sep10?language=printer
WASHINGTON -- A secret appellate court has met for the first time in its 24-year history to consider a request from the Justice Department for more power to wiretap suspected terrorists and spies, according to department officials.
The appeals court, the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, convened in a high-security room at the Justice Department in Washington Monday and made no announcement of whether it had made a decision.
But senators immediately asked the court to publicly release its decision and the arguments Justice Department lawyers made in front of it, so lawmakers can know how government prosecutors are using the changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act granted after the Sept. 11 attacks last year.
"We need to know how this law is being interpreted and applied," Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. said Tuesday. No answer had been received from the Monday request, Senate officials said.
The appeal stems from a decision from the main court that assesses the legitimacy of Justice Department and FBI requests to spy on people suspected of foreign espionage inside U.S. borders.
Civil liberties groups denounced the secret nature of the court.
"Hearing a one-sided argument and doing so in secret goes against the traditions of fairness and open government that have been the hallmark of our democracy," said Ann Beeson, a litigation director at the American Civil Liberties Union.
When or if the court's ruling on the department's request will ever be made public was not clear.
In August, the secret court struck down a government surveillance request and the government's assertion that national security concerns justify some lessening of previously recognized civil liberties or privacy rights, lawyers said.
The Justice Department had argued that under the new laws, the FBI could use the surveillance law to perform searches and wiretaps "primarily for a law enforcement purpose, so long as a significant foreign intelligence purpose remains."
The USA Patriot Act, passed late in 2001, changed the surveillance law to permit its use when collecting information about foreign spies or terrorists is "a significant purpose," rather than "the purpose," of such an investigation. Critics at the time said they feared government might use the change as a loophole to employ espionage wiretaps in common criminal investigations.
A Justice Department official argued to senators Tuesday that the agency still could only use espionage wiretaps against people considered to be foreign spies or working for foreign countries. But Associate Deputy Attorney General David Kris said that there may be times where law enforcement needs to be involved with their work to stop foreign spies and terrorists.
"When we identify a spy or a terrorist, we have to pursue a coordinated, integrated, coherent response," Kris said in written remarks to the Senate Judiciary Committee. "We need all of our best people, intelligence and law enforcement alike, working together to neutralize the threat."
Senate Republicans and Democrats disagreed on whether they intended the USA Patriot Act to loosen the wiretap laws to include criminal investigations.
"It was not the intent of the amendments to fundamentally change FISA from a foreign intelligence tool into a criminal law enforcement tool," Leahy said. "We all wanted to improve coordination between the criminal prosecutors and intelligence officers, but we did not intend to obliterate the distinction between the two, and we did not do so."
But Republicans said that was the exact intent of the law. "It is clear that Congress intended to allow greater use of FISA for criminal purposes and to increase the sharing of intelligence information and coordination of investigations between intelligence and law enforcement officers," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.
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Justice Dept. says ruling impedes spying
By Richard Willing,
USA TODAY,
September 10, 2002
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2002-09-10-warrants_x.htm
WASHINGTON - A ruling issued by a secret foreign intelligence court could undermine national security by making spying on U.S.-based terrorism suspects "unworkable," a top Justice Department lawyer said Tuesday.
"Investigations of foreign spies and terrorists are - or at least should be - dynamic and fast-paced," David Kris, associate deputy attorney general, told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
The secret court's recent ruling requires American intelligence agents to be monitored by Justice Department lawyers when they share information with criminal prosecutors. That is an "enormous impediment," Kris said.
The department made the same argument Monday, he said, in a closed door hearing before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court's appeals panel. It's the first appeal in the history of the court, formed in 1978 to authorize wiretaps on Americans suspected of terrorist activity. It is unknown when that appeal will be decided.
Justice contends that changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) made after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks permit criminal prosecutors and intelligence agents to share information when investigations overlap.
Several senators said Tuesday that that process could endanger Americans' rights. Unlike most criminal wiretaps, FISA taps are secret and require less proof before they are authorized. The senators fear prosecutors will use foreign intelligence investigations to file FISA taps when they are unable to get authorization for regular wiretaps.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, Judiciary Committee chairman, said, "FISA is even more important to the nation today than it was a year ago, (but) we must first exercise the utmost care and diligence in overseeing its use."
FISA warrants are issued by a panel of federal judges acting as the court. They were made relatively easy to obtain because information gathered was not to be used in criminal prosecutions.
But last October, the USA Patriot Act changed FISA to permit information sharing between the government's foreign intelligence and criminal investigators. On May 17, the FISA court, in its first published opinion, struck down the Justice Department's proposed rules for information sharing because they did not maintain a "wall" between criminal and intelligence functions.
That opinion, requiring Justice to insert monitors into the sharing process, is the one being appealed.
In the Senate, the appeal has ignited a debate over how much information sharing legislators intended when they voted 99-1 for the FISA changes.
Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., who cast the lone vote against the changes, said the government is abusing the language of the bill to permit criminal prosecutors to direct FISA investigations. However, Kris said criminal and intelligence investigators need to consult in order to decide how to fight potential terrorism.
"When we identify a spy or a terrorist, we have to pursue a coordinated, integrated ... response," Kris said. "We need all of our best people, intelligence and law enforcement alike, working together to neutralize the threat."
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Administration Pares Cyber-Security Plan
Firms Fight Some Recommendations
By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 10, 2002; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59168-2002Sep9?language=printer
As the White House moves to finalize a national plan to better secure cyberspace, high-tech firms and other companies are continuing a furious campaign to have some recommendations struck from the document.
The administration no longer plans to recommend that Internet service providers such as America Online, MSN and EarthLink bundle firewall and other security technology with their software. Instead, it will ask ISPs to "make it easier" for home users to get access to such protections.
It also does not plan to recommend that a privacy czar be appointed to oversee how companies make use of their customers' personal information, according to several people involved in drafting the document.
A government official said the changes were made in hopes the plan would be adopted voluntarily by industry and not necessitate another layer of government regulation.
Several companies have argued that if the government tells people what to buy and dictates how they should run their businesses, innovation will be squelched. But others said private industry was more concerned about the costs involved in carrying out the recommendations. Businesses also worry about taking on new legal liability.
"I've been really shocked at how companies have been acting in their own interest rather than in the national interest," said Allan Paller, director of the SANS Institute, a computer-security think tank and education center.
Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America, which represents 500 companies, said the private sector is in no way trying to dilute the plan. It was the industry, in fact, that first suggested a plan be developed, he said.
"The idea that industry is somehow a reluctant partner is inaccurate," Miller said.
At about 150 pages, the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, which is scheduled to be released Sept. 18, remains a weighty document outlining about 80 new obligations for the government, companies, universities and even home computer users.
The most extensive recommendations are for the government. The plan would restrict federal workers from using certain wireless technologies and mandate that agencies only purchase software that has been certified to be secure.
One of the top priorities, according to one draft, is for the government and the private sector is to make sure computers that control major systems such as subways, nuclear reactors and dams are secure.
Also under consideration are recommendations calling for the establishment of a center that would study computer viruses, worms and other security threats; an accreditation board that would certify security personnel; and a private-public program that would help pay for security enhancements for critical parts of the Internet, including the routers that direct traffic, as well as operating systems such as Windows, Linux and the Mac OS.
Some drafts also outline plans for the collection and analysis of network data that pass through universities -- places often used as jumping-off points for cyber-attacks. The draft also includes a plan to educate home users on how to secure their computers.
The national strategy is being compiled and analyzed by Richard A. Clarke, director of the Office of Cyberspace Security, with input from a cross section of industry representatives, computer science experts and others.
It is scheduled to be delivered to President Bush for his signature in the next week.
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[To reply - mailto:letters@washingtontimes.com]
The protesters are coming - again
EDITORIAL •
September 10, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20020910-78106651.htm
The Metropolitan Police Department expects to spend $14 million on the protests later this month at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and the federal government needs to pick up its share of the costs in manpower and dollars. After all, law and order must be maintained.
So far, the police department plans for the Sept. 25-29 event appear to be two-fold: Recruit 1,500 law-enforcement officers from other jurisdictions, which is precisely what happened in past situations involving such large protests; and maintain a full contingent of officers in D.C. neighborhoods to help ward off daily criminal activity and to keep an eye on the protesters, who will be using Metro stations in those neighborhoods. However, that plan already faces a substantial hurdle. In the past, Metropolitan Police have recruited as many as 3,600 officers from about a dozen cities. This time, Police Chief Charles Ramsey is having trouble recruiting half as many, because some of those law-enforcement agencies have yet to be reimbursed for earlier services. Their reluctance is understandable.
