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NUCLEAR
Schools to Be Allowed to Serve Irradiated Meat
N. Korea: Arms Needed to Fight U.S.
Nuclear Negotiations
Engaging North Korea
N. Korea's Neighbors, U.S. Issue Ultimatum
Cold War Charm and Hot Tub
The Enemy Within
The Terminator's Proposition
Bush, Focusing Firmly on Terror, Seeks Unity at Talks
MILITARY
Blast rocks U.S. base in southern Afghanistan
Planes Bomb Rebels in Central African Capital
New Yugoslav-Iraqi Ties Alleged
On-line firearm purchases are not just a click away
Nebraska on Mark in Biowar Defense
An 'unfortunate' view of the terrorism-insurance bill
Concerns Arise Over Type Of Gas Used by Moscow
Iraqi Kurds discuss draft constitution
Arab League urges Libya to stay
Back to Europe
Kashmir Coalition Sets Peace Agenda
Russia braces for added Chechen violence
Hostage deaths reach 118 after rescue
Gas Used in Moscow Raid Questioned
Iran Frees 3 Jewish Prisoners in Spy Case
France Is Set to Offer U.N. Its Own Resolution on Iraq
Powell doubtful of U.N. support
Military officials fear U.N. will weaken resolution on Iraq
The Secret War
Al-Jazeera hit by advertising ban
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Hostage deaths reach 118 after rescue
How Large a Fig Leaf?
Sniper Death Penalty Issues
ACTIVISTS
Thousands March in Washington Against Going to War in Iraq
Antiwar Protest Largest Since '60s
IRAQ: 12 Americans Stage Protest, Hussein Is Happy to Allow
U.S. Peace Group Holds Anti-War Protest in Baghdad
Anti-war crowd noisy, peaceful
Thousands March Against War in Iraq
Anti-war protesters gather in Europe
Amid Anti - War Protests, U.S. Decries UN Iraq Delays
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Schools to Be Allowed to Serve Irradiated Meat
October 27, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/27/national/27MEAT.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 26 - Schools will be allowed to serve children meat that has been sterilized through irradiation, the Agriculture Department has decided.
Irradiation sterilizes food by using low levels of gamma rays or electrons to kill bacteria and parasites, like E. coli and salmonella.
In 1999, the government approved the sale of irradiated meat to the public, but irradiated meat was prohibited in the school lunch program. The farm bill approved in May changed that, said Alisa Harrison, spokeswoman for the Agriculture Department.
Under the new policy, announced on Friday, schools will be allowed to buy irradiated meat by the end of the year, Ms. Harrison said, emphasizing that doing so was optional.
The meat industry has been urging the agency to approve such a policy, saying it will make products safer. Companies want the department to start a pilot program for buying irradiated ground beef for school lunches.
"It's time for U.S.D.A. to acknowledge the food safety benefits of this technology and begin purchasing irradiated ground beef products for the nation's schoolchildren," J. Patrick Boyle, chief executive of the American Meat Institute, said in a statement.
Some advocacy groups say irradiated food is unhealthy, though the World Health Organization and the American Medical Association have said it is safe. The consumer group Public Citizen has strongly opposed irradiation, saying the process destroys vitamins and nutrients and can cause chemicals linked to cancer and birth defects to develop.
Carol Tucker Foreman, director of the Consumer Federation of America's Food Policy Institute, said she accepted that irradiated food was safe to eat but warned that it was "not a silver bullet" for food-borne illnesses.
Food poisoning in American schools has been increasing 10 percent a year, the General Accounting Office, the auditing agency of Congress, reported this year. Fifty school-related outbreaks of food poisoning were reported nationwide in 1999, with 2,900 illnesses.
-------- korea
N. Korea: Arms Needed to Fight U.S.
Oct 27, 2002
AP
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/N/NKOREA_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
SEOUL, South Korea -- A day after U.S., Japanese and South Korean leaders demanded that North Korea abandon its nuclear weapons program, the communist state said Sunday it needs military arms to fight against "U.S. imperialists."
It was unclear whether the statement in North Korea's official Rodong Sinmun newspaper was a response to the three leaders, who met during the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Mexico. A second North Korean paper said Sunday that the Pyongyang government was willing to talk with the United States to allay fears about the nuclear program, under certain conditions.
President Bush, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, demanded on Saturday that North Korea abandon its nuclear weapons program "in a prompt and verifiable manner."
On Sunday, the Rondong Sinmun said, "U.S. imperialism looks down upon those countries weak in military power, forces them to accept its brigandish demands and makes them a target of its military intervention and aggression."
"As a stick is the best to beat a wolf, so are arms to fight with the imperialists," said the paper. "It is essential to readily cope with the moves of the reactionaries all the time."
It also said that victory does not depend on weapons, but on "political and ideological readiness."
Meanwhile, the Minju Josun newspaper reiterated the North's willingness for dialogue about its nuclear weapons program if Washington promises not to invade and takes other conciliatory steps.
"If the U.S. gives legal assurances of nonaggression, including the no use of nukes against the DPRK through the nonaggression treaty, the DPRK will be ready to clear the U.S. of its security concerns," Minju Josun newspaper said.
DPRK is an acronym for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the official name of North Korea. The two reports were carried by North Korea's state-run Korean Central News Agency.
The North's appeal for a "nonaggression treaty" with the United States came as U.S. officials tried to muster international pressure on the communist state to drop its nuclear program.
Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Washington has no plans to open negotiations with North Korea.
----
Nuclear Negotiations
New York Times
October 27, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/27/opinion/L27SAFI.html
To the Editor:
Re "Hicks Nix Blix Fix," by William Safire (column, Oct. 24):
Who "double-crossed" whom? In 1994 North Korea agreed to stop reprocessing plutonium - a program that could have yielded more than 100 bombs' worth of plutonium by now. In return, the United States promised to provide a light-water reactor by 2003, supply heavy fuel oil and, above all, improve relations. Washington got what it most wanted up front, but did not live up to its end of the bargain.
Hard-liners in Congress, with Mr. Safire's fervent support, denounced the deal, and the Clinton administration backpedaled on carrying it out. In 1997, after Washington was slow to fulfill the 1994 accord, Pyongyang threatened to break it. Its covert effort to acquire the means to enrich uranium may date from that time.
Mr. Safire also alleges that North Korea "secretly kept on building nukes," but United States intelligence assesses it completed one or two bombs before the plutonium program stopped and it has yet to begin producing uranium - leaving time to negotiate.
LEON V. SIGAL
New York, Oct. 24, 2002
----
Engaging North Korea
October 27, 2002
New York Times
By JIMMY CARTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/27/opinion/27CART.html
ATLANTA -- In June 1994, the North Koreans had expelled inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency and were threatening to process spent fuel - from a graphite-moderated nuclear reactor in Yongbyon - into plutonium. It was clear that war might break out on the Korean peninsula. The United Nations Security Council was being urged by the United States to impose severe sanctions on North Korea. There was a general consensus, shared by American military experts, that the combined forces of South Korea and the United States could defeat North Korea with overwhelming power. But it was almost inevitable that severe damage would be done to Seoul and much of the fighting would take place in its streets. The American military commander in South Korea estimated that total casualties would exceed those of the Korean War.
It was the policy of the United States to reject any direct talks with North Korean leaders. Responding to a standing invitation from North Korean President Kim Il Sung and with the approval of President Bill Clinton, I went to Pyongyang and helped to secure an agreement that North Korea would cease its nuclear program at Yongbyon and permit I.A.E.A. inspectors to return to the site to assure that the spent fuel was not reprocessed. In return, the United States and our allies subsequently assured the North Koreans that there would be no nuclear threat to them, that a supply of fuel oil would be provided to replace the power lost by terminating the Yongbyon nuclear program and that two modern nuclear plants would also be provided, with their fuel supplies to be monitored by international inspectors.
Since then, the spent fuel at Yongbyon has continued to be monitored, but the two replacement nuclear plants have not been built and the United States has assumed what the North Koreans consider a belligerent attitude toward them. More seriously, Pyongyang has announced that it has acquired a source of enriched uranium and is developing the capability to produce nuclear weapons. If true, this is a gross violation of previous agreements and a threat to peace in the region.
It is not clear if the North Koreans are bluffing, actually have a nuclear program or have yet produced any nuclear explosives. It is clear that the world community cannot permit North Korea to develop a nuclear weapons capability.
South Korea and Japan are calling for continuing negotiations. China's position has not yet been clarified. The United States, in effect, faces a choice very similar to that in 1994: whether to move toward a military confrontation or accept North Korea's offer to resolve the nuclear problem based on the easing of tension between our two countries.
Kim Il Sung promised me that he would have full diplomatic discussions with Kim Young Sam, then president of South Korea, and arrangements were made for such a summit meeting. The North Korean leader died shortly thereafter. His son, Kim Jong Il, and President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea later arranged talks. Some progress has been made between the North Koreans and both Japan and South Korea in recent months, but similar efforts by President Clinton terminated with his administration.
What is needed on the Korean peninsula is an end to more than a half-century of "armistice" and the consummation of a comprehensive and permanent peace agreement. The success of strong diplomacy is still a possibility, with it being crucial that the United States play a constructive role. The framework for an agreement still exists and includes some elements that must be confirmed by mutual actions combined with unimpeded international inspections. First, North Korea should forgo any nuclear weapons program and the two Koreas should proceed with good-faith talks. The United States may then move toward normal relations with North Korea. The basic premises of the agreed framework of 1994 must be honored, with North Korea, Japan, South Korea, the United States and China cooperating. Finally, international tensions should be reduced through step-by-step demilitarization on the border between the two Koreas.
There is, of course, still the option of war instead of peace talks. It would be devastating and probably unnecessary.
Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, is chairman of the Carter Center in Atlanta and won the Nobel Peace Prize this year.
----
N. Korea's Neighbors, U.S. Issue Ultimatum
By Maura Reynolds
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 27 2002
http://www.latimes.com/la-fg-bush27oct27004442,0,4469734.story
CABO SAN LUCAS, Mexico -- Japan, South Korea and the United States joined forces Saturday against North Korea's nuclear ambitions, laying down an ultimatum to Pyongyang to abandon its uranium enrichment program. But they left open the possibility of engagement and assistance in the future.
At a three-way meeting in this Baja beach resort, President Bush and the leaders of Japan and South Korea denounced North Korea's recently acknowledged development of weapons-grade uranium and demanded that the impoverished totalitarian state "dismantle this program in a prompt and verifiable manner."
But they also said Japan and South Korea would not go further and cancel upcoming talks with North Korean officials, and the United States hinted that it may be willing to engage the North in the future.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said the joint policy is designed to be firm but patient, recognizing that harsher measures might backfire.
"We want to make sure that we move deliberately, we move with patience, that we do not create a crisis in the region," Powell told reporters.
But, he added, there would be no quid pro quo.
"You can't violate an agreement and then show up and say, 'We violated this agreement. What will you pay us for this violation in order to get out of the violation?' " Powell said.
Japan has been holding talks with North Korea on normalizing relations, with the next session scheduled this week in Malaysia.
In their statement, the leaders said those meetings would go forward because they "can serve as important channels" to pressure North Korea.
Bush met with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi during a summit here of leaders from the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.
The two-day gathering, held annually to promote free trade and economic cooperation in the Pacific Rim, has been overshadowed by threats of terrorism and nuclear conflict.
Bush also lobbied Pacific leaders -- in particular Mexican President and APEC host Vicente Fox -- to support a U.S.-proposed United Nations Security Council resolution on use of force in Iraq. Mexico, which is currently a member of the Security Council, has indicated that it prefers milder French and Russian proposals because they have wider support.
"We think broad unanimity is more important for the U.S. cause than details of the resolution," said Jorge Castaneda, the Mexican foreign minister.
Terrorism was also the prime topic during Bush's meeting with Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri. Bush offered condolences over the deaths of nearly 200 people in a Bali bombing two weeks ago and expressed understanding of the difficulties she has faced in reining in radical groups.
Earlier in the day, Bush administration officials suggested that they were seeking a harsher condemnation of North Korea. The goal, according to a senior administration official, was "to isolate the North Koreans, make them clear that this is not cost-free, get them to think about their own future. If they want to engage with the world, they're going to have to give up that program."
But the diplomatic strategy that emerged from the talks acceded to South Korean and Japanese desires for a policy balanced between carrots and sticks.
Experts have warned that it would be dangerous to further antagonize North Korea, since it could decide to restart its plutonium-based weapons program, which it agreed to freeze in 1994. North Korea reportedly is years away from making a nuclear bomb using enriched uranium but would need only months to make a plutonium-based bomb.
South Korea and Japan have argued against cutting off contact with the North and said they will go ahead with scheduled meetings and exchanges. A high-level North Korean economic delegation that includes Chang Sung Taek, a brother-in-law of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, arrived Saturday in Seoul for a nine-day tour of South Korean factories and high-tech facilities.
The task, according to a senior Japanese diplomat, is "applying continuous pressure but not cornering North Korea ... to the extent that they might scratch back like a cornered cat."
In that vein, the leaders' joint statement seemed to offer the North Koreans a small carrot from the United States. In recent days, the North Koreans have sought a nonaggression pledge from the U.S. The statement did offer one, although it was a restatement of previous policy.
"President Bush reiterated his February statement in South Korea that the United States has no intention of invading North Korea, as well as the fact that he had been prepared to pursue a bold approach to transforming" U.S.-North Korea relations, the statement said.
Powell stressed that the United States has no plans to meet with any North Korean officials and that in all upcoming contacts by Japan and South Korea, the issue of the enriched-uranium program will be "uppermost."
The joint statement appeared to resolve, at least for the time being, a potentially awkward disagreement among the three countries over how hard to press North Korea on nuclear issues.
In South Korea, the nuclear crisis has been shrugged off in some quarters as a creation of an overly hysterical and hawkish White House.
"Nuclear crisis? What Crisis?" read the headline of an editorial Friday in the South Korean daily JoongAng Ilbo, describing the reaction of the South's government.
"There is a delicate difference of opinion between the United States and South Korea about how serious this whole nuclear matter is and whether the North is serious about developing nuclear weapons," said Paik Jin Hyun of Seoul National University. "Many people claim that the North admitted the nuclear program to express their willingness to talk to the United States."
U.S. officials said that is now the common understanding and that, as a result, engagement, not confrontation, is the aim.
"The threat from North Korea is one ... we do have the luxury of addressing through diplomatic means," said the senior Bush administration official. "And we think diplomatic means, obviously, are much more effective in this particular case."
Times staff writers Sonni Efron and Richard Boudreaux in Cabo San Lucas and Barbara Demick in Seoul contributed to this report.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new york
Cold War Charm and Hot Tub: Silo Site Fetches $2.1 Million
October 27, 2002
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/27/nyregion/27SILO.html
A converted missile silo site has been sold for $2.1 million in an online auction to a couple who are getting an Adirondack getaway home with a Jacuzzi, three-foot-thick walls and some cold war charm.
The owners had marketed the site as a "safe haven" for dangerous times. "The complex, accessible via its own private paved airstrip, offers the optimum level of security and privacy available today," read the description of the property, which was offered through the eBay Internet auction site.
In a time of government warnings of United States vulnerability to terrorist attack, bombings in Bali, Chechen guerrillas in Moscow and sniper shootings in suburban Washington, the property attracted three offers by the close of bidding on Friday.
No bids had been submitted in an auction a month earlier, so the minimum bid was lowered to $550,000 from $2.1 million.
The high bid, $2,100,100, came from a couple who want to remain anonymous, according to one of the sellers, Bruce Francisco. The husband and wife had different reasons for wanting the home, Mr. Francisco said.
"She liked the safety of it," Mr. Francisco said, while the husband seemed more interested in owning a bit of American history.
The missile site is in Adirondack Park, between Plattsburgh and Saranac Lake, and was one of a dozen built in northern New York and Vermont in the early 1960's. The missiles, housed in underground silos, encircled Plattsburgh Air Force Base. The Atlas-F technology soon became obsolete, and all the sites were deactivated by 1965. The air base closed in 1995.
Mr. Francisco's cousin, Gregory Gibbons, bought the property a decade ago for $55,000 and pumped out the water and sludge that had filled the silo and former launch control center. The two men built a home above ground and renovated the underground launch center to include a kitchen, bedrooms, bathrooms and a hot tub.
The underground living space is encased in three-foot-thick concrete walls. Such features as an escape hatch and locking steel doors have been preserved.
The winning bidders have yet to close on the property, but signed a pre-sale agreement to purchase it if they won the auction, Mr. Francisco said. The couple visited the property on Tuesday and were won over, not only by the missile site, but by the home design and a neighbor who lives on the other side of the airstrip, Mr. Francisco said.
"Part of it was the possibility of needing security one day," he said. "It felt like a secure environment."
-------- us politics
The Enemy Within
From: Paul Wolf <paulwolf@icdc.com>
Gore Vidal is America's most controversial writer and a ferocious, often isolated, critic of the Bush administration. Here, against a backdrop of spreading unease about America's response to the events of 11 September 2001 and their aftermath, we publish Vidal's remarkable personal polemic urging a shocking new interpretation of who was to blame.
"The Enemy Within" by Gore Vidal
The Observer, London,
Sunday 27th October 2002
Gore Vidal
http://9-11congress.netfirms.com/Vidal.html
On 24 August, 1814, things looked very dark for freedom's land. That was the day the British captured Washington DC and set fire to the Capitol and the White House. President Madison took refuge in the nearby Virginia woods where he waited patiently for the notoriously short attention span of the Brits to kick in, which it did. They moved on and what might have been a Day of Utter Darkness turned out to be something of a bonanza for the DC building trades and up-market realtors.
One year after 9/11, we still don't know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many civil-libertarians that 9/11 applied not only to much of our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected president with the oil and gas Cheney/Bush junta.
Meanwhile, our more and more unaccountable government is pursuing all sorts of games around the world that we the spear carriers (formerly the people) will never learn of. Even so, we have been getting some answers to the question: why weren't we warned in advance of 9/11? Apparently, we were, repeatedly; for the better part of a year, we were told there would be unfriendly visitors to our skies some time in September 2001, but the government neither informed nor protected us despite Mayday warnings from Presidents Putin and Mubarak, from Mossad and even from elements of our own FBI. A joint panel of congressional intelligence committees reported (19 September 2002, New York Times) that as early as 1996, Pakistani terrorist Abdul Hakim Murad confessed to federal agents that he was 'learning to fly in order to crash a plane into CIA HQ'.
Only CIA director George Tenet seemed to take the various threats seriously. In December 1998, he wrote to his deputies that 'we are at war' with Osama bin Laden. So impressed was the FBI by his warnings that by 20 September 2001, 'the FBI still had only one analyst assigned full time to al-Qaeda'.
From a briefing prepared for Bush at the beginning of July 2001: 'We believe that OBL [Osama bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against US and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against US facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.' And so it came to pass; yet Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor, says she never suspected that this meant anything more than the kidnapping of planes.
Happily, somewhere over the Beltway, there is Europe - recently declared anti-Semitic by the US media because most of Europe wants no war with Iraq and the junta does, for reasons we may now begin to understand thanks to European and Asian investigators with their relatively free media.
On the subject 'How and Why America was Attacked on 11 September, 2001', the best, most balanced report, thus far, is by Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed ... Yes, yes, I know he is one of Them. But they often know things that we don't - particularly about what we are up to. A political scientist, Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development 'a think-tank dedicated to the promotion of human rights, justice and peace' in Brighton. His book, 'The War on Freedom', has just been published in the US by a small but reputable publisher.
Ahmed provides a background for our ongoing war against Afghanistan, a view that in no way coincides with what the administration has told us. He has drawn on many sources, most tellingly on American whistleblowers who are beginning to come forth and hear witness - like those FBI agents who warned their supervisors that al-Qaeda was planning a kamikaze strike against New York and Washington only to be told that if they went public with these warnings they would suffer under the National Security Act. Several of these agents have engaged David P. Schippers, chief investigative counsel for the US House Judiciary Committee, to represent them in court. The majestic Schippers managed the successful impeachment of President Clinton in the House of Representatives. He may, if the Iraqi war should go wrong, be obliged to perform the same high service for Bush, who allowed the American people to go unwarned about an imminent attack upon two of our cities as pre-emption of a planned military strike by the US against the Taliban.
The Guardian (26 September 2001) reported that in July 2001, a group of interested parties met in a Berlin hotel to listen to a former State Department official, Lee Coldren, as he passed on a message from the Bush administration that 'the United States was so disgusted with the Taliban that they might be considering some military action ... the chilling quality of this private warning was that it came - according to one of those present, the Pakistani diplomat Niaz Naik - accompanied by specific details of how Bush would succeed ...' Four days earlier, the Guardian had reported that 'Osama bin Laden and the Taliban received threats of possible American military action against them two months before the terrorist assaults on New York and Washington ... [which] raises the possibility that bin Laden was launching a pre-emptive strike in response to what he saw as US threats.' A replay of the 'day of infamy' in the Pacific 62 years earlier?
