------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Security Tightens at Nuclear Plants
NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT PROGRESS
U.S. to Pursue Withdrawal From ABM Pact
UNIVERSITY FINED OVER RADIATION EXPOSURE

MILITARY
Pakistan Mission Fails to Get Taliban to Deliver bin Laden
Afghanistan: A Nightmare Battlefield
Taliban Bring Scud Missiles Near Pakistan Border
Macedonia Approves Extended NATO Security Mission
Bioterrorism: An Even More Devastating Threat
Mubarak: Too Early for Alliance Against 'Terrorism'
India says it gave U.S. secret data
India to Allow U.S. to Use Bases for Staging Ground
Fearful, Iran and Iraq hunker down
Iran Advises U.S. Against Attacking Afghans
Iraqi Paper Expects Baghdad to Face U.S. Retaliation
Arafat Calls for Truce as Violence Rages
Pakistan Shuts Border to Afghanistan
Uzbekistan May Loan Military Bases
War will be stealthy, dirty, in the shadows, Bush says
Pentagon Issues Order To Elite Units In Infantry
A New War and Its Scale

OTHER
NEW HAZARDOUS WASTE SITES ADDED TO SUPERFUND LIST
IMF, World Bank cancel D.C. meetings
WTO Gives China Formal Go - Ahead
Personal liberties a victim of terrorist assaults
Ashcroft eyes law review to aid FBI
FBI Seeks Accomplices, Detains Potential Witnesses
For the FBI, a Chance at Redemption
Tenet takes heat for not stopping attacks
New Powers Sought for Surveillance
Some Unsavory Spies in CIA Network
Mubarak calls for counterterrorism treaty
International Reaction to Terrorism

ACTIVISTS
Street Demonstrations Postponed
Peace & Justice Events
At White House
Group Destruction Manual
'Eye for an Eye' Has Its Detractors
RETALIATION--A MODEST PROPOSAL
Attack on US - Message from Nobel Laureate



-------- NUCLEAR

Security Tightens at Nuclear Plants

September 17, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Nuclear.html?searchpv=aponline

VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- Security is being tightened at the world's nuclear power plants, an international watchdog agency said Monday, but it conceded that little can be done to shield a nuclear facility from a direct hit by an airliner.

Most nuclear power plants were built during the 1960s and 1970s, and like the World Trade Center, they were designed to withstand only accidental impacts from the smaller aircraft widely used at the time, the International Atomic Energy Agency said as it opened its annual conference.

``If you postulate the risk of a jumbo jet full of fuel, it is clear that their design was not conceived to withstand such an impact,'' spokesman David Kyd said.

U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham was among delegates from 132 nations who opened the conference with calls to better safeguard nuclear plants and keep nuclear materials out of terrorists' hands.

Abraham brought a message from President Bush to the Vienna-based IAEA, urging the agency to keep pace with ``the real and growing threat of nuclear proliferation.''

The world ``must ensure that nuclear materials are never used as weapons of terror,'' Abraham said. ``We cannot assume that tomorrow's terrorist acts will mirror those we've just experienced.''

In the wake of last week's attacks in New York and Washington, governments have tightened security outside nuclear power and radioactive waste facilities worldwide.

But Japan, which is heavily dependent on nuclear energy and has 52 nuclear plants, warned Monday that although tighter security is needed, nothing can shield the plants from attacks by missiles or aircraft.

Conference delegates, who began Monday with a minute of silence and a song from the Vienna Boy's Choir in memory of the victims of the attacks on the United States, planned to meet behind closed doors Monday and Tuesday on ways to improve plant security.

In the West, nuclear power plants were designed more with ground vehicle attacks in mind, Kyd said. Although many were designed to withstand a glancing blow from a small commercial jetliner, a direct hit at high speed by a modern jumbo jet ``could create a Chernobyl situation,'' said a U.S. official who declined to be identified.

But the buildings that house nuclear reactors themselves are far smaller targets than the Pentagon posed, and it would be extremely difficult for a terrorist to mount a direct hit at an angle that could unleash a catastrophic chain of events, Kyd said.

If a nuclear power plant were hit by an airliner, the reactor would not explode, but such a strike could destroy the plant's cooling systems. That could cause the nuclear fuel rods to overheat and produce a steam explosion that could release lethal radioactivity into the atmosphere.

---

NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT PROGRESS EVEN MORE IMPORTANT AFTER TERRORIST ATTACK ON UNITED STATES SAYS SECRETARY-GENERAL TO ATOMIC ENERGY AGENCY MEETING

IAEA/1348,
17 September 2001
From: Felicity Hill <flick@igc.org>

Following is the message of Secretary-General Kofi Annan to the forty-fifth General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), delivered by Steinar Bjornsson, Deputy-Director, United Nations Office at Vienna, on 17 September:

I am pleased to convey my warm greetings to all the participants in the forty-fifth regular session of the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The IAEA plays a key role in our collective efforts to achieve the twin goals of peace and development, and has been a catalyst for the development and transfer of peaceful nuclear technologies, as well as assisting the international community in curbing nuclear weapon proliferation.

Making progress in the areas of nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament is more important than ever in the aftermath of last week's appalling terrorist attack on the United States. The States Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) agreed last year that this challenge could not be overcome by halfway measures. Indeed, they concluded that "the total elimination of nuclear weapons is the only absolute guarantee against the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons". Regrettably, several important treaties aimed at nuclear non-proliferation, nuclear disarmament or nuclear reductions still await entry into force. It is vitally important for the world community to continue its efforts to implement the commitments already made, and to further identify the ways and means of achieving nuclear disarmament as soon as possible.

Looking towards the future, it is evident that broad international cooperation is essential to upgrade the physical protection of nuclear material, to improve capabilities for intercepting and responding to illicit trafficking in nuclear materials and other radioactive sources, and to enhance the protection of facilities against terrorism and sabotage. Another issue of fundamental importance is the enhancement of nuclear safety worldwide. I would like to commend the IAEA for its efforts in assisting the people affected by the Chernobyl accident, and in enhancing safety levels in the hope that an accident of this nature is never repeated.

Finally, I would like to urge the IAEA to further develop its work in developing the use of nuclear energy for sustainable development. Coupled with your work in identifying environmentally sound sources of energy, these efforts can help transform nuclear energy into a universal force for progress and peace. The IAEA's mission is likely to grow and deepen in the decades ahead, and as you tackle this vast array of challenges, I wish you all success.

-------- treaties

U.S. to Pursue Withdrawal From ABM Pact

By Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, September 17, 2001; Page A28
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41224-2001Sep16?language=printer

MOSCOW, Sept. 16 -- The Bush administration will inform Russia Monday that it is prepared to press ahead with a unilateral withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to build a missile defense system, according to a senior administration official.

Seeking to put to rest questions about whether President Bush will still make missile defense a priority after last week's terrorist attacks in the United States, the administration plans to tell Russian in talks Monday that, "if anything, the likelihood of unilateral withdrawal has increased" as a result of the attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, said the U.S. official.

"Missile defense will not fade as a priority of the administration. These incidents prove that there are people in the world for whom the concept of deterrence doesn't mean a thing," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "This was high-tech terrorism; these people had jet plane pilots. And if these same people had access to ballistic missiles, do you think they wouldn't have used them?"

Undersecretary of State John Bolton arrived in Moscow today for the talks, which were to be held in London last week but were postponed after the attacks. He is to meet with Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Mamedov Monday, and sources said the two would also likely discuss potential Russian cooperation with U.S.-led retaliatory strikes following the attacks.

In recent weeks, top Russian officials have signaled a newfound willingness to accept U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, a move they previously said would be tantamount to unraveling "the entire framework of international security."

Indeed, just minutes before the planes crashed into the World Trade Center last Tuesday, a Russian general told reporters here that a U.S. withdrawal would not affect the "level of trust" between the two countries and that Russia was prepared to negotiate a new, post-Cold War security structure even after such a move.

Now, according to the Bush administration official, "the Russians have come to an acceptance that, absent some major development, the United States is going to withdraw from ABM unilaterally or at least give notice of withdrawal. They have realized that maybe we're not going to negotiate on this before the treaty is gone."

But last week's attacks by knife-wielding terrorists have also sparked a new round of public criticism of Bush's missile defense plans here. Many top Russian officials have gone out of their way to point out the relatively low-tech nature of the attacks, insisting that it undermines Washington's stated reason for spending billions of dollars on a system of missile defense aimed at heading off a nuclear attack by small, hostile states such as North Korea.

On Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov is due in Washington for talks on missile defense with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, and U.S. sources said they are expecting new proposals from the Russians then. At the same time, in Moscow, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage is slated for meetings on enlisting Russia in the anti-terrorism fight, and specifically on what support Russia can provide for possible U.S. strikes in Afghanistan.

Since last week's attacks, Russian leaders have pledged support for the United States but have ruled out Russian participation in military strikes.

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

-------- missouri

UNIVERSITY FINED OVER RADIATION EXPOSURE

September 17, 2001
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/sep2001/2001L-09-17-09.html

CAPE GIRARDEAU, Missouri, The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has proposed an $11,000 fine against Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau for violations of NRC regulations associated with a radiation overexposure to a contractor in June 2000.

The overexposure occurred during work by the contractor to inventory and remove radioactive material stored in a safe in the basement of Magill Hall at the university. Radioactive contamination was later found and cleaned up in several areas of the building.

The contractor was exposed to airborne americium-241 which, when inhaled, is deposited in a person's bones. This resulted in a radiation dose of 263 rems to the bone surface, exceeding the NRC annual dose limit of 50 rem to individual organs or body tissues.

The university was cited for failing to make the necessary radiation surveys to determine the hazards present; for failure to control activities to avoid exceeding the NRC radiation dose limits; and for possessing radioactive material - americium-241 and two other radioactive isotopes - that was not authorized in the university's NRC license.

The amount of the proposed fine was doubled because the university took four months to determine the contents of the safe once it was questioned by an NRC inspector; because it possessed the material for 10 years without license authorization; and for failing to implement an effective radiation protection program which allowed the problems to persist and contributed to the overexposure.

There were two additional violations for which a fine was not assessed. These violations were failing to secure a strontium-90 sealed source, which could not be accounted for in the university's inventory and failing to have a radiation safety officer from August 1999 until July of last year.

The NRC noted that the university had taken extensive corrective actions after the contamination occurred including retaining a qualified contractor to survey and clean up the contamination and assess individuals who might have been exposed to the americium-241.


-------- MILITARY

-------- afghanistan

Pakistan Mission Fails to Get Taliban to Deliver bin Laden

New York Times
September 17, 2001
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/17/international/17CND-PAK.html?pagewanted=all

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sept. 17 - A Pakistani group of high-ranking military officers met today inside Afghanistan with the Taliban government but failed to convince it to hand over the accused terrorist Osama bin Laden and his top associates to the United States.

After eight hours of meetings in Kandahar, the Taliban stronghold, the Pakistani officials were reported to be "severely discouraged" at the intransigence of the Taliban and its leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, who set out several conditions for giving up Mr. bin Laden that seemed impossible to meet.

These conditions were, according to Pakistani officials, that convincing evidence of Mr. bin Laden's involvement in terrorism must be presented to the Shura, as the Taliban's inner circle is called; that the surrender of Mr. bin Laden must be approved by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, an international organization whose membership includes some militant Islamic groups; and that if Mr. bin Laden were to be put on trial outside Afghanistan, at least one of the judges must be a Muslim.

The Taliban's bargaining was reminiscent of the maddening conditions that the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein kept setting before the United States and its allies finally expelled his forces from Kuwait in 1991.

Mullah Omar said after receiving the Pakistanis that Islamic leaders from around Afghanistan would meet on Tuesday to make a decision about the crisis developing over Mr. bin Laden's presence inside Afghanistan, the Kabul radio reported.

The Taliban warned over the weekend that any neighboring country that helped the United States, an allusion to Pakistan, would risk being attacked by Taliban fighters, who have seized almost all of Afghanistan in a lengthy civil war.

The Pakistani officials said that the delegation arrived in Kandahar to tell the Taliban leaders that they had "only a few days" to hand over Mr. bin Laden or face an eventual American military attack that would almost certainly target the Taliban as well as Mr. bin Laden, and possibly lead to American troops' entering Afghanistan.

Alternatively, the Taliban was to be told that if they agreed to hand over Mr. bin Laden and his associates and close down all his training camps, the Taliban would be left to continue in power. Mr. bin Laden is said to enjoy the loyalty of as many as 4,000 fighters in his camps.

Having conveyed the ultimatum, the Pakistani envoys were reported to be frustrated the Taliban's negative posture.

The group has been led by Maj. Gen. Faiz Gilani, one of the top officers in Pakistan's military intelligence wing, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or ISI, which is thought to have unique intelligence on Mr. bin Laden's operations in Afghanistan and his whereabouts.

Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, had agreed to relay the ultimatum after days of intensive discussions between American and Pakistani officials, in Washington and Islamabad, the Pakistani officials said. But the officials also cautioned beforehand that the chances of the Taliban's bowing to the American demand were slim.

In the first test of its pledge to make nations choose sides in a war against terrorism, the Bush administration has placed relentless pressure on Pakistan to cooperate in capturing or eliminating Mr. bin Laden, who is suspected of masterminding Tuesday's catastrophic attacks on New York and Washington.

In effect, the Pakistani officials said, American officials had told General Musharraf's government that Washington would use every lever "short of war" to punish Pakistan unless it cooperated.

The choice between confronting the Taliban or cooperating with the United States is a wrenching one for General Musharraf, who leads a chronically unstable and nuclear armed nation of 140 million people, dependent on ties to the West but increasingly lured by radical Islam.

In a sign of just how treacherous he judges the situation to be, General Musharraf spent Sunday in a highly unusual series of meetings with influential Pakistanis, including politicians, newspaper editors, Muslim clerics and dozens of people with links to conservative Islamic groups.

Success in Kandahar would head off an American military operation that would almost certainly involve the use of Pakistan's airfields and airspace. Such an event could set off bitter protests by supporters of Mr. bin Laden and the Taliban in Pakistan, who took to the streets on Sunday in modestly sized rallies across the country. It could even shake or wrench loose General Musharraf's hold on power.

But officials already said they rated the chances of the Taliban bowing to the ultimatum as "very poor." The Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, said in a defiant, warlike radio speech on Friday that he believed that handing over Mr. bin Laden would not spare Afghanistan from an American attack.

If the delegation's mission does fail, Pakistan will almost certainly have to prepare for a central role in what President Bush has repeatedly described as war. In Washington, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Sunday that an "an interagency" team of top officials would fly to Islamabad this week to work out the details of that support.

Pakistani officials, however, continued to avoid specifying what Pakistan's role would be, apparently to give General Musharraf time to prepare crucial centers of opinion for steps certain to provoke bitter opposition.

"This is not a man who is used to having to sell anything, least of all to politicians, editors and mullahs," said one of those who was at the Sunday meetings. "He's a general, used to telling people what to do, not asking them to support him."

An influential Pakistani who attended some of the Sunday briefings said General Musharraf had already assured President Bush in a telephone call on Saturday that Pakistan would allow the use of its airspace and airfields, if needed, as well as full access to Pakistani intelligence on Mr. bin Laden.

Crucially, too, this participant said, Pakistan has agreed to provide "logistical support" to an American military campaign, apparently including the provision of crucial supplies like fuel.

The only hard-and-fast limits that Pakistan had set, the participant in the briefings said, were that it would not allow its own troops to be deployed alongside an American force in Afghanistan, and that any American military presence on the ground in Pakistan would have to be kept "well out of sight," at remote military bases and airfields.

"Other than that," the participant said, "I got the impression that we will not be pussyfooting about this, that we will give the Americans just about everything they want."

But those who took part in the meetings said General Musharraf had given the impression that he had driven a hard bargain. Among other things, the general was said to have demanded an end to economic sanctions imposed by Washington after Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in 1998, and the lifting of an American ban on weapons sales.

Also on the list, participants said, was a pledge that Washington would assist Pakistan's battered economy by encouraging generous treatment by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and a shift in Pakistan's favor in its dispute with India over the Kashmir region.