The IMF and World Bank streamlined their annual meetings on the advice of U.S. and D.C. agencies, but the federal government has not stepped up and claimed its law-enforcement and financial responsibilities. The Bush administration agreed to reimburse the city for last year's costs, which were $16 million, but still owes $3.2 million. Add that to the $14 million in costs estimated for this month's week long protests and, so far, the Bush administration's financial responsibilities total $30 million in law-enforcement costs alone. Those other federal responsibilities include making certain that the several federal law-enforcement agencies in Washington not only police their home turf but necessarily assist Metropolitan Police.
Prior to and during the meetings later this month, the anarchists and other protesters plan to wreak havoc. They are planning to begin their vigils and demonstrations on Sept. 25, three days prior to the official IMF/World Bank meetings. High on their list of priorities are a so-called people's strike and plans to disrupt traffic. They specifically want to encircle and isolate workers in the IMF-World Bank headquarters in Foggy Bottom. Chief Ramsey must not allow that to happen. Meanwhile, some of the protests are staged events for which the organizers already have permits. One organizing group, the Anti-Capitalist Convergence, which is a D.C.-based coalition of anarchists and anti-capitalists, is urging public- and private-sector employees to stay away from work and school, stage sit-ins, and give away their businesses' products. Organizers also are urging participants to be creative in their actions, which means trouble will surely lurk with fringe outfits that might use violence or destroy public property. Whatever the protesters' tactics, law and order must prevail.
In sum, the organizers, including the Mobilization for Global Justice, greens and college students in the region, appear hell bent on fomenting chaos. Fortunately, Chief Ramsey has been able to keep disruption of our daily lives to a minimum, and that was partly due to the augmentation of officers from elsewhere. This time we expect the same - not just from his officers, but from the federal government as well.
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Reporters find cracks in UK national security
REUTERS UK:
September 10, 2002
LONDON - As the spectre of terror loomed large over Britain at the approach of the anniversary of last year's September 11 attacks on the United States, two Sunday newspapers have again exposed cracks in national security.
In what has become something of a media obsession, a reporter from the tabloid The People smuggled a steel meat cleaver onto a domestic flight, while another from the News of The World used fake references to gain access to a nuclear reactor.
Nuclear sites and airports are considered high on terrorist hit-lists, with security significantly stepped up after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
The lapses were reported days after another journalist smuggled an imitation pistol onto a plane at London's Heathrow airport.
They also come after a Swedish man of Tunisian origin was arrested last month on suspicion of trying to hijack a plane bound for Britain from near Stockholm.
In The People's investigation, reporter Roger Insall cleared airport security with a meat cleaver and a four-inch dagger concealed in a hairbrush - two much more formidable weapons than the "box-cutters" said to have been used in the September 11 hijacked airliner attacks.
MINISTER ORDERS REPORT
"Amazingly, we were able to pull the weapons out mid-flight right under the noses of two uniformed flight attendants sharing the same row of seats," Insall said.
Transport Secretary Alistair Darling said he was extremely concerned.
"I have asked for an immediate report from the airport operator to find out exactly what happened and what remedial action has been taken," Darling said in a statement.
"I cannot stress enough the importance of the aviation industry being as vigilant as they possibly can," he said.
BAA Plc, which runs Heathrow airport, said it took any breach of security seriously.
"We're concerned these items were apparently taken through our security, but items deliberately concealed can be difficult to detect," a spokesman said.
"We keep our security under constant review and we are actively seeking to improve security processes through new technologies, working with the government and research agencies.
BAA added that thousands of banned items were confiscated from passengers daily and that all hold luggage was thoroughly screened.
The News of The World reporter took a job as a fire-watcher at the Dungeness B nuclear power station in Kent, southern England.
Though he was not given clearance by the Office of Civil Nuclear Security, a temporary pass allowed him access to the reactor refuelling zone at the heart of the power station.
Interviews with senior members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network - blamed for the September 11 attacks - this week by Qatar-based al-Jazeera television revealed that nuclear power plants were considered a future target.
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Senator Shelby Faults the Intelligence Agencies
New York Times
September 10, 2002
By ALISON MITCHELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/10/politics/10SHEL.html
These interviews are the seventh and eighth of a series in which national and world figures reflect on the terrorist attacks and their effect on a year of public life and policy.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 - After months of work on a joint Congressional committee investigating the events of Sept. 11, Senator Richard C. Shelby said he feared that Congress would adjourn before all the facts are unearthed. As a result, he said, he would not oppose an outside investigating commission.
"Time is not on our side," warned Mr. Shelby of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee. As he ticked off the few remaining months before Congress leaves for the year and the joint committee dissolves, he stopped just short of accusing intelligence agencies of slowing the flow of information to investigators as a way to beat the clock.
"You know," he said in an interview on Thursday, sitting at a conference table in his Senate office, "we were told that there would be cooperation in this investigation, and I question that. I think that most of the information that our staff has been able to get that is real meaningful has had to be extracted piece by piece."
Was he accusing the agencies of a deliberate slowdown? "I'll have to let you make that judgment call," he said, then added: "You're dealing with smart people. No one likes to be investigated."
Across his nearly eight years on the Senate Intelligence Committee, some of them as its chairman, the courtly but cunning Mr. Shelby, 68, has become known as one of the most blistering critics of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. The Sept. 11 attacks have only made him more outspoken.
He recalled the hurried evacuation of Congress as smoke wafted from the Pentagon, and said his instant belief was that this was a result of a monumental intelligence failure.
"I felt so then; I know so now," he said. "It seems that every week, every month, there are new revelations that support my basic conclusion that I came to early on, on September the 11th."
Mr. Shelby said the failures started in 1993 after the bombing of the World Trade Center. "That should have been, in my judgment, a wake-up call that terrorists would hit us on our own soil with devastating effect," he said.
He runs through other cases: the attack on the United States barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the explosions at the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the attack on the American destroyer Cole in 2000.
He then lists some recent revelations: the ignored memorandum from a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent in Phoenix warning that Osama bin Laden's followers might be training for terrorist operations at American flight schools; the refusal by bureau headquarters to seek a search warrant that would have allowed Minneapolis agents to search a laptop computer of Zacarias Moussaoui, now charged with being a conspirator in the Sept. 11 plot.
Grimly, Mr. Shelby promised that the nation would someday learn of other lapses, which he could not yet divulge.
"There are a lot of other things that I believe we don't know," he said. "As a matter of fact I believe that there will be more - there will be more information coming out of this joint inquiry. Some, I know, will be very, very sensitive. Some should be brought to the attention of the American people."
He suggested that the information would prove explosive. "I think there are some more bombs out there," he said, adding, "I know that."
Mr. Shelby has ideas for what needs to be done to fortify intelligence agencies for a long battle against terror. He says the director of central intelligence should be elevated to a full cabinet post and be given more power to oversee the entire sprawling intelligence apparatus.
He says the government must do a better job at turning America's ethnic diversity and immigrant heritage into an intelligence asset by recruiting into its ranks Americans who speak Arabic and Farsi and can better meld into the byways of the terrorists.
"One of the solutions is there has got to be again emphasis on human intelligence," he said, "because we've got the people."
But Mr. Shelby does shy away from one idea being promoted by some in Congress, the creation of a new and powerful domestic intelligence agency to monitor potential terrorists inside the United States. "I have certain reservations involving the rights of the individual, constitutional rights," he said.
"We want the best security we can have for ourselves, our family, our co-workers," he mused, "but we don't want to give up everything because what's built this country, sustained us, I believe, is free markets, free people, freedom of press, freedom of thought. We never had, ever in this country, a police state."
He is still withholding judgment of Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director who was new to his job on Sept. 11. "I think the question is, will he actually break with the past," he said. "And we will have the measure of that in several years."
But the senator does not try to hide his dismay that the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, a holdover from the Clinton administration, has not resigned or been replaced. "I've said all along that that was the president's decision, you know," he demurred, "and I'm not the president."
But pressed, he says he thinks that "you could get somebody stronger," and adds, "I believe that you, that we need a strong, strong director of central intelligence that will assert himself and will have the power and the backing of the president to be the chief of staff, I mean, the C.E.O. of the whole intelligence community."