Why the US needed a Eurasian adventure On 9 September 2001, Bush was presented with a draft of a national security presidential directive outlining a global campaign of military, diplomatic and intelligence action targeting al-Qaeda, buttressed by the threat of war. According to NBC News: 'President Bush was expected to sign detailed plans for a worldwide war against al- Qaeda ... but did not have the chance before the terrorist attacks ... The directive, as described to NBC News, was essentially the same war plan as the one put into action after 11 September. The administration most likely was able to respond so quickly ... because it simply had to pull the plans "off the shelf".'
Finally, BBC News, 18 September 2001: 'Niak Naik, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October. It was Naik's view that Washington would not drop its war for Afghanistan even if bin Laden were to be surrendered immediately by the Taliban.'
Was Afghanistan then turned to rubble in order to avenge the 3,000 Americans slaughtered by Osama? Hardly. The administration is convinced that Americans are so simple- minded that they can deal with no scenario more complex than the venerable lone, crazed killer (this time with zombie helpers) who does evil just for the fun of it 'cause he hates us, 'cause we're rich 'n free 'n he's not. Osama was chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the most frightening logo for our long contemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan, planning for which had been 'contingency' some years before 9/11 and, again, from 20 December, 2000, when Clinton's out-going team devised a plan to strike at al-Qaeda in retaliation for the assault on the warship Cole. Clinton's National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, personally briefed his successor on the plan but Rice, still very much in her role as director of Chevron-Texaco, with special duties regarding Pakistan and Uzbekistan, now denies any such briefing. A year and a half later (12 August, 2002), fearless Time magazine reported this odd memory lapse.
Osama, if it was he and not a nation, simply provided the necessary shock to put in train a war of conquest. But conquest of what? What is there in dismal dry sandy Afghanistan worth conquering? Zbigniew Brzezinski tells us exactly what in a 1997 Council on Foreign Relations study called 'The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives'.
The Polish-born Brzezinski was the hawkish National Security Advisor to President Carter. In 'The Grand Chessboard', Brzezinski gives a little history lesson. 'Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some 500 years ago, Eurasia has been the centre of world power.' Eurasia is all the territory east of Germany. This means Russia, the Middle East, China and parts of India. Brzezinski acknowledges that Russia and China, bordering oil-rich central Asia, are the two main powers threatening US hegemony in that area.
He takes it for granted that the US must exert control over the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, known to those who love them as 'the Stans': Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikstan and Kyrgyzstan all 'of importance from the standpoint of security and historical ambitions to at least three of their most immediate and most powerful neighbours - Russia, Turkey and Iran, with China signaling'. Brzezinski notes how the world's energy consumption keeps increasing; hence, who controls Caspian oil/gas will control the world economy. Brzezinski then, reflexively, goes into the standard American rationalization for empire;. We want nothing, ever, for ourselves, only to keep bad people from getting good things with which to hurt good people. 'It follows that America's primary interest is to help ensure that no single [other] power comes to control the geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it.'
Brzezinski is quite aware that American leaders are wonderfully ignorant of history and geography so he really lays it on, stopping just short of invoking politically incorrect 'manifest destiny'. He reminds the Council just how big Eurasia is. Seventy-five percent of the world's population is Eurasian. If I have done the sums right, that means that we've only got control, to date, of a mere 25 percent of the world's folks. More! 'Eurasia accounts for 60-per cent of the world's GNP and three-fourths of the world's known energy resources.' Brzezinski's master plan for 'our' globe has obviously been accepted by the Cheney-Bush junta. Corporate America, long over-excited by Eurasian mineral wealth, has been aboard from the beginning.
Ahmed sums up: 'Brzezinski clearly envisaged that the establishment, consolidation and expansion of US military hegemony over Eurasia through Central Asia would require the unprecedented, open-ended militarisation of foreign policy, coupled with an unprecedented manufacture of domestic support and consensus on this militarisation campaign.'
Afghanistan is the gateway to all these riches. Will we fight to seize them? It should never be forgotten that the American people did not want to fight in either of the twentieth century's world wars, but President Wilson maneuvered us into the First while President Roosevelt maneuvered the Japanese into striking the first blow at Pearl Harbor, causing us to enter the Second as the result of a massive external attack. Brzezinski understands all this and, in 1997, he is thinking ahead - as well as backward. 'Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.' Thus was the symbolic gun produced that belched black smoke over Manhattan and the Pentagon.
Since the Iran-Iraq wars, Islam has been demonized as a Satanic terrorist cult that encourages suicide attacks - contrary, it should be noted, to the Islamic religion. Osama has been portrayed, accurately, it would seem, as an Islamic zealot. In order to bring this evil-doer to justice ('dead or alive'), Afghanistan, the object of the exercise was made safe not only for democracy but for Union Oil of California whose proposed pipeline from Turkmenistan to Afghanistan to Pakistan and the Indian Ocean port of Karachi, had been abandoned under the Taliban's chaotic regime. Currently, the pipeline is a go-project thanks to the junta's installation of a Unocal employee (John J Maresca) as US envoy to the newly born democracy whose president, Hamid Karzai, is also, according to Le Monde, a former employee of a Unocal subsidiary. Conspiracy? Coincidence!
Once Afghanistan looked to be within the fold, the junta, which had managed to pull off a complex diplomatic-military caper, - abruptly replaced Osama, the personification of evil, with Saddam. This has been hard to explain since there is nothing to connect Iraq with 9/11. Happily, 'evidence' is now being invented. But it is uphill work, not helped by stories in the press about the vast oil wealth of Iraq which must - for the sake of the free world - be reassigned to US and European consortiums.
As Brzezinski foretold, 'a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat' made it possible for the President to dance a war dance before Congress. 'A long war!' he shouted with glee. Then he named an incoherent Axis of Evil to be fought. Although Congress did not give him the FDR Special - a declaration of war - he did get permission to go after Osama who may now be skulking in Iraq.
Bush and the dog that did not bark
Post-9/11, the American media were filled with pre-emptory denunciations of unpatriotic 'conspiracy theorists', who not only are always with us but are usually easy for the media to discredit since it is an article of faith that there are no conspiracies in American life. Yet, a year or so ago, who would have thought that most of corporate America had been conspiring with accountants to cook their books since - well, at least the bright days of Reagan and deregulation. Ironically, less than a year after the massive danger from without, we were confronted with an even greater enemy from within: Golden Calf capitalism. Transparency? One fears that greater transparency will only reveal armies of maggots at work beneath the skin of a culture that needs a bit of a lie-down in order to collect itself before taking its next giant step which is to conquer Eurasia, a potentially fatal adventure not only for our frazzled institutions but for us the presently living.
Complicity. The behavior of President George W. Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to all sorts of not unnatural suspicions. I can think of no other modern chief of state who would continue to pose for 'warm' pictures of himself listening to a young girl telling stories about her pet goat while hijacked planes were into three buildings.
Constitutionally, Bush is not only chief of state, he is commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Normally, a commander in such a crisis would go straight to headquarters and direct operations while receiving the latest intelligence.
This is what Bush actually did - or did not do - according to Stan Goff, a retired US Army veteran who has taught military science and doctrine at West Point. Goff writes, in 'The So- called Evidence is a Farce': 'I have no idea why people aren't asking some very specific questions about the actions of Bush and company on the day of the attacks. Four planes get hijacked and deviate from their flight plan, all the while on FAA radar.'
Goff, incidentally, like the other astonished military experts, cannot fathom why the government's automatic 'standard order of procedure in the event of a hijacking' was not followed. Once a plane has deviated from its flight- plan, fighter planes are sent up to find out why. That is law and does not require presidential approval, which only needs to be given if there is a decision to shoot down a plane. Goff spells it out: 'The planes were hijacked between 7:45 and 8:10am. Who is notified? This is an event already that is unprecedented. But the President is not notified and going to a Florida elementary school to hear children read.
'By around 8:15am it should be very apparent that something is terribly wrong. The President is glad-handling teachers. By 8:45am, when American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the North Tower, Bush is settling in with children for his photo op. Four planes have obviously been hijacked simultaneously and one has just dived into the twin towers, and still no one notifies the nominal Commander-in-Chief.
'No one has apparently scrambled [sent aloft] Air Force interceptors either. At 9:03, Flight 175 crashes into the South Tower. At 9:05 Andrew Card, the Chief of Staff whispers to Bush [who] "briefly turns somber" according to reporters. Does he cancel the school visit and convene an emergency meeting? No. He resumes listening to second- graders ... and continues the banality even as American Airlines Flight 77 conducts an unscheduled point turn over Ohio and heads in the direction of Washington DC.
'Has he instructed Card to scramble the Air Force? No. An excruciating 25 minutes later, he finally deigns to give a public statement telling the United States what they have already figured out - that there's been an attack on the World Trade Centre. There's a hijacked plane bee-lining to Washington, but has the Air Force been scrambled to defend anything yet? No.
'At 9:35, this plane conducts another turn, 360 [degrees] over the Pentagon, all the while being tracked by radar, and the Pentagon is not evacuated, and there are still no fast-movers from the Air Force in the sky over Alexandria and DC. Now the real kicker: a pilot they want us to believe was trained at a Florida puddle-jumper school for Piper Cubs and Cessnas, conducts a well-controlled downward spiral descending the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes, brings the plane in so low and flat that it clips the electrical wires across the street from the Pentagon, and flies it with pinpoint accuracy into the side of the building at 460 knots.
'When the theory about learning to fly this well at the puddle-jumper school began to lose ground, it was added that they received further training on a flight simulator. This is like saying you prepared your teenager for her first drive on the freeway at rush hour by buying her a video driving game ... There is a story being constructed about these events.'
There is indeed, and the more it is added to the darker it becomes. The nonchalance of General Richard B. Myers, acting Joint Chief of Staff, is as puzzling as the President's campaigning-as-usual act. Myers was at the Capitol chatting with Senator Max Cleland. A sergeant, writing later in the AFPS (American Forces Press Service) describes Myers at the Capitol. 'While in an outer office, he said, he saw a television report that a plane had hit the World Trade Centre. "They thought it was a small plane or something like that," Myers said. So the two men went ahead with the office call.'
Whatever Myers and Cleland had to say to each other (more funds for the military?) must have been riveting because, during their chat, the AFPS reports, 'the second tower was hit by another jet. "Nobody informed us of that," Myers said. "But when we came out, that was obvious. Then, right at that time, somebody said the Pentagon had been hit."' Finally, somebody 'thrust a cellphone in Myers' hand' and, as if by magic, the commanding general of Norad - our Airspace Command - was on the line just as the hijackers mission had been successfully completed except for the failed one in Pennsylvania. In later testimony to the Senate Armed Forces Committee, Myers said he thinks that, as of his cellphone talk with Norad, 'the decision was at that point to start launching aircraft'. It was 9:40am. One hour and 20 minutes after air controllers knew that Flight 11 had been hijacked; 50 minutes after the North Tower was struck.
This statement would have been quite enough in our old serious army/air force to launch a number of courts martial with an impeachment or two thrown in. First, Myers claims to be uninformed until the third strike. But the Pentagon had been overseeing the hijacked planes from at least the moment of the strike at the first tower: yet not until the third strike, at the Pentagon, was the decision made to get the fighter planes up. Finally, this one is the dog that did not bark. By law, the fighters should have been up at around 8:15. If they had, all the hijacked planes might have been diverted or shot down. I don't think that Goff is being unduly picky when he wonders who and what kept the Air Force from following its normal procedure instead of waiting an hour and 20 minutes until the damage was done and only then launching the fighters. Obviously, somebody had ordered the Air Force to make no move to intercept those hijackings until ... what?
On 21 January 2002, the Canadian media analyst Barry Zwicker summed up on CBC-TV: 'That morning no interceptors responded in a timely fashion to the highest alert situation. This includes the Andrews squadrons which ... are 12 miles from the White House ... Whatever the explanation for the huge failure, there have been no reports, to my knowledge, of reprimands. This further weakens the "Incompetence Theory". Incompetence usually earns reprimands. This causes me to ask whether there were "stand down" orders.'?? On 29 August 2002, the BBC reports that on 9/11 there were 'only four fighters on ready status in the north-eastern US'. Conspiracy? Coincidence? Error?
It is interesting how often in our history, when disaster strikes, incompetence is considered a better alibi than ... well, yes, there are worse things. After Pearl Harbor, Congress moved to find out why Hawaii's two military commanders, General Short and Admiral Kimmel, had not anticipated the Japanese attack. But President Roosevelt pre-empted that investigation with one of his own. Short and Kimmel were broken for incompetence. The 'truth' is still obscure to this day.
The media's weapons of mass distraction
But Pearl Harbor has been much studied. 11 September, it is plain, is never going to be investigated if Bush has anything to say about it. In January 2002, CNN reported that 'Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to limit the Congressional investigation into the events of 11 September ... The request was made at a private meeting with Congressional leaders ... Sources said Bush initiated the conversation ... He asked that only the House and Senate intelligence committees look into the potential breakdowns among federal agencies that could have allowed the terrorist attacks to occur, rather than a broader inquiry .. Tuesday's discussion followed a rare call from Vice President Dick Cheney last Friday to make the same request ...'
The excuse given, according to Daschle, was that 'resources and personnel would be taken' away from the war on terrorism in the event of a wider inquiry. So for reasons that we must never know, those 'breakdowns' are to be the goat. That they were more likely to be not break - but 'stand-downs' is not for us to pry. Certainly the one-hour 20 minute failure to put fighter planes in the air could not have been due to a breakdown throughout the entire Air Force along the East Coast. Mandatory standard operational procedure had been told to cease and desist.
Meanwhile, the media were assigned their familiar task of inciting public opinion against bin Laden, still not the proven mastermind. These media blitzes often resemble the magicians classic gesture of distraction: as you watch the rippling bright colours of his silk handkerchief in one hand, he is planting the rabbit in your pocket with the other. We were quickly assured that Osama's enormous family with its enormous wealth had broken with him, as had the royal family of his native Saudi Arabia. The CIA swore, hand on heart, that Osama had not worked for them in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Finally, the rumour that Bush family had in any way profited by its long involvement with the bin Laden family was - what else? - simply partisan bad taste.
But Bush Jr's involvement goes back at least to 1979 when his first failed attempt to become a player in the big Texas oil league brought him together with one James Bath of Houston, a family friend, who have Bush Jr. $50,000 for a 5 per cent stake in Bush's firm Arbusto Energy. At this time, according to Wayne Madsen ('In These Times' - Institute for Public Affairs No. 25), Bath was 'the sole US business representative for Salem bin Laden, head of the family and a brother (one of 17) to Osama bin Laden... In a statement issued shortly after the 11 September attacks, the White House vehemently denied the connection, insisting that Bath invested his own money, not Salem bin Laden's, in Arbusto. In conflicting statements, Bush at first denied ever knowing Bath, then acknowledged his stake in Arbusto and that he was aware Bath represented Saudi interests ... after several reincarnations, Arbusto emerged in 1986 as Harken Energy Corporation.'
Behind the Junior Bush is the senior Bush, gainfully employed by the Carlyle Group which has ownership in at least 164 companies worldwide, inspiring admiration in that staunch friend to the wealthy, the Wall Street Journal, which noted, as early as 27 September 2001, 'If the US boosts defence spending in its quest to stop Osama bin Laden's alleged terrorist activities, there may be one unexpected beneficiary: bin Laden's family ... is an investor in a fund established by Carlyle Group, a well- connected Washington merchant bank specialising in buyouts of defence and aerospace companies ... Osama is one of more than 50 children of Mohammed bin Laden, who built the family's $5 billion business.'
But Bush pere et fils, in pursuit of wealth and office, are beyond shame or, one cannot help but think, good sense. There is a suggestion that they are blocking investigation of the bin Laden connection with terrorism. Agent France Press reported on 4 November 2001: 'FBI agents probing relatives of Saudi-born terror suspect Osama ... were told to back off soon after George W. Bush became president ...' According to BBC TV's Newsnight (6 Nov 2001), '... just days after the hijackers took off from Boston aiming for the Twin Towers, a special charter flight out of the same airport whisked 11 members of Osama's family off to Saudi Arabia. That did not concern the White House, whose official line is that the bin Ladens are above suspicion.' 'Above the Law' (Green Press, 14 February 2002) sums up: 'We had what looked like the biggest failure of the intelligence community since Pearl Harbor but what we are learning now is it wasn't a failure, it was a directive.' True? False? Bush Jr will be under oath during the impeachment interrogation. Will we hear 'What is a directive? What is is?'
Although the US had, for some years, fingered Osama as a mastermind terrorist, no serious attempt had been made pre-9/11 to 'bring him to justice dead or alive, innocent or guilty', as Texan law of the jungle requires. Clinton's plan to act was given to Condeleezza Rice by Sandy Berger, you will recall, but she says she does not.
As far back as March 1996 when Osama was in Sudan, Major General Elfatih Erwa, Sudanese Minister for Defence, offered to extradite him. According to the Washington Post (3 October 2001), 'Erwa said he would happily keep close watch on bin Laden for the United States. But if that would not suffice, the government was prepared to place him in custody and hand him over ... [US officials] said, "just ask him to leave the country. Just don't let him go to Somalia", where he had once been given credit for the successful al-Qaeda attack on American forces that in '93 that killed 18 Rangers.' Erwa said in an interview, 'We said he will go to Afghanistan, and they [US officials] said, "Let him."'
In 1996 Sudan expelled Osama and 3,000 of his associates. Two years later the Clinton administration, in the great American tradition of never having to say thank you for Sudan's offer to hand over Osama, proceeded to missile- attack Sudan's al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory on the grounds that Sudan was harboring bin Laden terrorists who were making chemical and biological weapons when the factory was simply making vaccines for the UN.
Four years later, John O'Neill, a much admired FBI agent, complained in the Irish Times a month before the attacks, 'The US State Department - and behind it the oil lobby who make up President Bush's entourage - blocked attempts to prove bin Laden's guilt. The US ambassador to Yemen forbade O'Neill (and his FBI team) ... from entering Yemen in August 2001. O'Neill resigned in frustration and took on a new job as head of security at the World Trade Centre. He died in the 11 September attack.' Obviously, Osama has enjoyed bipartisan American support since his enlistment in the CIA's war to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. But by 9/11 there was no Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, indeed there was no Soviet Union.
A world made safe for peace and pipelines
I watched Bush and Cheney on CNN when the Axis of Evil speech was given and the 'long war' proclaimed. Iraq, Iran and North Korea were fingered as enemies to be clobbered because they might or might not be harbouring terrorists who might or might not destroy us in the night. So we must strike first whenever it pleases us. Thus, we declared 'war on terrorism' - an abstract noun which cannot be a war at all as you need a country for that. Of course, there was innocent Afghanistan, which was levelled from a great height, but then what's collateral damage - like an entire country - when you're targeting the personification of all evil according to Time and the NY Times and the networks?
As it proved, the conquest of Afghanistan had nothing to do with Osama. He was simply a pretext for replacing the Taliban with a relatively stable government that would allow Union Oil of California to lay its pipeline for the profit of, among others, the Cheney-Bush junta.
Background? All right. The headquarters of Unocal are, as might be expected, in Texas. In December 1997, Taliban representatives were invited to Sugarland, Texas. At that time, Unocal had already begun training Afghan men in pipeline construction, with US government approval. BBC News, (4 December 1997): 'A spokesman for the company Unocal said the Taliban were expected to spend several days at the company's [Texas] headquarters ... a BBC regional correspondent says the proposal to build a pipeline across Afghanistan is part of an international scramble to profit from developing the rich energy resources of the Caspian Sea.' The Inter Press Service (IPS) reported: 'some Western businesses are warming up to the Taliban despite the movement's institutionalisation of terror, massacres, abductions and impoverishment.' CNN (6 October 1996): 'The United States wants good ties [with the Taliban] but can't openly seek them while women are being oppressed.'
The Taliban, rather better organised than rumoured, hired for PR one Leila Helms, a niece of Richard Helms, former director of the CIA. In October 1996, the Frankfurter Rundschau reported that Unocal 'has been given the go-ahead from the new holders of power in Kabul to build a pipeline from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan to Pakistan ..' This was a real coup for Unocal as well as other candidates for pipelines, including Condoleezza's old employer Chevron. Although the Taliban was already notorious for its imaginative crimes against the human race, the Wall Street Journal, scenting big bucks, fearlessly announced: 'Like them or not, the Taliban are the players most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history.' The NY Times (26 May 1997) leapt aboard the pipeline juggernaut. 'The Clinton administration has taken the view that a Taliban victory would act as counterweight to Iran ... and would offer the possibility of new trade routes that could weaken Russian and Iranian influence in the region.'