If it comes to war, General Musharraf will be committing Pakistan to a war against a neighboring Muslim state, something bound to shock parts of this overwhelmingly Muslim nation whose unquenchable poverty has made it a breeding pool for radical Islamists, including those in the senior echelons of the army.

Although Pakistan's army and police are almost certainly powerful enough to suppress street protests, influential Pakistanis say, General Musharraf, who took power in a coup nearly two years ago, cannot be sure that some of his fellow army commanders might not topple him if he fails to carry them with him.

"If he lets the Americans use Pakistan as a launching pad for operations in Afghanistan, Musharraf will face problems, no doubt about it," a veteran politician said. "But his difficulties will be proportional to the benefits he can bring to Pakistan, and to the length of time it takes for the Americans to achieve their objectives in Afghanistan.

"If the operation is swift and short, Musharraf will be O.K., but if it is protracted he'll run into all sorts of political problems."

Regardless of the outcome of today's mission, even locating Mr. bin Laden is less than a certainty. A Pakistani journalist, Jamal Ismail, who represents Abu Dhabi Television in Afghanistan, said on Sunday that he had received a clandestine message from the Taliban saying that Mr. bin Laden had gone. "Our guest has left," Mr. Ismail quoted the message as saying, "and we are not aware of his whereabouts."

Officials in Pakistan, however, noted that the Taliban had made such claims before, only to have the Saudi-born militant reappear in the company of Taliban leaders.

In any case, it was not clear where Mr. bin Laden could go, except into some new hideout in the semi-deserts and mountains that make up much of Afghanistan, which in themselves may provide safe haven enough. As Soviet troops discovered during their disastrous decade occupying Afghanistan in the 1980's, the terrain is among the most rugged and inhospitable on earth.

A Russian official told CNN in Moscow on Sunday that Russia's intelligence service knew where Mr. bin Laden was just before last Tuesday's attacks, but not any more. Pakistan's own intelligence service has said that it, too, does not know Mr. bin Laden's current hideout.

As for Mr. bin Laden himself, the Qatar-based satellite television station Al Jazeera broadcast a statement on Sunday that it attributed to the world's most wanted fugitive. "I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seem to have been planned by people for personal reasons," read the message, whose authenticity was impossible to verify. "I have been living in the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and following its leaders' rules. The current leader does not allow me to exercise such operations."

--------

Afghanistan: A Nightmare Battlefield

By Molly Moore and Kamran Khan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, September 17, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41121-2001Sep16?language=printer

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sept. 16 -- In a war against Afghanistan, the world's only superpower would be aligning the most sophisticated, high-tech military weaponry ever developed against mud barracks, mountain caves, a few hundred artillery pieces and a savvy foe able to melt into the khaki folds of an already devastated landscape.

In all the war-gaming of military academies and Pentagon planners, the U.S. armed forces would be hard-pressed to have invented a more intractable military scenario than waging combat operations in this impoverished, bedraggled land against a radicalized guerrilla force and its most infamous resident -- Saudi fugitive and accused terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. U.S. officials have pointed to bin Laden as the chief suspect in last week's terror attacks in New York and Washington.

Afghanistan is an ethnically fragmented country with some of the most rugged and isolated terrain in the world, an infrastructure that has been almost completely devastated by two decades of continuous war, and a population struggling to survive in the face of drought, famine and endless cycles of violence and bloodshed.

Unlike the multinational coalition attacks on Belgrade and Baghdad over the last decade, fought with high-precision weapons aimed at selected targets, there are few major command and control networks to be hit in Afghanistan, where guerrilla battles are usually fought with artillery barrages and mortar fire. Neither requires the sophisticated orchestration of First World combat.

The militant Islamic Taliban movement, which controls more than 90 percent of the country, has amassed an eclectic arsenal of aging tanks and other equipment left over from the Soviet Union's failed occupation. It also nabbed some overused aircraft from various warring Afghan factions defeated since the Taliban began its takeover of Afghanistan in 1994. More recently, new weapons, mostly automatic rifles, machine guns and mortars, have been supplied by bin Laden and other wealthy Saudi benefactors.

The U.S. military learned during the Persian Gulf War that months of bombing destroyed only a fraction of the Iraqi military hardware arrayed across a flat desert, a lesson that could apply to Afghanistan as well. "Carrying out large-scale bombing of Afghanistan would be a mistake," Nikolai Kovalyov, former head of the Russian Federal Security Service, a successor agency to the KGB, said in an interview in Moscow. "We must learn from the lessons of history -- we have not been able to solve the problems of terrorism by large-scale bombing."

Vice President Cheney today identified Afghanistan as a possible target for a reprisal attack. "The government of Afghanistan has to understand that we believe they have, indeed, been harboring a man who committed and whose organization committed this most egregious act," Cheney said of the airplane attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

But there are enormous logistical hurdles to an attack on the Taliban and bin Laden.

In Afghanistan, U.S. surveillance satellites will see no sizable power grids, no vast military bases, no major bridges and highway networks as targets: There are none. Special forces would land in a war zone that has changed little from the desert country of nomadic tribes and medieval-looking villages British troops invaded more than two centuries ago. Land forces, with virtually no access to local supplies, would be treading through one of the most densely mined countries on the globe amid a hostile population.

While Pakistan has given the United States permission to use its airspace for missile assaults and aerial bombardment of Afghanistan, the easiest military targets already have disappeared, according to Pakistan intelligence reports.

The Taliban has emptied its training bases, arms depots, command and government headquarters and has scattered its military hardware. Bin Laden has gone into even deeper hiding than usual and has dispatched his family members to a variety of locations, Pakistani intelligence sources said.

The U.S. military failed to kill bin Laden on a previous attempt in 1998 when it launched missile attacks on his training bases and suspected hide-outs in Afghanistan in the aftermath of two U.S. embassy bombings in Africa.

The problems of locating useful targets and destroying them in air assaults would pale when compared with the complexity of trying to land special forces or send ground troops into the country, according to U.S. and Pakistani military planners.

"The first mistake would be a large-scale land operation," said former Russian security chief Kovalyov. "In the mountains there, it is impossible to determine where or what to destroy. For every trainful of explosives, perhaps three guerrillas at most will die. The country is filled with caves and crevices in which to hide."

The Taliban is estimated to have no more than 45,000 troops, including up to 12,000 foreign troops -- Pakistanis, Arabs, Uzbeks and others, according to most estimates. Pakistani military officials said they are uncertain how large an arsenal the Taliban has assembled but said the militia is armed with Soviet T-59 and T-55 tanks left over from the 1980s, as well as artillery guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, antiaircraft and antitank missiles, aging Soviet MIG and Sukoi fighter planes, mortars and thousands of small arms.

But it is the guerrilla tactics of the Taliban that make the militia more formidable than its numbers might indicate. Those tactics were instilled in what is now the Taliban leadership by Pakistan, with CIA backing during the rebels' successful attempt to oust the Soviets, and more recently honed by bin Laden's Arab soldiers.

Senior Pakistani military and intelligence officials -- whose officers have advised, coordinated and in many cases participated in combat in Afghanistan with various factions over the past 20 years -- said they are warning U.S. war planners of the daunting challenges.

"You yourself [the United States] trained them to be the best guerrilla force in the world," said a former Pakistani intelligence official who said he advised Islamic freedom fighters under CIA-sponsored programs during the rebels' war with Soviet forces in the 1980s. "Some of these Taliban were the CIA's superstars."

"Doesn't the CIA remember they were the ones who gave the Afghans the best lessons in the world in how to humiliate a great army?" said another former Pakistani intelligence official, who has advised the Taliban in military operations for the past five years.

Taliban leader Mohammad Omar fought under one of the CIA's most prized rebel commanders, Yunis Khalis, according to the former operative.

Invading forces have been attempting to conquer Afghanistan and tame its feuding tribes for centuries. And in every instance, it was the politically charged ethnic divisions that undermined efforts to unify the country. It is a legacy that may not only govern how the U.S. military would plot attacks, but also the problems it would generate to fill the void created if the military objective is to dismantle the Taliban government.

Afghanistan's population, estimated to be about 25 million, is a volatile mixture of ethnic groups: about 38 percent Pashtun, 25 percent Tajik, 6 percent Uzbek, 19 percent Hazara, along with small numbers of Aimaks, Turkmen and Baloch. Most of the population speaks an Afghan form of Persian called Dari, Pashto, or one of more than 30 other minor languages. The language barriers alone offer a vivid example of problems land forces would face in fighting or follow-up efforts to rehabilitate the country, according to military planners.

The warlords and military commanders who controlled each of these groups were united in their effort to dislodge Soviet forces. But when Moscow withdrew its troops in 1989, a power-sharing government composed of the former rebel leaders quickly disintegrated into civil war, with the defense minister and president assembling their own army to fight the prime minister.

It was the brutality and destruction of those wars that led to the formation of the Taliban in 1994, though the movement's rise can also be traced to ethnic and religious animosities going back three centuries.

While the Taliban easily won control of the largely Pashtun southern deserts and mountains that border Pakistan, opposition forces managed to cling to small pockets of territory in the more isolated and beautifully rugged valleys and mountain lands bordering Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

One commander was most responsible for fending off the Taliban near the Tajik border: the rail-thin Ahmed Shah Massoud. Only this year he had managed to persuade other ethnic commanders from the anti-Soviet days to return to northern Afghanistan in a loosely organized group called the Northern Alliance.

On Sept. 9, Massoud, 48, was hit in a suicide-bomb attack by two men posing as Arab journalists at his headquarters. Though Pakistani and U.S. intelligence reports indicated he died within hours of the explosion, his family only confirmed the death on Thursday.

Now, it is unclear whether his successor will be able to maintain the same loyalty commanded by Massoud, who enjoyed almost legendary stature in his home Panjshir Valley.

Pakistani military officials note that inserting ground forces into Afghanistan from Pakistan would force them through the region of Afghanistan that would be most hostile to foreign forces attempting to drive out the Taliban.

They say more sympathetic entry points would be along the northern borders through Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. While the United States has been holding an increasing number of joint military training exercises with those and other Central Asian nations in recent months, the Northern Alliance has been heavily supported by Iran and Russia, two countries with strong concerns about the presence of Western forces in the region.

Correspondent Susan B. Glasser in Moscow contributed to this report.

--------

Taliban Bring Scud Missiles Near Pakistan Border

September 17, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-attack-afghan-scuds.html

KHYBER PASS, Pakistan (Reuters) - Afghanistan's Taliban rulers have moved a large arsenal of weapons, including Russian Scud missiles, to positions near the border with Pakistan, a Pakistani army officer said Monday.

``We are already prepared, we are ready to defend the motherland,'' Captain Abid Bahtti told reporters, speaking at an army checkpoint just 2.5 km (one mile) from the border with Afghanistan. ``The Pakistan border is very secure.''

Asked if the situation was warlike, Bahtti said: ''Definitely, but it is not a declared war.''

-------- balkans

Macedonia Approves Extended NATO Security Mission

September 17, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-balkans-macedonia-nato.html

SKOPJE, Macedonia (Reuters) - The Macedonian government said Monday it would accept a small NATO security force to solidify a peace accord with ethnic Albanian guerrillas.

Skopje had previously ruled out a longer-term NATO presence, fearing it would split Macedonia along ethnic lines, but diplomats said it signaled a change of heart in talks with NATO Secretary General George Robertson Friday.

A top aide to President Boris Trajkovski said the National Security Council of top ministers had approved the deployment of a small NATO force mandated to protect European monitors who will oversee steps to reintegrate rebel territory.

``It is agreed that President Trajkovski will send a letter to NATO in which Macedonia expresses its readiness to support a light, restricted NATO mission with details still to be worked out,'' said Nikola Dimitrov, the president's security adviser.

``A special (government) working group will work out the details, exactly how many soldiers, how long the mission should be and what kind of (powers),'' he told reporters.

``But it seems we are talking about 200 soldiers on the ground..., most probably soldiers that were already present in Macedonia before 'Essential Harvest'.''

He was referring to NATO's 30-day mandate to collect weapons voluntarily yielded by the rebel National Liberation Army, which agreed to disband in return for constitutional reforms to raise the status of the large Albanian minority.

REBEL DISARMAMENT ON HOLD

The NLA has turned in 70 percent of its declared arsenal and the 2,481 weapons were taken to Greece Monday for destruction. NATO's disarmament mandate has just a week to run, but further collections are on hold until parliament starts enacting the reforms.

Western authorities had feared the departure of the weapons collectors without a follow-on stabilization force would leave a security vacuum in which armed extremists would try to settle scores, rekindling the conflict.

``The Security Council supported the idea of Trajkovski and Robertson that some sort of transitional NATO force might be positive for the peace process,'' Dimitrov told Reuters.

Weekend violence lent substance to Western concerns.

Unruly elements of the security services opened fire on an ethnic Albanian village in a major cease-fire violation, triggering four and a half hours of sporadic gunbattles.

NATO accused the security services of endangering its liaison teams in the area, 21 miles west of Skopje, and demanded swift action to rein in the gunmen.

Dimitrov said Monday the security units at issue were being withdrawn from positions in the villages of Ratae and Zilce and would be replaced by army troops.

NATO diplomats had said the position was manned by out-of- control police reservists and associated paramilitaries who had been harassing demobilized guerrillas and shooting without provocation at ethnic Albanian communities for weeks.

``To avoid speculation about police reservists, it has been decided to make an exchange -- to withdraw them from the two villages and the army will fill their posts,'' said Dimitrov.

-------- biological weapons

Bioterrorism: An Even More Devastating Threat

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 17, 2001; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41225-2001Sep16?language=printer

It would require just a small private plane, not a hijacked commercial jetliner. A helper could casually dump a bag of powdery bacterial spores while in flight, rather than having to overpower a planeload of passengers. And the team could land and be home in time for dinner instead of ending it all in a suicidal inferno.

It's called bioterrorism, and experts say it would be a lot easier to conduct and is more likely to occur in the next few years than a replay of last week's terrorist tragedies. A small cloud of bacteria or viruses could easily and silently infect tens of thousands of people, triggering fatal outbreaks of anthrax, smallpox, pneumonic plague or any of a dozen other deadly diseases. And victims infected with contagious ailments could pass the microbes to thousands of others before doctors even figured out what was going on.

Moreover, bioterrorism could foment political instability, given the panic that fast-moving plagues have historically engendered.

"The events in New York and Washington were tragedies beyond what anyone had previously imagined, but the potential of biological terrorism is far greater in terms of loss of life and disruption," said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. "It would be less graphic -- no flames and explosions -- but much more insidious. Anyone with a cough would be a weapon."

In many respects the nation is less prepared for bioterrorism than it is for conventional acts of terrorism. An October 1999 General Accounting Office (GAO) report documented major gaps in the nation's system for protecting itself against biological attacks. Inspectors found shortages of vaccines and medicines, stockrooms filled with expired drugs, and lax security measures where crucial drugs were stored.

A January 2001 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta concluded that the nation's public health infrastructure is "not adequate to detect and respond to a bioterrorist event." And a March 2001 GAO report noted that 20 percent of the nation's pharmaceutical and medical supplies held by the federal Office of Emergency Preparedness for a bioterrorist attack were stored in a vault whose temperature was 95 degrees and that had no air-conditioning. The medicines' potency could be assured only if kept cooler than 86 degrees.

Some improvements have been implemented since then. Still, the nation and the world are largely unprepared to fight major outbreaks of deadly diseases like plague, said Norman Cantor, an emeritus professor at New York University and a plague scholar.

"It would be some improvement over the Middle Ages, but not all that great an improvement," he said.

Bioterrorism is not new. Fourteenth-century barbarians tossed plague-infected corpses over the walls of fortified cities to spread the deadly infection among their enemies. In 1763, the English at Fort Pitt, Pa., gave smallpox-laden blankets to Indians who had been loyal to the French. And, as recently as the mid-1990s, U.N. weapons inspectors discovered that Iraq had stockpiled warheads containing anthrax spores and the toxin that causes botulism.

Russian scientists have revealed that the former Soviet Union produced large volumes of weapons-grade anthrax spores. And Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese religious cult that released sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway system in 1995, made several tentative efforts to release biological agents. Members even went to Zaire to learn more about the deadly ebola virus.