He still fumes that Mr. Tenet challenged the idea that there had been an intelligence failure and defended the Central Intelligence Agency's record on terrorism in a February appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee after the attacks.
Explaining how he had become a critic of the C.I.A., Mr. Shelby said he had a "real wake-up call" in May 1998 when India conducted three underground nuclear tests. He said Mr. Tenet, in a phone call, had told him that the agency "didn't have a clue" that such an event was on the horizon. The senator said he had thought: "My gosh, I wonder what else is going on. They had no clue on that."
He acknowledges that months ago, when the intelligence panels were beginning their investigation of Sept. 11, he believed that they would be able to carry out a thorough inquiry. But the lawmakers ran into problems, from an early staffing shakeup, to infighting, to an information leak. The joint panel has had long negotiations with the administration over obtaining some information. Public hearings have been delayed repeatedly.
Nonetheless, Mr. Shelby insists that the committee must try to do a thorough job. "We need to do everything we can, leave no stone that we know about unturned," he said. "And we won't. But I would not rule out or oppose subsequent investigations because I think they could build on what we are doing." Mr. Shelby is in his last months on the intelligence committee, which has an eight-year term limit.
"I think the failures in the intelligence are so widespread, so deep, that we owe the American people a searching job," he said.
-------- courts
Secret Court Weighs Wiretaps
New York Times
September 10, 2002
By PHILIP SHENON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/10/national/10WIRE.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 - The nation's most secret appellate court met today, apparently for the first time in its 24-year history, to consider a request from the Justice Department for broad new wiretap powers, department officials said today.
The court, a three-judge panel known as the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, released no advance information about the hearing, which was held in secret in a high-security room at the Justice Department in Washington. When or if the court's ruling on the department's request will ever be made public was not clear.
The department confirmed that the hearing took place after Congressional staff members and civil liberties groups complained that they had sought to participate in the hearing, but that their requests had been denied.
"Hearing a one-sided argument and doing so in secret goes against the traditions of fairness and open government that have been the hallmark of our democracy," said Ann Beeson, litigation director of the Technology and Liberty Program of the American Civil Liberties Union.
The hearing was organized by the Justice Department to appeal a decision by a lower court rejecting Attorney General John Ashcroft's request for the new wiretap powers in espionage and terrorism cases.
Mr. Ashcroft has said the department is entitled to the new authority under the Patriot Act, the sweeping antiterrorism law passed by Congress last year after the Sept. 11 attacks. The department seeks to make national security wiretaps easier to obtain.
In a decision made public last month, the lower court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, rejected Mr. Ashcroft's requests as too broad. The surveillance court, which was formed under a 1978 law, is responsible for authorizing wiretaps and other electronic surveillance of suspected spies and terrorists.
The Justice Department appealed the lower-court ruling, its first appeal in the court's history.
The appeal went today before the Court of Review, made up of three semiretired federal appellate judges appointed on a rotating basis by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. Until now, the Court of Review had essentially existed only on paper.
The Court of Review is made up of Judges Ralph B. Guy of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit; Edward Leavy of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Laurence H. Silberman of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
In a sign of the importance that the Justice Department has attached to the case, its argument before the Court of Review was made today by Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson.
Congressional officials said staff members of the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary Committees had advance word of the hearing and sought to attend, but were turned down by the Justice Department.
Barbara Comstock, the department's spokeswoman, said it barred the staff members because of the small size of the hearing room and because the hearing involved discussion of "intelligence gathering."
Ms. Beeson, the civil liberties union official, said her organization had tried to contact the Court of Review by phone and letter to find out how to file a brief, but had received no answer so far. "This is so unusual that it's hard to know how to respond," she said. "And this underscores what is so pernicious about the secrecy of this entire system."
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U.S. Rift With Allies on World Court Widens
New York Times
September 10, 2002
By JULIA PRESTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/10/international/europe/10COUR.html
UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 9 - Senior Canadian and European officials, openly expressing their frustration with Washington's objections to the International Criminal Court, pledged today to work to extend its jurisdiction worldwide.
As expectations heightened here of the speech President Bush will make Thursday to rally support against Iraq, the differences over the court between the United States and some of its closest allies were conspicuous.
While Mr. Bush met in Detroit this morning with Prime Minister Jean Chrétien of Canada to seek his support for a confrontation with Iraq, Canada's foreign minister, Bill Graham, was here chastising the United States for its "ad hoc and often unilateral pursuit" of the prosecution of crimes against humanity.
As he reassured "democratic, law-abiding states that they have nothing to fear" from the court, Mr. Graham warned that the United States' lack of faith in it could erode the faith of other countries in American justice.
Officials from Germany, Italy and the European Union also said they would move ahead on expanding the range and legitimacy of the court.
The Bush administration, citing fears that American soldiers or political leaders could face politically motivated prosecution, withdrew the United States' signature from the treaty creating the court and has sought bilateral agreements from countries around the world to exempt American citizens from its reach.
Officials from the United Nations and countries supporting the court have said the Bush administration's efforts could undermine the court's credibility, crippling its ability to detain war criminals for trial.
The session today was part of the first organizing assembly for the new court, and representatives of the nations that ratified the treaty by July 2 were invited. By that date, 76 states had ratified the treaty, bringing it into force much more quickly than many nations, including the United States, expected. It is expected to go to work next spring.
None of the speakers today directly called for nations to spurn Washington's overtures. But they made it clear that they thought the American tactics were unnecessary.
Many speakers said they thought the best way to convince the Bush administration was by helping the court to get started prosecuting major human rights crimes "in a fair, competent and effective manner," in the words of Lene Espersen, the justice minister of Denmark, who spoke for the European Union.
Last week the organizing assembly approved a budget of $39.37 million through 2003 and rules for electing 18 judges and a prosecutor. The rules were intended to ensure that recognized professional jurists would be chosen for the bench, avoiding nominations based on political patronage. Diplomats also built in a requirement that governments cast half their votes for women among the candidates.
The assembly also adopted descriptions of the human rights crimes to be prosecuted. United States delegates had agreed to those descriptions in a series of meetings since 1998, when the treaty was completed.
But Washington's pressure has worked with several countries, slowing the court's progress. Colombia, the world's third largest recipient of American aid for its war against leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and drug traffickers, opted for a treaty provision exempting it for seven years from war crimes prosecutions under the court. The Philippines has also delayed ratifying the treaty.
But the representative from East Timor, a young nation that was reported to have signed an agreement with the United States, said today - in an unmistakably defensive tone - that the measure was still under debate by its Parliament.
Some of the United States' most important friends were the most blunt today.
Invoking the example of the trials of Nazi war criminals, Jürgen Chrobog, a senior Foreign Ministry official from Germany, said the American concerns about the new court were unfounded. He pointed out that under the treaty, national courts take precedence, so if governments conscientiously prosecute war crimes by their own citizens, the international court would not have jurisdiction to take over those cases.
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U.S. Raises Terror Alert Level
September 10, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Threats.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration raised the nation's terror alert warning to its second highest level Tuesday -- code orange -- signaling a ``high risk'' of attack ahead of the Sept. 11 anniversary. The government increased security at federal buildings and monuments and closed some U.S. embassies abroad.
``We take every threat seriously. The threats that we have heard recently remind us of the pattern of threats that we heard prior to September 11,'' President Bush said.
He said there was no specific threat to the U.S. mainland. But, Attorney General John Ashcroft cited intelligence from a senior al-Qaida operative ``of possible attacks on U.S. interests overseas.'' He said there was information about possible car bombings and other attacks on U.S. facilities in south Asian countries and the threat of a suicide attack against U.S. interests in the Middle East.
Ashcroft and Homeland Security Adviser Tom Ridge announced the new alert level.
The State Department announced that the government was temporarily closing for public business about two dozen U.S. diplomatic posts worldwide. Officials cited specific threats against U.S. embassies in southeast Asia, including embassies in Indonesia and Malaysia.
Even before Ashcroft and Ridge made their announcement, Vice President Dick Cheney left the White House for a secure, undisclosed location, canceling a Tuesday night speech and sending the disappointed audience a videotaped address instead. Cheney's schedule for Wednesday was up in the air, as well.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Cheney had also spent Monday night at a secret, safe spot as a precaution.
Bush's own public schedule for Sept. 11, including a major speech at the Pentagon and a visit to New York's Ground Zero, remained unchanged, Fleischer said.