But by 1999, it was clear that the Taliban could not provide the security we would need to protect our fragile pipelines. The arrival of Osama as warrior for Allah on the scene refocused, as it were, the bidding. New alliances were now being made. The Bush administration soon buys the idea of an invasion of Afghanistan, Frederick Starr, head of the Central Asia Institute at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in the Washington Post (19 December 2000): 'The US has quietly begun to align itself with those in the Russian government calling for military action against Afghanistan and has toyed with the idea of a new raid to wipe out bin Laden.'
Although with much fanfare we went forth to wreak our vengeance on the crazed sadistic religious zealot who slaughtered 3,000 American citizens, once that 'war' was under way, Osama was dropped as irrelevant and so we are back to the Unocal pipeline, now a go-project. In the light of what we know today, it is unlikely that the junta was ever going to capture Osama alive: he has tales to tell. One of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's best numbers now is: 'Where is he? Somewhere? Here? There? Somewhere? Who knows?' And we get his best twinkle. He must also be delighted - and amazed - that the media have bought the absurd story that Osama, if alive, would still be in Afghanistan, underground, waiting to be flushed out instead of in a comfortable mansion in Osama-loving Jakarta, 2,000 miles to the East and easily accessible by Flying Carpet One.
Many commentators of a certain age have noted how Hitlerian our junta sounds as it threatens first one country for harbouring terrorists and then another. It is true that Hitler liked to pretend to be the injured - or threatened - party before he struck. But he had many great predecessors not least Imperial Rome. Stephen Gowan's War in Afghanistan: A $28 Billion Racket quotes Joseph Schumpeter who, 'in 1919, described ancient Rome in a way that sounds eerily like the United States in 2001: "There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, the allies would be invented ... The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbours."' We have only outdone the Romans in turning metaphors such as the war on terrorism, or poverty, or Aids into actual wars on targets we appear, often, to pick at random in order to maintain turbulence in foreign lands.
As of 1 August 2002, trial balloons were going up all over Washington DC to get world opinion used to the idea that 'Bush of Afghanistan' had gained a title as mighty as his father's 'Bush of the Persian Gulf' and Junior was now eager to add Iraq-Babylon to his diadem. These various balloons fell upon Europe and the Arab world like so many lead weights. But something new has been added since the classic Roman Hitlerian mantra, 'they are threatening us, we must attack first'. Now everything is more of less out in the open. The International Herald Tribune wrote in August 2002: 'The leaks began in earnest on 5 July, when the New York Times described a tentative Pentagon plan that it said called for an invasion by a US force of up to 250,000 that would attack Iraq from the north, south and west. On 10 July, the Times said that Jordan might be used as a base for the invasion. The Washington Post reported, 28 July, that "many senior US military officers contend that Saddam Hussein poses no immediate threat ..."' And the status quo should be maintained. Incidentally, this is the sort of debate that the founding fathers intended the Congress, not military bureaucrats, to conduct in the name of we the people. But that sort of debate has, for a long time, been denied us.
One refreshing note is now being struck in a fashion unthinkable in imperial Rome: the cheerful admission that we habitually resort to provocation. The Tribune continues: 'Donald Rumsfeld has threatened to jail any one found to have been behind the leaks. But a retired army general, Fred Woerner, tends to see a method behind the leaks. "We may already be executing a plan," he said recently. "Are we involved in a preliminary psychological dimension of causing Iraq to do something to justify a US attack or make concessions? Somebody knows.' That is plain.
Elsewhere in this interesting edition of the Herald Tribune wise William Pfaff writes: 'A second Washington debate is whether to make an unprovoked attack on Iran to destroy a nuclear power reactor being built with Russian assistance, under inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency, within the terms of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty of which Iran is a signatory ... No other government would support such an action, other than Israel's (which) would do so not because it expected to be attacked by Iran but because it, not unjustifiably, opposes any nuclear capacity in the hands of any Islamic government.'
Suspect states and the tom-toms of revenge
'Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it compromises and develops the germ of every other. As the parent of armies, war encourages debts and taxes, the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended ... and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people ...' Thus, James Madison warned us at the dawn of our republic.
Post 9/11, thanks to the 'domination of the few', Congress and the media are silent while the executive, through propaganda and skewed polls, seduces the public mind as hitherto unthinkable centers of power like Homeland Defence (a new Cabinet post to be placed on top of the Defence Department) are being constructed and 4 per cent of the country has recently been invited to join Tips, a civilian spy system to report on anyone who looks suspicious or ... who objects to what the executive is doing at home or abroad?
Although every nation knows how - if it has the means and the will - to protect itself from thugs of the sort that brought us 9/11, war is not an option. Wars are for nations not root-less gangs. You put a price on their heads and hunt them down. In recent years, Italy has been doing that with the Sicilian Mafia; and no one has yet suggested bombing Palermo.
But the Cheney-Bush junta wants a war in order to dominate Afghanistan, build a pipeline, gain control of the oil of Eurasia's Stans for their business associates as well as to do as much damage to Iraq and Iran on the grounds that one day those evil countries may carpet our fields of amber grain with anthrax or something.
The media, never much good a analysis, are more and more breathless and incoherent. On CNN, even the stolid Jim Clancy started to hyperventilate when an Indian academic tried to explain how Iraq was once our ally and 'friend' in its war against our Satanic enemy Iran. 'None of that conspiracy stuff,' snuffed Clancy. Apparently, 'conspiracy stuff' is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.
As of August, at least among economists, a consensus was growing that, considering our vast national debt (we borrow $2 billion a day to keep the government going) and a tax base seriously reduced by the junta in order to benefit the 1 per cent who own most of the national wealth, there is no way that we could ever find the billions needed to destroy Iraq in 'a long war' or even a short one, with most of Europe lined up against us. Germany and Japan paid for the Gulf War, reluctantly - with Japan, at the last moment, irritably quarrelling over the exchange rate at the time of the contract. Now Germany's Schroder has said no. Japan is mute.
But the tom-toms keep beating revenge; and the fact that most of the world is opposed to our war seems only to bring hectic roses to the cheeks of the Bush administration (Bush Snr of the Carlyle Group, Bush Jnr formerly of Harken, Cheney, formerly of Halliburton, Rice, formerly of Chevron, Rumsfeld, formerly of Occidental). If ever an administration should recuse itself in matters dealing with energy, it is the current junta. But this is unlike any administration in our history. Their hearts are plainly elsewhere, making money, far from our mock Roman temples, while we, alas, are left only with their heads, dreaming of war, preferably against weak peripheral states.
Mohammed Heikal is a brilliant Egyptian journalist-observer, and sometime Foreign Minister. On 10 October 2001, he said to the Guardian: 'Bin Laden does not have the capabilities for an operation of this magnitude. When I hear Bush talking about al-Qaeda as if it were Nazi Germany or the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, I laugh because I know what is there. Bin Laden has been under surveillance for years: every telephone call was monitored and al-Qaeda has been penetrated by US intelligence, Pakistani intelligence, Saudi intelligence, Egyptian intelligence. They could not have kept secret an operation that required such a degree of organisation and sophistication.
The former president of Germany's domestic intelligence service, Eckehardt Werthebach (American Free Press, 4 December 2001) spells it out. The 9/11 attacks required 'years of planning' while their scale indicates that they were a product of 'state-organised actions'. There it is. Perhaps, after all, Bush Jnr was right to call it a war. But which state attacked us?
Will the suspects please line up. Saudi Arabia? 'No, no. Why we are paying you $50 million a year for training the royal bodyguard on our own holy if arid soil. True the kingdom contains many wealthy well-educated enemies but ...' Bush Snr and Jnr exchange a knowing look. Egypt? No way. Dead broke despite US baksheesh. Syria? No funds. Iran? Too proud to bother with a parvenu state like the US. Israel? Sharon is capable of anything. But he lacks the guts and the grace of the true Kamikaze. Anyway, Sharon was not in charge when this operation began with the planting of 'sleepers' around the US flight schools 5 or 6 years ago. The United States? Elements of corporate America would undeniably prosper from a 'massive external attack' that would make it possible for us to go to war whenever the President sees fit while suspending civil liberties. (The 342 pages of the USA Patriot Act were plainly prepared before 9/11.) Bush Snr and Jnr are giggling now. Why? Because Clinton was president back then. As the former president leaves the line of suspects, he says, more in anger than in sorrow: 'When we left the White House we had a plan for an all-out war on al-Qaeda. We turned it over to this administration and they did nothing. Why?' Biting his lip, he goes. The Bushes no longer giggle. Pakistan breaks down: 'I did it! I confess! I couldn't help myself. Save me. I am an evil-doer!'
Apparently, Pakistan did do it - or some of it. We must now go back to 1979 when 'the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA' was launched in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Central Asia specialist Ahmed Rashid wrote (Foreign Affairs, November-December 1999): 'With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan's ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) who wanted to turn the Afghan jihad into a global war, waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals, from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan's fight between 1982 and '92 ... more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghanistan jihad.' The CIA covertly trained and sponsored these warriors.
In March 1985, President Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive 166, increasing military aid while CIA specialists met with the ISI counterparts near Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Jane's Defence Weekly (14 September 2001) gives the best overview: 'The trainers were mainly from Pakistan's ISI agency who learnt their craft from American Green Beret commandos and Navy Seals in various US training establishments.' This explains the reluctance of the administration to explain why so many unqualified persons, over so long a time, got visas to visit our hospitable shores. While in Pakistan, 'mass training of Afghan [zealots] was subsequently conducted by the Pakistan army under the supervision of the elite Special Services ... In 1988, with US knowledge, bin Laden created al-Qaeda (The Base); a conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells spread across 26 or so countries. Washington turned a blind eye to al-Qaeda.' When Mohamed Atta's plane struck the World Trade Centre's North Tower, George W. Bush and the child at the Florida elementary school were discussing her goat. By coincidence, our word 'tragedy' comes from the Greek: for 'goat' tragos plus oide for 'song'. 'Goat-song'. It is highly suitable that this lament, sung in ancient satyr plays, should have been heard again at the exact moment when we were struck by fire from heaven, and a tragedy whose end is nowhere in sight began for us.
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The Terminator's Proposition
By David S. Broder
Sunday, October 27, 2002
Washington Post; Page B07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20097-2002Oct26?language=printer
The 50-odd voter initiatives on the ballot next month in states that allow citizens to write the laws have a dazzling variety of sponsors, ranging from animal rights activists to anti-tobacco forces to proponents of more lenient drug laws.
But none of them has a bigger star promoting its passage than Proposition 49 in California, the after-school-program initiative sponsored by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the latest Hollywood star to dip his toe into the political waters.
I spent a half-hour on the phone the other day with the muscular action-movie hero, and if the verbal torrent had been accompanied by even the mildest of physical gestures, I would have been much too bruised to type these words. As it was, my eardrums got more of a workout than if I had been listening to Sen. Strom Thurmond, the champion Senate filibusterer, in his prime.
It is an article of faith among California reporters that Schwarzenegger is using this initiative campaign as a warm-up for a run for governor in 2006. As evidence, they cite the presence in this effort of virtually the entire political team that made Pete Wilson the last Republican elected to a Senate seat and to the governorship in the Golden State.
They may be right, but I can't confirm that, because I could not get the man to stop talking about the needs of the million California kids under age 15 he says have no place to go when they leave their classrooms -- and consequently get into trouble.
Schwarzenegger was pumped, because he had just come from a news conference on the steps of San Francisco City Hall with Mayor Willie Brown, a bantamweight but a man whom Schwarzenegger accurately described as being "as sharp as the suits he wears." Brown's endorsement of Proposition 49 was one more addition to what was already an amazingly diverse coalition.
The Democratic mayor is thoroughly despised by Schwarzenegger's fellow conservatives, who passed a term-limits initiative a few years ago mainly to force Brown out of his long-held position as speaker of the state Assembly. Schwarzenegger, a Republican married into the prominent Kennedy-Shriver clan of Democrats, said his alliance with Brown shows "this cause is bigger and more important than who you are or what your philosophy may be."
It is certainly a cause of which Schwarzenegger speaks with passion -- and a wealth of personal experience and sociological data. Police statistics show that the peak hours of juvenile crime are between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. "I was involved for 10 years with after-school programs for inner-city children," Schwarzenegger said, "but after Columbine and other shootings, it became clear this is not just an inner-city problem. Wherever children are left alone, they are in danger of getting in trouble with crime, drugs, unwanted pregnancies."
California has a well-regarded after-school program, but the actor said its current appropriation covers only one school in six. His initiative would expand the funding enough to make it universal.
The League of Women Voters and a number of newspaper editorial pages have opposed Proposition 49 on the good-government grounds that spending priorities should be set by the governor and the Legislature, weighing all the state's needs, rather than by initiative -- especially when California, like many other states, is facing a severe budget deficit.
Schwarzenegger said the measure has tried to deal with that objection by specifying that the expanded program would not begin before 2004 and then only if the economy had recovered enough to pump an additional $1.5 billion into the non-education portion of the state budget. He has gained support from major taxpayer groups by promising that no new taxes would be levied for the program.
The actor is clearly serious about his cause. He has put $1 million of his own money into a campaign fund that has reached $8.5 million of a $10 million goal. Opposition groups have no such kitty, but it is never easy to hold public support for a potentially expensive program -- especially in the face of editorial opposition. Still, last week's poll by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found 64 percent approval for Proposition 49.
Willie Brown is far from the only prominent Democrat backing Schwarzenegger's effort. Jim Hahn, the mayor of Los Angeles, Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson and Attorney General Bill Lockyer (himself a potential 2006 Democratic gubernatorial candidate) all have signed on.
Are they letting themselves be used to create a new Ronald Reagan for the embattled California Republican Party? Is all this simply positioning on Schwarzenegger's part? I don't know. But it's not the worst -- or least worthy -- way to join the political dance.
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Bush, Focusing Firmly on Terror, Seeks Unity at Talks
October 27, 2002
New York Times
By TIM WEINER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/27/international/27SUMM.html
CABO SAN LUCAS, Mexico, Oct. 26 - President Bush arrived here this morning for meetings with foreign leaders, hoping to build a united front against North Korea's nuclear program and a stronger global coalition against Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Mr. Bush has 24 hours for a whirl of meetings with the leaders of Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and other nations, including Mexico, whose vote in the United Nations Security Council may be crucial to the fate of an American-drafted resolution against Iraq.
The disarmament of Iraq and North Korea, the disruption of Al Qaeda's international networks in Asia, and the development of economic and political counterterrorist strategies are of the deepest concern to the White House this weekend, a concern that may not generate a unanimous response even among the allies meeting here.
Leaders and ministers from 21 nations are here for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. The group, once a trade-oriented alliance of Pacific Rim nations, a counterweight to the European Union, has altered its focus in the last year. The political and economic impact of terrorist attacks in New York and Washington last year, and in Indonesia and the Philippines in recent days, turned the conference's attention from trade to terrorism.
Russia's prime minister, Mikhail M. Kasyanov, attending for President Vladimir V. Putin, who stayed home to deal with the hostage crisis in Moscow, said world events compelled "the countries which were to some extent reluctant to join in this coalition to more actively participate in combating all signs of terrrorism."
Mr. Bush is to meet first with his host, President Vicente Fox, and even that conversation is likely to be dominated by the American agenda against what Mr. Bush has called the "axis of evil."
At the meeting, their seventh in 22 months, Mr. Fox will try to raise intertwined issues of migration and trade. He wants some legal rights for undocumented Mexicans in the United States, and some relief from heavily subsidized American agricultural imports, which threaten to swamp Mexican farmers and small-business men, driving more migrants north.
But Mr. Bush will seek Mexico's support in the Security Council vote on Iraq, with little or nothing to offer in return, diplomats here said.
Mexico's vote in the 15-member Council will be pivotal next week. The United States is assuming that Mexico will vote Washington's way, but that is not a certainty.
The United States wants strict new rules for weapons inspections in Iraq and "serious consequences" - meaning military force - if Iraq does not submit. Russia wants the old inspection rules without the threat of force. France also wants to forestall a military attack, though its draft resolution would impose inspections stricter than those in the Russian proposal.
Then Mr. Bush will turn to Japan's prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, and President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea. As he did in a meeting with China's president, Jiang Zemin, in Crawford, Tex., on Friday, he will press those leaders to help persuade North Korea to halt its nuclear weapons program.
The White House wants to coerce the North Koreans through economic pressure. China, South Korea and Japan are skeptical of that tactic. North Korea wants the United States to sign a nonaggression pact before it gives up its nuclear arms. The Russian prime minister, Mr. Kasyanov, said here on Friday that North Korea and its newly disclosed nuclear weapons posed no danger to the world.
"We do not have any evidence and proof that North Korea holds any threat," he said.
Mr. Bush will also meet with Indonesia's president, Megawati Sukharnoputri, aiming to stiffen her spine against militant Islamic forces in Indonesia. It took the bombing in Bali this month, which killed some 200 people, for her to acknowledge the force and depth of that militancy in Indonesia, home to roughly a quarter of a billion Muslims.
Prime Minister John Howard of Australia, which lost 90 or more citizens in the bombing, said the nations of APEC had to work together to deal with forces that, as he put it, share "a distaste for Western civilization" and an antipathy for any government with secular values.
President Megawati met with Mr. Howard on Friday and offered her condolences for the attack, the Indonesian foreign minister, Hassan Wirayuda, said. But she also asked him to "tell other Western countries not to hastily issue travel warnings against Indonesia." This tension between terrorism and tourism is a telling example of the tug of war between foreign and financial policies evident at the conference.
Other nations' leaders have used the conference to evoke a common humanity, as did Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, the deputy prime minister of Malaysia, who said that the world was becoming one giant "interconnected village - a village where if a house burns, no one is safe."
The United States is not unmindful of this notion. Mr. Bush is likely to offer some kind of counterterrorism support in the form of soldiers or spies or technology or money to nations like Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia, three countries where Al Qaeda and its allies are a known if shadowy presence. For example, Washington is prepared to begin regular reconnaissance flights by spy planes in the Philippines, where Islamic guerrillas are based in thick jungles, according to Adm. Thomas Fargo, who commands United States forces in the Pacific.
The United States will also ask leaders at the conference to undertake a host of other security measures, such as placing electronic seals on millions of cargo containers used in international shipping. The leaders are to announce a series of counterterrorism proposals and plans before the conference ends on Sunday.
The Mexican government, which has imposed tight security at this popular resort town, was spared having to move the conference to an alternate location when a hurricane missed Cabo San Lucas by about 180 miles on Friday. But one logistic nightmare remained.
A huge white inflatable tent, sheltering the site where the leaders were to have dined Saturday night, mysteriously deflated on Friday afternoon. The crumpled tent, which had no means of support save air pressure, lay on the ground, a sorry sight, before it was removed. The leaders, it appeared, would be dining under the stars.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Blast rocks U.S. base in southern Afghanistan
Reuters
Sun, Oct. 27, 2002
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/world/4381999.htm
KABUL - A loud bomb blast shook a U.S. special forces base in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar early Sunday, but there appeared to be no casualties and little damage, residents said.
The blast was triggered by explosives placed in a tea jug in the yard of a huge compound that once belonged to Mullah Mohammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban regime toppled from power last year.
"After the big explosion, we heard shooting inside the compound for several minutes," Rasouldad, a Kandahar resident, said. "Apparently the U.S. soldiers inside the compound thought they had come under attack from outside."
Another resident added, "Nobody has been killed or wounded as far as we know. The building windows have been broken and there is some more damage, but we don't know for sure the extent of the damage because we are not allowed to enter."
Afghan and U.S. officials were not available for comment on the blast in the same city where U.S. special forces saved President Hamid Karzai from a September 5 assassination bid blamed on a Taliban sympathizer.
U.S. special forces recently moved into the compound in the center of the city. It is guarded by Afghan soldiers.
One Afghan soldier in Kandahar said the U.S. military suspected the guards could have been behind the attack.
Kandahar was the main bastion of the fundamentalist Taliban which sheltered Osama bin Laden, accused by Washington of masterminding the attacks on the United States last year.
About 8,000 American soldiers are in Afghanistan pursuing remnants of the Taliban and bin Laden's al Qaeda network. Kandahar airport has become one of the main U.S. bases. Elsewhere, a boy was killed in an explosion in the border town of Spin Boldak, about 60 miles southeast of Kandahar, a district official said.
He said the explosion was caused by a bomb hidden in a bag of grapes and resulted in a sizeable crater, and added that police were investigating.