An international biological weapons convention signed by 143 nations has outlawed the development, production and stockpiling of biological weapons since 1975, but the absence of any formal verification regime to monitor compliance has limited the effectiveness of the convention, according to the United Nations. In any case, terrorists don't play by the rules. And at least five countries known to sponsor international terrorism have acquired the capacity to produce biological weapons, according to U.S. Army experts.

Despite those capabilities, U.S. preparedness has lagged, in part because bioterrorism has been deemed so unlikely. "Who would do such a thing?" skeptics asked. Last week's attacks in New York and Washington seriously undermined such rational assurances.

Biological attacks can be far more difficult to respond to than conventional terrorist attacks. For one thing, they are covert rather than overt; for days, no one would know that one had occurred. That's a huge problem for a disease like anthrax. Up to 80 percent of people infected by inhaled spores die within days if untreated. By the time symptoms appear -- fever, rash and congested lungs -- it's generally too late.

Another problem is that the first-line defenders against a biological attack would not be police and fire officials, who are specially trained for public safety emergencies. They would be local doctors and hospital staffers, most of whom have received little training in the art and science of being able to recognize and respond to unusual outbreaks quickly.

And contagious diseases -- unlike explosions -- keep spreading long after an initial attack. Smallpox, for example, is easily spread by coughing and sneezing. The disease was declared eradicated in 1980, but vials of the virus were saved and the whereabouts of some are uncertain. Vaccination no longer occurs, leaving an entire generation susceptible to attack. And few doses of the old vaccine remain in storage.

In a federal exercise three months ago, 24 simulated cases of smallpox were "discovered" in U.S. hospitals as part of an assessment of U.S. bioterrorism preparedness. Less than two weeks after those cases popped up, computer models indicated that -- if the exercise had been real -- 15,000 people would have contracted the disease and 1,000 would have died. The "epidemic" was still raging when the exercise ended, and, the computer models predicted, rioting and looting would have broken out as vaccine supplies ran out.

"This would cripple the United States if it were to occur," a former defense department official testified to Congress after the exercise.

A Clinton administration bioterrorism initiative, administered jointly by the CDC and the National Institutes of Health, is speeding development of protective technologies, including portable DNA diagnostic devices that may someday help identify mystery microbes raining from the sky. But the initiative's $300 million budget is a fraction of what will be needed to protect the nation in years to come, Osterholm and others said.

Meanwhile, just in case, the CDC has contracted with two biotech companies to make and stockpile 40 million doses of smallpox vaccine. The first batches that could be used by civilians are expected to be ready in 2004.

-------- egypt

Mubarak: Too Early for Alliance Against 'Terrorism'

September 17, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-attack-mubarak.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said on Monday it was too early to talk of an alliance against ''terrorism'' and the United States should think twice before taking military action that would kill civilians.

The United States has proposed an international coalition, with a military component, against those who organized last Tuesday's attacks in Washington and New York.

Mubarak, whose country is a key U.S. ally in the Middle East, said: ``I think the world has a proposal of making a coalition for fighting terrorists, but I could tell you very frankly it's too early to think of this.''

``To attack a country because of some individual, you are going to kill innocent people. We have to be very careful of that,'' he told CNN's Larry King Live program in an interview to be broadcast later on Monday.

``We have to work hard not to be in a hurry, not to jump to conclusions unless you have hard evidence about who did it,'' he added, speaking from the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

The prime suspect in the attacks is the Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden, who is believed to be living under the protection of the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan.

The United States is making preparations for possible military retaliation against bin Laden's organization and has sought access to Afghanistan from neighboring Pakistan.

Mubarak said that a campaign against ``terrorism'' must include all countries and that it would not be possible to emulate the Gulf War alliance against Iraq in 1990-91.

INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION

``We cannot imitate what happened in the Gulf countries, it was another thing. ... A coalition, that means we are going to divide the world into different groups -- groups for fighting terrorists, groups against this group ... then we are going to fight each other without any reason,'' the president said.

U.S. officials have cited the Gulf War coalition as a model for what they are trying to achieve now, especially for their decision to seek cooperation from countries like Syria.

Mubarak said Egypt would prefer to see a U.N. conference agree on an anti-terrorism convention similar to conventions imposing international inspections on nuclear facilities.

A State Department official, asked to comment on Mubarak's reservations, said: ``We don't want to jump to conclusions. We don't want to kill innocent civilians. President Mubarak is expressing a fear that I have heard a lot in the Arab world. We are going to be consulting a lot.''

Mubarak said he had told President Bush that the Middle East conflict could be an element in the attacks on the United States -- a view shared by most Arabs but ignored by many U.S. leaders, who blame the attacks on irrational hatred.

``I spoke with him about (how) Middle East problems may be one of the elements which encouraged such a thing. So I think he told me he's going to be very active and he's going to do his best,'' Mubarak said.

Mubarak also accused the Israeli government of taking advantage of the situation to attack Palestinians. ``This will have terrible percussions (repercussions),'' he added.

-------- india

India says it gave U.S. secret data

THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 17, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010917-89270920.htm

NEW DELHI (AP) -- Indian intelligence officials say they have shared sensitive information with the United States about Islamic extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including photographs, maps -- and footage of militants using a picture of former President Bill Clinton for target practice.

A top Indian intelligence official said the information included evidence describing how Osama bin Laden and other Muslim militant leaders were financing guerrilla groups and running armed training camps in Pakistan and southern Afghanistan.

The official said the intelligence gathered over the years by India -- Pakistan's eastern neighbor and its enemy in three wars since 1947 -- can be of crucial help in the American investigation into the attacks.

The documents provided to U.S. investigators included transcripts of conversations among militant groups and descriptions, locations, photographs and video footage of camps, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

He said video clips showed members of groups including Lashkar-e-Tayyaba -- a large Pakistan-based militant organization that is fighting to separate the Indian-ruled portion of disputed Kashmir from India -- firing at enlarged photographs of Mr. Clinton during training.

Lashkar-e-Tayyaba is among the most active groups battling Indian troops in Indian Kashmir. There are several strong militant Islamic groups operating in Pakistan, and tens of thousands of religious schools that turn out young boys dedicated to jihad, or holy war.

Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and other militant groups have sharply criticized Pakistan's promise of cooperation with the United States in seeking to find and punish those behind the terror attacks.

U.S. officials say bin Laden, a Saudi exile who operates in Afghanistan under protection of its hard-line Islamic Taliban rulers, is the prime suspect.

The Indian intelligence official said the United States has not asked India for permission to use its airspace or refueling facilities for possible air strikes on Afghanistan.

--------

India to Allow U.S. to Use Bases for Staging Ground
Offer Would Give Military a Backup Plan Should Pakistan Balk at Letting in Troops

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, September 17, 2001; Page A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41682-2001Sep17?language=printer

NEW DELHI, Sept. 16 -- India will allow its military bases to be used as a staging ground for U.S. forces in a retaliatory attack on terrorist targets in Afghanistan, an offer that provides the United States with a new degree of strategic flexibility and additional leverage to elicit a similar commitment from neighboring Pakistan.

Indian officials have not publicly discussed their decision, reached at a cabinet committee meeting on security less than two days after the terrorist strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, apparently out of fear that it might inflame the country's Muslim minority.

But Indian officials have privately told the United States that, if requested, they will allow U.S. troops and equipment to be temporarily based on Indian soil for the first time in the country's history. Although Indian officials said the United States has not yet formally asked to use any Indian facilities, Western officials and military analysts said the offer provides U.S. commanders with a nearby backup location for ground forces should Pakistan, which lies between India and Afghanistan, balk at allowing in U.S. combat units.

Pakistani officials have said the United States has not sought permission to put ground combat forces in Pakistan. The Pakistani government has said that, if asked, it would consider a request for a multinational force that includes representatives of Muslim nations -- a condition not attached to India's offer.

"We have given unconditional and unambivalent support for any action the United States may take to deal with the problem of global terrorism," one Indian official said.

Staging ground troops in India could pose a challenge, however, because India and Afghanistan do not share a border. Any troops based in India likely would have to be transported by air over Pakistan, analysts said.

More significantly, officials and analysts said, Indian air bases could play a role in housing fighter planes and refueling long-range bombers. And Indian intelligence services, which have long tracked Muslim extremist groups in Afghanistan because of their support for separatist guerrillas in the disputed Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, could provide valuable information to U.S. commanders.

U.S. officials have identified Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden, who is being harbored by Afghanistan's ruling Taliban movement, as the primary suspect behind last week's attacks in New York and Washington.

Indian officials said they already have given the United States intelligence reports about the Taliban, bin Laden's training camps and other extremist groups operating in Afghanistan.

India's offer to cooperate with the United States is a significant milestone in efforts by the two nations over the past year to forge closer ties. Such a proposal, officials and analysts said, would have been unthinkable during the Cold War, when India led a nonaligned movement and had friendly relations with the Soviet Union.

"Within 72 hours of the attacks, India had reversed decades of policy with regard to cooperating with the United States," one U.S. official here said.

During the Persian Gulf War, India allowed U.S. planes to refuel en route from bases in the Pacific Ocean, a move that sparked controversy domestically.

"India could have offered what it did before and everyone would have thought, 'Great,' " a Western diplomat here said. "The idea of foreign troops on Indian soil has heretofore been anathema."

Indian officials, whose alacrity in proffering support surprised Western nations, see their wholehearted backing for the U.S. effort as a chance to seize the high ground over Pakistan, its longtime enemy. Pakistan has been more tepid in its endorsement of the U.S. campaign to avoid provoking its fundamentalist Muslim population. India contends that Pakistan has turned a blind eye to terrorist groups that operate on its territory.

For India, a predominantly Hindu country that has been a frequent victim of Islamic terrorism, any campaign to crack down on militant activity in Afghanistan is welcome, if long overdue. India contends that the Taliban has provided support not just to insurgents in Kashmir but to a range of other terrorists, including those who hijacked an Indian Airlines plane in 1999.

In a nationally televised address after the attacks, India's prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, echoed President Bush's call for a war against terrorism. "The world must join hands to overwhelm them militarily, to neutralize their poison," Vajpayee said.

Although the rapprochement between Washington and New Delhi began in the final year of the Clinton administration, it has picked up steady momentum under Bush, who favors lifting sanctions imposed on India in 1998 after it conducted nuclear tests. The Bush administration has increased military cooperation, and over the past few months, a series of high-level U.S. officials have visited this capital, including Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage and Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

-------- iran

Fearful, Iran and Iraq hunker down

September 17, 2001
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010917-923968.htm

Military forces in Iran and Iraq have begun dispersing throughout those countries in anticipation of retaliatory U.S. military attacks, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

The military forces were primarily ground-force units of the Iranian and Iraqi armies that have been moved from known bases to remote locations.

"They are expecting attacks," said one official.

Disclosure of the regional military moves comes as top Bush administration officials huddle with the president to discuss the options for striking back at the terrorists who hijacked U.S. airliners and crashed them into the Pentagon and World Trade Center on Tuesday, killing thousands.

The official said the military movement was precautionary and does not necessarily mean those nations are linked to the airliner terrorist attacks. Similar troop and forces movements have occurred in the past during times of expected U.S. military action.

Both Iran and Iraq for years have been branded as key "state sponsors" of international terrorism by the State Department. Iran has been active in supporting Islamic terrorists in the Middle East. Iraq has targeted its terrorist activities primarily at Kuwait and Iraqi dissidents.

Iraq recently has moved some ground forces to the western part of Iraq.

Some Iranian naval forces also were moved out of ports, the officials said.

The activity was observed by U.S. spy satellites, which have begun a major search for Islamic terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.

Vice President Richard B. Cheney said there is no indication so far that Saddam or Iraq are behind the recent attacks. The main focus is on bin Laden's al Qaeda network, he said.

In discussing military options, Mr. Cheney said, "We've got a broad range of capabilities, and they may well be given missions in connection with this overall task and strategy.

"We also have to work from sort of the dark side, if you will," Mr. Cheney said on NBC. "We're going to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in."

So far, U.S. intelligence agencies have not identified direct state sponsorship of the attacks, which are thought to have been carried out by Islamic extremists associated with bin Laden.

U.S. officials, however, believe the Afghan Taliban movement, which controls most of Afghanistan, has been the key supporter of bin Laden and al Qaeda.

The U.S. military and the U.S. intelligence community are said to have good intelligence on sites in Afghanistan known to be used by bin Laden or his associates. All are considered targets of U.S. missile or long-range bomber attacks and possibly covert operations.

They include:

• Areas west of the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad in a farming district known as Hada. The area is close to a road linking the Afghan capital of Kabul and the Khyber Pass and Pakistan. Terrorist training camps are known to be located in the area.

• Residences used by bin Laden in Mehtarlam in Laghman province, a rural area close to the Hindu Kush mountains. Bin Laden is known to have bases further north in Kunar province.

• Homes near Kabul's diplomatic quarter, known as Wazir Akbar Khan, where bin Laden and his associates have been spotted.

• Training camps along the southern outskirts of Kabul

•Facilities or bases south of Kabul near Khost. These areas were hit by U.S. missiles in August 1998.

• A large mansion in Kandahar said to be owned by bin Laden.

• Additional training bases located in the mountainous province of Uruzgan.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters yesterday that there are "a number of countries that are harboring terrorists."

"They in some cases facilitate them, in some cases finance, in other cases just tolerate," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "But these people could not be functioning around the globe with the success they are unless they had that help from countries. And those countries, some of them do in fact have armies and navies and air forces, and they do have capitals and they do have high-value targets. And we are going to need them to stop tolerating terrorists."

Former Defense Secretary William S. Cohen said yesterday that Iraq's leader, Saddam Hussein, is capable of supporting the type of terrorism that was conducted in the United States. However, in the past Saddam has focused his targeting on Kuwait and dissident Iraqis in Iraq.

"I wouldn't rule it out," Mr. Cohen said of an Iraqi link to the U.S. attacks.

--------

Iran Advises U.S. Against Attacking Afghans

September 17, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-attack-iran.html

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Monday condemned deadly attacks in the United States, but said punishing Afghanistan might cause a human catastrophe and could trigger more problems for America.

His comments indicate that it is unlikely that Iran, which is hostile to Afghan's Taliban rulers, would join a U.S.-led international coalition in a possible attack on Afghanistan.

``Islam condemns the massacre of defenseless people, whether Muslim or Christian or others, anywhere and by any means,'' Khamenei said in his first public reaction to Tuesday's attacks that killed around 5,000 people in New York and Washington.

``Based on the same principle, Iran condemns a possible attack on Afghanistan which could lead to another human catastrophe,'' Iran's IRNA news agency quoted him as saying.

Khamenei, a staunch foe of the United States, has the final say on all state matters in Iran, including foreign policy.

``If America wants to wage war on Afghanistan from bases in Pakistan and expand its influence in the region, it will see its problems mounting,'' Khamenei warned.

``Is the Muslim nation of Afghanistan to suffer another war only because a few people are believed to have had a hand in the recent events?'' he asked.

``The actions of a few Muslims are no authorization to commit repression against Muslims and attack Afghanistan.''

KHATAMI SEEKS UNITED FRONT AGAINST TERRORISM

Iranian President Mohammad Khatami Monday called for an urgent meeting of the world's largest Muslim body to discuss fighting terrorism and a possible clash of cultures.

``Given the sensitive situation, there is a need for efforts to mobilize public opinion against violence and intolerance,'' the moderate Khatami said in a letter to Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the leader of Qatar, which currently chairs the 55-member Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC).

``Unfortunately, the recent inhuman acts in the United States have become an excuse for those who see their interests in clashes with the Muslim civilization to provoke anger against Muslims,'' Iran's state-run radio reported him as saying.

Iranian leaders have strongly condemned the attacks in a rare expression of sympathy for the United States, regarded by the Islamic republic as its arch-foe.

But Tehran has been increasingly wary of the backlash in the West against Muslims following Tuesday's attack and a possibly over-hasty response from the United States.

The United States may strike the Taliban rulers of Iran's eastern neighbor Afghanistan if they refuse to hand over Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden, wanted for the attacks.