Ashcroft said the government was not urging Americans to change travel plans or cancel events. Similarly, he said there was no call for government workers to stay home.
Ashcroft said the United States had gathered intelligence suggesting that such attacks are intended to coincide with the Sept. 11 anniversary of the terrorist attacks. ``Symbols of American power and authority,'' such as embassies, military facilities and national monuments are possible targets, Ashcroft said.
He said terrorists might ``lash out in even small strikes,'' including car bombings and other suicide attacks. He asserted that some cells al-Qaida cells in south Asia had been accumulating explosives since last January.
Security was also being increased at military bases worldwide.
The orange level, which reflects a ``high risk of terrorist attacks,'' is one step below the top ``red,'' or ``severe risk.'' The level had been at ``yellow,'' in the middle of the five-color scale.
Code orange calls for government officials to take extra precaution at public events, including moving or canceling them if necessary; and to coordinate their efforts with the military and law enforcement. Access to various government installations is restricted to only ``essential personnel.''
Ashcroft said Americans should remain ``alert but defiant in the face of this new threat.''
Ridge, speaking of the threat at home, said ``specific protective measures'' would be taken by federal agencies as a result of the heightened alert status. He mentioned more barriers around federal buildings and more inspections and searches.
Americans should use their common sense and be more alert to possible threats, Ridge said. ``Be wary and be mindful,'' Ridge cautioned.
Ridge had spoken earlier Tuesday with governors and their staffs, preparing them for the new alert, said George Vinson, the anti-terror chief in Gov. Gray Davis' administration in California.
``New information has become available very recently,'' including information provided to the U.S. intelligence community by a senior al-Qaida official, Ashcroft told reporters. He added that the intelligence that led to the new warning came within the last 24 hours.
The plans are believed to be linked directly to al-Qaida, rather than one of its affiliates, said another official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The al-Qaida leader that provided some of the information has been in U.S. custody for several months, the official said.
Ashcroft said intelligence has concluded that ``the most likely al-Qaida targets are the transportation and energy sectors.'' Ridge added that U.S. sky marshals would be out in force over the next few days to foil any possible new hijacking attempts.
Bush, speaking with reporters after a visit to the Embassy of Afghanistan, said the new threat level ``means our government will be providing extra security at key facilities and that we'll be increasing surveillance.''
``Americans need to go about their lives. They just need to know that their government, at the federal and state and local level, will be on an extra level of alert to protect us,'' he added.
Meanwhile, the General Services Administration, which operates and provides security for most of the government's buildings, immediately alerted federal agencies and put in place new security procedures. The agency declined to specify changes, citing security concerns.
The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta was operating 24 hours a day, said spokeswoman Von Roebuck.
The FBI had issued a warning that became public Monday asking operators of computer networks, utilities and transportation system to be wary during the anniversary observance.
Since the administration created a five color coded threat system in March, the government had kept the warning at code yellow, signifying an elevated condition of alert and a significant risk of terrorist attacks.
At the Pentagon, security was already heightened. A mobile surface-to-air missile launcher -- part of an exercise announced Monday -- was parked several hundred yards away Tuesday morning.
And U.S. Navy officials in Bahrain issued a warning to shippers Tuesday following unconfirmed reports that al-Qaida may be planning attacks on oil tankers.
On The Net:
NIPC: http://www.nipc.gov/publications/infobulletins/2002/ib02-007.htm
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F.B.I. Warns Local Agencies to Be Aware
New York Times
September 10, 2002
By DAVID JOHNSTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/10/national/10WARN.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 - The F.B.I. has issued an advisory to local authorities warning of possible terrorist attacks on the anniversary of Sept. 11, but senior government officials said today that the warnings were precautionary and not based on specific or credible threats.
Bush administration officials said today that the possibility of terrorist strikes had prompted heightened security in places like New York and Washington. Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, said the threat of attacks "remains a concern." But Mr. Fleischer added that the intelligence did not indicate any specific threats.
"Anniversaries can be, not necessarily always, can be occasions for heightened terrorist activity," he said.
Other officials said they had not received credible threats relating to the commemorative events planned in New York and Washington. Even so, the F.B.I. issued a bulletin to local police departments last week advising them to institute heightened security measures.
"A large volume of threats of undetermined reliability continues to be received and investigated by the F.B.I.," said the bulletin, issued on Sept. 5 by the National Infrastructure Protection Center at the bureau. "Several of these threats make reference to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and to New York City and Washington, D.C."
Other unrelated events are scheduled this month that the authorities regard as potential targets for terrorism, like the 57th United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York from Sept. 10 to Sept. 20 and the meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington from Sept. 25 to Sept. 29.
The bulletin said a "loose alliance of left-wing groups" were planning to protest the World Bank meeting.
"It is expected that some individuals plan to engage in criminal activity aimed at disrupting the meeting and drawing attention to their cause," the bulletin said.
"Historically, tiny contingents of individuals associated with the protests belonged to violent groups," it added. "Those groups have a history of causing property damage."
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On Path to the U.S. Skies, Plot Leader Met bin Laden
New York Times
September 10, 2002
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
This article was reported by Douglas Frantz, Don Van Natta Jr., David Johnston and Richard Bernstein and was written by Mr. Bernstein.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/10/national/10PLOT.html
On Nov. 29, 1999, a 31-year-old architecture student in Germany named Mohamed Atta, unknown to the world but already determined to strike an unforgettable blow against those he believed to be his enemies, boarded Turkish Airlines Flight 1662 from Istanbul to Karachi, Pakistan. Mr. Atta took at least a couple of days to reach his final destination: a training camp in Afghanistan run by Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's sprawling international terrorist organization.
There, investigators say, Mr. Atta was accorded the greatest honor that a soldier in the international Islamic army can receive: an audience with Mr. bin Laden himself.
Mr. Atta's visit with Mr. bin Laden, which has not been disclosed previously, is among the latest discoveries by American investigators trying to reconstruct the hijacking plot that brought so much death and havoc to the United States. The investigators believe that Mr. Atta was accompanied by other leaders of the plot and that they talked to Mr. bin Laden about undertaking a terrorist operation. The new information, much of it gleaned from interviews with Qaeda members captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan, provides the strongest evidence that Mr. bin Laden personally supported the 19 men who carried out the deadliest foreign attack on American soil.
Over the last year, investigators have reached other conclusions as well. They have identified several figures aside from the hijackers who seemed to form a penumbra of support for the terrorist network, serving as recruiters, messengers and handlers of the $500,000 to $600,000 needed to carry out the attacks. Mr. Atta himself has emerged as an even more important organizer than was previously known, a figure who might not have created the plot but who took early command of it and was viewed, in the words of one of the other hijackers, as "the boss."
Foreign intelligence officials also say one of the most important supporters, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who lived with Mr. Atta in Hamburg and accompanied him to Afghanistan, was at a critical meeting in early 2000 in Malaysia that was attended by two other Qaeda operatives who later formed the core of one hijacking team. Mr. bin al-Shibh's presence there is the earliest known link between Mr. Atta's Hamburg team, which included three of the Sept. 11 pilots and trained mainly in Florida, and the men who commandeered the fourth plane, who trained in California and Arizona.
In addition, American law enforcement officials have become increasingly confident that a 37-year-old Kuwaiti, Khalid Shaik Mohammed, was one of the plot's central planners. Interviews with Qaeda prisoners, including Abu Zubaydah, the highest-ranking operative in custody, have confirmed the suspicions about Mr. Mohammed, who investigators believe is an uncle of Ramzi Yousef, the convicted mastermind of the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.
This new information, disclosed by officials as the anniversary approaches, helps fill in significant gaps in the narrative of what happened that Tuesday, helping explain a diabolical plot that involved years of planning and training across three continents yet required nothing more to execute than 19 driven and suicidal men, a half-million dollars and a handful of knives.
In the days after the attacks, government investigators quickly determined many details of the plot, including the identities of all the hijackers and their itineraries from several points around the globe to flights schools in Florida, California and Arizona and then to their targets in the United States. But much else about Sept. 11 remained mysterious. Investigators were sure from the beginning that Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda were ultimately behind it, but they did not know who exercised practical control, when and where the plot was hatched or how Al Qaeda recruited and maintained contact with the killers. Even now, they have not filled in all the gaps.
"There are many aspects of the plot that we'll never know unless you get a participant to tell you when it began and how it was put together," said one senior American law enforcement official.