-------- africa
Planes Bomb Rebels in Central African Capital
Reuters
Sunday, October 27, 2002
By Jean-Lambert Ngouandji
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26168-2002Oct27.html
BANGUI (Reuters) - Planes bombed rebel-held northern districts of Central African Republic's capital on Sunday as Libyan-backed loyalist troops battled to dislodge insurgents linked with a former army chief, residents said.
President Ange Felix Patasse's forces fought for a third day to try to restore control to Bangui and end the latest episode in a series of mutinies, coup attempts and raids to hit the impoverished country since 1996.
The sounds of fighting died down overnight but erupted again early in the morning. Plumes of smoke sprouted in the rebel-held Boy-Rabe district from the bombing by two small aircraft and missiles fired from a 40-barrel launcher.
Hundreds of people fled from the northern districts toward the center of the city on the banks of the Oubangui river.
"I know of four people who were killed by the bombing, all civilians," one man said. Witnesses have confirmed at least 20 dead, including one of Patasse's nephews, but believe the toll to be much higher.
Presidency sources said Patasse was in a safe place, although his spokesman was captured by rebels and his fate was unclear.
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi flew troops to the former French colony last year to save Patasse. At least 200 Libyan troops have stayed on to help the presidential guard.
Diplomats said they believed more than 100 Congolese rebels had crossed the river from the Democratic Republic of Congo to help Patasse, as they did during fighting last year.
Foreign involvement is a common feature of the region's conflicts. Four out of five of Central African Republic's neighbors are dealing with either insurgencies or full-blown civil wars.
The Central African insurgents include fighters loyal to sacked army chief Francois Bozize, who fled to northern neighbor Chad last year after a brief uprising that followed his refusal to answer questions over an earlier coup attempt.
Despite rich diamond mines and possible oil reserves, the landlocked Central African Republic is among the poorest countries on earth, exacerbated by its years of instability.
Former military ruler Andre Kolingba was sentenced to death in absentia last August for a failed coup in May 2001. That coup led to Bozize's uprising, then his flight to Chad, where his presence soured relations between the two countries.
After Chad and the Central African Republic agreed earlier this month to work to improve relations, Bozize left for exile in France.
Patasse, 65, has been in power since winning a 1993 election and was re-elected in 1999. A grey-bearded agronomist, he has said he believes he was picked by God to lead the Central African Republic.
-------- arms sales
New Yugoslav-Iraqi Ties Alleged
U.S. Says Defense Firms Developing Cruise Missile for Baghdad
By Nicholas Wood
The Washington Post
Sunday, October 27, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A24696-2002Oct26?language=printer
BELGRADE, Oct. 26 -- Yugoslav defense companies have been working for two years on the development of a cruise missile for Iraq, according to a document delivered by U.S. diplomats to Yugoslav government officials this month.
The allegations were made in a "non-paper," or aide-memoire, accompanied by a stern letter to the country's top officials from the U.S. ambassador in Belgrade. The letter asked Yugoslavia to end its breach of the U.N. arms embargo on Iraq, according to a senior Yugoslav official who has knowledge of the U.S. document.
The official said the document asserts that Yugoslav scientists have been working on the development of a turbojet engine for a medium- to long-range cruise missile called CM 1500. It also alleges that Yugoslav scientists have made repeated visits to Iraq since early 2001 to complete work on the project, and that the contracts were arranged by the state defense conglomerate, Yugoimport.
The claims followed a State Department announcement this week that the same company had cooperated with a Bosnian aviation firm to help repair and sell spare parts for MiG fighter planes destined for Iraq.
The revelations were made after a raid by NATO troops on an aviation plant in the Bosnian Serb Republic on Oct. 11. The Yugoslav government has since dismissed the head of Yugoimport, Gen. Jovan Cekovic, as well as a deputy minister of defense, Ivan Djokic.
Senior government officials have publicly sought to play down the extent of any deal between the two countries. The Yugoslav president, Vojislav Kostunica, said Thursday that the contracts boiled down "to overhauling older-generation aircraft engines, rather than to selling state-of-the-art weapons."
But sources within the Yugoslav government said the evidence presented by the United States directly contradicted those claims and suggested Yugoslav firms had been working to update Iraq's military arsenal and equip Iraq with a weapon that could accurately target neighboring states.
In February 2000, the U.S. document alleges, Yugoimport concluded a contract with a company called Al Fatah for the development of a cruise missile. Until now, Iraq has had access only to ballistic missiles, which are more difficult to control.
Yugoimport, the document states, then worked with five smaller private companies to fulfill the contract.
The companies were named Infinity, Brunner, GVS, Temex and Interdeal. They were all said to be associated with or controlled by active or retired Yugoslav army officers. Brunner was assigned to develop an MM 400 turbojet engine for use in a cruise missile. The company is also alleged to have helped build a facility in Libya that manufactures rocket propellant, and to have assisted the Libyan government in obtaining U.S. software designed to improve the accuracy of rockets.
The paper goes on to say that some of the directors of these companies, as well as some from Yugoimport, met with representatives of an Iraqi trading company called Al Rawa at the beginning of 2001 and that Yugoslav scientists employed by the firms have been based in Iraq intermittently since then.
A senior security adviser to Kostunica refused to comment on the claims made in the U.S. document. The Yugoslav government has closed Yugoimport's office in Baghdad and formed a commission to investigate whether U.N. sanctions on Iraq have been breached.
Yugoslav officials appear to be divided on how to deal with the U.S. allegations. Some are pushing for a public inquiry, while others favor a more discreet approach.
Milos Vasic, a defense analyst in Belgrade, said Yugoslav scientists had the expertise to develop such technology but he questioned whether Iraq had the resources to build a missile.
"The problem is not whether they have the know-how, but how they could get the high quality materials that are needed for it," he said.
In Croatia, meanwhile, the Interior Ministry confirmed today that several crates of gunpowder that could be used in mortars, artillery shells and rockets were seized from a freighter in the port of Rijeka. Western officials said police will try to determine whether the powder could be used in Iraq's weapons program.
On Friday, the Belgrade daily newspaper Blic published documents suggesting that Yugoimport had also exported several thousand tons of munitions and explosives to countries in the Middle East, including Iraq and Syria.
----
On-line firearm purchases are not just a click away
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
October 27, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20021027-95756428.htm#2
An article Thursday speculated on how the sniper's weapon could be more concealable than some might guess ("Ballistics cannot identify weapon," Metro). It concluded by saying that people can buy firearms over the Internet. Strictly speaking, that's true, but it should not give the impression that it is at all easy to do so.
All federal, state and local laws must be complied with in such transactions. You can order a firearm, but the manufacturer or retailer must ship it to a federally licensed firearms dealer in the buyer's state. The buyer must present himself at this place of business and fill out the transfer paperwork, submit to the background check and otherwise comply with applicable laws before he can take possession of the weapon. Omitting this fact adds fuel to the "gun show loophole" fiction vigorously promoted by the anti-gun crowd.
RICH FRAYSIER
Charles Town, W.V.
-------- biological weapons
Nebraska on Mark in Biowar Defense
States Face Deadline on Smallpox Shots
By Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 27, 2002; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A24164-2002Oct26?language=printer
LINCOLN, Neb. -- If a terrorist launches a smallpox attack on the United States, Richard Raymond intends to call 10 helicopter pilots, two Sudanese interpreters and a Salvadoran immigrant who practiced medicine 35 years ago.
Quirky as the list may sound, it helps explain why Nebraska's chief medical officer is credited with putting his state in the forefront of an unprecedented national effort to prepare for a biological attack.
Long before local officials in other parts of the country were addressing the daunting task, Raymond was already figuring he would need the Air Ambulance Service to rush patients and supplies across his 77,000-square-mile state.
He realized months ago he'd need Sudanese interpreters -- along with Hispanic, Vietnamese and Native American Indian leaders -- to overcome cultural barriers in this surprisingly diverse part of the country. And the Salvadoran immigrant whom Raymond recruited for a new public health strike force is the only person in Nebraska who has seen smallpox firsthand, making him invaluable for confirming an outbreak.
"It is easier to do this now and be proactive than when people may be panicking," he said. "That's why we've put together a strike force that can go in and provide health care, investigate cases and set up clinics."
The job of national defense may rest with the Pentagon, but in the post-Sept. 11 era of homeland security, state and local officials such as Raymond face enormous new burdens as the nation's front-line protection against attacks with the smallpox virus or other biological weapons.
Because Raymond started planning before getting specific instructions from Washington, Nebraska is far along in resolving the myriad practical details of responding to a biological attack. The efforts by Raymond and his colleagues offer an early look at the work ahead in the other 49 states and highlights the challenges that must be overcome not just in major urban centers, but even the remote and rural corners of the country.
"Nebraska has really shown an enormous amount of foresight for responding to these new threats," said Jerome M. Hauer, who is overseeing bioterrorism planning at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. "They really have become a model for other states."
Raymond and his team knew from the outset that they needed to develop medical, technical and logistical expertise to detect and respond to a biological attack. But the Nebraska experience illustrates that less obvious challenges, unique to each state -- geography, communications, weather patterns and cultural differences -- are equally important in preparing for bioterrorism. 2 Scenarios: Some or All
For months, President Bush's top advisers -- torn between the potential dangers of an intentional release of the deadly virus and the known risks of the vaccine -- have debated who should be vaccinated against smallpox.
In the meantime, states are struggling under a Dec. 1 deadline to prepare for two scenarios: inoculating a limited number of medical workers prior to an attack who could then diagnose and treat early cases, and vaccinating the entire population within a week of an attack.
That means identifying not only the clinic sites but also the personnel to collect medical histories, administer vaccine, monitor side effects and handle security -- for 280 million Americans. It is an extraordinary challenge, particularly for public health departments more accustomed to tracking routine flu outbreaks during 9-to-5 business hours, said Hauer.
With an infusion of $8.8 million in federal money, Nebraska has hired eight additional county health directors, upgraded laboratories, bought computers and fax machines for the state's 85 hospitals and approved Raymond's Public Health Strike Team, the eclectic group he will summon in the event of an attack.
The preparations range from the sophisticated lab equipment being installed at the University of Nebraska Medical Center to the rudimentary color-coded telephone tree Becky Rayman has devised for the East Central District Health Department, based in Columbus, Neb.
What makes the effort here especially noteworthy -- and the challenge for other states so overwhelming -- is the seemingly endless array of small, but necessary, details. Like FredMassoomi's "Go Kits."
The kits contain the pens, clipboards, batteries, extension cords, signs, walkie-talkies and ID badges needed to convert a church basement or school gym quickly into a temporary clinic, capable of inoculating 5,000 people a day. Massoomi, pharmacy operations coordinator at Methodist Hospital in Omaha, is in charge of assembling a kit for each of the city's 21 emergency vaccination sites. He plans to draw maps with the precise location of each kit so that in case of a biological attack, frantic volunteers won't waste time hunting for them.
"This is a huge job," said Carol Allensworth, chief planner at the Douglas County Health Department and one of Massoomi's partners at the Omaha Metropolitan Medical Response System. "We are looking to be able to mobilize a clinic very quickly, in a matter of hours."
Since the day hijacked planes were flown into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, the Bush administration has worried about a revival of germ warfare.
"I remember the alert we got at exactly 12:31 Central time on September 11," Raymond said, describing the warning from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Due to current events, CDC is on heightened alert status to monitor for any possible unusual disease patterns associated with today's events, including chemical and biological agents."
In the French and Indian wars of the 18th century, smallpox was a stunningly effective weapon; British soldiers used contaminated blankets to decimate the native Indian population. Until it was declared eradicated in 1980, the highly contagious, incurable disease killed about one-third of the people who contracted it. Routine vaccinations, however, were stopped in 1972, in part because of serious, sometimes fatal, reactions. Who Gets Vaccinated
Administration officials have not quantified the likelihood of a smallpox attack, but they have indicated it is among the most feared weapons today. The Pentagon, preparing for possible war with Iraq, has ordered the first 1 million doses of vaccine for soldiers headed overseas. Israel, meanwhile, has reinstituted vaccination for emergency medical workers.
In America, the simple question of whom to vaccinate has turned out to be among the most nettlesome. Several state health commissioners say political pressures make the task particularly unappealing.
Raymond decided to draw up a list in increments of 500 doses. On Aug. 15, his deputy, Joann Schaefer, convened a meeting at Mahoney State Park with medical experts and representatives from the hospitals, National Guard, Indian tribes, police, fire and emergency rescue squads.
"We gave them some pop and said, 'Okay, we need a list of who should be vaccinated,' " Schaefer said. Projecting a computer spreadsheet on a nearby wall, the group began drawing up the list, starting with the strike force -- 170 people across the state who would investigate suspected cases, treat patients and open the first vaccination clinics.
Some choices were obvious, Schaefer said. Epidemiologists, lab workers, police and the ambulance pilots comprise the heart of the strike force. Workers at the state's two largest health departments -- based in Omaha and Lincoln -- infectious disease specialists, interpreters, representatives of the Indian tribes and Arturo Coto, the man who treated smallpox in El Salvador in the 1960s, complete the team.
The remaining 330 doses would go to the state's hospitals -- six doses for large facilities, three for rural hospitals. The list can be expanded to 1,000 or 1,500, although some Bush administration sources suggest a much broader pre-attack plan would give Nebraska as many as 5,000 doses.
"The first 500 was the hardest," said Schaefer. "If we get 5,000, it will be like Christmas." Learning How to Inoculate
Under federal emergency plans, the CDC is responsible for delivering vaccine and other medical supplies to states within 12 hours of an attack. But states must distribute the material, which in storage could consume 12,000 square feet, or about half the size of the main hangar at the Nebraska Air National Guard base in Lincoln.
"Most of what we do is move cargo," said Maj. Bob Yager, the civil engineer on the base who is assisting the strike force. The runways can handle any military aircraft, and although the Guard would have other duties during an attack, Yager has offered a dining hall, medical clinic and vehicle shed to health officials.
Both the state and some counties have agreements with private trucking companies to deliver supplies to five hubs and more than 25 smaller towns across Nebraska. Hotels have been contracted to store the supplies, and state planners are identifying nursing homes and other buildings that could provide backup hospital beds, particularly in rural areas.
Although the prospect of vaccinating all 1.7 million residents in a week would be unprecedented, public health workers say they have drawn on previous experiences, such as the rubella outbreak of 1999.
To contain the disease, public health workers announced they would go directly to meatpacking plants to vaccinate workers. But the outbreak coincided with Operation Vanguard, a major roundup by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and immigrants in the plants suspected the rubella vaccinations were a trick. Work attendance dropped 25 percent.
Next time, Schaefer said they would approach immigrant communities in their own language, with local leaders they know and trust.
"We don't think it's realistic to expect them to come and fill out papers at a government site with people in uniform," she said. "They're afraid they'd be deported."
-------- business
[To reply - mailto:letters@washingtontimes.com]
An 'unfortunate' view of the terrorism-insurance bill
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
October 27, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20021027-95756428.htm#2
Thursday's editorial on the terrorism insurance legislation before Congress ("A bad terrorism-insurance bill") reflects an unfortunate view on the matter. The Alliance of American Insurers, which represents the interests of 340 property-casualty insurers from around the country, believes the editorial reaches the wrong conclusion.
First, the facts. The insurance industry needs the federal government to assume a substantial role in insurance markets that have been affected worldwide by a variety of factors - most notably the events of September 11, 2001, but additionally a brutally competitive market, a substantial reduction in investment income, and the global nature of the industry all come into play. Tragic events such as the recent attack on an oil tanker in the Persian Gulf and the nightclub bombing in Bali, Indonesia, impact the global reinsurance market and point out the possibility of terrorist attacks. Knowledgeable investment analysts also stress the importance of the legislation. As Alice Schroeder of Morgan Stanley opined recently: "We view eventual passage [of terrorism insurance] as imperative."
The bill is neither a subsidy nor a key to the federal Treasury for the trial bar. The retention levels on this bill are very high for insurers. For a large company that writes $4 billion in premiums, the retention is $280 million in the first year; in the third year, it rises to 15 percent of $4 billion, or $600 million. There is a payback provision in the legislation as well. Moreover, we do not believe terrorism insurance is the only legislative vehicle for addressing tort-reform issues. While limiting excessive punitive damages remains a worthy goal, we believe this bill - which would consolidate cases in federal courts - is workable. Furthermore, the retention levels required in the legislation will protect American taxpayers in a significant way.
Most important, the peril of terrorism except in selected coverages (marine, aviation, political risk) is not capable of being underwritten across the broad coverages in the property and casualty industry. It is more akin to flood insurance, currently provided almost exclusively by the federal government through the federal flood insurance program. This bill creates partnerships that benefit everyone.
President Bush wisely supports this legislation as a way to assist insurers, contractors, real estate developers and small businesses all across America in helping to protect their workers. The bill also will help businesses obtain financing and will grow an economy teetering on the edge of a double-dip recession.
Perfection should not be a stumbling block in passing this bill. Congress should pass this legislation when it returns to work Nov. 12 to move our economy forward.
DAVID M. FARMER
Senior vice president for federal affairs Alliance of American Insurers Washington
-------- chemical weapons
Concerns Arise Over Type Of Gas Used by Moscow
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 27, 2002; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A24691-2002Oct26?language=printer
The unidentified gas used by Russian security forces in their raid on a Moscow theater appears to have been an incapacitating agent that may fall into the gray area of international restrictions on chemical weapons, U.S. experts said yesterday.
Before storming the theater, where about 700 people were held hostage by Chechen militants, security forces pumped an odorless gas into the building's ventilation system that put most of the hostages and their captors to sleep.
Russian officials have declined to identify the chemical used in the operation, describing it generically as a "sleeping gas" or "special gas."
"We have only been given general information that it was an incapacitating or calming agent, but we do not know specifically the nature of the substance," U.S. Ambassador Alexander Vershbow told reporters in Moscow.
Emergency workers who entered the theater after the raid reported seeing people slumped over as if they were sleeping. There were some reports of nausea and vomiting, along with hallucinogenic effects.
Experts said it was impossible to know for sure what gas was used without more detailed evidence of its effects, but speculation included an aerosol form of Valium or a Cold War-era agent called BZ, which was developed by the United States and nicknamed the "sleeping agent" by U.S. soldiers. BZ can produce both sleepiness and hallucinations.
"It sounds like some sort of incapacitating agent, and BZ certainly fits in that category because it can put you to sleep," said Frederick Sidell, a former U.S. Army chemical weapons expert.
But some experts also cautioned that BZ is highly unpredictable and frequently increases agitation and excitability, which would have undermined the goal of neutralizing the militants.
Jonathan Tucker, a longtime chemical weapons expert and a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, said that the use of BZ or other similar chemicals would be a violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which was signed by Russia in 1997.
The convention bans the production, stockpiling and use of numerous toxic chemicals and agents, but includes exceptions for nonlethal agents used for riot control and other domestic security purposes.
"There's something of a blurry line between a riot-control agent and an incapacitant," Tucker said. "Something like tear gas, which has a very transient effect, is allowed, but an agent that has incapacitating effects for several hours are clearly banned."
Elisa Harris, a chemical weapons expert at the University of Maryland and a former staff member at the National Security Council, said that "if they used something other than tear gases in this scenario, they may well be in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention. But there's really too little information at this point to tell for sure."
Lev Fedorov, president of the Russian Union for Chemical Safety, speculated that the gas used was one not banned by the convention.
"Many countries have such poisonous substances, including Russia," he said on Russian television. "With us, they came into being around the threshold of the 1960s and the 1970s and thank God were never used on such a big scale. But this time around one had to use it."
Correspondent Peter Baker in Moscow contributed to this report.
-------- iraq
Iraqi Kurds discuss draft constitution
By IHSAN AL-MUFTI
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
October 27, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20021027-064448-7653r.htm
ANKARA, Turkey, Oct. 27 (UPI) -- Iraqi Kurdish leaders representing 35 parties gathered Sunday in northern Iraq to discuss draft proposals of a new constitution before presenting them to the Kurdish parliament.
The head of the Democratic Socialist Party of Kurdistan, Mohammad Haji Mahmoud, said the parties were meeting in Kowaisanjak, some 50 kilometers east of Arbil in northern Iraq.
In a telephone interview with United Press International, Mahmoud said deliberations were focused on draft proposals prepared by the two major parties controlling northern Iraq: the National Unity Party, headed by Jalal Talbani, and the Democratic Kurdish Party, headed by Masoud Barzani.
He said the meeting was held after an invitation by the two major parties to debate the proposals and finalize "a unified Kurdish text that seeks a federal, free and democratic system in Iraq."
Mahmoud added that the final drafts would be presented to the Kurdish parliament and proposed to the rest of the Iraqi opposition groups.