Khatami also sent a message to U.N. chief Kofi Annan calling for a united international front against terrorism, IRNA said.

``Terrorism is a common problem in today's world, something that threatens freedom, spirituality, culture and peaceful coexistence,'' the agency quoted the president as saying.

``With wisdom and prudence, we must root out terrorism and the conditions that breed it. One cannot fight terrorism based on emotional and hasty reactions,'' he said.

IRAN WARY OF REFUGEE INFLUX

Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi echoed the concern in his own telephone conversation with Annan Monday.

``Unfortunately, news of possible attacks have sent Afghans rushing toward Afghanistan's borders and threaten a new wave of homelessness,'' he said.

A UNHCR spokesman said in Pakistan Monday that tens of thousands of Afghans had left several major cities and were heading toward borders with Iran and Pakistan.

A new exodus could undermine recent efforts in Iran to repatriate more than two million refugees, mainly Afghans, amid a severe shortage of jobs.

The head of Iran's navy said earlier the armed forces were ready to defend the country's territory and would use their full authority to maintain peace and security in the region.

Admiral Abbas Mohtaj condemned terrorist attacks ``wherever they occurred'' and said Iran had always cooperated with the ''true combatants against terrorism.''

Iran has deployed troops to seal its 900-kmborder with Afghanistan to stop an influx of refugees.

Analysts say Iran would probably maintain a vigilant neutrality in a possible conflict in Afghanistan.

Iran is one of seven countries listed by the United States as state sponsors of ``terrorism,'' but complains that it has also long been the victim of terror attacks, especially by armed opposition rebels backed by neighboring Iraq.

-------- iraq

Iraqi Paper Expects Baghdad to Face U.S. Retaliation

September 17, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-attack-iraq.html

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's most influential newspaper said Monday it expected the country to be a target of U.S. retaliation after last week's attacks in New York and Washington.

``We do not rule out that we are in the forefront of countries that America wants to attack,'' said Babel, the newspaper of President Saddam Hussein's eldest son Uday.

Babel said U.S. concentration on Afghanistan as the primary focus of any revenge strike could be a cover for a plan to hit other countries like North Korea, Iran, Sudan and Syria.

Al-Thawra, an official newspaper, said the United States was intent on using the attack as an excuse to ``humiliate totally'' Arabs and Muslims.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said Washington will go after countries that harbor ``terrorists and their organizations'' in retaliation for the attacks, which left more than 5,000 dead and missing.

A U.S.-led coalition bombed Iraq heavily during the 1991 Gulf War. Iraqi targets still come under attack by Western planes policing two ``no-fly'' zones in the north and south of the country.

Iraqi officials declined to comment on whether Iraq would be the subject of U.S. retribution. Foreign Minister Naji Sabri told Reuters that Iraq hoped the attacks on New York and Washington would force America to reconsider its foreign policy.

Privately, officials in Baghdad expressed relief after U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell said Washington did not possess evidence linking Iraq to the attack.

Life in the Iraqi capital Monday was normal and people went on with their routine business. The exchange rate was stable at 2,003 dinars to the dollar. Government buildings, which were targets of previous Western bombardment, remained well lit at night.

At the Trabeel border crossing with Jordan, a main land outlet available to Iraq, drivers said movement was subdued.

``People don't know what to expect,'' one man said. ``They are postponing their journeys in both directions.''

An Iraqi official said: ``When you've gone through as much bombardment as we did, life goes on normally, even under the present circumstances.''

-------- israel

Arafat Calls for Truce as Violence Rages

September 17, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-mideast.html

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Palestinian and Israeli leaders jockeyed over urgent U.S. calls for truce talks on Monday as fighting raged on in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Washington has pushed for intensified efforts to end a year of Israeli-Palestinian bloodletting since last week's terror attacks in New York and Washington.

President Bush wants to include Arab and Islamic states in his effort. Experts say calming the Israeli-Palestinian storm, in which 579 Palestinians and 167 Israelis have died in a year, would do much to ease that campaign.

As the fighting continued, Palestinian President Yasser Arafat repeated a cease-fire order in greetings to Israelis, released by his office, to mark the Jewish New Year holiday.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has said Israel will not bend over backwards to help the United States attract Arab countries. Sunday he blocked his dovish foreign minister, Shimon Peres, from meeting with Arafat, making such talks conditional on at least 48 hours of peace and quiet.

``I have issued strict instructions for a total commitment to the cease-fire and I hope the Israeli government will respond to this peace appeal and will take the decision to cease fire,'' Arafat said in his letter.

Sharon aide Raanan Gissin commented: ``We welcome his greetings but we wish he will really act on his words and take the necessary action to stop the shooting.''

Gissin said the Israeli government had not received a copy of the letter.

Sharon said Sunday he was making the cease-fire appeal to Arafat ``in the light of the U.S. commitment to uproot all the terrorist organizations' networks and in order to prevent continued bloodshed in our region.''

FIGHTING DESPITE TRUCE TALK

In the West Bank, Palestinian hospital officials said 11 people were wounded in fighting near Ramallah. Several houses were damaged by Israeli tank shells. The Israeli army said a soldier was seriously wounded.

A 33-year-old Palestinian was killed on the sidelines of a battle between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen in the southern Gaza Strip, near the border with Egypt.

Clashes also erupted near the Jewish settlement of Netzarim in Gaza. Some 500 Palestinian students lobbed stones at Israeli tanks. Palestinian hospitals said a 16-year-old was badly hurt.

Israeli security forces were on alert for attacks by Islamic militants over New Year, or Rosh Hashanah, despite capturing, in a raid on Ramallah Sunday, what they described as a ``terror cell'' planning bombings during the holiday.

Rosh Hashanah starts at sundown Monday and ends at sundown Wednesday.

ISRAEL SETS UP BUFFER ZONE

Sharon insisted Israel was not under U.S. pressure to make compromises to entice Palestinians to end their revolt.

``There is no pressure. Not now and not before,'' Sharon told Israel Radio.

While the world continued to focus on events in the United States, the Israeli army announced it would make a 30-km (18-mile)-long area of the West Bank adjacent to the Israeli border off-limits to Palestinians, save for local villagers.

The army called the move a security measure to block suicide bombers from reaching Israeli cities.

``This Israeli plan harms thousands and thousands of Palestinians and kills the Oslo peace deals,'' Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo told reporters, referring to the 1993 interim Israel-Palestinian peace accords.

-------- pakistan

Pakistan Shuts Border to Afghanistan

September 17, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-Afghan-Refugees.html

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistan virtually shut down its border with Afghanistan on Monday, preventing refugees from entering and ordering police to confine more than 1 million of those already in the country to the squalid camps in the north where they live.

Pakistan halted nearly all trade across the 1,560-mile frontier, where both countries have been increasing troops and weaponry.

Thousands of refugees fleeing hunger and drought and fearing a a U.S. military strike tried to cross into Pakistan at the border town of Torkham but were turned away. About two dozen supply trucks were stopped at Torkham, in northern Pakistan, unable to cross into Afghanistan.

The measure comes after the government of President Gen. Pervez Musharraf agreed to ``full cooperation'' with Washington in its fight against those responsible for the terror attacks on the United States.

In addition to the border closure, the United States requested use of Pakistan's airspace and soil as well as an exchange of intelligence material.

The closure applies to everything except food and people with valid travel documents, said Farooq Shah, a border official in Torkham. A few trucks with staple foods were allowed into Afghanistan on Monday, he said.

Also Monday, Pakistan's Northwest Frontier province began assembling police to enforce an order confining 1.2 million Afghan refugees to the dozens of camps scattered throughout the region.

Pakistan called that order, issued Sunday, a precautionary measure in the event of a U.S. strike on neighboring Afghanistan, the base of the leading suspect in the terror attacks, Osama bin Laden.

Pakistan is worried that refugees loyal to Afghanistan's hard-line Islamic Taliban regime might turn violent if the United States uses Pakistani soil or airspace.

In the refugee camps, there was anger and dismay at the new orders.

``If we don't go outside the camps how will we feed our children?'' asked Aziz, a 43-year-old refugee who like many Afghans uses only one name. ``We are people and we are not creating any problems for Pakistan.''

Although exact numbers are not available, last week's terror attacks appear to have intensified Afghanistan's refugee crisis, which the United Nations says is already the world's worst.

In Geneva, the U.N. refugee agency said ``large numbers'' Afghans have been fleeing the major cities of Kabul, Kandahar and Jalalabad since the terrorist attacks.

``Kandahar -- the principal city in the south and the headquarters of the Taliban -- is reported to be half empty,'' the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said in a statement.

Many ``are said to be going to villages in Afghanistan, but many others are reportedly headed to the Pakistan border, and some to the Iranian border,'' it said. Iran and Pakistan have both closed their borders.

All international aid groups have pulled their employees out of Afghanistan. The U.N. agency said emergency staff are alert in the region and are preparing for a major refugee crisis.

Before the terror attacks, millions of Afghans were ``barely managing to survive'' after three years of drought and more than 20 years of war, the agency said. Now the situation could ``deteriorate very rapidly, leading to major population movements, and even widespread deaths.''

Abdullah Jan, a 56-year-old refugee from Kabul and a father of six, said Pakistan has nothing to fear from the Afghan refugees.

``We have nothing to do with terrorism or terrorists. We are ourselves victims of terrorism,'' he said.

He said he sympathizes ``with the pain of the families'' who lost family in the U.S. terror attacks, but said the United States should ``not do anything that would increase the suffering of innocent Afghans.''

-------- uzbekistan

Uzbekistan May Loan Military Bases

September 17, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-Uzbekistan.html

TASHKENT, Uzbekistan (AP) -- Uzbekistan said Monday it would consider lending its military bases to U.S. forces for staging strikes in neighboring Afghanistan.

``Uzbekistan is ready to discuss any form of cooperation in the struggle against international terrorism in our region, including the deployment of U.S. forces,'' Foreign Ministry spokesman Bakhodyr Umarov said.

But Umarov said it was too early to discuss specifics, since the United States had not yet asked Uzbekistan for permission to deploy forces to the Central Asian nation.

Earlier, Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Kamilov told the Washington Post that the former Soviet republic was ready to consider all ``possible forms of cooperation,'' including the presence of U.S. troops in Uzbekistan.

Uzbekistan's neighbors in volatile Central Asia have condemned the terror attacks, but stopped short of offering their bases or airspace to the U.S. military for possible strikes against Osama bin Laden, the suspected terrorist mastermind.

The leaders of Tajikistan, Kazakstan and Kyrgyzstan have voiced fears that U.S. strikes on Afghanistan could rock the unstable Muslim region and prompt a massive refugee exodus.

Tajikistan, which borders Afghanistan, had initially said it might consider offering its bases to the U.S. military, but only on condition Russia approves the move. Moscow quickly made clear it would not welcome the use of Central Asia as a launch pad for the attacks, and Tajikistan said the offer was off.

President Vladimir Putin on Monday discussed regional security in a series of telephone conversations with Central Asian leaders -- conspicuously excluding Uzbekistan's President Islam Karimov.

Unlike Tajikistan, which has about 25,000 Russian troops and depends on Russian subsidies, Uzbekistan has followed a more independent course, often bristling at Moscow's attempts to strengthen its military presence in Central Asia.

Karimov's government has long struggled with Islamic militants who it says aim to carve out an Islamic state in the country's Ferghana Valley.

It says the extremists -- who staged bombings in Tashkent, the capital, in 1999 and armed incursions last year -- have links with Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia.

In the past, the United States has provided aid to help Uzbekistan guard its porous border with Afghanistan, but it has also accused Karimov's government of human rights violations in its campaign against the extremists.

During the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Moscow used Uzbekistan as its main supply and logistics base. It has two large, Soviet-built air bases.

-------- u.s.

War will be stealthy, dirty, in the shadows, Bush says

By CRAIG GILBERT
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Sept. 17, 2001
http://www.jsonline.com/news/nat/sep01/war17091601.asp

Washington - The public may want swift justice, but the Bush administration did its utmost Sunday to gird Americans for a "different kind of war," a long, shadowy campaign with no martial visions of tanks rolling and bombs exploding, and no predictable end point.

"This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile, and the American people must be patient," President Bush said Sunday, standing outside the White House.

"My administration has a job to do. . . . We will rid the world of evil-doers," he said.

Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," Vice President Dick Cheney said:

"It's not like Desert Storm, where we had a buildup for a few months, four days of combat and it was over with. This is going to be the kind of work that will probably take years."

Secretary of State Colin Powell described an elaborate, long-term strategy using soldiers, spies, sleuths and diplomats.

"It's more an intelligence war. It's a law enforcement war. It's that kind of war which isn't just a military war. It's a different kind of war," Powell said.

As these and other high-ranking officials took to the Sunday talk shows, their cautionary comments had more than one purpose.

One was a rather open plea for patience from a public that has memories of the 1991 blitzkrieg against Iraq and may be expecting swift, direct, dramatic retribution. Popular pressure for a punishing retaliatory strike could be one of the biggest political challenges facing Bush in this crisis.

Bin Laden's network

Bush warned Sunday that the network of terrorist Osama bin Laden, the government's prime suspect in Tuesday's attacks, is "in a lot of countries."

Americans are used to wars "where there was a beachhead or desert to cross or known military targets," the president said. "That may occur, but right now we're facing people who hit and run. They hide in caves. We'll get 'em out."

Both Bush and Cheney underscored the government's belief that bin Laden was a central figure in the attacks on New York and Washington. The millionaire Saudi-born fugitive has enjoyed a safe haven in Afghanistan.

Cheney stepped up the rhetoric against that country Sunday, warning, "If you provide sanctuary for terrorists, you face the full wrath of the United States of America."

In their repeated allusions Sunday to a "different kind of war," members of the administration had another goal as well. Bluntly put, they want to unleash the government's secret agents to fight a dirty war against a dirty foe.

During an hourlong interview on NBC's "Meet the Press," Cheney made it clear that the White House wants to lift restrictions against enlisting foreign operatives with criminal backgrounds or records of human rights violations.

The vice president said the government needs to hire some "very unsavory characters."

"We've got to work the dark side," Cheney said. "It's a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena."

Assassination ban

Some in Congress support such changes. There also are calls among lawmakers to relax a quarter-century ban on the use of agents to assassinate foreign figures. All that would require is an executive order from the president. The White House has not said it will take that step.

But Cheney was asked by NBC's Tim Russert if he believed it would be illegal right now for the U.S. to assassinate bin Laden.

"Not in my estimation," he said.

He cautioned, however, against focusing solely on one figure.

"He's the target of the moment, but I don't want to convey the impression if somehow we had his head on aplatter today, that would solve the problem," Cheney said.

The unmistakable message Sunday from Cheney, Powell and key members of Congress was that the government needs time and latitude to root out what the vice president called a "very broad, kind of loose kind of coalition of groupings."

"What we have to do is take down those networks of terrorist organizations," Cheney said. "There is not going to be an end date that we say, 'There, it's all over with.' It's going to require constant vigilance."

No links to Hussein

Cheney said bin Laden's network was linked to groups in several countries, including Egypt and Uzbekistan.

"I have no doubt that he and his organizations played a significant role in this," said Cheney, interviewed at the presidential retreat at Camp David, where he has been stationed for security reasons.

He said there was no evidence that Iraq's Saddam Hussein played a role in the attacks.

Powell, interviewed on CNN, also cautioned against defining counterterrorism in conventional military terms. He and others inside and outside the administration repeatedly drew the contrast with Operation Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf. Powell and Cheney helped direct that swift, lopsided victory. But they don't want Desert Storm to be the public's point of reference for a marathon slog against international terrorism.

"Nobody should think this is going to be, 'We go in, it's over in two days and we're out,' " Powell said.

"I don't think you'll see a ground-sweeping campaign of tanks crossing the desert," House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) said Sunday in another Gulf War allusion. "It's more like a SWAT team cleaning out a den of thieves."

People 'in the shadows'

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made the same point, saying: "It is not a war a military campaign deals with. . . . There are not armies to go after. These are people that operate in the shadows, and we have to deal in the shadows."