But in the year since Sept. 11, investigators have pored over cellphone records, flight manifests, financial receipts and interviews with captured Qaeda members to develop a richer picture, particularly of how the plot came together overseas. One general conclusion that can be drawn is this: the attacks last year were the deadly outgrowth of a series of terrorist efforts that began with the truck bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and a foiled plot two years later in the Philippines where terrorists schemed to blow up a dozen American airliners as they crossed the Pacific.
The investigation in this sense has not turned up evidence that the same groups were responsible for all those plots but rather that there is a kind of interlocking terrorist directorate, with one group taking the baton from another, and one group's goals becoming those of the next group. The form of terrorism that struck on Sept. 11 involves a still shadowy and fluid network of people and groups, and it clearly shows that since the mid-1990's, many parts of that network have gravitated toward Al Qaeda. Sept. 11, with its three separate groups of young men from scattered places coming together to shatter America's calm, was the culmination of that process.
A Hamburg Wedding Plotters, Recruiters, Supporters Gather
In October 1999, at the radical Quds mosque in Hamburg, several men attended the wedding of Said Bahaji, a German-born Muslim of Moroccan descent who is believed to have been in charge of logistics for the local cell of Al Qaeda. Looking back, investigators see it as a gathering of the most important of the Sept. 11 terrorist teams just as the plotting began.
Among the men at the wedding were Mr. Atta, who was from a middle-class family in Egypt; Ziad al-Jarrah, who had left his native Lebanon in April 1996 to fulfill a dream of studying aeronautical engineering in Europe; and Marwan al-Shehhi, a citizen of the United Arab Emirates who, also arriving in Germany in 1996, seems to have been almost inseparable from Mr. Atta. Investigators believe that the men were at the controls of three of the four planes that were commandeered on Sept. 11.
Others were at the ceremony as well, men from several countries who investigators believe were part of the plot's network of support.
Among them, for example, was Mohammed Heidar Zammar, a German of Moroccan ancestry who is believed to have recruited for Al Qaeda among the young radical Muslims who prayed at the Quds mosque. Another was Ramzi bin al-Shibh of Yemen, a roommate of Mr. Atta in Hamburg and a man who would most likely have been among the hijackers, except his repeated applications for visas to the United States were turned down.
The men almost surely knew each other for some time before the Bahaji wedding; a year earlier, Mr. Atta, Mr. bin al-Shibh and Mr. Bahaji signed a lease for an apartment at 54 Marienstrasse, a narrow, sloping street in a working-class suburb of Hamburg. The investigators say it was when the men became roommates that the plan to take some action together in the service of the Islamic holy war began to be formed.
"For us, the decisive moment is the move into the Marienstrasse 54," Kay Nehm, Germany's general prosecutor, said in a recent German television interview. "This is when there were intensive discussions concentrating on the question of what can be done. The hate was there, the hate against the U.S., the hate against international Judaism. Those were the discussion topics, and then they say, `Actually, we have to do something.' "
In forming a terrorist cell in Hamburg, Mr. Atta and company were doing what radical young Muslims were doing across the globe, participating in a movement whose chief backer and inspiration was the renegade Saudi millionaire Osama Bin Laden. A few months before the Bahaji wedding, in February 1998, Mr. bin Laden had issued a well-publicized fatwa, or Muslim religious order, calling on all Muslims to "comply with God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it." Then, in August 1998, Al Qaeda succeeded in simultaneous truck bombings of the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, killing 250 people, including 11 Americans, an event that no doubt electrified the members of Al Qaeda cells in other countries.
In addition, Hamburg, and specifically the Quds mosque, was an important center for recruitment into the radical Muslim cause.
"The typical pattern of recruitment is that the recruiters find you," said Magnus Ranstorp, an expert in terrorism at the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. "They are talent spotters. You go to a radical mosque, they notice you." The first litmus test, Mr. Ranstorp said, is a show of religious devotion, specifically a willingness to regularly attend morning prayers, which take place at 5 every morning.
"Then they conduct background checks," Mr. Ranstorp said. "Then comes the test for psychological strength - commitment is not enough."
The presence of all of these men at the wedding of Mr. Bahaji has led investigators to believe that the plan to attack the United States had essentially been formed by then, a bit under two years before Sept. 11, 2001. A videotape of the wedding obtained by German officials shows Mr. bin al-Shibh speaking of the "danger" posed by Jews, and then he recited a paean to jihad, or holy war, against the supposed enemies of Islam.
Soon after the wedding of Mr. Bahaji, who fled Germany after Sept. 11, the men in the Hamburg cell began to take concrete steps to implement a plan. Most important, according to German investigators, all three of the Hamburg hijackers, as well as Mr. bin al-Shibh and Mr. Bahaji, went to Afghanistan for training in an Al Qaeda camp.
Klaus Ulrich Kersten, director of Germany's federal anticrime agency, the Bundeskriminalamt, said the men were all in Afghanistan from late 1999 until early 2000.
The Philippine Link Meeting Mastermind Of the '93 Bombing
In going to Afghanistan, the members of the Hamburg cell entered into a culture of holy war that was already well established. The Muslim men who journeyed to Afghanistan in order to join Al Qaeda went through a similar, demanding program of basic military training. Those who showed exceptional promise were singled out for special missions, including what were called martyrdom operations, like the 1998 African embassy bombings, or Sept. 11.
That pattern seems to have been broken in at least a minor way in connection with the Hamburg group, which arrived in Afghanistan together and was allowed to stay together. Did Mr. Atta and company already know precisely what mission they would undertake? Or did the specific plan to hijack airliners and use them to attack targets in the United States come from the Qaeda leadership itself?
Mr. Mohammed, the Kuwaiti whom some investigators now see as one of the main planners of the Sept. 11 attacks, is a man with a past that connects him to other efforts to inflict maximum harm on the United States. In 1995, he was in Manila, where he was close to Mr. Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 trade center attack and a man who was planning, before he was forced to escape the Philippines, to blow up a dozen American airliners over the Pacific on the same day.
Among the notes found in Mr. Yousef's computer after his sudden flight from the Philippines was the outline of a plan to hijack an American airliner and crash it into the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Mr. Yousef was captured a few weeks after he left the Philippines, but Mr. Mohammed has remained at large, and while there are no signs that either he or Mr. Yousef were members of Al Qaeda at that time, investigators believe that Mr. Mohammed became an important figure in Al Qaeda later.
Some investigators believe that Mr. Atta and other midlevel Al Qaeda members could have devised the plot and brought it to top leaders for approval. But most American and German investigators believe that the plan originated with Mr. Mohammed or others in Afghanistan and that Mr. Atta got involved after he conveyed a message that he wanted to carry out a terrorist attack.
That being the case, these investigators say, Mr. Atta and his associates went to Afghanistan for training by Al Qaeda, which presented them a plan inspired by the 1993 trade center attack and by Mr. Yousef's scheme of using a hijacked airliner to attack the C.I.A. The investigators think that senior Qaeda leaders then deemed Mr. Atta and the others up to the job and entrusted it to them.
"We know that the initial decision to carry out a terrorist act came from Afghanistan, more specifically from the top Al Qaeda leadership," the German investigator, Mr. Kersten, said. "We believe too that there were then further phases, when the plans were made more precise, not only in Germany, and involving many other people."
Mr. Atta himself was a near perfect person to carry out the plot. He had no record of terrorist activities and so he would not be under suspicion by Western intelligence agencies. He was well-educated and spoke both German and English fluently, which would enable him to operate without difficulty in the United States. He was also a grimly determined man, disciplined, reliable and not likely to flinch.
In recent weeks, American officials say, some Al Qaeda members being interrogated in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere have confirmed that Mr. Atta and some of his associates met with Mr. bin Laden while they were in Afghanistan. That would have been consistent with the standard practice in Al Qaeda camps where an audience with Mr. bin Laden was regarded as a high honor reserved for those selected for important missions.
When the Hamburg men returned to Germany toward the end of February 2000, they began the first practical steps toward implementing the plot, sending e-mail to request information from 31 flight schools in the United States.
Mr. Nehm, the German prosecutor, described a conversation in which Mr. Shehhi mentioned the World Trade Center to a Hamburg librarian, in April or May 2000, and boasted: "There will be thousands of dead. You will all think of me."
"You will see," Mr. Nehm quoted Mr. Shehhi as saying. "In America something is going to happen. There will be many people killed."