He said the objective of Sunday's meeting was to "draw the largest number of Kurdish parties to prepare a unified text on the two drafts that involve the fate of all the citizens of Iraq, Arabs and Kurds, Turkmen and Assyrians, and all the ethnic and religious trends."
The Kurdish official added that a large number of intellectuals and lawyers were expected to take part in the discussions before presenting the final drafts to the Kurdish parliament.
The parliament, based in Arbil, resumed its sessions earlier this month with the blessing of the United States, Britain and other European countries.
Kurdish parties have controlled northern Iraq since 1991. Mahmoud said most of the parties supported the proposals on a federation, which he said meant that "Iraq's Kurds are not seeking independence or the establishment of a Kurdish entity separate from the region."
The Kurdish federation draft, as well as the resumption of the Kurdish parliament, has drawn concern from Turkish officials, who threatened to use force should the Kurds attempt to establish an independent state in northern Iraq should the US launch military operations against Iraq.
Turkey, whose south is dominated by a Kurdish population, fears such a move would infect its own Kurds to seek independence.
Iraq's main Kurdish groups have assured Ankara they did not intend on declaring an independent state in northern Iraq, where the regime in Baghdad has no control.
Official Kurdish delegations held talks with Turkish officials in Ankara on Saturday, as well as with Western ambassadors, aimed at clarifying the Kurdish position and defuse the tension with Turkey.
-------- mideast
Arab League urges Libya to stay
By SADEK AL-TARHOUNI
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
October 27, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20021026-060311-6778r.htm
TRIPOLI, Libya, Oct. 27 (UPI) -- Arab League Secretary General Amr Mousa Saturday urged Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi to reverse his decision to pull out of the 22-member Arab League.
Mousa, who arrived in the Libyan capital earlier in the day, held talks with Gadhafi to discuss Libya's request, officially submitted Thursday, to withdraw from the Arab League.
Sources close to the Arab League in Tripoli said Mousa did not succeed in persuading Gadhafi to reconsider his decision, but said consultations were continuing.
Mousa told the official Libyan News Agency upon his arrival that Libya "is an Arab country with Arab people, which has persevered like the others in the current situation, as we are passing through one of the most serious phases that requires one hand and one mind."
He said that "Arab work from all is needed, and that does not mean we are weak, but we must insist and push for serious and decisive positions, and to confront this vicious attack against us. Keeping Libya in the Arab League is important to all, including Libya."
Mousa, insisting that Gadhafi's role "is important in the Arab process," added that the North African country's presence in the Arab League was instrumental in reviving common action.
"That's why I have great hope that the Libyan message has been received, but it needs to stay with its Arab sisters, and for the Libyan people to remain with their brothers in facing the serious attack we are facing today," he added.
Libya officially requested its withdrawal from the Arab League to protest its members' "weak positions" regarding issues in the region. It came after expressing frustration with the Arab positions.
According to the Arab League Charter, Libya's request cannot be implemented except one year after its submission.
Sudan's Foreign Minister Othman Ismail also arrived in Libya to discuss the same issue with officials and to persuade Tripoli to reverse its decision.
Ismail described Libya's request as a "warning to Arabs on the dangers and conspiracies they are facing," adding that "these dangers require serious stands."
-------- nato
Back to Europe
By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, October 27, 2002
Washington Post; Page B07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20098-2002Oct26?language=printer
Eastern Europe and NATO sprint to the top of America's foreign policy agenda this week after a long hiatus. President Bush will take decisions on isolating the rogue president of Ukraine, making Romania and Bulgaria part of the next wave of NATO expansion, and putting the final touches on a new alliance quick-strike force for use in future Afghanistans.
Iraq, China and Russia have absorbed the Bush administration's energy and attention in recent months. In the shadow of the Iraq crisis, officials in Washington and Europe have nonetheless pushed to final decision points a set of proposals that will reshape the alliance and Europe itself.
At a time of outward cultural and political dissonance across the Atlantic over Iraq, the Kyoto treaty and other issues, the Old Continent faces its most far-reaching wave of change in institutions and security priorities since the end of the Cold War. No U.S. administration -- even one tempted to listen to the Pied Piper of unilateralism -- can afford to be absent from Europe as patterns that may endure for decades take shape.
And appearances deceive. The U.S.-French scuffling over Iraq at the United Nations obscures the failure of Europeans to reach a common policy on Iraq among themselves. As a result, Paris and other European capitals have been devoting more energy and attention to bilateral relations with Washington than they have in years -- for better and for worse.
With Germany, the results of a more Ameri-centric focus have been mostly for the worse. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder harshly slammed Bush's approach to Iraq during the German election campaign. But Berlin is now putting forward olive branches in the all-important security area.
After initial resistance from U.S. officials who were not ready to overlook the campaign demagoguery of others, Washington has agreed to a German-Dutch command taking charge of the small international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan at the end of the year. This step will save American taxpayers millions of dollars in U.S. subsidies that had enabled Turkey to hold the command temporarily.
NATO Secretary General George Robertson helped smooth the way for that understanding on Afghanistan and put forward a promising new unity idea to Bush in a White House meeting last week, according to U.S. officials: Germany is considering taking the lead in providing Europe's NATO members with new heavy airlift capability. Initially at least this would involve leasing U.S.-manufactured C-17s (and helping Boeing's balance sheet).
Robertson was in town to brief Bush on final preparations for the NATO summit in Prague late next month. The president is moving toward joining the consensus already formed in Europe to admit seven new members -- including Romania and Bulgaria, U.S. officials say. A month later the European Union discusses steps to take in 10 new members by 2004.
The darkest cloud hanging over this mood of change and expansion comes from Ukraine, whose "controversial" (a journalistic code word for leaders who are totally reprehensible) president, Leonid Kuchma, is about to be disinvited from a high-profile ceremony that was to be held on the edge of the Prague NATO summit.
U.S. and British experts have just returned from Ukraine, where they investigated allegations that sophisticated radar tracking devices were sold to Iraq two years ago in violation of international embargoes. The experts are set to report that the Ukrainians were unable to substantiate their denials of the allegations or account for a number of the tracking devices, U.S. and European sources tell me.
U.S. aid has been suspended while the investigation is being carried out. The experts' report should trigger the cancellation of November's scheduled Ukraine-NATO meeting during the Prague summit and the warm welcome that Kuchma was to receive there. And Bush should call for a unified effort by NATO's 19 member nations to single out Kuchma -- evidently personally responsible for the illegal sale -- for diplomatic isolation, while still emphasizing support for the Ukrainian people.
The Prague summit will commit NATO to new core missions that include stabilizing the still volatile politics of Eastern Europe, largely by the force of example and interaction, and the taking on of new security challenges outside alliance territory. Approval is expected for a NATO rapid-response force of 20,000 soldiers -- which will include France -- to deal with crises and terrorism on Europe's periphery.
"This is what we should have had in Afghanistan, when we were deluged with offers of help from our NATO partners and did not know how to respond to them," says one involved U.S. official. Speaking privately to a friend in Washington last week, Robertson made the same point more succinctly: "If people offer to help you, you may want to find ways to let them."
-------- pakistan / india / kashmir
Kashmir Coalition Sets Peace Agenda
Reuters
Sunday, October 27, 2002
By Sanjeev Miglani
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26526-2002Oct27?language=printer
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Kashmir's new ruling coalition vowed Sunday to release political prisoners and probe custodial deaths as a first step to end a separatist revolt, but left it to the Indian government to open talks with the rebels.
"The goal of the coalition is to heal the physical, psychological and emotional wounds inflicted by 14 years of militancy," said an action plan agreed by the regional People's Democratic Party and its coalition partner, the main opposition Congress party.
The PDP, whose leader Mufti Mohammad Syed will be the new chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, campaigned in state elections pledging unconditional talks with separatists and guerrillas to end a 13-year-old revolt in which more than 35,000 people have died.
But the two parties, whose action plan came after two weeks of debate and wrangling over who would lead the coalition, left the sensitive issue of talks to the federal government.
"We will request the government of India to initiate and hold sincerely and seriously wide-ranging consultations and dialogue without conditions with members of the legislature and other segments of public opinion," the plan said.
It did not say exactly who the talks should be held with.
The Congress, which also advocates a negotiated settlement of the revolt in the Muslim-majority region, has not said whether guerrillas should be included in the talks or if they should be held without pre-conditions.
PLEDGE OF SUPPORT
The federal government pledged support to the new coalition Sunday, saying it would extend all help to the administration in fighting militancy and securing the welfare of the state's people.
"On both these issue the federal government will give complete assistance to the state government," Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani told Zee News television.
Separatist groups boycotted the elections, calling them no substitute for a U.N.-mandated plebiscite to decide whether Muslim-majority Kashmir should be part of secular but mainly Hindu India or Islamic Pakistan.
India's federal government, which blames Pakistan for fomenting the Kashmir revolt, has said it will discuss with new legislators demands for greater autonomy for the Himalayan region.
"Our policy will be to give a healing touch and win the hearts of the people," Syed, who was federal home minister when the revolt broke out late in 1989, told reporters.
"Prisoners against whom there are no cases will be freed. Many people are held under political grounds, we do not want to keep our people in jails," he said.
LITTLE HOPE AMONG KASHMIRIS
Kashmir's main city Srinagar was shut Sunday after separatists called a protest strike to mark the 55th anniversary of the arrival of Indian troops in Kashmir.
Many Kashmiris, locked in a cycle of violence between militants and security forces, said they did not think the new administration would make a difference to their lives.
"Neither Abdullahs nor Muftis can change (the) situation in Kashmir," said businessman Reyaz Ahmad Bhat, referring to the powerful Abdullah family whose National Conference party was ejected by the elections. "Only God can save us."
It is not yet clear what role Syed's charismatic daughter, Mehbooba Mufti, who is widely said to be behind the party's strong showing in the elections, will have in the government.
Analysts were pessimistic of Syed's chances.
"He (Syed) is not going to make a much difference on the ground, because of the complexity of the issues involved," political expert Noor Ahmad Baba said. "However, he might try to win goodwill of people by relaxing the security situation."
The coalition also promised to relocate men of the Special Operations Group, a counter-insurgency force of the Kashmir police whom separatists and rights groups say abused their power.
India had banked on the elections to boost the legitimacy of its rule in the territory, which was at the heart of a 10-month military faceoff with nuclear rival Pakistan and the trigger of two of India and Pakistan's three wars.
India said last week it would begin pulling back its forces from the border but Pakistan said Sunday it had yet to see any sign of this happening.
-------- russia / chechnya
Russia braces for added Chechen violence
By Jim Heintz
ASSOCIATED PRESS
October 27, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021027-6713290.htm
MOSCOW - A shocked, wary Russia counted its rising toll of dead and steeled itself for new terrorist blows yesterday in its never-ending Chechen war, after commandos striking behind clouds of disabling gas brought a sudden bloody end to a hostage nightmare.
The special-forces assault on a Moscow theater after a three-day siege left Russians with feelings of both pain and pride: More than 90 hostages were dead, but 750 others were rescued and dozens of their Chechen captors killed.
Russia "cannot be forced to its knees," President Vladimir Putin declared afterward on national television.
But the Russian leader acknowledged the heavy cost to victims' families: "We could not save everyone. Forgive us."
The key targets for the unidentified gas were almost 20 suicide attackers, Chechen women, who sat among the hostages wrapped in explosives, officials said. Had they detonated the charges, the toll of innocents would have been much higher, Deputy Interior Minister Vladimir Vasilyev said.
President Bush condemned the "terrorists" who took the theatergoers hostage. "This is a reminder of the risk to the free world that terrorists present," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said as Mr. Bush flew yesterday to a Pacific Rim conference in Mexico.
Besides 50 Chechen assailants reported killed at the theater - some with an apparent execution-style bullet to the head - officials said three other gunmen were captured, and authorities searched this nervous city for accomplices and gunmen who may have escaped.
Three persons were known to have been killed before the special-forces assault began: a young woman whose body was brought out Thursday and the two killed yesterday morning. No foreign hostages were among the dead, officials and diplomats said. In Washington, the State Department said no Americans were killed.
The precision terror operation that began Wednesday night in the Russians' own capital had defied the Kremlin's repeated contention that the nationalist rebels in predominantly Muslim Chechnya were on the verge of final defeat.
Most surviving hostages, staggering or unconscious from the gas, were being kept from family members who gathered in freezing rain outside a hospital, and their conditions were not reported.
But the death toll rose as the day stretched on.
Police officials said hours after the raid that 67 hostages were killed, but the Health Ministry later said the number had risen above 90.
How they died was not immediately clarified.
Mr. Vasilyev, the deputy interior minister, said none of the 67 initial victims died from gas poisoning. He said nine died because of heart problems, shock or lack of medicine. At the same time, doctors at City Hospital No. 13, where more than 320 freed hostages were taken, said none of those hospitalized had gunshot wounds, Moscow's TVS television reported.
The end came 58 hours after the gunmen stormed into the crowded theater during a performance of the popular musical "Nord-Ost" (North-East), vowing to die for Chechnya's independence and threatening to kill their captives unless Moscow withdrew its troops from the war-ravaged region.
The special-forces' assault began in icy rain when the gunmen began executing hostages before dawn yesterday, Mr. Vasilyev said.
"About 5:15 a.m. there was shooting," he told reporters at the scene, three miles southeast of the Kremlin. "There was a real threat. Therefore the operation was undertaken."
Olga Chernyak, an Interfax news agency reporter caught in the hostage audience, said the gunmen killed a woman and a man "before our eyes."
The incapacitating agent apparently seeped into the theater through the ventilation system, TVS said, and then soldiers from the Alpha anti-terrorist squad burst in. Soon the hostages were brought out, some in the arms of soldiers, most loaded unconscious onto city buses.
Government film of the aftermath showed dead female hostage-takers sitting in red plush theater seats, in black robes and veils, heads thrown back or bent over, indicating they may have been shot while unconscious. Precisely placed bullet holes could be seen in their heads. One had a gas mask on her face.
The TV footage showed the camouflage-clad body of the assailants' leader, Movsar Barayev, lying on his back amid blood and broken glass.
A cognac bottle could be seen near Barayev's lifeless hand, and syringes were scattered in the litter surrounding the corpses of other gunmen, their faces masked by blood. Mr. Vasilyev said puncture marks, possibly from drug injections, were found on some gunmen's bodies.
Because only one Alpha trooper was reported wounded, some analysts believed the gas, which officials would not identify, had so incapacitated or disoriented the gunmen that they couldn't pull the triggers on their guns.
An emergency worker who entered the hall behind the commandos said everyone he saw was slumped in the seats, unconscious.
"First we thought that they were dead, then we checked them and found that most were alive," said Vadim Mikhailov. "Inside there was a sweltering heat and the odor of human excrement. People were in shock, starved and incapacitated."
On Friday, reports said the hostage-takers had agreed to release their 71 foreign captives. That didn't happen, but 19 persons were freed, including eight children.
On Friday afternoon, a theater worker telephoned out word that the Chechens had vowed to begin "executions" at dawn yesterday. Later Friday, mediator Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist respected by the Chechen separatists, said the gunmen demanded that Mr. Putin declare an end to the war in their region and begin withdrawing troops, in exchange for the hostages' lives.
But all that authorities ever guaranteed during the three-day ordeal, as far as known, was that the hostage-takers' lives would be spared if they released their captives.
----
Hostage deaths reach 118 after rescue
October 27, 2002
UPI
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20021027-060641-1344r.htm
TBILISI, Georgia, Oct. 27 -- The immobilizing gas used in the rescue of hundreds of hostages from the Chechen-held theater was the cause of death of at least two foreign national hostages, their diplomatic missions said Sunday, as the hostage death toll climbed to 118.
The Russian government said more than 700 hostages lives were saved when special forces moved in as the gas kept the Chechens from triggering explosives throughout the building.
The diplomatic missions of Kasakhstan and the Netherlands each announced that one of their citizens had succumbed to the gas, the BBC reported, although Russian officials have said the gas itself was not the sole cause of death of any of the hostages.
Footage aired on independent television in Georgia shows doctors in hospitals in Moscow saying the several dozen hostages who died in Saturday's dramatic rescue were poisoned by the gas Russian forces used to wrest control of the theater.
The interviews were obtained by Ekho Moskvy, but authorities there would not allow the Russian station to air them, Rustavi-2 television announced in its broadcast. So Ekho Moskvy journalists went to their colleagues in Georgia, a former Soviet satellite just across the border from Russia's Chechnya province.
The doctors in the footage described the gas as being a neuro-paralyzing agent, one that disables the body's nervous system. The description contrasts with other reports that described it as a sleeping gas.
The distinction is an important one for Georgians, who remember that then-Soviet forces used such a gas in Tbilisi in April 1989. The bloody clash between soldiers and pro-independence demonstrators that culminated on April 9 of that year killed 20 of the protesters, mostly young men and women.
If true, the comments in the footage also contradict what has been so far the official explanation for the hostages' deaths. Several hours after Russian special forces stormed the theater, Deputy Interior Minister Vladimir Vasilyev denied reports that hostages succumbed to the effects of the gas. They had been weakened, he said, "because of the stress, they were hungry, they were not given timely medical assistance while they were held hostage."
More than 50 ambulances had rushed to the scene to evacuate the wounded as buses transported the unhurt survivors. About 445 of the some 750 hostages were taken to hospitals around Moscow immediately after the rescue, according to Itar-Tass. The Russian news agency also reported doctors as saying that most would be able to go home on Sunday.
Russian officials initially said 67 hostages had died, a toll that climbed higher as the hours went by to 118 by Sunday. The initial toll of Chechen's killed rose from 34 to about 50.
The Georgian government almost immediately condemned the Chechen hostage taking. Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze declared the crisis "proves once again that the fight against terrorism requires a unified effort."
The popular response has been more negative, however. Despite the fact that most Georgians are Christian and most Chechens Muslim, many Georgians expressed a "it could have been us" sentiment to United Press International.
Part of the fear comes from the conflict over Pankisi Gorge, a beautiful but rugged region of Georgia near the Chechen border that Russia says is a haven and training area for Chechen militants. Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened military operations in the Pankisi Gorge if Georgia itself does not control the rebels there.
A Chechen-born film director who recently filmed a documentary about Pankisi Gorge told UPI: "We are sorry for the innocent lives that have been lost (in the Moscow hostage crisis). We know what it's like because our own (Chechen) people have died for the past decade day after day."
----
Gas Used in Moscow Raid Questioned
October 27, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Theater-Raid-Gas.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- Russian doctors said Sunday that they learned just a few minutes before evacuating hostages from a Moscow theater held by Chechen terrorists that special forces had pumped an anesthetic gas into the auditorium.
Not knowing what gas was used, medical personnel were left scrambling in confusion about how to treat the rescued captives.
They still have not been told what the gas was.
One day after special forces liberated the theater, killing 50 Chechens who held more than 750 people hostage, criticism mounted over the number of dead hostages -- 116 -- and the way they died.
A trio of doctors from the Moscow medical service said that only one hostage had been killed by gunfire. The remaining 116 were felled by the gas, they told a news conference.
``In standard situations, the compound that was used on people does not act as aggressively as it turned out to do,'' said Andrei Seltsovsky, Moscow's chief physician. ``But it was used on people who were in a specific (extreme) situation for more than 50 hours. ... All of this naturally made the situation more difficult.''
Seltsovsky said medical personnel are familar with the general category of the gas, which makes recipients unconscious, and is used to anesthetize surgical patients.
But many questions remain about the gas used in Saturday's assault.
Doctors know the gas can stop people from breathing, hinder the circulation of blood and paralyze the heart and liver, even in controlled situations.
But the situation was not normal for the hostages -- nearly no movement, a lack of water, food and sleep, and pyschological stress.
``For us, there was nothing surprising in the toxicological composition itself,'' said Yevgeny Luzhnikov, the head of the city health service's Department of Severe Poisoning. ``What was unusual was its use in extraordinary circumstances.''
He said that the main causes of death among the 116 dead hostages included respiratory failure, heart attack and circulatory failure.
The doctors said that as of Sunday afternoon, there were 646 patients in 14 hospitals, including 150 in intensive care.
Lev Fedorov, an independent chemist and environmental activist, asserted that medical teams and rescue services weren't told enough beforehand to help evacuate and treat the hostages. That, he said, led to so many of their deaths.
He speculated that the special forces troops were treated with an antidote to the gas, but none was provided for the hostages.
``Instead of wasting time when taking hostages out from the hall, emergency workers and doctors should have given them the antidote right in the hall,'' Fedorov said.