"The terrorists who are attacking our way of life do not have armies, navies or air forces. They do not have capitals. They do not have high-value targets that the typical weapons of war can go in and attack," Rumsfeld said. "They're in apartments, and they're using laptops, and they're using cell phones. . . ."

Armey warned that unlike past wars, the progress in this one may not even be discernible to Americans at home.

Notably, members of both parties went on television Sunday to reinforce that message. While there may come a time when the White House is second-guessed by lawmakers impatient with its progress or strategy, that time isn't now.

New York Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has lauded Bush for backing billions in disaster relief for her state, termed the coming war an "extraordinarily difficult undertaking" that will "take the patience of all of us."

Added Senate Democrat John Kerry of Massachusetts: "No one is articulating this as a quick event. . . . This is different, and Americans need to recognize that."

These two joined all but one other Democrat in Congress in voting Friday to give Bush the authority to use military force against those responsible for Tuesday's attacks and any nations that harbor them.

Public supports a war

As the White House is striving to prepare the public for an arduous undertaking, some polls suggest that Americans do have some patience, at least at the outset.

In an ABC News/Washington Post poll, 69% of those surveyed support going to war even if it means "getting into a long war with large numbers of U.S. troops killed or injured."

In a Gallup poll, 7 of 10 Americans said the country should wait to retaliate until it could identify those responsible for the attacks, even if it takes months.

Bush's other message Sunday was that while the nation grieves, it also is time for people to resume their lives and work.

"Our nation was horrified, but it's not going to be terrified," he said.

----

Pentagon Issues Order To Elite Units In Infantry
Military Action Could Involve Ground Troops

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 17, 2001; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41006-2001Sep16?language=printer

The Pentagon issued a "warning order" late last week to some elite infantry units to prepare for a possible imminent combat mission, indicating the administration is moving closer toward taking wide-ranging military action that will involve ground combat troops, a defense official said.

The order was issued after planners on the staff of the Joint Chiefs last week worked intensely to produce several possible "courses of action," as the military calls tentative plans, to retaliate for the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon. A senior officer on the Joint Staff then notified the Army that most of the missions being contemplated could require ground combat forces, as well as combat aircraft.

A warning order involving the deployment of troops overseas requires the approval of the secretary of defense.

President Bush is expected to be briefed on the tentative plans today by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and may approve one for execution, defense officials said.

Rumsfeld also indicated that multifaceted missions are being planned when he said on Fox News yesterday that "this isn't going to be a few cruise missiles flying around on television for the world to see that something blew up." He said that "there very likely will be" military action.

Returning to the White House from Camp David, where he held strategy meetings with senior advisers over the weekend, President Bush said, "It is time for us to the win the first war of the 21st century decisively."

And Vice President Cheney, speaking from Camp David on NBC's "Meet the Press," said about the U.S. military that "we've got a broad range of capabilities, and they may well be given missions in connection with this overall task and strategy."

The headquarters that was notified for possible action is the XVIII Airborne Corps, which is headquartered at Fort Bragg, N.C., and comprises four divisions: The 82nd Airborne, the 101st Airborne, the 3rd Infantry Division and the 10th (Mountain) Division.

Of those units, the most likely to be tapped is the 82nd Airborne, which specializes in capturing airfields and other swift assault missions. The 82nd keeps one battalion at the highest level of readiness, able to begin deploying overseas in 18 hours.

"I'm absolutely positive we're going to go someplace," said one Army officer. He said he wasn't aware of the order, which was closely held, but was judging more by Bush's remark over the weekend that "everybody who wears the uniform" should "get ready" for action.

In another signal the administration is moving closer to military action, the USS Carl Vinson, an aircraft carrier that has been sailing in the vicinity of the Persian Gulf, stopped showing its location on its Web site (www.cvn70.navy.mil). That Web site also reported that sailors aboard the ship have been blocked from sending e-mail.

"Our outgoing e-mail has been shut down to preserve operational security," the Web site read. It is standard practice aboard Navy ships to cut off telephone calls and e-mails before going into combat.

Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, the senior uniformed Pentagon spokesman, declined to comment on the issuance of the warning order or the clampdown on information about the USS Carl Vinson.

"We will not comment on the pending movements of operational units," he said.

--------

MILITARY ANALYSIS
A New War and Its Scale

New York Times
September 17, 2001
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/17/international/17ASSE.html

WASHINGTON, Sept. 16 - When President Bush and his top aides talk about military action to end Afghanistan's support for terrorism, they are focusing on attacks to punish the Taliban and undermine their control over the country, not a full-scale American occupation.

No war plan appears to have been agreed on, and officially the Bush administration insists that no options have been excluded.

The administration, however, is preparing a powerful military strike if the Taliban, as expected, refuse to hand over the terrorist Osama bin Laden and shut down his terrorist network.

The blow would be intended not only to destroy terrorist bases in Afghanistan but also to demonstrate to other nations that there is a heavy cost to be paid for those who shelter enemies of the United States.

A principal option is to intervene militarily in Afghanistan's civil war on the side of the Taliban's foes: the beleaguered rebel alliance that claims just a sliver of Afghanistan's territory. It was just weakened further with the assassination of its leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, who died Saturday, after a bomb attack committed just two days before the raids in New York and Washington.

At the same time, the United States would apply additional pressure, for example, by persuading Pakistan to close off financial channels to the bin Laden organization and the flow of fuel to Afghanistan.

Such steps might fall short of a knockout blow to the Taliban. Complicating the administration's planning, the element of surprise has been lost. The Taliban and Mr. bin Laden's men are expecting a bombing attack and have been evacuating their camps and bases, according to American intelligence.

But there is a recognition that to go further by carrying out a Soviet-style occupation with thousands of troops would place the United States at odds with much of the Islamic world and is fraught with danger.

The administration seems to be grappling for a plan involving air power, and potentially ground troops, that is more forceful than the cruise missile strike that the Clinton administration launched in 1998 against Mr. bin Laden in Afghanistan - with little effect - but that is less than the huge air and ground offensive that the United States launched in the Persian Gulf war.

Administration officials indicated that military action against Afghanistan need not be an urgent matter without the element of surprise. Indeed, the Pentagon will need time to position its forces if it decides to carry out a major attack in a distant region like Afghanistan, far from American bases.

But administration officials also know that politically it will be easier to take action while world outrage over the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is still fresh.

The military action being planned for Afghanistan is part of a broader diplomatic as well as military policy of holding nations accountable that provide aid and comfort to terrorists.

The administration's goal is clear: it wants to rip apart the terrorists' networks. But since the terrorists are hard to find, Washington is focusing not just on them but on the governments that back them. Certainly capturing a terrorist or enemy leader is one of the most difficult of military tasks.

The American military tried in vain to capture the Somali warlord Muhammad Farah Aidid. And it failed to break Saddam Hussein's hold on power despite numerous raids including some devised to kill the Iraqi leader.

The first Bush administration was successful in apprehending Manuel Noriega, the Panama strongman. But Washington had many advantages, including American military bases and airfields in Panama.

But Mr. bin Laden has been elusive and has based himself in a rugged region, remote from American bases and forces. Vice President Dick Cheney said today that the United States was not even sure that Mr. bin Laden is still in Afghanistan. Faced with a difficult task of tracking him down, the Bush administration has responded by enlarging the problem. The theory is that while the terrorist may be hard to find, a government that shelters him is not.

"The terrorist organizations themselves and the terrorists don't have targets of high value," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today on the Fox News Channel. "They don't have armies and navies and air forces that one can go battle against. They don't have capital cities with high-value assets that they're reluctant to lose."

He added: "Some of the countries that are harboring terrorist networks do, in fact, have high-value targets. They do have capitals. They do have armies." Deputy Secretary of State Paul D. Wolfowitz spoke last week of "ending states who sponsor terrorism." Officials say now that he misspoke, that he meant to say that the goal is ending state support.

In some cases, like Afghanistan, that may be a semantic issue since the goal would be to dislodge the Taliban rulers if they refused to cooperate with Washington's counterterrorism campaign.

In other cases, political, economic and limited military pressure may be applied. The Bush administration has certainly not committed itself to invading all the nations on the State Department's list of those found to help terrorists - Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Cuba and North Korea.

And it may be prepared to show some tactical flexibility. Some officials say that they do not exclude cooperating with Iran, a supporter of the anti-Taliban insurgents, in their quest to take the fight to the Taliban. That would be an application of the old dictum "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

In a country as poor as Afghanistan, there may be precious few of the high-value targets that Mr. Rumsfeld referred to. But there are still bases, police posts and forces that the United States could strike. Certainly the main focus is on targets in Afghanistan.

Mr. Cheney said there was no indication that Iraq was linked to last week's terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. "Saddam Hussein's bottled up at this point," he said.

Recognizing the difficulty of its military task, the Bush administration has also been avoiding expectations that one or two raids will put an end to the worldwide terrorist threat. It is talking about a military campaign that would last years, not months.

"What we have to do is take down those networks of terrorist organizations," Mr. Cheney said today. "I think this is going to be a struggle that the United States is going to be involved in for the foreseeable future."


-------- OTHER

-------- environment

NEW HAZARDOUS WASTE SITES ADDED TO SUPERFUND LIST

September 17, 2001
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/sep2001/2001L-09-17-09.html

WASHINGTON, DC, The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is adding 11 new hazardous waste sites to the National Priorities List (NPL), also known as the Superfund list, and is proposing 17 new sites.

The primary purpose of the NPL is to guide the EPA in determining which sites warrant further investigation. A site is proposed for the NPL if preliminary investigations indicate that it warrants further action.

Proposed sites must go through a public comment period before they can be finalized on the NPL. Including today's additions, the NPL now contains 1,248 final sites.

The 11 added sites are:

Casmalia Resources, Casmalia, California American Creosote Works, Inc., Louisville, Mississippi Barker Hughesville Mining District, Barker, Montana Carpenter Snow Creek Mining District, Neihart, Montana Barber Orchard, Waynesville, North Carolina MacKenzie Chemical Works, Inc, Central Islip, New York Valmont TCE, Hazle Township and West Hazleton, Pennsylvania Watson Johnson Landfill, Richland Township, Pennsylvania Bountiful/Woods Cross 5th South PCE Plume, Bountiful/Woods Cross, Utah Ely Copper Mine, Vershire, Vermont Lower Duwamish Waterway, Seattle, Washington

More information on these sites, and the 17 proposed sites, is available at: http://www.epa.gov/superfund

-------- imf / world bank

IMF, World Bank cancel D.C. meetings

USA TODAY
09/17/2001
The Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/09/17/imf-world-bank-cancel.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank announced Monday that they have canceled this year's annual meetings, saying security agents need time to focus on issues raised by last week's terrorist attacks. In a joint statement, officials of the two multinational lending agencies headquartered in Washington said their normal operations would not be affected by the cancellation.

"This decision was taken out of deepest respect and sympathy for the families of all those touched by the horrific events of last Tuesday and in order to dedicate law enforcement personnel fully to the extraordinary and immediate priorities at hand," said IMF Managing Director Horst Koehler and World Bank President James Wolfensohn.

The two officials said that they expect to return to their regular schedule of meetings next year, which would mean a spring meeting of finance ministers from the 24 nations on the steering committees for both the IMF and World Bank.

Koehler and Wolfensohn said they would find other ways to deal with the issues that would have been addressed at the annual meetings.

After Tuesday's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, District of Columbia Police Chief Charles Ramsey urged the IMF and World Bank to cancel the meetings.

City police had been counting on colleagues from other jurisdictions, including New York City, to help them deal with what they said could be as many as 100,000 protesters at the meetings.

World Bank spokeswoman Caroline Anstey had said last week that officials at both institutions were intent on helping to make sure that police forces were deployed in the best way to protect national security.

Many of the groups that had been planning to protest had already announced that they were calling off their demonstrations.

On Sunday, the Mobilization for Global Justice, the umbrella group for many of the protest organizations, said it was calling off its street demonstrations but would continue with plans for a "people's summit" of teach-ins and discussions Sept. 26-28.

"Our decision to postpone was made out of respect for the victims of this tragedy," the group said in a statement.

Last Friday, the AFL-CIO, Friends of the Earth and Oxfam America all announced that they were pulling out of the planned demonstrations.

While the annual meetings of the 183-nation IMF and World Bank have been canceled, officials have indicated that some events that normally take place around those discussions would continue.

Last week, the German Finance Ministry said a meeting of the finance ministers and central bank presidents of the seven wealthiest nations, the Group of Seven, was likely to be held but that the meeting might be moved from Washington.

The G-7 normally meets immediately before the spring and fall gatherings of the IMF and World Bank.

--------

WTO Gives China Formal Go - Ahead

September 17, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-WTO-China.html

GENEVA (AP) -- World Trade Organization negotiators formally agreed Monday to terms for Chinese membership after 15 years of tough talks, chief WTO spokesman Keith Rockwell said.

China's chief negotiator, Long Yongtu, welcomed the decision and said the world would benefit.

``After China's accession, the great potential of China's market will be gradually translated into actual purchasing power so as to provide a huge open market to all countries and regions in the world,'' Long said. ``This would be an important contribution by China to mankind.''

A deal was reached early Saturday at an ``informal'' meeting of the 142-nation body and was rubber-stamped Monday afternoon at the formal session of the China Working Party at WTO's lakeside headquarters.

It is due to be adopted at a meeting of trade ministers scheduled for Qatar in November, clearing the way for the world's most populous nation to become a member of the all-powerful trade club early next year after its own legislation ratifies it.

European Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy, the key negotiator for the 15-nation European bloc in the final phase of negotiations, welcomed the WTO consensus.

``It is very satisfying to see over 15 years of hard work bear fruit. China's accession will make the WTO a truly global organization,'' Lamy said.

China's entry into the rules-making body for world trade will have far-reaching implications for everyone from American farmers to Chinese auto workers. It will open its state-dominated economy to imports but will also lead to an upsurge in Chinese exports.

Chinese leaders are convinced that increased foreign investment and greater access overseas for Chinese exports will create jobs and prosperity -- both key to maintaining the Communist Party's grip on power.

But in the short term, millions of Chinese are expected to lose their jobs as inefficient family farms and state-owned firms succumb to cheaper imports.

Foreign products could also undermine Communist rule by increasing China's exposure to Western ideas.

Saturday's deal came after a compromise was reached over the remaining obstacle -- a dispute between the United States and the European Union over insurance companies.

China applied to join the WTO's predecessor -- the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade -- in 1986. But the process was complicated by its crackdown on democracy activists, and fears that China would use its vast labor market to undercut competitors.

Long said the 15 years of negotiation was ``indeed a long process. However, it is only a blink of the eye compared with the 5,000-year history of China.''

-------- police / prisoners

Personal liberties a victim of terrorist assaults

By The Associated Press,
September 17, 2001
http://www.courierpress.com/cgi-bin/view.cgi?200109/17+libertyjm091701_siege.html+20010917

NEW YORK - More scrutiny at airports. No coolers or backpacks at baseball stadiums. More information-sharing with law enforcement, with or without search warrants.

The suicide attacks on the nation's landmarks have already prompted some sacrifices of personal liberties. So far, most Americans are accepting them in the interest of the common welfare.

But civil libertarians fear a creeping challenge to the freedoms considered fundamental to the American way of life.

"We can very well accomplish ourselves what the terrorists couldn't do on their own: Destroy the United States as we know it," said Lauren Weinstein, moderator of an online privacy forum. "Even if we don't tear the Constitution up explicitly, we can do it one piece at a time."

Already at airports, passengers are facing tougher measures: Longer lines and more scrutiny at security checkpoints, non-ticketed relatives further restricted from accompanying loved ones to gates.

Internet service providers and car rental companies have turned over information to law enforcement _ sometimes without search warrants, said Larry Ponemon of the Privacy Council, which advises Fortune 1000 companies.

"Many of these organizations are cooperating in a way they would never have before," Ponemon said. "From the purely emotional level, you can understand why privacy is being suspended."

Expect more surveillance and access restrictions at sporting events, concerts and shopping malls. When baseball resumes Monday, fans will no longer be able to take along coolers, backpacks or large bags.