Learning to Fly A Malaysia Meeting, Then to the U.S.
Two months after the wedding in Hamburg and halfway around the world, a group of seven or eight Muslim militants got together in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at the apartment of a local supporter of Al Qaeda. The C.I.A. had learned of the meeting and tipped off Malaysian intelligence, which secretly photographed it. Two of the men photographed, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi, would later be among the 19 hijackers.
Malaysian intelligence had no listening devices planted at the meeting, so it is not clear what its purpose was. The main item on the agenda might have been the plans for an attack on an American naval vessel. One of the men present was later implicated in the attack on the Navy destroyer Cole, in October 2000.
But it is possible that the emerging plans for an assault on American territory were also discussed. American officials have said they are not certain that Mr. bin al-Shibh was there, but in recent interviews foreign investigators, who have seen the photographs of the Kuala Lumpur meeting, say they are convinced that he was. Credit card records also indicate that Mr. bin al-Shibh was in Malaysia at the time of the meeting.
The signs are strong that just after the Kuala Lumpur meeting, Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi became part of the Sept. 11 plan. A few weeks later, in January 2000, the two men became the first of the hijackers to land in the United States, arriving in Los Angeles on a flight from Bangkok. Within weeks, the two had registered at a flight school in San Diego and begun learning to fly - though they showed very little aptitude for it and were soon dropped by the flight instructor.
Why did the plot involve two separate groups, one that prepared in California and one in Florida, where Mr. Atta, Mr. Shehhi and Mr. Jarrah arrived a few months later?
One possibility is that Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi were better known within Al Qaeda than any of the young men from Hamburg. Intelligence officials say Mr. Midhar's father-in-law ran a safehouse in Yemen that relayed messages between Qaeda leaders and operatives. Qaeda leaders might have wanted the hijackers to enter from two separate tracks for added security. It is also possible that Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi were supposed to keep an eye on Mr. Atta from enough of a distance that they would not arouse the suspicion of American law enforcement authorities and report on him to Al Qaeda headquarters in Afghanistan.
At some point, Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi were joined by Hani Hanjour, the 29-year-old member of a well-off Saudi family who is believed to have been the pilot of American Airlines Flight 77, which was hijacked after taking off from Dulles International Airport and crashed into the Pentagon. Mr. Hanjour had been in the United States since 1996, when he attended a flying school in Scottsdale, Ariz. Despite a poor record as a student, he was able to get a commercial pilot's license in 1999.
Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi settled into San Diego, attending activities at the local Islamic Center. Mr. Midhar traveled extensively outside the United States, but Mr. Alhazmi seems to have stayed put. He even advertised for a wife with an Arab-language Internet dating service and received two replies - an odd thing for a man on a suicide mission to do.
The Hamburg group arrived in the United States several months after the Malaysian group. Mr. Shehhi was first, arriving in Newark on May 29. Mr. Atta came on June 3, also through Newark, but in another of the unresolved mysteries he arrived via Prague, where he took considerable trouble to go. He first went to Prague via plane but was turned away because he did not have a valid visa. He went back to Germany on the first flight, obtained a visa in Bonn and then returned to Prague by bus. He stayed just one night and left for the United States the next day.
Several weeks later, on June 27, Mr. Jarrah arrived in Atlanta on a flight from Munich.
Within a few weeks of their arrival, all three undertook the first task of the plot: they took flying lessons at various academies, getting their licenses around the end of 2000. After learning how to fly small planes, each paid for time on a simulator learning the techniques of flying larger planes, specifically wide-bodied Boeing passenger jets.
Then, in the first half of 2001, all three members of the Hamburg contingent traveled several times outside the United States. Early in January, for example, Mr. Atta made a short trip to Spain. He made a second trip to Spain in July, going via Zurich, where, according to one government document, he bought a knife. Mr. bin al-Shibh was there at the same time, the Spanish police say.
Aside from whatever role he played in planning the attacks, Mr. bin al-Shibh was apparently the operation's coordinator and paymaster. Shortly after Mr. Atta and Mr. Shehhi arrived in Florida, Mr. bin al-Shibh wired roughly $115,000 to their accounts at the Sun Trust Bank in Florida.
Officials of the Czech Interior Ministry say Mr. Atta made another trip to Prague, in April 2001, and while he was there, the Czechs said, he met with an Iraqi intelligence agent named Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani. Some American investigators doubt this account. Those who believe he did go to Prague and meet Mr. Ani note that the Czech interior minister, Stanislav Gross, has reaffirmed it several times.
Those who are skeptical cite the fact that there are no American immigration records showing Mr. Atta traveling outside the United States in April. And in the Czech Republic, some intelligence officials say the source of the purported meeting was an Arab informant who approached the Czech intelligence service with his sighting of Mr. Atta only after Mr. Atta's photograph had appeared in newspapers over the world. It is possible that the informant mistook another man for Mr. Atta, and many investigators now lean to the conclusion that the meeting never took place.
The Muscle Arrives 13 Saudis Join The Plot Leaders
When Mr. Atta returned to Florida from Spain on July 19 the plot swung into its final phase. Over the next several weeks, 13 men, all Saudis, entered the country on valid visas to join Mr. Atta, the three other pilots and Mr. Alhazmi and Mr. Midhar.
The 13 came to provide muscle for the plot - to help execute the hijackings and keep passengers and crew at bay while the newly trained pilots flew the jets to their targets. It seems likely that the Saudis were among the legions of young Muslim men who went to Afghanistan in response to the call to make holy war against the enemies of Islam. In previous Qaeda operations - in particular the embassy bombings - those entrusted on missions were chosen from among the recruits training in the camps in Afghanistan. Some investigators believe that Mr. Zubaydah, who ran the training camps before his capture and is the highest-ranking Qaeda leader under interrogation, might have played a role in selecting them.
At about this time, one other mysterious figure entered the picture, a Moroccan-French Muslim named Zacarias Moussaoui. Mr. Moussaoui was arrested in August in Minnesota after instructors at a flight school reported to the F.B.I. that he was behaving suspiciously. Federal prosecutors say that Mr. Moussaoui received money transfers from Mr. bin al-Shibh, and they contend that he was to have been the 20th hijacker, the replacement for Mr. bin al-Shibh who had been unable to get into the United States.
Investigators concede that it is also possible that Mr. Moussaoui was training for a separate mission.
Last Details Bank Accounts, ID's, Rentals, Plane Tickets
In the final few weeks before the attacks, the 19 men busied themselves with practical details. Many of the Saudis opened bank accounts at the Sun Trust Bank. They got driver's licenses, thereby satisfying the airlines' requirement that all passengers show government-issued photo ID's before boarding a plane. Several of the men got Virginia identification cards via a black market that operated out of a parking lot in Arlington. To maintain discipline and to stay in good condition, most of the men got temporary memberships in health clubs in Florida.
Over the course of the summer, the various teams went to separate places on the East Coast. One took up residence at motels in Laurel, Md., not far from Dulles. Several men rented an apartment in Paterson, N.J., just across the river from Manhattan where they had distant views of their main target, the World Trade Center. Others, including Mr. Atta, continued to live in Florida.
Airline, rental car, and cellphone records show that Mr. Atta was furiously busy. He rented cars often and put thousands of miles on them. American officials say he also made regular trips from Florida to Newark, presumably to meet with the group in Paterson. Because some of those living in Paterson had come across the country from California, it may have been on one of these trips that the Florida group and the California group began to coordinate their plans directly. The F.B.I. has also noticed spikes in cellphone use at what seem to be critical points in the plan; for example, just after the arrest of Mr. Moussaoui and just before the men began, in late August, to buy tickets for the flights they would hijack.
Investigators found that members of both the Florida and California teams were in Las Vegas in August, and they believe that final plans might have been coordinated then, including, quite possibly, what flights to hijack and which team members would be on which flight. As Sept. 11 neared, the teams were geographically in place. The men who hijacked Flight 77 from Dulles were installed in Laurel. Those who seized United Airlines Flight 93 were at hotels near Newark. Most of the 10 who hijacked two planes at Logan International Airport were at a hotel in downtown Boston.
In one of the most mysterious aspects of the plot, Mr. Atta and one of the Saudi recruits, Abdulaziz Alomari, drove to Portland, Me., on the night of Sept. 10. The two stayed in a motel in Portland and took an early morning commuter flight to Boston the next day. In doing so, they took a risk. They did not have much time to make the connection from their commuter flight to United Airlines Flight 11, the flight they commandeered. Indeed, the connection was so close that, had the commuter flight been at all late, they would have missed the very flight they intended to hijack, even as their confederates coming from downtown Boston were already assembled at Logan.