But Seltsovsky and the other doctors said there was no antidote. They also defended the actions of the medical personnel at the theater, calling the the first aid provided outside the theater and modern intensive care methods sufficient to counter the effects of the gas on people in normal health.
-------- spies/spy agencies
Iran Frees 3 Jewish Prisoners in Spy Case
October 27, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/27/international/middleeast/27TEHR.html
TEHRAN, Oct. 26 - Iran has granted early release to three Jewish men convicted two years ago of spying for Israel, members of Jewish groups here said today.
The men were part of an original group of 13 Jews whose arrest in 1999 and subsequent closed-door trial provoked widespread condemnation by Western governments and Jewish organizations.
Ten Jews and two Muslims were eventually sentenced to prison terms of up to 13 years for taking part in a spy ring based in the southern city of Shiraz. Two of the Jewish men have already served their sentences and have been released.
The three men, Javid Beit-Yakov, Farzad Kashi and Shahrokh Paknahad, were released on Thursday, three to five years before the ends of their jail terms.
"They were told that they were released for a long holiday after serving about three years in prison," a member of a Jewish group said.
"The rest of the prison term might change to a suspended sentence," another person familiar with the case said.
Several appeals have been lodged on behalf of the Jewish prisoners whose jail terms were reduced to a maximum of nine years in September 2000.
"We are hopeful that the others will be released soon," the member of the Jewish group said.
-------- un
France Is Set to Offer U.N. Its Own Resolution on Iraq
October 27, 2002
New York Times
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/27/international/27FRAN.html
PARIS, Oct. 26 - In a bold diplomatic challenge to the United States, France announced today that it may formally introduce its own resolution on disarming Iraq at the United Nations Security Council.
In a radio interview, Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin emphasized that France was willing to use the draft resolution formally presented to the full Council by the United States on Wednesday as a basis for an agreement among the 15 members.
But if consensus can not be reached on the American draft, which France and Russia believe gives the United States too much leeway to start a war without further Council approval, then France would offer a competing resolution.
"We are going to try to work with the Americans on the basis of the text they have proposed," Mr. de Villepin said. "If we don't manage that, then we will obviously officially propose our own text."
Underscoring the fluid nature of the diplomacy, one senior French official said today that American diplomats were already indicating a willingness to make substantive changes in the United States draft, a move that was welcomed in Paris. American officials were not immediately available for comment.
Mr. de Villepin's comments, in an interview with Europe 1 radio, raise the pressure in what has been a nail-biting exercise in diplomacy between Washington and Paris.
In a tense three-way contest in the Security Council on Friday, the United States pressed for rapid approval of the resolution. American diplomats added to the pressure on the Council by threatening to call for a vote on the measure at any time, adding that Washington was not prepared to consider major changes to the draft or formally discuss anyone else's draft.
United Nations procedures can be very complicated, and by formally and publicly introducing a resolution, instead of keeping it in the corridors where it can be discussed in private, the United States was clearly signaling its Security Council partners that it had taken the lead.
France and Russia responded by presenting their own "informal" texts, which are not considered official United Nations documents. Early in the week, French officials had assured the United States that they did not intend to compete by formally introducing a competitive text.
But France and Russia believe that the American resolution is deeply flawed and has too many ambiguous references that would give the United States too much leeway to go to war.
France has also been concerned that the United States might try to force a vote on the American resolution, putting Paris in the position of perhaps having to abstain or even use its veto.
A resolution in the Security Council needs nine "yes" votes for adoption and no veto from among its five permanent members: the United States, France, Russia, China and Britain. The last time France vetoed an American resolution at the United Nations was over the Suez crisis in 1956, and it is determined not to be faced with having to decide to vote against the United States on such a crucial matter.
In the radio interview, Mr. de Villepin made clear that, "There is still work to be done, progress to be made and we have said so to our American friends for weeks." He also underlined that France wanted a unanimous vote in the Security Council "to send a clear and strong message" to Iraq, adding that for France the use of force cannot be automatic and is only a last resort.
French officials involved in the negotiations said that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Mr. de Villepin had developed a close working relationship in their regular phone conversations and have agreed that it is crucial for the Council to forge a common position. But French officials said that they were worried that President Bush might suddenly announce a deadline for a vote on the resolution that would force France into an untenable position. A competing French resolution would make such diplomatic hardball more unlikely.
"We are convinced that if everyone concentrates on the main objective - disarmament, the return of the inspectors - there is a strong chance, and the document which we have prepared demonstrates this, of a unanimous vote in the Security Council," said Mr. de Villepin.
Mr. de Villepin's remarks came a day after Mr. Bush publicly pressured the United Nations to act, repeating the American vow to take action unilaterally if the United Nations fails to do so.
"We won't accept a resolution which prevents us from doing exactly what I have told the American people is going to happen, and that is if the U.N. won't act, and if Saddam won't disarm, we will lead a coalition to disarm him," Mr. Bush told reporters after talks with President Jiang Zemin of China.
After Mr. de Villepin spoke today, senior French officials said that France had made no decision to confront the United States head on at the United Nations and hoped that Washington was willing to work with Paris to reach a resolution that all the permanent members could live with.
"It must be clearly understood that we are not in the mood to take this additional step," one senior French official said. "We want to work on improving the American draft. But we are trying to make it understood that if there is no improvement, we are not ruling out an alternative approach."
Asked whether the decision to possibly introduce a competing resolution represented a shift in French thinking, the official said, "I wouldn't call it a shift. It's a step at additional clarity."
American officials have said that the resolution must have a tougher weapons inspection system to ensure that United Nations inspectors gain complete access to any sites they choose as well as to Iraqi experts and documents. It must also refer to Iraq's "material breach" of past Security Council resolutions, the officials said.
In its proposal, France made a concession to the United States by strengthening its own language about "serious consequences" if Iraq does not comply with weapons inspections.
But the French version does not mention Iraq's "material breach." France considers this phrase a "hidden trigger" that could permit the United States to cite any new Iraqi violations of United Nations demands as justification for war without approval by the Security Council.
France sees its own plan as a bridge between the Russian and American positions. Russia is the firmest opponent of Washington's resolution, and the Russian proposal includes no mention of "material breach" or "serious consequences" - that is, no threat of military action.
The council is scheduled to resume talks Monday when it will be briefed by the chief United Nations arms inspector, Hans Blix.
----
Powell doubtful of U.N. support
By Joseph Curl
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
October 27, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021027-793592.htm
LOS CABOS, Mexico - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell yesterday said the United States may not win U.N. approval to use military force against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, sounding the administration's most pessimistic tone to date on negotiations in the world body.
With U.N. talks at a virtual standoff and several foreign leaders refusing to budge on objections to a proposed U.S.-backed resolution authorizing force, Mr. Powell said next week will likely settle the matter.
"If resolution is not possible, then let's come to that realization and move forward. We just can't continue to have a rolling debate without end," he told reporters gathered at the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, a two-day summit addressing the effect of global terrorism.
Also, President Bush and the leaders of Japan and South Korea yesterday demanded that North Korea abandon its nuclear weapons program "in a prompt and verifiable manner."
Mr. Powell said a watered-down U.N. resolution is simply not an option.
"The threat of force and the threat of consequences as a result of continued violation and misbehavior must be there or we know that Iraq will not respond," he said at the seaside resort where 21 world leaders are meeting.
Mr. Powell spoke bluntly about the prospect of attaining a U.N. resolution on Iraq that meets the criteria set out by the United States.
"We have reached the point where we have to make a few fundamental decisions in the early part of next week and go forward. We all agree that it is time to bring the remaining issues to a head for resolution, if possible," he said.
Mr. Bush nearly six weeks ago said he wanted the United Nations to act in "weeks, not months." That general deadline ends in the second week of November.
In campaign speeches across the country over the past month, Mr. Bush has seldom sounded optimistic about the prospect of the United Nations' granting authority for the United States to use force against Saddam.
He has cajoled, threatened and attempted to shame the world body into firm action, saying it runs the risk of becoming as obsolete as the League of Nations if it fails to act.
But at each stop - just as he did yesterday - Mr. Bush concludes with the same declaration of U.S. resolve to deal with Saddam.
"If the U.N. does not pass a resolution which holds him to account and that has consequences, then, as I have said in speech after speech after speech, if the U.N. won't act - if Saddam Hussein won't disarm - we will lead a coalition to disarm him," Mr. Bush said after a meeting with Mexican President Vicente Fox.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer yesterday said it would be "not very hard at all" to confront the Iraqi dictator without the support of the United Nations.
Like Mr. Powell, the spokesman sounded pessimistic about a strong U.N. resolution. "It is possible for the United Nations Security Council to fail to confront the challenge of the threat of Saddam Hussein," Mr. Fleischer said.
France and Russia have been the most vocal opponents to a U.N. resolution allowing the use of force. The two nations prefer what has been labeled as a "two-stage" approach - supporting the return of U.N. weapons inspectors to Iraq, with the threat of authorizing force in a separate resolution if Saddam thwarts their efforts to eliminate his stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
France plans to submit its own draft resolution on a settlement to the Iraq crisis in the United Nations if no accord is reached with the United States, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said yesterday.
To pass, a resolution needs nine votes on the U.N. Security Council. Russia, France, China and Britain - the permanent members of the Security Council, along with the United States - can single-handedly veto any proposal. Britain supports the U.S. plan; China, which has hinted it would abstain, said Friday it has not yet decided whether to vote on any Iraq resolution.
Mr. Powell also said there is still hope for an agreement. "I don't want to say that we're near a solution because it may evade us. But I think we have successfully narrowed down the differences to a few key issues. And if we can resolve these few key issues in the days ahead, then I think we might get a resolution that would be strong."
James Cunningham, U.S. deputy ambassador to the United Nations, made it clear that the United States wants a vote on its resolution by the end of this week. Diplomats said the vote will almost certainly take place by Thursday.
The situation in North Korea also dominated the agenda at the annual economic conference of Pacific Rim nations, this time hosted by Mexico. Mr. Bush yesterday met with South Korean President Kim Dae-jung and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. They urged Pyonyang to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, and made clear their support for a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.
"The three leaders called upon North Korea to dismantle this program in a prompt and verifiable manner and to come into full compliance with all its international commitments," the three leaders said in a statement.
As with Iraq, Mr. Bush said he will work with foreign leaders to pressure the North Korean leader to disarm.
"Our goal is to work with our friends in the region to convince Kim Jong-il to disarm," the president said.
But the statement fell short of U.S. desires because it did not harshly condemn North Korea's actions nor threaten economic or other sanctions.
Mr. Powell told reporters that the United States has no plans to open negotiations with North Korea. Following its recent announcement of having a nuclear weapons program in violation of a 1994 accord, Pyongyang had said this week it was open to a nonaggression pact with the United States. Bush officials said the president will not agree to U.S.-North Korean talks for now because he does not want to reward Pyongyang for its illicit nuclear weapons program.
Mr. Bush has labeled North Korea as forming part of an "axis of evil" along with Iraq and Iran.
On Friday, Mr. Bush secured firm support from another key Asian power, China, for a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.
----
Military officials fear U.N. will weaken resolution on Iraq
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
October 27, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021027-75554930.htm
Pentagon officials are expressing disappointment in the drawn-out negotiations at the United Nations, fearing President Bush will sanction a watered-down resolution that commits the United States to months of unproductive weapons inspections in Iraq.
Officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, say Secretary of State Colin L. Powell appears so determined to win approval of some type of Security Council resolution that the result could be a win for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
The officials, some saying they are "pessimistic," paint this scenario: France and Russia get their way, and the council approves a weak resolution with flexible deadlines. Saddam Hussein remains in power. Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix declares Iraq is disarmed, when in fact the regime has played a shell game with its weapons of mass destruction.
"The problem is with the criteria that has to be met," said one Pentagon official. "It gives [Saddam] the ability to bob and weave."
The casualty, they fear, will be President Bush's options for war in 2003.
After Mr. Bush's stern warning to the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 12 to enforce 1991 cease-fire resolutions long ignored by Saddam, the White House pressed for a new resolution that authorized force if weapons inspections again failed.
But in the ensuing weeks, as France and Russia balked, Mr. Powell has acceded to water-downed language and backed off the administration's policy of "regime change."
The United States wanted the United Nations to demand that Saddam allow his weapons scientists to leave Iraq, with their families, for questioning by arms inspectors. The thinking was that Saddam would never allow the best eyewitnesses to his nuclear-bomb program to leave his control. His defiance would then trigger the use of force to remove him from power.
But that tough language now seems certain to be left out of any U.N. resolution.
Mr. Bush has spent much political capital urging the nation to support a war to oust Saddam and prevent the dictator from one day obtaining nuclear weapons. "If Bush does not follow through, his political future sinks," said one military officer.
Interviews with Pentagon officials revealed frustration with the pace and content of negotiations at the United Nations.
"This is getting deferred, and we're now going through a U.N. Kabuki dance," said one official. "What has caused the momentum for action to slow?"
There is a suspicion among some hard-liners at the Pentagon that in the private sanctum of the White House, Mr. Powell has convinced Mr. Bush that he must get a new resolution if he wants to ultimately use force.
Mr. Powell is on record, however, as saying the administration believes it does not need a new resolution. Its position is that a series of U.N. Security Council resolutions enacted after Iraq invaded Kuwait, and after Iraqi troops were forcibly evicted, provide sufficient authority to topple Saddam and disarm Iraq.
After its defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf war, Baghdad agreed to unconditionally get rid of its nuclear-, chemical- and biological-weapons components - something it has not done.
On the Iraq debate, the administration has two main camps. There are the Pentagon hard-liners, led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and supported by Vice President Richard B. Cheney. And there are the State Department centrists, led by Mr. Powell. The Powell wing earlier this year succumbed to the hard-liner position that Saddam must go. But the timeline, and diplomatic and military method, are still being debated.
Officials say Mr. Bush has decided that the only way to disarm Saddam is to depose him. But he has not selected a final war plan.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld publicly declines to discuss the nuts and bolts of drafting a new U.N. resolution. This may stem from his doubts that any new round of inspections would work with a bellicose Baghdad.
"Inspections don't work, really, in a situation that's hostile," said Mr. Rumsfeld, an apparent reference to Iraq's blatant maneuvers to block the work of inspectors before they left in 1998.
"In terms of being able to disarm a country, unless that country is cooperative, it strikes me as a very, very difficult thing to accomplish," the defense chief said. "I can't quite imagine how that could happen, except through the cooperation of the country."
-------- us
The Secret War
Frustrated by intelligence failures, the Defense Department is dramatically expanding its 'black world' of covert operations
By William M. Arkin E-mail: warkin@igc.org
October 27 2002
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/la-op-arkin27oct27001451,0,7355676.story
William M. Arkin is a military affairs analyst who writes regularly for Opinion.
SOUTH POMFRET, Vt. -- In what may well be the largest expansion of covert action by the armed forces since the Vietnam era, the Bush administration has turned to what the Pentagon calls the "black world" to press the war on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.
The Defense Department is building up an elite secret army with resources stretching across the full spectrum of covert capabilities. New organizations are being created. The missions of existing units are being revised. Spy planes and ships are being assigned new missions in anti-terror and monitoring the "axis of evil."
The increasingly dominant role of the military, Pentagon officials say, reflects frustration at the highest levels of government with the performance of the intelligence community, law enforcement agencies and much of the burgeoning homeland security apparatus. It also reflects the desire of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to gain greater overall control of the war on terror.
Insulated from outside pressures, armed with matchless weapons and technology, trained to operate below the shadow line, the Pentagon's black world of classified operations holds out the hope of swift, decisive action in a struggle against terrorism that often looks more like a family feud than a war.
Coupled with the enormous effort being made throughout the government to improve and link information networks and databases, covert anti-terror operations promise to put better information in the hands of streamlined military teams that can identify, monitor and neutralize terrorist threats.
"Prevention and preemption are ... the only defense against terrorism," Rumsfeld said in May. "Our task is to find and destroy the enemy before they strike us."
The new apparatus for covert operations and the growing government secrecy associated with the war on terrorism reflect the way the Bush administration's most senior officials see today's world:
First, they see fighting terrorism and its challenge to U.S. interests and values as the 21st century equivalent of the Cold War crusade against communism. Second, they believe the magnitude of the threat requires, and thus justifies, aggressive new "off-the-books" tactics.
In their understandable frustration over continued atrocities such as the recent Bali attack, however, U.S. officials might keep two points in mind.
Though covert action can bring quick results, because it is isolated from the normal review processes it can just as quickly bring mistakes and larger problems. Also, the Pentagon is every bit as capable as the civilian side of the government when it comes to creating organization charts and bureaucracy that stifle creative thinking and timely action.
The development of the Pentagon's covert counter-terror capability has its roots in the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. The Army created a highly compartmentalized organization that could collect clandestine intelligence independent of the rest of the U.S. intelligence community and follow through with covert military action.
Known as the Intelligence Support Activity, or ISA, when it was established in 1981, this unit fought in drug wars and counter-terror operations from the Middle East to South America. It built a reputation for daring, flexibility and a degree of lawlessness.
In May 1982, Deputy Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci called the ISA "uncoordinated and uncontrolled." Though its freelance tendencies were curbed, the ISA continued to operate under different guises through the ill-starred U.S. involvement in Somalia in 1992 and was reportedly active in the hunt for Bosnian Serbs suspected of war crimes.
Today, the ISA operates under the code name Gray Fox. In addition to covert operations, it provides the war on terrorism with the kind of so-called "close-in" signals monitoring -- including the interception of cell phone conversations -- that helped bring down Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.
Gray Fox's low-profile eavesdropping planes also fly without military markings. Working closely with Special Forces and the CIA, Gray Fox also places operatives inside hostile territory.
In and around Afghanistan, Gray Fox was part of a secret sphere that included the CIA's paramilitary Special Activities Division and the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command.
These commands and "white" Special Forces like the Green Berets, as well as Air Force combat controllers and commandos of eight different nations report to a mind-boggling array of new command cells and coordination units set up after Sept. 11.
An Army brigadier general commands the Joint Interagency Task Force at Bagram air base north of Kabul to coordinate CIA, Defense Department and coalition forces in Afghanistan. A new Campaign Support Group has been established at Ft. Bragg, N.C. The Special Operations Joint Interagency Collaboration Center has been created in Tampa, Fla.
In Europe, the Joint Interagency Coordination Group handles information-sharing and logistical support with NATO. Hawaii's Pacific Command stood up a Joint Interagency Counter-Terrorist Group this summer.
Meantime, old commands are being morphed into new ones for the covert war. The two Joint Interagency Task Forces in the United States previously devoted to fighting drugs now have the war on terrorism as their highest priority.
The epicenter of the Pentagon's covert operations remains the North Carolina-based Joint Special Operations Command, often referred to as Delta Force. The super-secret command is still not officially acknowledged to exist. Its two-star commander, Army Maj. Gen. Dell L. Dailey, who spent much of the Afghan war in Oman, has no public biography.
Among Dailey's assets is a fleet of aircraft specially equipped for secret operations -- conventional and covert military planes and helicopters, and even former Soviet helicopters. The bulk of those craft, including the reconfigured Russian choppers, fly from airfields in Uzbekistan and from two Pakistani air bases, Shahbaz and Shamsi.
The Air Force and the CIA collect additional intelligence from unmanned Predator and Global Hawk drones. They also have low-profile reconnaissance assets that look like transport planes and operate under such code names as ARL-Low, Keen Sage, Scathe View and Senior Scout.
Not to be left out, the Navy's Gray Star spy vessel, reminiscent of the old Pueblo, captured by North Korea in 1968, now sweeps up sophisticated -- and obscure -- "measurements and signatures intelligence" to monitor the ballistic missile capabilities of Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
Even with all this, the Pentagon wants to expand covert capabilities.
Rumsfeld's influential Defense Science Board 2002 Summer Study on Special Operations and Joint Forces in Support of Countering Terrorism says in its classified "outbrief" -- a briefing drafted to guide other Pentagon agencies -- that the global war on terrorism "requires new strategies, postures and organization."
The board recommends creation of a super-Intelligence Support Activity, an organization it dubs the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group, (P2OG), to bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception.
Among other things, this body would launch secret operations aimed at "stimulating reactions" among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction -- that is, for instance, prodding terrorist cells into action and exposing themselves to "quick-response" attacks by U.S. forces.
Such tactics would hold "states/sub-state actors accountable" and "signal to harboring states that their sovereignty will be at risk," the briefing paper declares.
Never to be outdone in proposing hardware solutions, the Air Force is designing its own Global Response Task Force to fight the war on terrorism. The all-seeing, all-bombing Air Force envisions unmanned A-X aircraft capable of long-range, nighttime gunship operations and an M-X covert transport, as well as hypersonic and space-based conventional weapons capable of delivering a "worldwide attack within an hour."