Expect more office buildings to restrict access to the public. Expect fewer places where individuals can truly remain anonymous _ where they can pass without showing an ID or having a surveillance camera record their features.

For now, the constraints at airports and elsewhere are mostly inconveniences. But civil libertarians fear the next steps could include racial profiling and X-ray machines that see through clothing.

Technology companies are pushing video cameras with face-recognition software to match visitors with police databases. Such systems are already in use, deployed at this year's Super Bowl and by the police in Tampa, Fla.

The public appears supportive.

"It's a small price to pay for saving lives," said Chad Beaman, a hair salon manager in New York.

Ellen Scarborough, who owns an antiques business, said she favors "whatever it takes to secure the American public."

Americans will be less tolerant, though, once memories of the attacks fade, Ponemon predicts. By that time, he expects, the measures "permanently will become a way of life."

Some question whether such constraints will truly provide safety: Ban guns, and terrorists turn to knives. Ban knives, and they'll use sharpened belt buckles or learn martial arts.

Even before Tuesday's attacks, some in government sought greater surveillance powers over e-mail and telephone communications.

And although law enforcement has made no case publicly that existing wiretap restrictions have hindered their investigation of the attacks, those rules now may be loosened.

On Thursday, the Senate passed a measure that would broaden court-ordered wiretapping to include terrorism cases and computer crimes; on Sunday, Attorney General John Ashcroft said the administration would ask Congress this week for increased authority to use wiretaps to seek out and prosecute suspected terrorists.

Other proposals that could infringe on personal privacy and liberty have included tighter immigration laws and requirements that encryption software contain a backdoor for law enforcement to access scrambled messages.

"The intelligence agencies have a long list of things they want done," said Morton H. Halperin, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C. "They've been waiting for an event to justify them."

Victoria Toensing, the Justice Department's antiterrorism chief during the Reagan administration, agreed that security and civil liberties must be balanced.

But she believes the balance already favors liberties, constraining law enforcement. For instance, the CIA has restrictions on employing informants with unsavory backgrounds, though they may have the best ties to terrorists.

"There's a chilling effect on really being able to get information on terrorism," she said.

Gene Poteat, president of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, said tough measures are already common abroad. He's been patted down at checkpoints and asked to snap a camera pointed at himself _ just to prove it's not a weapon.

Visionics Corp., a company that makes face-recognition cameras, has been receiving more than three times the normal inquiries from airports, sporting venues and other public places.

The systems can store video images for days or weeks, and tying them together allows police to reconstruct an individual's whereabouts.

"What we see right now is something that is very real, while concerns about privacy have to do with theoretical possibilities," said Joseph Atick, the company's chief executive.

Civil libertarians, on the other hand, worry about setting policies based on emotions, citing a mentality that led to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

"It's a matter of historical fact that whenever there have been crises of this sort, the balance between civil liberties and security changes," said Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We sacrifice freedom for really no good reason other than fear."

----

Ashcroft eyes law review to aid FBI

September 17, 2001
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010917-52582802.htm

The FBI's hunt for terrorist Osama bin Laden's accomplices received a boost yesterday from Attorney General John Ashcroft, who wants sweeping revisions in federal law to help track down those who aided the 19 hijackers involved in last week's terrorist attacks.

Mr. Ashcroft said during a briefing at Camp David that FBI agents who are part of "the largest single investigation in the history of the United States" have less authority while searching for members of bin Laden's shadowy terrorist group, al Qaeda, than while seeking organized crime figures, drug dealers, spies and gamblers.

The attorney general, who began talking with congressional leaders yesterday by phone and in person, said the FBI needs additional authority to detain foreigners suspected of plotting attacks against the United States, increased ability to operate wiretaps on any telephone used by those under surveillance, and new tools to track money launderers who finance terrorist operations.

"We do believe that people involved in the terrorist attack, with connections to terrorist groups, may be present in the United States," said Justice Department spokeswoman Mindy Tucker. "We believe that that is a significant enough threat to warrant quick action on Congress' part."

Meanwhile, the Justice Department acknowledged yesterday that the FBI and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service had vigorously sought two of last week's suspected hijackers -- Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhamzi -- after being told by the CIA on Aug. 23 that they were in the United States.

The two had been placed on the government's "watchlist" of suspected terrorists.

Al-Midhar was observed in a surveillance tape in January 2000 meeting with suspected terrorists in Kuala Lumpur, Indonesia; he later traveled with Alhamzi to the United States. Authorities said the two men left this country before the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen.

FBI agents, working on a tip that the two men were staying at a Marriott Hotel in New York, checked all 10 Marriott hotels in the city but could not find them there. Dozens of other hotels and sites also were checked, authorities said. The two have since been identified as being among the five hijackers who commandeered the jetliner that crashed into the Pentagon.

In the ongoing probe, two persons remain under arrest as material witnesses. They are among 25 persons being held in the investigation on immigration violations. None has been charged in connection with the attacks, although Ms. Tucker said several were cooperating with authorities.

In seeking new legislation, Mr. Ashcroft said there are "areas of our laws and procedures" that give authorities better tools against organized crime figures and drug dealers than against terrorists and even specify lesser punishment for terrorists.

"We need to make sure we provide the maximum capacity against terrorists in the United States," including increased penalties for those who "would harbor or assist terrorists to at least the same level as the penalties for those who would harbor or assist those who have been involved in espionage," he said.

Mr. Ashcroft said telephone wiretaps have historically been limited to specific telephones, rather than to people, meaning that when a suspect "ceases using one telephone and begins to use another telephone, we have to go back to court to get new authority."

"We all understand that you can buy disposable telephones now, use them for a limited period of time and throw them away. It simply doesn't make sense to have the surveillance authority associated with the hardware or with the phone instead of with the person or the terrorist," Mr. Ashcroft said.

Ms. Tucker said the proposed legislation would go to Capitol Hill this week.

The FBI has assigned 4,000 agents to track down the accomplices, assisted by a support staff of more than 3,000 persons, including FBI lab personnel.

Ms. Tucker said that "hundreds of interviews" have been conducted by FBI agents across the country and that many more were expected.

The first arrest in the case occurred Friday when FBI agents took into custody a man in New York as a material witness. The FBI declined to identify him or elaborate on what role, if any, he had in the attacks. Authorities said he was among 10 persons detained Thursday at John F. Kennedy International Airport after he showed what they said was a pilot's license issued to his brother.

A second man, also named as a material witness, was arrested Saturday.

The second man also has not been identified.

Canadian authorities yesterday also turned over a man to the FBI who had been detained at Toronto's Pearson International Airport. The unidentified man had been in the custody of Canadian immigration officials since Tuesday.

Among the 25 detainees are two men who were seized from an Amtrak train in Texas. Ayub Ali Khan, 51, and Mohammed Jaweed Azmath, 47, were detained at an Amtrak station in Fort Worth.

Both men were questioned in Texas and later flown to New York for additional interviews by the Joint Terrorism Task Force. They were detained after Fort Worth police said they found box cutters, hair dye and $5,000 to $10,000 in cash during a routine drug search.

Some of the 19 hijackers who commandeered the three jets that hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and a fourth plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, had knives and box cutters.

The FBI is seeking about 100 persons it believes may have information on Tuesday's attacks.

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FBI Seeks Accomplices, Detains Potential Witnesses
Suspected Hijacker Took Md. Test Flights

By John Mintz and Brooke A. Masters
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, September 17, 2001; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41070-2001Sep16?language=printer

One of the men suspected of crashing American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon had flown over the Washington area in small planes at least three times over the past six weeks, according to law enforcement sources and officials at the Bowie flight school where instructors unwittingly accompanied him.

Hani Hanjour, who is in his mid-twenties, was seeking permission to rent a plane from Freeway Airport and took the flights to try to demonstrate his competence in the cockpit, said Marcel Bernard, chief flight instructor, and others connected with the flight school. But Freeway declined the rental because the instructors had doubts about Hanjour's abilities and he refused to provide an address and phone number. FBI agents have pursued numerous other leads in the Washington area, including a Laurel apartment complex, a Fairfax public library, a Dulles parking lot and dozens of hotels.

Meanwhile, details emerged about the FBI's failed attempts to locate two other hijackers of the same flight who had been placed on a watch list on Aug. 23 to be stopped at the U.S. border. CIA officials had alerted the FBI and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service that the two were suspected associates of Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden. The CIA had already told the INS verbally of its concern two days earlier, on Aug. 21, officials said.

But a check of immigration records at that time revealed that Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhamzi were already in the United States and had passed through Los Angeles International Airport on Saudi passports, U.S. officials said.

The pair gave phony destinations to U.S. immigration officials at the Los Angeles airport, and the FBI was unable to find the men over the next two weeks, officials said.

"Two weeks is not a lot of time to find two people in a country as big as ours," a government official said.

Al-Midhar had been spotted on a videotape provided to the CIA speaking with a man in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, who was a suspect in last year's bombing of the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen. The tape is another piece of circumstantial evidence linking the Sept. 11 attacks to bin Laden, who is suspected of masterminding the Cole bombing and has been labeled the prime suspect in Tuesday's attacks. The tape was made in January 2000, months before the Cole bombing, in which 17 sailors died, officials said.

Law enforcement and intelligence authorities scrambled yesterday to locate people who had assisted the suicide bombers and to assemble a sharper portrait of the 19 men the FBI says executed the terrorist strike.

Agents canvassed neighborhoods from Jersey City, N.J., to Laurel, pored over passenger lists for airline flights and watched people traveling by train.

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft suggested that authorities are looking into whether bin Laden, the multimillionaire scion of a Saudi construction family, worked with other groups in the devastating attacks. "We are not limiting our investigation or our effort to any particular network," he said.

Justice Department spokeswoman Mindy Tucker said the investigation is now focused mostly on locating accomplices. "The most important thing is to go out and identify any potential threats and eliminate any threats," Tucker said.

Authorities said they took a man into custody in New York yesterday as a possible material witness, after the arrest of a man at Kennedy International Airport who was carrying a phony pilot's license. Another man also had been picked up as a material witness in recent days. And officials said two more such witnesses, who usually are considered important enough to affect the outcome of a case, were in custody.

Federal officials cited grand jury secrecy rules in refusing to provide details. Law enforcement officials are using a federal grand jury impaneled in Manhattan to take testimony in the matter.

Authorities investigating Tuesday's attack on the World Trade Center found a passport belonging to one of the hijackers three blocks from the demolished 110-story buildings, New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik said. Officials declined to say to whom the passport was issued, but a government source said that it was a Saudi passport.

Moreover, law enforcement officials said they have a promising lead in the case of two men who were detained in Texas on Wednesday on possible immigration violations.

Mohammed Jaweed Azmath, 47, and Ayub Ali Khan, 51, were picked up Wednesday on an Amtrak train in Texas carrying $5,000 in cash, hair dye and box cutters, weapons thought to have been used by the hijackers.

Khan and Azmath had boarded a flight from Newark to San Antonio around the time of the attacks Tuesday morning. Their flight was forced to land in St. Louis when all U.S. flights were grounded after the attacks. They then boarded an Amtrak train for Texas.

After two days of questioning in Texas, the men were transported to New York for further interviews on the hijacking. The men have not been arrested but were detained on possible immigration violations.

Saturday afternoon FBI agents and police also searched the Jersey City apartment the two men had been sharing, located in the same neighborhood of some of the conspirators who plotted the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

The men, both from India, had lived there for six or seven years, according to their landlord, Mohamad Abd Rabouh. On their rental application for the $480-a-month apartment, they said they worked at a stationery store in New York, said Rabouh.

According to Rabouh, Azmath was recently out of the country for several months. Neighbors said Azmath and Khan were seen nearly every day, leaving very early and coming home late, for the past several years until they disappeared about a week ago. Around noon Saturday, FBI agents and local police stormed the four-story apartment building where the men lived and took into custody two other men who were staying in Azmath and Khan's apartment.

Authorities arrested a third man, Abdoul Salam Achou, 37. Achou's wife, who is eight months pregnant, said her husband's visa application had expired on Sept. 1 but that he was staying for the birth of their baby. He is a delivery driver for a Paterson, N.J., bakery.

Investigators also detained three men in Elizabeth, N.J., who were carrying a large amount of cash and a one-way plane ticket to Syria. Ahmad Kilfat, 45, Mohammad Mahmoud Al Raqqad, 37, and Nicholas Makrakis, 27, were in a red Pontiac that matched an FBI description of a vehicle connected to the attacks.

The men were carrying bags that contained $9,900, several credit cards, phone records of calls to the Middle East and a plane ticket from Kennedy airport to Damascus.

In Minnesota, authorities gave scant details about a man who had been arrested on Aug. 17 for illegally entering the country. Habib Zacarias Moussaoui, 33, had been held by the INS at the Sherburne County jail in Elk River, Minn., until Sept. 14, when he was transferred by INS officials to an undisclosed location, officials said.

Europe 1 Radio in Paris reported that Moussaoui, described variously as being from France and Algeria, has been identified by French intelligence officials as a bin Laden operative, the Boston Herald reported. Moussaoui studied to become a pilot at the Airman Flight School in Norman, Okla., earlier this year but generated suspicions and the INS check after he tried to buy training sessions on a commercial airline flight simulator in Eagan, Minn., news services reported.

Just hours after the attacks Tuesday, British police arrested a man arriving at London's Heathrow Airport from New York. Scotland Yard said the man was to be questioned under Britain's new Prevention of Terrorism Act, but it did not identify him.

London's Sunday Telegraph said the man was Mufti Mohammed Khan, a bin Laden associate from Pakistan, and that he had traveled to Britain to meet with allies in London and Birmingham. Khan was to be flown back to New York for questioning by the FBI, the Telegraph reported.

At the same time that authorities cracked down on the suspected terrorist operatives overseas, federal agents were pursuing leads in the Washington area.

FBI agents swarmed into Crestleigh Gardens, a Laurel apartment complex, going door-to-door last week asking neighbors if they recognized two men in photos that appeared to have been taken by a surveillance camera, residents said. The agents said the two men were dead.

The complex drew particular attention because it is home to a Muslim cleric who was identified by FBI agents in Dallas as one of more than 100 people the government is seeking to question in connection with the hijackings.

Moataz Al-Hallak has lived in Laurel and taught at a local Islamic school for about a year, but he first attracted FBI notice when he was an imam at a mosque in Arlington, Tex., after the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

In a court hearing in that case, a federal prosecutor described Al-Hallak as a conduit among members of the group organized by bin Laden's, the suspected sponsor of both the attacks on Tuesday and those in Africa. Al-Hallak has never been charged in the conspiracy.

Although authorities described Al-Hallak as missing, his attorney, Stanley L. Cohen, said his client has been at his home and workplace in Laurel since the hijackings, and Al-Hallak came to his door when a reporter knocked yesterday. He referred questions to Cohen.

Cohen said his client is not involved in terrorism and has cooperated with authorities, testifying three times before a federal grand jury in the embassy bombings case. "The specter of him being involved in any way, shape or form related to these events is insane," Cohen said.

Cohen said his client has several connections to bin Laden, but he described them as attenuated. The cleric once sent money to a member of his Texas congregation in Sudan who was later convicted in the embassy bombings. Cohen said his client also put another congregant in touch with a pilot who later flew a plane from the United States to Sudan, where it was sold to a bin Laden-controlled operation.

Hanjour, the man who flew planes in Bowie, obtained his pilot's license in April 1999, but it expired six months later because he failed to complete a required medical exam. He also received flight training for a few months at a private school in Scottsdale, Ariz., in 1996 but did not finish the course because his instructors thought he was not proficient.

The Freeway instructors also were skeptical of Hanjour's skills. "They told me he flew so poorly that they were not willing to give him an endorsement to fly our planes," Bernard said.

Hanjour's two instructors did not return calls and were not home yesterday, but Ann Conner, the mother of one of them, said her 19-year-old son, Benjamin, went aloft twice with Hanjour. They flew the school's routine flight path -- in half-hour to hour-long segments in oblong loops over the airport -- and did not stray into the restricted airspace over the Pentagon, flight instructor Bernard said.