There have been many theories about this: that they made contact with an accomplice in Portland who gave them the final go-ahead; or more likely that by arriving on a connecting flight, they would avoid the security check in Boston. The explanations seem unsatisfactory, given the risk and especially given that only Mr. Atta and Mr. Alomari, who were on the same hijacking team, took the steps they did, which means that whatever their motivation, it did not apply to the three other teams.
Perhaps the best explanation is that Mr. Atta saw arriving on a connecting flight in Boston as a kind of insurance policy. Assuming that security procedures were less rigorous at a smaller airport, he may have believed that he and Mr. Alomari had a better chance of getting their knives through the checkpoint than in Boston. That would mean that, even if all the other team members failed in their assigned tasks, at least Mr. Atta and one confederate would succeed in theirs.
It was perhaps a final measure of Mr. Atta's determination and fanaticism. If the plot succeeded only in hijacking one plane and flying it to its target, he wanted to be sure that it was the plane he was on.
On the last night, the hijackers were supposed to read some handwritten instructions that Mr. Atta had distributed. The instructions told the men to shave excess hair from their bodies, to read certain passages of the Koran and to remember that the most beautiful virgins, "the women of paradise," awaited the martyrs of Islam. "When the confrontation begins," the instructions continued, "strike like champions who do not want to go back to this world."
The men who waited to strike and to die were near the end of a long journey. Mr. Atta had gone from Cairo to Hamburg to Afghanistan to the Czech Republic to Switzerland to Spain and, of course, to the United States. Others came from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates; they had passed through Malaysia, Thailand and states of the Persian Gulf on their way to what would come to be called Ground Zero.
There the complex plot to murder Americans in fulfillment of Osama Bin Laden's fatwa "to kill the Americans and their allies" would take its terrible toll on thousands of unsuspecting men and women who got up on Sept. 11 to go to work or to travel on airplanes and who died before the morning was over.
--------
ELF admits to arson
September 10, 2002
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020910-1341902.htm
An extremist environmental group is taking credit for torching a Forest Service laboratory in August and is threatening more violence against the agency.
The Earth Liberation Front (ELF) caused $700,000 in damage and destroyed 70 years of research at the Irvine, Pa., facility.
"In pursuance of justice, freedom, and equal consideration for all innocent life across the board, segments of this global revolutionary movement are no longer limiting their revolutionary potential by adhering to a flawed, inconsistent, non-violent ideology," the group said last week in an e-mail from its Portland, Ore.-based press office.
"While innocent life will never be harmed in any action we undertake, where it is necessary, we will no longer hesitate to pick up the gun to implement justice, and provide the needed protection for our planet that decades of legal battles, pleading protest, and economic sabotage have failed so drastically to achieve," it said.
Bill Wasley, director of Forest Service law enforcement, said security has been raised at agency offices and employees have been made aware that they could be targets.
"What I didn't like about it at all is the reference to using guns," Mr. Wasley said.
ELF membership figures are unknown because the group operates in "cells" that may consist of one or many individuals. Since 1997, according to its Web site, ELF has carried out dozens of actions, causing more than $30 million in damage.
The Aug. 11 fire and the timing of the message, issued just days before the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, has angered Capitol Hill lawmakers, who call it a "cowardly arsonist act."
"World terrorists are against our economic system, and in reality, these people are, too - they want the Earth for the critters without human involvement," said Rep. John E. Peterson, Pennsylvania Republican.
The facility was located in Mr. Peterson's congressional district, 30 miles from his home. The research there focused on maintaining a healthy forest ecosystem on the Allegheny Plateau.
ELF said the fire was in response to "threats posed to life in the Allegheny Forest by proposed timber sales, oil drilling, and greed driven manipulation of nature."
"It's very disturbing, I don't know how you rationalize burning down a building where research is being done on how to grow trees better and faster. This was good research," Mr. Peterson said.
"It's very concerning when you have people willing to blow up buildings and destroy property and to risk life over false issues. They have very twisted minds, in my view," he said.
The communication said the facility was strategically targeted, and if rebuilt, will be "targeted again for complete destruction." Construction on a new building began two days before ELF took responsibility for the fire.
"Furthermore, all other U.S. Forest Service administration research facilities, as well as all [Forest Service] buildings nationwide should now be considered likely targets," the message said.
The FBI has identified ELF as one of the country's primary domestic terrorism threats, and national forests are ground zero, said Rep. Scott McInnis, Colorado Republican and chairman of the Resources subcommittee on forests and forest health.
ELF gained notoriety after destroying five buildings and four ski lifts at the Vail Mountain ski resort in Colorado more than two years ago "on behalf of the lynx," causing $12 million in damage.
Mr. McInnis, who represented the congressional district before district lines were redrawn, chaired a House hearing earlier this year on ecoterrorism.
"ELF's latest language clearly suggests an escalation of violence and the threat to human life, and as I have long said, it is only matter of time before their parade of terror results in human lives lost," Mr. McInnis said.
"Threatening 'maximum retaliation' against the employees of the U.S. government, such as Forest Service rangers, is criminal and clearly strips away any 'Robin Hood' image ELF hopes to portray," he said.
Lawmakers say the domestic terrorists should be pursued as aggressively as foreign ones.
"Ecoterrorism should outrage and disgust every American, especially as we continue to reflect on the heroes who lost their lives on September 11," said Rep. George P. Radanovich, California Republican.
"This group of extremists has forever damned their cause and should be treated by law enforcement as a threat to our national security. ELF is as cowardly as al Qaeda and as dangerous as the Taliban. It is critical for us to track them down and prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law," he said.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- environment
Honeywell Fined for Chemical Reporting Violations
September 10, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/sep2002/2002-09-10-09.asp#anchor4
CHICAGO, Illinois, Honeywell International has agreed to pay a $36,000 fine to settle charges that fires at one of its tar plants released coal tar to the atmosphere.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had filed an administrative complaint against Honeywell for violation of federal laws on the reporting of hazardous chemical releases. The complaint, filed March 29, 2002, was based on two separate incidents that resulted in the release of coal tar.
A fire at Honeywell's tar plant in Detroit, Michigan on February 5, 1998 released between 7,000 and 8,000 gallons of coal tar. On December 17, 1999, a second fire at the same plant released about 4,500 pounds of coal tar.
After the incidents, the company failed to immediately notify the National Response Center, the Michigan State Emergency Response Commission and the local emergency planning committee - in this case, the Detroit Fire Department.
Honeywell also failed to provide written follow up reports to the Michigan SERC and the city of Detroit's local emergency planning committee after the second fire. These reports are required as soon as practicable after such incidents.
Coal tar contains the hazardous chemicals benzo(a)pyrene and dibenz(a,h)anthracene, which when heated can evaporate into clouds. Both chemicals are suspected carcinogens.
Prolonged exposure to coal tar fumes, vapors or dust can cause irritation or burning to the eyes or respiratory tract. Ingestion of coal tar may cause irritation to the gastrointestinal tract, nausea and vomiting.
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Biodegradable Plastics Could Reduce Landfill Need
September 10, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/sep2002/2002-09-10-09.asp#anchor5
ITHACA, New York, Biodegradable plastics could help replace landfills, now clogged with computer and car parts, packaging and a myriad of other plastic parts, with compost piles, says a Cornell University fiber scientist.
Biodegradable composites, developed at Cornell and elsewhere, can be made from soybean protein and other plant based fibers.
"These new fully biodegradable, environment friendly green composites have good properties and could replace plastic parts in the interiors of cars and trains, in computers and in packaging materials and other consumer products," said researcher Anil Netravali, a professor of fiber science in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell. "They also provide excellent insulation against heat and noise for use in applications such as cars."
"Although the plant based fibers may not be as strong as graphite and Kevlar(r), for example, they are low in cost, biodegradable and replenishable on a yearly basis," Netravali added. Netravali's findings are published in the September issue of the "Journal of Materials Science."
Instead of nondegradable plastics based on petroleum products, green composites - also known as reinforced plastics - use natural fibers that, for strength, are embedded in a matrix made of a plant based or other resin. Composites technology is not new, Netravali points out, citing primitive bricks and walls made of straw mixed with mud as examples.