Who says the arms race is over? Rumsfeld's science board warns against overemphasis on equipment even as it recommends more. Washington is well on its way to an arms race with itself.
And for those who worry that all these secret operations and aggressive new doctrines will turn the United States into the world's policeman, there is a ray of hope.
Rumsfeld is now the field marshal of the war on terrorism, but the Pentagon is also creating new layers of bureaucracy that may save it from itself. Not to mention the rest of us.
-------- propaganda wars
Al-Jazeera hit by advertising ban
By Jason Nissé, Business Editor
27 October 2002
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=346262
The future of Al-Jazeera, the independent Arabic news service, is threatened by an advertising boycott created by political pressure within the Middle East.
The TV station, best known for broadcasting tapes of Osama bin Laden, is losing up to $30m (£19m) a year and is under pressure to find new sources of revenue.
Al-Jazeera was founded in 1996 with a $150m investment by the Emir of Qatar. He hoped the service would be self-funding by 2001 but it has missed that target and the emir has had to put another $30m of his own money into the venture.
Al-Jazeera's management blames its financial troubles on Arab governments who are unhappy with its uncensored coverage, which has seen it carry not only the Bin Laden tapes, but also interviews with Israeli ministers and Saudi Arabian dissidents and, last week, messages from the Chechen kidnappers in Moscow.
Al-Jazeera, which is broadcast via satellite, cannot be blocked but its journalists can be banned, as Jordan, Kuwait, Iran and the Palestinian Authority have done. Economic pressure is also being brought to bear, largely from Saudi Arabia.
"A lot of companies are instructed not to advertise on Al-Jazeera," claims Ali Mohammed Kamal, the station's marketing director. "We could have had double the revenue we have now."
Mr Kamal said Al-Jazeera was operating on a year-by-year basis and must agree a fresh budget with the Emir of Qatar if it is to continue.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Hostage deaths reach 118 after rescue
October 27, 2002
UPI
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20021027-060641-1344r.htm
TBILISI, Georgia, Oct. 27 -- The immobilizing gas used in the rescue of hundreds of hostages from the Chechen-held theater was the cause of death of at least two foreign national hostages, their diplomatic missions said Sunday, as the hostage death toll climbed to 118.
The Russian government said more than 700 hostages lives were saved when special forces moved in as the gas kept the Chechens from triggering explosives throughout the building.
The diplomatic missions of Kasakhstan and the Netherlands each announced that one of their citizens had succumbed to the gas, the BBC reported, although Russian officials have said the gas itself was not the sole cause of death of any of the hostages.
Footage aired on independent television in Georgia shows doctors in hospitals in Moscow saying the several dozen hostages who died in Saturday's dramatic rescue were poisoned by the gas Russian forces used to wrest control of the theater.
The interviews were obtained by Ekho Moskvy, but authorities there would not allow the Russian station to air them, Rustavi-2 television announced in its broadcast. So Ekho Moskvy journalists went to their colleagues in Georgia, a former Soviet satellite just across the border from Russia's Chechnya province.
The doctors in the footage described the gas as being a neuro-paralyzing agent, one that disables the body's nervous system. The description contrasts with other reports that described it as a sleeping gas.
The distinction is an important one for Georgians, who remember that then-Soviet forces used such a gas in Tbilisi in April 1989. The bloody clash between soldiers and pro-independence demonstrators that culminated on April 9 of that year killed 20 of the protesters, mostly young men and women.
If true, the comments in the footage also contradict what has been so far the official explanation for the hostages' deaths. Several hours after Russian special forces stormed the theater, Deputy Interior Minister Vladimir Vasilyev denied reports that hostages succumbed to the effects of the gas. They had been weakened, he said, "because of the stress, they were hungry, they were not given timely medical assistance while they were held hostage."
More than 50 ambulances had rushed to the scene to evacuate the wounded as buses transported the unhurt survivors. About 445 of the some 750 hostages were taken to hospitals around Moscow immediately after the rescue, according to Itar-Tass. The Russian news agency also reported doctors as saying that most would be able to go home on Sunday.
Russian officials initially said 67 hostages had died, a toll that climbed higher as the hours went by to 118 by Sunday. The initial toll of Chechen's killed rose from 34 to about 50.
The Georgian government almost immediately condemned the Chechen hostage taking. Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze declared the crisis "proves once again that the fight against terrorism requires a unified effort."
The popular response has been more negative, however. Despite the fact that most Georgians are Christian and most Chechens Muslim, many Georgians expressed a "it could have been us" sentiment to United Press International.
Part of the fear comes from the conflict over Pankisi Gorge, a beautiful but rugged region of Georgia near the Chechen border that Russia says is a haven and training area for Chechen militants. Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened military operations in the Pankisi Gorge if Georgia itself does not control the rebels there.
A Chechen-born film director who recently filmed a documentary about Pankisi Gorge told UPI: "We are sorry for the innocent lives that have been lost (in the Moscow hostage crisis). We know what it's like because our own (Chechen) people have died for the past decade day after day."
-------- death penalty
How Large a Fig Leaf?
Sunday, October 27, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20131-2002Oct26.html
THE SUPREME COURT heard oral arguments recently in the case of Miller-El v. Cockrell, the latest death penalty appeal from Texas's hyperactive execution factory. At issue in this case is how obviously discriminatory jury selection needs to be before the Constitution requires that a capital murder conviction be thrown out. Prospective jurors cannot constitutionally be struck from a jury pool because of their race. The question is how large a fig leaf prosecutors need to defend a capital trial at which African Americans were systematically excluded from jury service.
Thomas Joe Miller-El was convicted of a brutal murder in Dallas in 1986. His trial took place against the backdrop of a long history of conscious efforts by city prosecutors to keep blacks off juries. A 1963 training manual for prosecutors stated: "Do not take Jews, Negroes, Dagos, Mexicans, or a member of any minority race on a jury, no matter how rich or well educated." A 1969 update said prosecutors should bar from juries "any member of a minority group which may subject him to oppression" and warned that "minority races almost always empathize with the Defendant." While this was no longer stated policy by the time of Mr. Miller-El's trial, veterans of the office testified that at least some prosecutors still observed an unwritten norm of keeping blacks out of the jury box. A study by the Dallas Morning News at the time of Mr. Miller-El's trial found that prosecutors had eliminated 92 percent of African Americans using peremptory challenges, which enable parties to remove otherwise qualified jurors, in 100 trials studied.
And the exclusion of blacks is precisely what happened in Mr. Miller-El's case. A pair of prosecutors -- who also helped prosecute other cases in which courts later found discriminatory jury selection -- appeared to manipulate the rules to minimize the chances of blacks being chosen. And they then used peremptory strikes to eliminate 10 of 11 qualified black jurors. The only African American they allowed on the jury was a man who said that lethal injection is "too quick. They don't feel the pain. . . . What I call punishment is back to the old Indian days. . . . Pour some honey on them and stake them out over an ant bed." The state contends that the jurors were struck on the basis not of race but of their statements in questionnaires and in individual interviews. But Mr. Miller-El's attorneys argue that the prospective black jurors were questioned differently from how the others were questioned, and that comparable answers caused blacks to be struck and others not.
As a general matter, courts ask only that prosecutors identify a reason for a strike that is valid and race-neutral. And the lower courts that have reviewed this case have taken Texas's word that it was the prospective jurors' statements, not their race, that prompted these strikes. This is clearly wrong. We don't doubt that if the court focuses narrowly on what took place in the jury questioning, this case will be a close one. But given the pervasive intentional exclusion of blacks from the jury pool in Dallas that was the norm even as Mr. Miller-El's trial was held, focusing so narrowly seems willfully naive. Against this backdrop, it should be entirely clear to a reasonable person what happened here -- and the court would do a terrible disservice to blind itself to the reality or to pretend that it is okay.
--------
Sniper Death Penalty Issues
October 27, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Sniper-Death-Penalty-Glance.html
Death penalty provisions in jurisdictions involved in the sniper shootings:
MARYLAND
State law requires that one of 10 specific circumstances be met for the death penalty to apply. The criterion that might apply: If a defendant commits more than one murder arising out of the same incident.
Prosecutors say the case meets that standard because on Oct. 3 four people were killed between 7:41 a.m. and 9:58 a.m. in Montgomery County.
They say a moratorium on executions imposed by the governor will soon be lifted.
Maryland law sets a minimum age of 18 for the death penalty, which would rule out its use against John Lee Malvo, believed to be 17.
VIRGINIA
State has broader statute for death penalty, including provisions allowing for execution of killers who commit more than one murder in three years and those with the ``intent to intimidate the civilian population at large.'' Both could apply in the sniper case.
Virginia has executed 86 people since 1982, a total second only to Texas. Unlike Maryland, a 17-year-old would be eligible for the death penalty.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
No death penalty.
ALABAMA
State law would not require prosecutors to prove which suspect was the triggerman in the killing of a woman outside a Montgomery liquor store. A 17-year-old would be eligible for the death penalty.
FEDERAL
Prosecutors would have to bring conspiracy charges carrying the death penalty. For instance, the Hobbs Act allows the government to seek death in murders where killers try to extort money. Police said two letters left during the attacks demanded $10 million.
-------- ACTIVISTS
THE PROTESTERS
Thousands March in Washington Against Going to War in Iraq
October 27, 2002
New York Times
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/27/politics/27PROT.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 26 - Thousands of protesters marched through Washington's streets, chanting and waving banners against possible military action against Iraq. The rally was one of several held in American and foreign cities today.
Fewer people attended than organizers had said they hoped for, even though after days of cold, wet weather, the sun came out this morning. Participants said the shootings in and around the city in the last three weeks had kept people from planning to visit Washington.
Others, though, continued to organize delegations over the last few weeks.
Among them was Liz Mason-Deese, a freshman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has sold $20 bus tickets in front of the student union and handed out antiwar flyers at college football games to get more students to pay attention to the issue. She said eight busloads of supporters had made the trip.
She rescheduled two midterm exams to make the trip possible. "Most of my professors are against the war," she said. "So when I told them what I was doing, they just said: `Hey, that's cool. Good luck.' "
The latest Gallup poll, taken Oct. 14-17, showed that 56 percent of Americans favored sending ground troops into Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power. But other polls detect a wish to wait for allied support and for United Nations inspectors to act in Iraq.
Some of the protesters said the polls reflected confusion among Americans on the war question. Nancy Kanwisher, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at M.I.T., said she saw a growing reluctance to edge toward war. "The people here are not automatic antiwar," she said. "Many of the experts in the field, many of whom are notorious hawks, are opposing this war. This is not just radicals."
Ms. Kanwisher, 44, said she had not taken part in a political protest in years, but had helped organize an open letter from academics opposing a war. More than 27,000 scholars, from more than 7,000 colleges and universities, signed the petition, which was circulated on the Internet.
MoveOn.org, another of the many groups taking part in the protests, also conducted an Internet-based organizing campaign, in response to the Congressional resolution on Iraq. The group said it raised $1.8 million in 11 days in an online campaign for the members of the House and Senate who voted against the resolution and for challengers in the election next month who have taken a stance against a pre-emptive strike.
Eli Pariser, 21, who directed international campaigns for MoveOn.org, said the Internet expanded the scope of organizing to people and places that marches can never reach. "It's a safe and instant way of getting involved," he said.
Still, Mr. Pariser said hundreds who supported his group's fund-raising drive had made the trip to Washington to take part in the march.
---
Antiwar Protest Largest Since '60s
Organizers Say 100,000 Turned Out
By Monte Reel and Manny Fernandez
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, October 27, 2002; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A25886-2002Oct27?language=printer
Tens of thousands of people marched in peaceful protest of any military strike against Iraq yesterday afternoon, in an antiwar demonstration that organizers and police suggested was likely Washington's largest since the Vietnam era.
Organizers with International ANSWER, a coalition of antiwar groups that coordinated the demonstration, had hoped for a turnout rivaling that of its pro-Palestinian rally in April that officials estimated at about 75,000. Organizers said they easily eclipsed that figure yesterday, assessing attendance at well more than 100,000. D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey also said he figured yesterday's rally turnout exceeded that in April, but he didn't provide a specific number.
"We think this was just extremely, extremely successful," said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a D.C. organizer with International ANSWER, Act Now to Stop War and End Racism. "It absolutely shows that when George Bush says America speaks with one voice, and it's his voice, he's wrong."
After a rally that lasted more than three hours at Constitution Gardens, near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the march began at 21st Street and Constitution Avenue. Using 17th, H, 15th and E streets NW, protesters circled the White House and returned to their starting point. Shoulder-to-shoulder crowds filled the streets for several blocks. When marchers at the front of the procession returned to Constitution Avenue on their way back, they had to wait to allow demonstrators at the tail of the march to pass.
Demonstrations in other cities, including Rome, Berlin, Copenhagen, Denmark, Tokyo and Mexico City, were held to coincide with the Washington march, and in San Francisco, thousands marched through downtown.
Protesters arrived by the busload, by car and by Metro early yesterday morning, some carrying signs and later joining in chants that echoed a common theme: A war against Iraq would be unjustified, and there is no consensus for it.
"Nebraskans for Peace" and "Hoosiers for Non-Violence" chanted alongside silver-coiffed retirees from Chicago and a Muslim student association from Michigan. Parents could be seen enjoying a sunny, picnic-perfect afternoon by pushing a stroller with one hand and carrying a "No War for Oil" sign with the other. Police on horseback monitored nearby.
The tone of the rally was far different from the District's last major protest -- the September demonstrations during the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. During those events, anti-globalization protesters had intended to paralyze the city with disruptive throngs, but their numbers were much smaller than expected, and they were dominated by a massive police presence. More than 600 people were arrested during the IMF and World Bank protests; yesterday, police reported three arrests.
Several groups, including the Anti-Capitalist Convergence that organized one of September's protests, mounted an independent march that fed into yesterday's rally and said everyone had agreed upon a non-confrontational goal from the outset.
"I don't think police want problems, and I don't think we want problems either," said Pat Elder, 47, a Bethesda antiwar activist who participated in the unpermitted feeder march.
The morning began under hazy skies on the wet grass at Constitution Gardens, as thick mud sucked at the heels of the arriving demonstrators and the nearby Washington Monument appeared truncated by fog. But by noon the skies cleared and most of the lawn was shoulder-to-shoulder with people listening to Jesse Jackson, actress Susan Sarandon, singer Patti Smith and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, among other speakers.
Several speakers referred to Vietnam era protests, and organizers were eager to compare the current movement with the one that peaked with a rally of between 250,000 and 500,000 people in Washington in 1969. The last large-scale peace protest in Washington was in 1991, when about 75,000 demonstrated during the height of the Persian Gulf War.
Unlike those protests, yesterday's rally was different in that it preceded war, and many interpreted that as an indication of a potentially powerful movement.
"During the Vietnam War, no demonstration of comparable size took place until 1967, three years after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution [that gave President Lyndon B. Johnson congressional authority to expand the war in Vietnam]," said Brian Becker, co-director of the International Action Center, one of the groups that make up International ANSWER.
But if the passions of the Vietnam era led to protests that often trembled on the edge between control and chaos, yesterday's event suggested that this movement is burning at a lower flame.
"Here I'm not being spit on, people aren't throwing tomatoes at me and Joan Baez isn't singing," said protest veteran Dot Magargal, 77, from Media, Pa. "People just want to come out and say that not everyone wants to go to war. This is a lot of people, a lot of voters, and it has to count for something."
For those looking for symbols often associated with left-wing demonstrations -- Grateful Dead T-shirts, dreadlocks, anti-corporate slogans, Socialist newsletters -- plenty could be found. But it wasn't necessary to comb through the fringe to find people who didn't fit the mold. Many said they were first-time protesters who had never attended a rally. Some said they were against all war, no matter the circumstances, and others said they were simply against the possibility of an Iraq invasion.
"I've never in my life done anything like this before," said Marie Johnson, 31, of Columbia. "What I wanted to do was say that even though Bush puts forth that everyone supports going to war against Iraq, some of us don't. I just thought it was important for me to do something to show how I felt."
Peggy McGrath, 59, said she hoped that Bush would look out of the windows of the White House to see that thousands disagreed with him. She said she remained optimistic that he might change his mind, especially if enough people voiced opposition.
"I think there's actually been a shift already in Bush's rhetoric in the last two weeks," said McGrath, who was on one in a caravan of eight buses from Chicago. "The hope is that maybe he'll see this, and maybe it can be stopped before it's started."
Bush, however, wasn't at the White House. He and first lady Laura Bush flew yesterday from their Texas ranch to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where the president was attending the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. Among other things, Bush was seeking to rally fellow leaders behind his Iraq stance.
The president had some support at the rally from a group of about 100 counter-protesters who gathered at 17th Street and Constitution Avenue. Along with activists from the national group Free Republic, a group of Iraqi exiles chanted slogans against Saddam Hussein. In one of the few points of tension during the day, police stepped into a scuffle between peace activists and counter-protesters and led away two of the former.
One who joined the counter-protesters, Imam Husham Al-Husainy, explained that he came to Washington from the Detroit area with about 40 Iraqis to present the view of people who had suffered under Hussein.
"Most of these people across the street, they don't know the reality in Iraq," Al-Husainy said.
Although the main protest message was focused on opposing war in Iraq, a few other causes slipped into the mix. Many of the same people who marched for Palestinian rights in April joined yesterday's march, waving Palestinian flags. But like others who had become activists for other causes, they said opposing the war was what brought them out yesterday.
"I don't come here to carry signs for fun," said Ribhi Ramadan, 36, who brought his family of seven from Paterson, N.J., to the protest. "I support not just Palestine, but everywhere that's threatened by war."
Luigi Procopio, 45, a social worker from the district, wore a pink triangle with "$ FOR AIDS NOT WAR" written on it. He said even though he normally focuses his activism on issues in the gay community, he and at least a dozen friends came to protest the war in Iraq.
"It's time, man. . . . It feels imminent," he said. "Congress has just rolled over."
Some protesters said they had been worried about attendance before they arrived at the rally. Larina Brown, 22, a student from the University of Minnesota-Morris, said she had feared that she and the 30 friends she traveled with would be greeted by scant crowds.
"It's a relief, really," Brown said. "I really wanted this to be a big statement, to show it's not just radical, anti-American people who go to these things."
Most of those who arrived in the morning on buses climbed back aboard shortly after the rally ended. By 5:45 p.m., the streets were almost deserted, and protesters had put down their signs and were sitting on park benches snacking.
Mark Zheng, 33, of Amherst, Mass., stopped to take a photo of two friends in front of a fountain in Lafayette Square. Zheng, from China, had been at the Tiananmen Square protests. He said he was impressed by the orderliness of the march.
"I think maybe people have different thoughts on things, but one thing is clear," he said. "Peace."
Staff writers David A. Fahrenthold, Ylan Q. Mui and Mary Beth Sheridan, staff researcher Madonna Lebling, special correspondent Liz Garone in San Francisco and wire services contributed to this report.
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IRAQ: 12 Americans Stage Protest, Hussein Is Happy to Allow
October 27, 2002
By JOHN F. BURNS
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/27/international/middleeast/27IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 26 - A group of 12 Americans from a Chicago-based pacifist group, Voices in the Wilderness, gathered today to bring the American style of protest to Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
If they had been here to agitate against Mr. Hussein's government, as groups of Iraqis did briefly earlier in the week, they would almost certainly have been treated as the Iraqis were and ordered abruptly to disperse. Like the Iraqis, who were demanding that Mr. Hussein's government account for people who disappeared in the hands of the state security prisons years ago, they might even have been subjected to warning shots fired in the air.
But since the Americans came to protest against President Bush and his threats of war against Iraq, the Iraqi police kept well away, giving the visitors as much time as they needed to make their case.
Standing on the shoulder of the busy highway that runs past the United Nations building here, the Americans - from New York, Albany, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Mo., and Spokane, Wash., as well as Chicago - raised signs reading "No U.N. Blank Check for Bush," a reference to the American campaign at the Security Council for a tough new mandate for arms inspections in Iraq that could be used as a basis for a military attack.
Kathy Kelly, a 49-year-old former Chicago high school English teacher who is a co-founder of Voices in the Wilderness, spoke out against the Bush administration and in defense of positions taken by Mr. Hussein.
At one point, she said she wished that the United States government would follow Mr. Hussein's example in ordering the emptying of Iraq's prisons, a move the Iraqi leader made last Sunday, in part to counter Mr. Bush's descriptions of him as a murdering tyrant.
"I wish people in our country would be willing to show the same spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation to the two million people in our prisons," she said.
What was notable at today's protests was not so much that the government left the visitors unhindered, since the Americans were making a case that Mr. Hussein clearly wanted to hear, but that Iraq's state-controlled news organizations were barely represented. The government apparently did not wish to give too much attention to the American demonstrators since that might have sent a signal that street protests are acceptable now, after all.