Hanjour "didn't say hardly anything," Ann Conner said after her son told her he had been interviewed by authorities. "His piloting skills were terrible, considering" he was licensed to fly multi-engine planes. "He didn't talk at all, no routine chit-chat."

Staff writers Justin Blum, Dan Eggen, Michael A. Fletcher, Maria Glod, Bill Miller, Robert E. Pierre, Hanna Rosin, Michael D. Shear, Mary Beth Sheridan, Leef Smith and Cheryl W. Thompson and correspondents DeNeen L. Brown in Toronto, T.R. Reid in London and Reem Haddad in Beirut contributed to this report.

---------

For the FBI, a Chance at Redemption
Agency Is Under Pressure to Prove It Can Come Together Under New Leadership

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 17, 2001; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41031-2001Sep16?language=printer

Six days into an investigation code-named PENTTBOM, more than 4,000 FBI agents are working the phones and the streets in pursuit of the most ambitious goal in the bureau's history. Rarely has the FBI faced as much pressure, or had such an opportunity for redemption.

The audacity of 19 suicidal hijackers angered the nation and propelled President Bush to declare a state of war. A unanimous Senate voted to permit all means necessary to assault terrorism around the globe. With military forces being readied and domestic worries still high that Osama bin Laden and his followers are not finished, the FBI is at the fulcrum.

"The work the bureau does will help determine where the gun is pointed," said Eric H. Holder Jr., deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration. He contrasted PENTTBOM with a typical case, where the principal goal is to build a criminal prosecution fit for trial.

"This is way bigger than that," Holder said. "The foreign policy concerns, the military concerns, depend on the investigators' ability to say, 'This is who did it. They were supported by these people, these countries, these organizations.' "

Most urgently, the FBI has been working to determine whether other likely terrorists are at large in the United States. Members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have been warned by government briefers that the attacks may not be over. U.S. intelligence agencies are working their own networks and those of foreign countries to learn more.

News about the FBI has been little but grim in recent times, the bureau's once-glamorous image suffering from repeated embarrassments. And then came Tuesday's assault on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. The terrorists took the government by surprise -- the FBI never saw it coming -- even though many of the hijackers had lived in the United States for considerable stretches, their names known, in some cases, to authorities.

The inability of the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies to detect the plot in advance seems certain to attract considerable inquiry. Many members of Congress have called the attack an intelligence failure and, yesterday, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft urged lawmakers to grant stronger investigatory powers to federal law officers.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) has been one of the harshest critics of what he considers the FBI's failings. He noted yesterday that the intelligence community was caught off guard by Tuesday's attack and "we have to assume there are some bad guys in this country. Maybe some of them have been in this country for a long time and have been your neighbor."

Yet, he said, the investigation presents a new chance as well.

"This is an opportunity for the FBI to rise to the occasion and to show their colors under a new director," said Grassley, referring to Robert S. Mueller III. He said it is time to "pull together" toward a clear goal. "Wherever there are cells of terrorists in the United States, ferret them out and get convictions."

Minutes after the two jetliners slammed into the World Trade Center on Tuesday morning, Bush spoke with Mueller, the former homicide prosecutor and U.S. Marine who took command of the FBI seven days before the attack. Mueller deployed thousands of agents and support workers -- 7,000 at last official count -- to piece together the conspiracy that is believed to have killed more than 5,000 people.

Within 48 hours of the attack, the bureau had logged 22,500 telephone tips and 2,000 more through the Internet. By Saturday, the total was 46,000, said Ashcroft, who called this "the largest single investigation in the history of the United States."

The FBI released the names of the hijacking suspects, in hopes of producing useful details. Authorities dispatched to every U.S. police agency the names of more than 100 people whom agents would like to contact. Working with telephone records, overseas intelligence reports and other documents, the bureau is assembling an ever-wider list of contacts worldwide.

"There's an unbelievable amount of information flowing, from an unbelievable number of directions. The hard part is making sure you track all of the information coming in," said James V. DeSarno Jr., former chief of the FBI's Los Angeles field office. "That's where the bureau's information technology needs are tremendous."

Mueller and his top lieutenants gather two to three times a day to talk about the case, reported an FBI spokesman, who said briefing papers are prepared for Mueller throughout the day and night. Twenty of the bureau's 56 field offices are closely involved in the case, the spokesman said, and conference calls among them and headquarters are frequent.

The 40,000-square-foot FBI operations center, built to handle four crises at once, is a windowless warren of rooms in FBI headquarters, positioned far from the outside world for security reasons. At any time, 500 people are working there, Mueller and Ashcroft often among them.

FBI Deputy Director Thomas Pickard is formally in charge of the investigation, but Justice Department spokeswoman Mindy Tucker told reporters that "the case agent, realistically, for all practical purposes, is Bob Mueller."

Someone familiar with Mueller's handling of the investigation said, "Mueller is just electrified, in charge. Just being Bob Mueller."

The FBI was tasked to solve the Oklahoma City bombing, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and the East African embassy bombings, but nothing prepared the bureau for this.

"The problem here is not one of structure but of magnitude," said Lewis D. Schiliro, former head of the FBI's New York office. "Strictly from an investigative standpoint, having the incredible tragedy of the skyjacking of four planes. Flying a plane into the Pentagon, in and of itself, would have devastated investigative resources."

Several former FBI agents and students of the bureau worry that turnover and a years-long brain drain will hinder the bureau. Also, although investigators are receiving large quantities of data from documents and wiretaps, two well-placed former law enforcement officials said the FBI suffers a lack of Arabic linguists and analysts. Another challenge is the harnessing by new leadership of an agency that has never had to function at such a high level.

"Will some things go wrong? Of course. Will there be criticism of something in an investigation this huge? I'm sure," DeSarno said. "But at the end of the day, I think we'll find that the FBI has done what this country expects it to do. This is what the FBI does best."

Schiliro, who worked on the 1998 embassy bombings and the 1993 World Trade Center attack, said the bureau will not lack zeal.

"This is something that becomes so focused that you can't believe how bad you want to do this," Schiliro said. "You have agents who feel an incredible need to go out and find who's responsible. It becomes personal."

-------- spying

Tenet takes heat for not stopping attacks

September 17, 2001
By Joyce Howard Price
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010917-30720122.htm

CIA Director George J. Tenet has come under increasing pressure from a leading Senate Republican to resign following the failure of the intelligence agency to prevent last week's terrorist attacks.

Sen. Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the ranking member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, has made it clear that he believes Mr. Tenet should be replaced as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, given its failure to detect planning for the deadly terrorist attacks on American soil.

"This was a massive intelligence failure. It happened on his watch," Mr. Shelby said yesterday on CBS' "Face the Nation."

"If we didn't have a clue, then something's wrong. If we had a clue and didn't act, then something's worse," Mr. Shelby said.

However, some Republicans and Democrats yesterday rushed to defend the CIA chief from Mr. Shelby's criticisms.

Interviewed yesterday on NBC's "Meet the Press," Vice President Richard B. Cheney said, "I think George clearly should remain as director of the CIA I have great confidence in him."

The vice president said he has worked closely with Mr. Tenet in the past seven or eight months and has been impressed. "I think he and his people do superb work for us, and I think it would be a tragedy if, somehow, we were to go back now in the search for scapegoats and say that George Tenet or any other official ought to be eliminated at this point."

Sen. Bob Graham, Florida Democrat and chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, said in an interview on ABC's "This Week" that he shared the White House's opinion that Mr. Tenet should stay. "I believe that he has served this nation well and honorably," said Mr. Graham.

"What you don't know in this battle against terrorism are all the victories that have been won, because those are all in the darkest shadows of confidentiality," he said.

"This was clearly a failure. Who precisely or what institution or what failure of resources or others was responsible is something that we'll have to know later," Mr. Graham added.

The debate over the CIA's responsibility for the failure to detect last week's kamikaze attacks came on a day of other developments:

• President Bush pledged a "crusade" to "rid the world of evil-doers," saying that Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden was the "prime suspect" behind the attacks.

• Mr. Cheney warned that those who harbored terrorists would face "the full wrath of the United States."

• The New York Stock Exchange and the Mercantile Exchange are set to reopen today.

• New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said last night that the number of persons missing at the World Trade Center has risen to 4,957; 190 have been confirmed dead, including 37 firefighters and other emergency services workers; and 115 of the dead have been identified. The Pentagon death toll has reached 188.

Mr. Cheney yesterday promised a "thorough reassessment" of both intelligence operations and resources after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. He and lawmakers who appeared on network news talk shows yesterday criticized current regulations, which intelligence personnel said restricted them in covert activities.

Mr. Graham also said yesterday that the Senate intelligence committee will introduce legislation this week that will address issues "we think were probably involved" in the CIA's failure to learn about the deadly terrorist attacks in advance.

One provision of the measure, he said, calls for the creation of a position some are describing as a terrorism czar. The person in this post would be "in charge of the U.S. federal government's responsibility for terrorism" and "would have the ability to establish a national program, allocate resources and be held accountable for our response against terrorism," Mr. Graham explained.

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New Powers Sought for Surveillance
Assassination Ban May Be Lifted for CIA

By Walter Pincus and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, September 17, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41055-2001Sep16?language=printer

Bush administration officials said yesterday that they are considering lifting a 25-year-old ban on U.S. involvement in foreign assassinations and loosening restrictions on FBI surveillance, part of an escalating war on terrorism in the wake of Tuesday's attacks on Washington and New York.

The Justice Department plans to send a wide-ranging set of proposals to Capitol Hill this week that would include more power to conduct wiretaps, detain foreigners and track money-laundering cases, administration officials said.

"There are areas of our laws and procedures which give us better tools against organized crime, against illegal gambling, for example, than we have against terrorists," said Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, who briefed top lawmakers yesterday on the proposals. "We need to make sure that we provide the maximum capacity against terrorists in the United States."

Vice President Cheney said yesterday that CIA field officers may be allowed to recruit and pay overseas agents linked to terrorist groups and human rights abuses, saying it was necessary to infiltrate suspected terrorist cells.

"If you're only going to work with officially approved, certified good guys, you are not going to find out what the bad guys are doing," Cheney said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "It is a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena."

In addition, Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he would introduce a counterterrorism package next week that would create a counterterrorism czar inside the White House, establish authority for the CIA to recruit unsavory agents and expand the intelligence community's ability to translate intercepted messages in Arabic, Farsi and other languages used within suspected terrorist circles.

The flurry of proposals marks a dramatic expansion of the Bush administration's efforts to track down those who helped plot Tuesday's deadly assaults, in which more than 5,000 were believed killed after hijacked jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside. But the proposals could also significantly weaken protections of privacy and civil liberties, advocates of civil liberties said yesterday.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said the administration was reviewing an executive order issued by President Gerald R. Ford in 1976 that bans U.S. personnel from engaging in, or conspiring to engage in, assassinations. Some intelligence and terrorism experts have advocated assassinating Osama bin Laden, the exiled Saudi millionaire who lives in hiding in Afghanistan and has been named the prime suspect in last week's attacks.

Powell said on CNN that "we are examining everything: how the CIA does its work, how the FBI and Justice Department does its work, are there laws that need to be changed and new laws brought into effect to give us more ability to deal with this kind of threat. . . . Everything is under review."

Ashcroft said one of the Justice Department's proposals would allow the department to seek authority to eavesdrop on any phone used by a suspect in a foreign intelligence case, rather than getting wiretap orders for each individual telephone number. In an era of cell phones, Ashcroft said, "it simply doesn't make sense to have the surveillance authority associated with the hardware or with the phone instead of with the person or the terrorist."

The proposals provoked immediate criticism yesterday from civil liberties advocates, who accused the administration of using Tuesday's tragedy to erode constitutional protections.

David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University, said there is no evidence that legal restrictions on the FBI, CIA or other federal agencies helped the hijackers evade detection. Two of the hijackers were on an FBI "watch list" for two weeks before the attacks, and most of the 19 men reportedly purchased their tickets in their own names through the Internet.

"The reality is that the FBI already has tremendous power," Cole said. "We have to be careful about giving the FBI or INS or anyone else greater powers unless they can show they really need those powers."

Several lawmakers vowed to be measured in their response. "We will give the government the tools it needs to deal with the guilty," said House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.). "But we will also always . . . preserve the rights of the innocent, and that will be as paramount as can be."

The executive order barring assassinations, which Bush can change without legislative action, dates to 1976, when Ford banned involvement in "political" killings in the wake of extensive hearings in the 1970s exposing CIA assassination plots. The prohibition was expanded by Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan to bar any U.S. employee or agent from engaging or conspiring in assassinations. But administration officials and some lawmakers said the ban is unrealistic in an age of terrorism.

If dealing with terrorists, Graham said, "means that we have to have the authority to assassinate people before they can assassinate us, yes, we should free that stricture."

Graham's bill creating a White House counterterrorism czar imitates what was established for the war on drugs, providing budget authority and oversight to an individual who would be named by the president and approved by the Senate. "We need to have someone who has the ability to establish a national program, allocate resources and be held accountable for our response against terrorism," Graham said.

Another section of Graham's bill would deal with critics of the CIA's lack of advance warning of the Sept. 11 attacks because of an agency regulation that required prior approval before case officers could recruit agents with unsavory backgrounds.

Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), ranking member of the intelligence panel and a sharp critic of CIA Director George J. Tenet, said the 1995 agency regulation tied the hands of agents. "Are they people you wouldn't want invite to your home? Absolutely. But we have to deal with these people to get at the bottom of a lot of information we want like terrorist cells," he said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

Staff writer Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report.

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Some Unsavory Spies in CIA Network

September 17, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Intelligence.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Contrary to the assertions of some lawmakers and administration officials, there are no barriers to CIA recruitment of people, including those with unsavory reputations, who are needed to infiltrate terrorist groups, the CIA said Monday.

Spokesman Bill Harlow commented in response to repeated calls in recent days for an easing of perceived recruiting constraints so the CIA can collect information on those responsible for last week's terrorist hijackings and attacks.

``The CIA has never turned down a field request to recruit an asset in a terrorist organization,'' Harlow said. ``Furthermore, the CIA does not avoid contact with individuals, regardless of their past, who may have information about terrorist activities.''

Another official, asking not to be identified, said the guidelines simply require field officers to obtain approval from headquarters before establishing a relationship with an individual who had engaged in human rights abuses or other disreputable activity.

The official added that there seems to be a misunderstanding about whether the guidelines hamstring CIA recruiting efforts.

Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday the government needs more than ``certified good guys'' to penetrate spy networks.

Otherwise, he said, ``You're not going to find out what the bad guys are doing. You need to be able to penetrate these organizations.'' Any recruiting restrictions, he said, should be lifted.

Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, said last week, ``We are not going to find the kinds of spies we need in monasteries.''

Sen. Richard Shelby. R-Ala., suggested Sunday that the agency needs unsavory characters in its ranks if it is to make headway.

``Are they people you wouldn't want to invite to your home? Absolutely,'' Shelby said. ``But we have to deal with these people to get at the bottom of a lot of information we want like terrorist cells.''

The CIA recruiting practices made headlines in the mid-1990s following allegations that several CIA agents in Guatemala ordered, planned or took part in human rights abuses, including assassination, since 1984.

The most publicized cases involved the killings in Guatemala of an American innkeeper, Michael Devine, in 1990, and of a Guatemalan guerrilla leader, Efrain Bamaca, who was married to an American lawyer. Bamaca was killed in 1992.

In 1996, the Intelligence Oversight Board, a presidential panel, found the allegations against CIA personnel in Guatemala to be credible.

Then-CIA Director John Deutch took a number of actions, including the dismissal of the chief of the Latin American Division of the CIA's Directorate of Operations.

In addition, a former CIA station chief in Guatemala was asked to retire

-------- terrorism

Mubarak calls for counterterrorism treaty

September 17, 2001
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010917-97599642.htm

SHARM-EL-SHEIKH, Egypt -- Non-American special forces are a critical element in combating the international terror network, according to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

In an exclusive interview, Mr. Mubarak said such commando-type units were needed "to go in and kill the snake's head." American forces, he added, "would be seen in the Muslim world as evidence supporting the worst paranoid suspicions of the fundamentalist extremists. Some countries are much better suited than the U.S. for such operations."