Netravali notes that most nondegradable plastic composites, made from petroleum based or synthetic polyurethane, polyethylene and polypropylene, end up in landfills. Not much can be reused or recycled. Plant based green composites could become inexpensive alternatives for many mass produced items.
"They will be made from yearly renewable agricultural sources and would be environmentally friendly because they would naturally biodegrade once they were thrown on a compost pile," Netravali said.
Netravali has helped develop green composites made from ramie fibers, obtained from the stem of an Asian perennial shrub and the resin made from a soy protein isolate-polymer. His research group is now working with a number of fibers, including those obtained from kenaf stems, pineapple and henequen leaves and banana stems.
The resin materials he is researching include commercial resins, such as polyvinyl alcohol and polylactones, and those derived from microorganisms. Netravali is manipulating the composites to improve their mechanical properties, such as stiffness and strength, and to decrease their water absorption, which could start premature degradation.
The new composites could also substitute for wood in such applications as crates or building studs.
"Trees take 25 years to grow," Netravali points out. "Fibers we use, however, come from plants that grow to maturity in a year."
-------- health
China admits 'blood stations' caused steep rise in Aids
John Gittings in Shanghai
Tuesday September 10, 2002
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,789050,00.html
Thousands of Chinese peasants who sold their blood to government-sponsored "blood stations" have contracted HIV-Aids, health officials have finally admitted in a secret report from the worst-affected province.
As many as 35% to 45% of donors in some areas of Henan in north China were infected because of inadequate safety precautions, says the report, which was compiled by the provincial health department.
"The number of people who contracted Aids has reached a peak after eight years," it warns. "Because of this the task of treating patients and preventing any further spread of the disease is exceptionally difficult."
The internal document, dated last month, was obtained by Wan Yanhai, a leading Aids activist, who then distributed it to supporters on the internet.
Mr Wan was detained on August 24 by Chinese state security in Beijing, allegedly for revealing a "state secret". Amnesty International has called for his release, saying it fears for his safety.
The report confirms widespread accounts last year in the foreign media and Chinese newspapers of horrifying negligence in Henan - which Mr Wan helped to expose. The government in Beijing now speaks openly of a growing Aids crisis and acknowledges that unhygienic blood collection has been a significant factor.
However, the Henan authorities continue to suppress public discussion of the problem in their province. Critics say this is because the provincial health department itself was implicated in the trade.
Investors in the drug companies which sought to cash in on a commercial demand for blood products in the mid-1990s included the local army and air force, the report reveals. "The companies blindly expanded their scope of production and raced to compete for supplies ... completely ignoring the quality of the [collected] blood."
Groups of peasants donated their blood at the same time. After the plasma had been extracted, the remainder was mixed together and recycled, increasing the risk of infection.
Selling blood has been a way of supplementing low incomes in parts of southern Henan ever since the 1950s, according to the report. It became more profitable in the 1990s because of a "vogue" among Chinese consumers for medicines containing blood plasma.
"When the peasants saw people who had sold blood building [new] houses and starting up businesses, they also began to enter the ranks," says the report. "Some peasants in [the village of] Wenlou have admitted giving blood 11 times in two days, and the usual rate was once or twice a day."
The report says that the "macro-control" of the blood collection business was made more difficult because of powerful commercial interests.
It names four companies, including one backed by the logistical support unit of the Jinan military region (which includes Henan province) and another by the same unit of the region's air force command.
The report does not refer to claims that the provincial health department itself led the way by setting targets for blood collection. Instead it blames "criminal elements" who set up "underground stations" after tighter controls were supposedly imposed.
"Most of these plasma collection stations were run secretly at night in peasants' homes," it says, adding that donors and the "bloodheads" would join forces to prevent anyone being arrested.
This evidently self-serving report treads an uneasy line between insisting that the health department has taken effective action and admitting that there is now a crisis situation.
The total number of people infected with the HIV-Aids virus is said to be only 30,000 - far below independent estimates of several hundreds of thousands. The report admits that recorded cases in Shangcai county (which includes Wenlou and other high-risk villages) have doubled in the past year from 7,000 to 14,000, but says the figures are "unreliable".
A sample survey two years ago of 376 blood donors in seven villages showed that the infection rate ranged from 32% to 48%, but the report claims that such villages are a small minority.
Mr Wan's detention illustrates the tight limits set on discussion of what is still one of China's most delicate subjects. "I believe what my husband did is good for his country, his people and Aids prevention in China. He is a very intelligent, rational scholar," says his wife, Su Zhaosheng, who is now studying in the US.
Friends of Mr Wan are relieved that he is being held in Beijing: they fear that if he were transferred to the authorities in Henan he could be "in physical danger".
-------- ACTIVISTS
EU 'has used September 11 to curb dissent'
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Brussels,
UK Telegraph
10/09/2002
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/09/10/wlib10.xml/
The European Union has taken advantage of September 11 to curb dissent in what amounts to a "war on freedom and democracy", according to a report published yesterday.
The civil liberties group Statewatch said the EU was acquiring draconian powers to harry protesters and carry out surveillance of ordinary citizens, but lacked the normal safeguards to prevent their abuse.
It described the EU's secretive and unaccountable system as a democracy "built on sand".
Among the "avalanche" of new measures since September 11 is a new law extending the definition of terrorism to ordinary political protest.
Damage to public property is now a terrorist offence if it is part of a campaign to change the political, economic or social order. The definition would appear to cover such groups as the Greenham Common women's movement or anti-globalist protesters.
This definition was quietly extended on Dec 27 2001, to cover even "passive" support of terrorism, blurring a distinction in English common law between conscious crimes and mere association. The measure was slipped through using a technical procedure that circumvents parliamentary debate.
The EU also pushed through an EU-wide arrest warrant, which was presented as an anti-terrorist measure but covers most ordinary crimes.
"This does away with all the checks and balances of the existing extradition procedure. There is no habeas corpus, no appeal, no rights for the suspect," said Statewatch, a body of independent researchers with Left-leaning political views.
Other measures include surveillance powers compelling telephone and internet companies to retain records.
Tony Bunyan, head of Statewatch, said the emerging system "utterly blurs the distinction between terrorism and resistance to oppression or political dissent".
Jesus Carmona, the justice spokesman for the European Council, said that every step taken conformed to the European Convention on Human Rights, overseen by a non-EU court in Strasbourg.
"Besides, we vote on a basis of unanimity. Each minister answers to his own national parliament; if he's not happy, he can block proposals," he said.
--------
Washington Seeks Comment on Mercury Reduction Plan
September 10, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/sep2002/2002-09-10-09.asp#anchor7
OLYMPIA, Washington, The Washington Departments of Ecology and Healthy is seeking public comment on a new plan for reducing the use and release of mercury in Washington state.
The Mercury Chemical Action Plan lists known sources and uses of mercury in Washington. The agencies are now taking public comment on the plan, which identifies long term and short term strategies for reducing mercury sources and exposure.
"People would be surprised to learn how many consumer products contain mercury," said Bill Backous of the Department of Ecology (Ecology). "Through this action plan, we hope to increase awareness of these potential sources of mercury so people can either avoid them or learn to handle and dispose of them safely."
Mercury is toxic, and exposure to it can cause neurological problems in humans and animals. People may be exposed to mercury by eating contaminated fish from certain water bodies or by inhaling the gaseous form of the element.
Mercury also may be absorbed through the skin if children or adults play with the silvery liquid mercury found in a broken thermometer or thermostat. Other states have launched efforts to reduce the use and release of mercury, and Washington's action plan builds on those efforts.
"We know a lot about the health problems that mercury can cause. Health effects are most severe for the developing fetus and young child," said Jude VanBuren of the Department of Health. "Our public health advisories warn about mercury in certain kinds of fish. To keep mercury out of our food chain, it is important to reduce the amount of mercury released into the environment."
The action plan for mercury, produced at the direction of the state legislature, is the first plan to be developed as part of Ecology's "persistent, bioaccumulative toxins" (PBT) strategy. The department intends to develop action plans for other PBTs, which are toxic substances that are known to build up in humans and animals.
The PBT strategy and the draft mercury action plan are available at: http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/eap/pbt/pbtfaq.html
The 60 day public comment period on the draft Mercury Chemical Action Plan ends on November 8. Written comments may be submitted to Mike Gallagher at mgal461@ecy.wa.gov or Department of Ecology, P.O. Box 47600, Olympia, Washington, 98501-7600.
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