That left the field to Western reporters, mostly Americans, who outnumbered the protesters by about five to one. What ensued was a curious verbal free-for-all between American reporters and Ms. Kelly.
Ms. Kelly is on her 16th visit to Baghdad, going back to the period of the Persian Gulf war when she and her American companions protesting against the American-led war to drive Iraqi occupation troops from Kuwait camped briefly on the Iraqi side of the desert border between Iraq and Kuwait. In 1996, she helped establish Voices in the Wilderness from her Chicago kitchen for the purpose of campaigning against the United Nations sanctions imposed on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait.
Those sanctions, greatly eased, remain in place over a decade later as part of the American-led effort to force Iraq to meet the terms of United Nations resolutions calling for it to dismantle its biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs.
Iraq's contention, considered wildly exaggerated by many who have studied the issue, is that the sanctions have caused more than 1.7 million deaths, including those of a million children, through malnutrition and disease resulting from shortages of food and medicines.
"When I ask myself who has created the greatest threat to the people of Iraq, my answer is, the United States," Ms. Kelly said.
Ms. Kelly said Voices in the Wilderness saw its mission in Iraq as giving the world an "education that is desperately needed" about America's real aims in Iraq, to combat the "cartoonized version of foreign policy" that she said emanated from the Bush White House. The issue for the Bush administration, she said, was not Iraq's weapons of mass destruction but control of its oil.
Asked repeatedly about Mr. Hussein's rights abuses, Ms. Kelly acknowledged there had been excesses in Iraq. But each answer was cast in a way that shifted the topic quickly back to what she sees as America's transgressions.
"I don't think there's any way to sidestep the fact that there have been abuses" in Iraq, she said. "However I come from the United States, and my primary responsibility is to speak out against the U.S.A. My responsibility is to speak out against my government inflicting punishment unto death upon hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children under the age of 5."
---
U.S. Peace Group Holds Anti-War Protest in Baghdad
Quixotic American Demonstration Draws More Journalists Than Participants, but Iraqi Government Willingly Plays Host
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, October 27, 2002; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A24692-2002Oct26?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 26 -- The turnout was anemic, the signs trite and the passersby nonplussed. But for a small group of American pacifists who wanted to protest the Bush administration's threat to go to war with Iraq, all that mattered was location.
In one of the more quixotic displays of anti-war activism anywhere in the world in recent weeks, a half-dozen members of an American peace organization staged a public demonstration today at the entrance to the U.N. offices here. This evening, the same group held a candlelight vigil in front of the former U.S. Embassy building.
Outnumbered by a throng of foreign journalists, the protesters held up large signs calling for "No Attack on Iraq" and "No U.N. Blank Check for Bush." The protesters urged the U.S. government and the United Nations to lift economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which have been blamed by Iraq for a steep increase in infant mortality, disease and malnutrition.
Although the demonstration was minuscule compared with similar events elsewhere, it illustrated how some peace activists have tried to bring their anti-war campaign to what could be Ground Zero, using the backdrop of Baghdad, with the enthusiastic backing of President Saddam Hussein's government, to highlight the possible consequences of a conflict on Iraq's civilian population.
Earlier this year, a few dozen Americans walked through 100 miles of desert to Baghdad to urge both nations to resolve their differences peacefully. And now, a handful of U.S. activists have arrived here -- their leader says more are on the way -- with the intention of becoming voluntary human shields in the event of a war.
"As long as we're allowed to stay, I'll be here," said Eric Edgin, 20, an Indianapolis resident who arrived in Baghdad two weeks ago and participated in today's rally. "I can't deal with the fact that the country I'm from is the country that is causing so much suffering here."
Most of the anti-war events that have occurred here, including today's demonstrations, were organized by a Chicago-based advocacy group called Voices in the Wilderness, which has been waging a lonely campaign to lift the U.N. economic sanctions. Its president, Kathy Kelly, a 49-year-old former high-school English teacher, said the group has helped bring more than 400 sympathetic Americans here since the group's inception in 1996.
"Iraq doesn't pose a threat to the United States or to neighboring states in the region," she said to a crowd of reporters outside the U.N. offices. "Iraq only poses a threat to the United States' ability to control its oil."
Kelly, who said she was once accused by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright of "living in an Alice-in-Wonderland fantasy," has become a minor folk hero here. She has spent weeks living with Iraqi families, including one couple in the southern port city of Basra whose son was killed during a U.S. airstrike.
Kelly said the group has come into the cross hairs of the U.S. government, which earlier this year slapped $10,000 fines on two members for traveling to Iraq, which is a violation of U.S. law for anyone who is not a journalist or on official government business. The two members raised the money through donations, but then used the funds to buy medicine, which they distributed in Basra, she said.
The Iraqi government appears more than happy to play host to Kelly and her group. Officials have generously doled out hard-to-get visas, and they allow the group to stay in hotels at the same rate ordinary Iraqis pay, though Kelly said the organization accepts no funds from the government.
In other ways, however, the government has kept the group at arm's length. Today's events were not covered by the state-controlled media and a dozen uniformed soldiers surrounded the demonstrators, dissuading any ordinary Iraqis from participating.
There was no immediate reaction from U.N. staff here or the Polish diplomats who have been babysitting the U.S. Embassy since the early 1990s. Both buildings were closed today. But the events were clearly designed for the dozens of foreign journalists in Iraq, whose presence at the protest in front of the U.N. offices outnumbered the participants by more than four-to-one.
Asked how she can justify the continued tenure of Hussein, who has been accused of ordering the torture and killing of thousands of political dissidents as well as ethnic Kurds and Shiite Muslims, Kelly said she has raised the issue of human-rights abuses with government leaders during meetings. But she insisted that the possible impact of a war was far more dangerous to the Iraqi people than that of political repression.
----
Anti-war crowd noisy, peaceful
By Guy Taylor and Denise Barnes
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
October 27, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20021027-85033144.htm
Thousands of anti-war demonstrators converged on Washington yesterday to rally for peace and protest pre-emptive military action against Iraq.
The demonstrators came from around the nation to beat drums, chant peace slogans, dance in circles and carry signs with such messages as: "No War With Iraq" and "Iraqi Children Are Not 'Collateral Damage.'"
The gathering remained peaceful throughout the day. It started early near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and ended in the evening after a march around the White House.
It was the largest anti-war gathering in the country on a day that saw similar protests in San Francisco; Augusta, Maine; and San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Protests also took place in Italy, Japan, Denmark, Sweden, Mexico, and in Berlin, where thousands of demonstrators marched before the U.S. and British Embassies, protesting U.S. war policies.
The activist group International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism), orchestrated the Washington rally. Organizers said more than 100,000 people were in the crowd that stretched at least five blocks along Constitution Avenue NW.
"We are going to war for all the wrong reasons," said Melissa Bradley, who came from New York City's Harlem section to protest. "It's a coverup, an opportunity for George Bush to take the focus off of what is happening in the United States."
Money spent on a war would be better spent on domestic problems, said Ms. Bradley, 34, who is most concerned about the plight of minorities in the United States. "People of color are fighting for their lives every day, fighting for jobs, fighting for freedom, health care and basic rights," she said. "People of color will be inadvertently affected by this war. If there's a draft, the brothers will go first."
Ben Hood, 43, and his wife, Anne, came from western Massachusetts, carrying a sign that stated, "Bush + Cheney = Axis of War." Mr. Hood said a war with Iraq "will serve the Bush administration's purposes because they want the oil in Iraq and to control the oil in the Middle East."
Police said a counter-demonstration at the corner of 17th Street and Constitution Avenue NW was so small that it presented no threat to the peaceful nature of the day.
The counter-demonstration included a contingent of about two dozen Iraqi-Americans, many of whom wore white turbans and long robes. The group was organized by leaders of various Islamic community centers, which included the Annandale, Va.-based Iraqi-American Council. They banged drums and held signs bearing messages such as "Save the World From Saddam's Mass-Destruction Weapon."
The anti-war demonstrators "have no idea about what Saddam does," said Said Al-Waly, who came to the United States in 1998 as a refugee from Iraq. "There are people suffering because of Saddam's regime. We want democracy and human rights in Iraq."
Hassan Al-Harery, an imam representing the Karbala Islamic Center in Detroit, spoke through a translator to say, "If the world does not stop Saddam now, it will be too late later on."
The anti-war rally centered on a series of rousing speeches from the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and others, including actress Susan Sarandon, singer Patti Smith and businessman Ben Cohen, the co-founder of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream.
"We need a regime change in this country," Mr. Jackson shouted over a loudspeaker to the spirited crowed. "There are some wars we should fight: the Civil War, to preserve the Union and end slavery; World War II, to end fascism; and even the Gulf war, to remove Iraq from Kuwait," he said. "But today, our coalition allies say there is no threat."
Last week President Bush signed legislation passed by Congress giving him power to authorize the use of military force to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from power. Mr. Jackson said Iraq presents "no imminent danger" to the world, so "we would do better to negotiate. We are saying use containment over expansion, and that's why the number of people protesting this war will only grow."
Swarms of demonstrators performed "anti-war" dances. In one circle, men and women of a wide range of ages - most appeared to be college-age or in their early 20s - pounded leather drums and chanted: "We want peace. We want peace."
A haunting display was staged nearby when two dozen activists lay on the ground in white, plastic body bags. "Thousands and thousands of people are going to die in this war, including American servicemen and women, people in the Iraqi service and innocent civilians, but it will appear on television like a well-choreographed video game," said John Sellers, director of the Ruckus Society, an Oakland, Calif.-based group that organized the display.
Natalie Brandon, 24, who lives in the District, stood sentry nearby. "We talk a lot about why we're going to war, but [the body bags] are something we don't see," she said. "People will die. It will be the people we care about and love."
----
Thousands March Against War in Iraq
By LAWRENCE L. KNUTSON
Associated Press Writer
Oct 27, 2002 9:12 AM EST
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/ANTI_WAR_PROTEST?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
Valentino says a pre-emptive strike against Iraq would have negative consequences for the U-S. (Audio)
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Tens of thousands of anti-war protesters circled the White House on Saturday after Jesse Jackson and other speakers denounced the Bush administration's Iraq policies and demanded a revolt at the ballot box to promote peace.
The protest coincided with anti-war demonstrations from Augusta, Maine, to San Francisco and abroad from Rome and Berlin to Tokyo to San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Mexico City. In Washington and many of the other demonstrations, protesters added complaints about U.S. policy toward the Palestinians.
"We must not be diverted. In two years we've lost 2 million jobs, unemployment is up, stock market down, poverty up," Jackson told a spirited crowd in Washington. "It's time for a change. It's time to vote on Nov. 5 for hope. We need a regime change in this country."
Congress has authorized the use of military force to achieve the administration policy of "regime change" in Iraq.
"If we launch a pre-emptive strike on Iraq we lose all moral authority," Jackson told the chanting, cheering throng spread out on green lawns near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Advertisement
A sign showed Bush's face at the end of two bright red bombs with the caption: "Drop Bush, not bombs."
The protest brought out the elderly, young parents with babies in strollers, even a man dressed as Uncle Sam wearing dreadlocks and another Uncle Sam, on stilts, with an elongated Pinocchio nose.
Protest organizers claimed up to 200,000 people had answered the call to challenge President Bush's determination to force out Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Because the U.S. Park Police no longer issues crowd estimates, the size of the crowd could not be verified. As the march began, participants stretched for at least five city blocks.
On a nearby street corner, a handful of Iraqi-Americans staged a counterdemonstration. Aziz al-Taee, spokesman for the Iraqi-American Council, said, "I think America is doing just fine. ... We think every day Saddam stays in power, he kills more Iraqis."
New Englanders ventured out in snow, sleet and rain to join demonstrations in Maine and Vermont. Across the nation a couple thousand showed up at the Colorado capitol in downtown Denver, and demonstrators marched at San Francisco.
The thousands who gathered in cities across Europe, Asia and beyond also displayed vocal opposition to the U.S. policy toward Iraq and demanded reversal of Bush's Iraq policies.
In San Francisco, demonstrators stretched about a mile as they marched from the financial district to City Hall, carrying placards that read, "Money for jobs, not for war" and "No blood for oil."
Young punk rockers with mohawks, aging hippies and middle-aged couples with children all took part, chanting, "One, two, three, four, we don't want your racist war."
More than 2,000 chanting, drum-beating protesters marched on a home owned by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld near Taos, N.M., waving placards that read, "Rumsfeld is a War Criminal" and "Teachers Against War." A few protesters held photographs of Iraqi children.
A Secret Service agent said Rumsfeld was not at home.
In Berlin, an estimated 8,000 people, brandishing placards that declared "War on the imperialist war," converged on the downtown Alexanderplatz and marched past the German Foreign Ministry. Another 1,500 showed up in Frankfurt, 500 in Hamburg.
Another 1,500 rain-soaked demonstrators gathered under umbrellas outside the U.S. Embassy in Copenhagen, Denmark. More than 1,000 marched in Stockholm, Sweden.
In Washington, civil rights activist Al Sharpton addressed Bush, even though the president was at an economic summit in Mexico.
"It would have been good for you to be here, George, so you could see what America really looks like," Sharpton said. "We are the real America.
"We are the patriots that believe that America should heal the world and not bring the world to nuclear war over the interests of those business tycoons who put you in the White House."
Associated Press writers Elizabeth Wolfe in Washington and Angela Watercutter in San Francisco contributed to this report.
On the Net:
International Answer: http://www.internationalanswer.org
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Anti-war protesters gather in Europe
By Geir Moulson
ASSOCIATED PRESS
October 27, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021027-78643376.htm
BERLIN - Demanding an end to threats of an "unjustified" war against Iraq, thousands gathered in cities across Europe and beyond yesterday to demonstrate their opposition against U.S. policy toward Iraq.
In Berlin, crowds of people brandishing placards that declared "War on the imperialist war," "Stop Bush's campaign" and "No blood for oil," along with a few Iraqi and Palestinian flags, converged on the downtown Alexanderplatz square and marched past the German Foreign Ministry.
Police estimated that as many as 8,000 people took part in damp, windy weather, while organizers put the number at 30,000. No trouble was reported.
Some 1,500 people turned out in Frankfurt and another 500 in Hamburg, according to police, while another 1,500 rain-soaked demonstrators gathered under umbrellas outside the U.S. Embassy in Denmark's capital, Copenhagen, and more than 1,000 hit the streets in Stockholm. The marches were planned by anti-war activists to coincide with protests in Washington and San Francisco.
Closely watched by police in anti-riot gear, a few thousand people marched in downtown Rome in a protest dominated by banners referring to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that also was attended by some opposition politicians.
"We're aware that war and terrorism feed each other," Paolo Cento, a lawmaker for the Greens party, said of his opposition to a war against Iraq.
In Baghdad itself, American anti-war activists protested in front of U.N. offices, urging the U.N. Security Council not to give President Bush a blank check for war against Iraq. Six members of the Chicago-based Voices in the Wilderness raised banners including "Drop sanctions not bombs."
In Tokyo, about 300 Japanese staged a "peace walk," holding up placards urging governments to "stop the war before it starts."
The United States, backed by Britain, wants tough new rules for U.N. weapons inspections and a declaration from the Security Council that Iraq faces "serious consequences" if it fails to comply.
However, Russia wants to stick as closely as possible to current inspection rules and eliminate any language allowing an attack on Baghdad. France also opposes any language possibly authorizing military action and wants to water down some U.S. inspection proposals.
"We say to President Bush: there is no reason for this war," pacifist German lawmaker Hans-Christian Stroebele told the crowd in Berlin, drawing cheers as he added: "This war is unjustified."
Yesterday's were the first major demonstrations in Germany in recent months against the prospect of military action against Iraq, which has been staunchly opposed by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
"I expect the government at least to stick to that," said Susanne Roessling, 41, an employee at a legal firm. "They should really exert pressure," for instance by refusing to let U.S. planes attacking Iraq fly over Germany, she added.
Mr. Schroeder has argued that a strike against Baghdad could wreck the international anti-terror coalition and throw the Middle East into turmoil, and says Germany would not participate.
"It's a tactical position that could change tomorrow," peace activist Wolfgang Ratzel, 54, said at the Berlin protest. "I have no illusions about the effect" of the demonstration, he added.
"Saddam Hussein is one of the absolutely worst dictators in the world today but that doesn't justify the U.S.A.'s war plans," Gudrun Schyman, leader of Sweden's former communist Left Party, told the crowd in Stockholm.
"You don't disarm a regime by conducting an armed war."
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Amid Anti - War Protests, U.S. Decries UN Iraq Delays
October 27, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq.html
WASHINGTON/LOS CABOS, Mexico (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Washington and other cities to voice opposition to a possible U.S. war against Iraq, while the United States decried a U.N. ``debate that never ends'' over a tough new resolution to disarm Iraq.
``This is going to be an ugly, unnecessary fight. Most of the world is saying 'no' to it,'' civil rights leader the Rev. Jesse Jackson told the crowd on Saturday at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. ``Pre-emptive, one-bullet diplomacy, we cannot resort to that.''
Tens of thousands of people -- organizers said 150,000 although witnesses said between 40,000 and 50,000 -- took part in the anti-war protest in the U.S. capital. Another 40,000 marched in San Francisco, with thousands more demonstrating in Berlin, Amsterdam and other cities.
A river of protesters flowed behind Jackson in a march to the White House to press the case that war against Iraq would be a tragic mistake. President Bush did not see the protesters because he was taking part in a summit of Pacific Rim leaders in Mexico.
With a skeptical Mexican President Vicente Fox by his side, Bush on Saturday emphatically repeated that the United States would lead a coalition against Iraq if the United Nations failed to act to ensure that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein does not possess chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
``If the U.N. does not pass a resolution which holds him (Saddam) to account and that has consequences, then, as I have said in speech after speech after speech, if the U.N. won't act, if Saddam Hussein won't disarm, we will lead a coalition to disarm him,'' Bush said.
'FUNDAMENTAL DECISIONS'
``We have reached the point where we have to make a few fundamental decisions in the early part of next week and go forward,'' added Secretary of State Colin Powell, who also was in the Mexican beach-side resort of Los Cabos for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. ``We can't continue to have a debate that never ends.''
The United States, with British support, has been pressing for six weeks for the 15-nation U.N. Security Council to approve a resolution intended to force Iraq to give up any weapons of mass destruction or face dire consequences.
But France and Russia have resisted the U.S. move, and have floated their own draft resolutions that eliminate some of the tough U.S. language. All five permanent members of the Security Council -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States -- possess the power to veto any resolution.
The U.S. resolution would give U.N. arms inspectors broad powers and privileges in uncovering any weapons of mass destruction programs in Iraq. It also would declare Iraq in ``material breach'' of existing U.N. resolutions and would warn Iraq of ``serious consequences'' if it thwarts U.N. weapons inspections -- language Russia and France fear that the United States can interpret as a trigger for military action even without a follow-up Security Council resolution.
Fox said he told Bush he hoped the United Nations could resolve the impasse but gave no indication whether he would back Bush's demand for a resolution with consequences.
Fox said he hopes for ``a resolution that will result in the prompt return of inspectors (and ensures) that Iraq complies with the existing agreements with the United Nations.''
Iraq agreed to give up chemical, biological and nuclear weapons following the 1991 Gulf War triggered by its invasion of neighboring Kuwait. The task of finding such arms was assigned to U.N. weapons inspectors. But they left before a 1998 U.S.-British bombing raid, ordered because Iraq allegedly was thwarting their efforts, and never have returned.
'WE CHARGE YOU WITH GENOCIDE!'
The march in Washington was boisterous but peaceful. ``George Bush, you can't hide. We charge you with genocide!'' chanted the protesters, who were escorted by mounted U.S. Park Police and watched by 600 police officers as they made their way to the White House.
``Let us resist this war,'' liberal activist actress Susan Sarandon told the cheering crowd. ``Let us hate war in all its forms, whether the weapon used is a missile or an airplane.''
The protesters brandished signs reading: ``No Proof, No War,'' ``Bush Sucks'' and ``Pre-emptive Impeachment.'' Some protesters carried Iraqi flags. ``No war, no way,'' shouted a protester wearing a mask of Bush with horns and a pitchfork.
In San Francisco, known for its liberal politics and history of activism, a group of about 20 children led the parade as protesters carried signs bearing pictures of Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld beneath the words ``weapons of mass destruction.''
In Germany, anti-war demonstrations were held in about 70 towns and cities. The largest was in Berlin, where almost 10,000 people marched. In Amsterdam, some 4,000 people rallied in heavy rain to protest against U.S. policy.
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