Seated in a conference room at the Jolie Ville resort hotel on the shores of the Red Sea, Mr. Mubarak took exception to President Bush's idea of counterterrorist coalition-building by saying, "We must be careful not to embark on the wrong course of action."

Plans for a coalition of nations, he said, "would simply divide the world between those who are part of the coalition and those who are not --and thus fail to reach the objective."

Instead, Mr. Mubarak said, decisive action had to be preceded by "an international conference at the highest level, held at the U.N., to sign a solemn treaty on counterterrorism, a document that must be well-prepared beforehand, leading to a strong binding resolution, with no wiggle room, to be implemented by all the countries in the world. This is a prerequisite if we want to live safely on this planet."

Asked about the all-consuming hatred of the United States that motivated last week's attacks, Mr. Mubarak said it came from a "feeling of injustice --and the root cause is the Middle Eastern crisis."

"Muslims everywhere see America giving arms to the Israelis to kill Muslims and America not putting any conditions on the arms it gives free to Israel," he said.

"Muslims see the media taking the side of Israel, whatever it does. Public opinion is seething against an America which continues to support Israel irrespective of [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon's policies that are designed to prevent the Palestinians from having their own state.

"Go to all the so-called moderate states in the region, from Jordan to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. Their leaders have told me that their streets are on the verge of boiling over."

As for what can be done in the immediate future, Mr. Mubarak said, "Both sides in the Palestinian-Israeli crisis should start implementing the U.S.-sponsored Mitchell report, gradually but quickly, withdrawing Israeli tanks and troops from the occupied Palestinian territories.

"The increasingly desperate Palestinians are encircled. They cannot send their children to school. They cannot feed them. They cannot send them to hospitals. They cannot earn a living. They cannot cannot cannot. So to recruit suicide bombers in such dire circumstances is not difficult."

The Egyptian president dismissed such well-known terrorist organizations as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and other Palestinian extremist groups as "small fry on the world stage" that would "fade away" as soon as the Palestinians "get a viable independent state with all of East Jerusalem as their capital."

Mr. Mubarak admitted he didn't know what role Iran might play in world terrorism but said that in Libya "I can assure you [terrorist training camps] are all gone." Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi "considers fundamentalist extremism as much of a threat as we do," he added.

Could Iraq have been involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks against the United States? Mr. Mubarak doesn't think so. Saddam Hussein "has no wish to unleash the wrath of the U.S.," he said.

Asked how one goes about removing Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan, Mr. Mubarak said: "When all the nations of the world agree that no safe haven for terrorists will be tolerated, Afghanistan will have to extradite him or face a total cutoff from the assistance it is now getting from Pakistan. The three nations [Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates] that now recognize the Taliban government would have to sever all ties."

Referring to intelligence reports at his disposal, Mr. Mubarak, a former fighter pilot who succeeded the late President Anwar Sadat after he was assassinated 20 years ago, said Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born suspected mastermind of transnational terrorism, "is still very wealthy and spreads his money around Afghanistan."

Reminded that bin Laden's original $200 million family inheritance had dwindled substantially in recent years, Mr. Mubarak said: "Don't you believe it. He's worth one or two billion dollars" from Afghanistan's "opium trade."

In the past year, most of Afghanistan's poppy fields have been eradicated by order of the Taliban's "Supreme Leader," Mullah Mohammed Omar. But Western narcotics experts say the Taliban still had vast supplies warehoused for such a hiatus in production.

"Don't forget," Mr. Mubarak said with a knowing cock of the eyebrow, "that bin Laden's organization was America's creation after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in late 1979, along with the recruitment of 'Afghan Arabs' from all over the Arab countries and several non-Arab Muslim countries."

The United States, he added, abandoned the Afghan Arabs -- estimated at 45,000 -- after the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989. This was the manpower pool from which bin Laden recruited his global terror network.

--------

International Reaction to Terrorism

September 17, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Reax-by-Country.html?searchpv=aponline&pagewanted=all

International actions and events connected with the U.S. campaign to find and punish those responsible for attacks on New York and Washington.

AFGHANISTAN: The Muslim fundamentalist Taliban leaders, who have refused to hand Osama bin Laden over to the West, said they were fortifying bunkers in preparation for a possible U.S. military response to the attacks. All foreigners were ordered to leave, and many Afghans began to flee.

ARMENIA: Armenia condemned the attacks and offered to send salvage experts to help in the rescue effort. Armenian officials have called for coordinating international efforts to fight terrorism.

AZERBAIJAN: Azerbaijani President Geidar Aliev denounced the attacks as ``the most monstrous event in modern history,'' ordered a nationwide mourning for its victims and offered his nation's help in tracking down the organizers of the attacks.

AUSTRIA: Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel said his neutral country would allow the use of Austrian airspace and provide whatever support it can, but added that Austrian soldiers would not become involved in military action because that is banned by the constitution.

BELARUS: President Alexander Lukashenko, who had frequently lashed out at the United States, sent his condolences to the American people after the attacks. Belarus did not join Russia and other European nations in observing a moment of silence last week, and some officials said the terror attacks had been prompted by arrogant U.S. policies toward the rest of the world.

BELGIUM: organized an anti-terrorist sweep in the wake of the attacks, holding one person on charges of possible involvement in planning an attack on U.S. interests in Europe. As current president of the European Union, it has also hosted emergency meetings of foreign ministers and transport ministers to show its support for the United States.

BRITAIN: Britain urged its citizens to leave parts of Pakistan amid fears that U.S. retaliation might target neighboring Afghanistan. Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has pledged British support for U.S. action against the terrorists, called Bush's handling of the attack and its aftermath ``absolutely right'' and praised the U.S. administration's consultations with allies.

BRUNEI: Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, absolute ruler of the tiny, oil-rich enclave on Borneo island in southeast Asia, has expressed shock and sent a message of condolences to President Bush.

BULGARIA: Prime Minister Simeon Saxcoburggotski pledged support for an international campaign against terror. Foreign Minister Solomon Pasi said his country, which is applying for NATO membership, was ``ready to act as a (virtual) NATO ally'' in the campaign.

BURUNDI -- President Pierre Buyoya expressed his condolences to all Americans, especially those living in Burundi.

CHINA: President Jiang Zemin called President Bush a day after the attacks to express condolences and say that China wanted to collaborate with the United States on anti-terrorism activities. A deputy foreign minister said China wanted to be consulted before Washington or NATO countries took any military action outside their territories.

CROATIA: Supports United States action against terrorism. However, Prime Minister Ivica Racan expressed concerns Monday that the European Union may now seek to impose tougher measures on its borders to prevent entry of potential terrorists, isolating nonmembers including Croatia.

CYPRUS: President Glafcos Clerides expressed support for action against terrorists. The government protested formally to the United States that a claim by former NATO commander Wesley Clark that Cyprus sheltered terrorists ``is absolutely unfounded and violates truth and real facts.''

DENMARK: As NATO member, Denmark supports a joint action against terrorism. The government asked intelligence agencies to track down possible supporters in Denmark.

EGYPT: President Hosni Mubarak denounced the attacks as ``horrible and unimaginable'' Mubarak also repeated his call for holding an international conference for combatting terrorism. Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher reiterated Egypt's full cooperation with United States in the investigation.

ETHIOPIA: Offered condolences and condemned the attack.

FINLAND: Beefed up security at borders, airports and outside embassies and increased air surveillance.

FRANCE: Defense Minister Alain Richard said France was confident the United States would react ``responsibly'' to last week's terror attacks, but he cautioned against using force alone to retaliate.

GEORGIA: Officials said they were ready to offer any help to the United States in its efforts to track down and punish the culprits.

GERMANY: Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder pledged to crack down on Islamic militant groups in Germany after three men who lived quietly in Hamburg were implicated in the terror attacks in the United States.

GREECE: Pledged full support to American and European Union actions to combat terrorism. Greece hosts a large U.S. Navy base on the island of Crete. Ministers and officials have also begun reevaluating security measures for the 2004 Olympics, to be held in Athens.

HUNGARY: Expressed full solidarity with the people of the United States and full support for the fight against terrorism. ``The essential thing is that the political readiness is there; we are supportive of the victims and will do our part in the struggle to eradicate terrorism,'' Foreign Minister Janos Martonyi said.

ICELAND: Foreign Minister Halldor Asgrimsson said the airport at Keflavik was available for any U.S. operations.

INDIA: Intelligence officials said they have given the United States information about Islamic extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including evidence describing how bin Laden and other Muslim militant leaders were financing guerrilla groups and running training camps.

INDONESIA: President Megawati Sukarnoputri condemned the U.S. attacks before she left Monday for the United States to meet President Bush and address the U.N. General Assembly. Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim nation where some hardline Islamic groups are waging separatist conflicts that threaten the secular government.

IRAN: Iran, an opponent of Afghanistan's Taliban leaders, closed its 562-mile border to prevent Afghan refugees from crossing over in case of U.S. attacks. The U.S. State Department has said it would consider welcoming Iran into an international coalition to fight terrorism. Iran has not indicated that it would join.

IRAQ: Said attacks resulted from aggressive U.S. policies, and that Americans should feel and learn from the pain they have inflicted on other people, including Iraqis and Palestinians. Saddam Hussein urged United States to use wisdom, rather than force, in responding to attacks.

IRELAND: Prime Minister Bertie Ahern has said the United States would be justified in retaliating, so long as the military action fell within the United Nations' definition of self-defense. He said a large-scale attack on Afghanistan would be wrong: ``It's an easy thing to bomb territories where people are in famine. But that will not do much to crush international terrorism.''

ISRAEL: President Bush pressured Israel to hold truce talks with the Palestinians as America seeks to build an international anti-terror coalition that would include Arab countries. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon compared Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to Osama bin Laden. Sharon said he would agree to peace talks with the Palestinians only after 48 hours of complete calm. Sharon also said Monday that Israel had been invited to join the anti-terror coalition.

ITALY: Has vowed an ``all-out battle against terrorist organizations,'' adding, ``we must concentrate our forces now in the Atlantic Alliance ... and the European Union.'' Italy's Supreme Defense Council -- consisting of the country's president, prime minister and top cabinet ministers -- convened for an emergency session on Friday for the first time since Libya fired missiles toward the Sicilian island of Lampedusa in 1986.

JAPAN: The Japanese government pledged to help the United States ``in whatever way we can.'' Japan's pacifist constitution prohibits it from engaging in offensive military action, but Tokyo has promised help with transport and medical operations. The government promised steps to keep its economy -- the world's second largest -- stable amid the global security crisis.

JORDAN: King Abdullah II, his government and leaders of opposition and Muslim groups had swiftly condemned the attacks. On Sunday, the Council of Religious Scholars, the religious authority in Jordan, issued a fatwa, or edict, saying it could not condone any party's effort to ``terrorize or attack any people on Earth'' and considered doing so ``a heinous crime.''

KAZAKSTAN: Kazakstan, the largest of the former Soviet republics in Central Asia, has condemned the attacks and sent condolences to Washington. But officials have been nervous about possible U.S. strikes in Afghanistan, fearing they would destabilize the region and trigger a flow of refugees.

KENYA -- President Daniel arap Moi offered condolences, but appealed for restraint. Security at Nairobi's main airport was tightened. Moi said Kenya would join the international fight against terrorism because of the U.S. Embassy bombing in 1998.

KYRGYZSTAN: Kyrgyzstan, separated from Afghanistan by a thin swath of mountainous Tajikistan, expressed condolences to the United States and called for stronger action against international terrorism. Officials have made no commitments to assist the United States.

KUWAIT: Defense minister Sheik Mubarak Al Sabah pledged to work ``hand in hand'' with Washington to eliminate terrorism. Politically strong Muslim fundamentalist groups, which say they are not militant, also condemned the attacks but said the world should not forget the ``suffering of our Palestinian brothers from Jewish terrorism.''

LEBANON: Has condemned the attacks, from President Emile Lahoud down to leaders of political and religious groups. Prime Minister Rafik Hariri said Wednesday he would support U.S. action against whoever is proven to be the perpetrators. The Hezbollah guerrilla group has expressed regret for the loss of life, but warned against ``taking advantage of the attacks to practice aggression and terrorism against those who committed aggression and terrorism.''

LIBYA: Leader Moammar Gadhafi condemned the attacks, called on Muslim aid agencies to offer support for the victims and said the United States had the right to take revenge, but asked ``will this put an end to the problem?'' ``There is nothing in Afghanistan,'' and if the United States occupies Afghanistan, ``it will not be in its interests.'' The international community has to ``determine the reasons'' why terrorism develops, he said.

LIECHTENSTEIN: As a sign of solidarity with the American people, the tiny European principality offered to send one or two pyschological counselors to the United States. The Banking Federation said it will discuss whether to set up a task force to investigate whether the country's financial institutions were used by anyone with terrorist links, but it says there is no evidence of this so far.

MADAGASCAR: Prime Minister Tantely Andrianarivo condemned the attacks, saying the people of Madagascar stand in solidarity with the American people and its government. Madagascar has sent extra police to help protect U.S. government buildings in the country.

MALAWI: President Bakili Muzuli, a Muslim, described the attacks as acts of ``barbarism'' and said they went against the teachings of Islam.

MALAYSIA: Security has been tightened at the world's tallest buildings, the Petronas Twin Towers, after a bomb scare. Officials promise to help investigate reports that one of the hijackers who crashed a plane into the Pentagon met a suspect in the USS Cole attack in Malaysia in October. Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has warned tit-for-tat violence could cause more terror.

MOZAMBIQUE: Mozambique condemned the attack as a horrible crime and expressed solidarity with the United States. President Joaquim Chissano urged the United States to think first before reacting and to be responsible in its actions.

THE NETHERLANDS: Dutch police, together with the Belgians, pledged to step up a joint operation against suspected members of Muslim radical groups. Rotterdam police took four men into custody on Thursday. Prime Minister Wim Kok, while lending full support to the fight against terrorism, was one of the first to caution the U.S. administration to be mindful of ``democratic values.''

NEW ZEALAND: Has offered the use of Special Air Services commandos and New Zealand intelligence resources in any action against those responsible for the terrorist attacks.

NORTH KOREA: Issued a statement calling the attacks ``very regretful and tragic'' and denouncing terrorism.

NORWAY: Strongly condemned the attacks and backs its ally the United States through NATO.

OMAN: Oman's leader, Sultan Qaboos condemned the attacks and said his country would stand ``side by side'' with the United States to fight terrorism. A Foreign Ministry statement has said Oman is ready to cooperate in the U.S. effort, but did not say what type of cooperation it would offer.

PAKISTAN: Declared its ``full support'' for U.S. action against the Taliban, and is sending a high-level delegation to Kandahar on Monday to demand the Taliban hand over bin Laden to the United States or risk a massive retaliatory assault.

Hard-line Muslims, who oppose Pakistani cooperation with the United States, demonstrated nationwide.

PORTUGAL: has pledged total cooperation with the US in all areas, including military support for a retaliation. Portugal next year takes over the rotating presidency of the 55-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and says the fight against international terrorism will be a priority policy.

QATAR: Foreign Minister Sheik Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al Thani said in a telephone call Friday with Secretary of State Colin Powell that Qatar condemned the attacks and is willing to cooperate in fighting terrorism. However, Qatar has not said whether it would join any specific anti-terrorism coalition.

RUSSIA: Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a nationwide moment of silence for victims of the attacks, offered help in rescue efforts and called for a global effort to uproot international terrorism. At the same time, Russia, where one of every seven residents is Muslim, is unlikely to risk internal unrest by joining any U.S. retaliation. Russian officials have also made it clear that Moscow does not want former Soviet republics in Central Asia to be used as bases for such operations.

RWANDA -- President Paul Kagame expressed ``deepest condolences'' to Americans, their leaders ``and the families who lost their loved ones, at this hour of profound national catastrophe.''

SAUDI ARABIA: Said it will cooperate fully with the United States on its investigation into the attacks. It has condemned the attacks, but said they are partly the result of U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East.

SLOVAKIA: Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda has condemned the terrorist attacks and expressed its determination to support the United States and NATO in all actions against terrorism around the world.

SLOVENIA: President Milan Kucan, in a letter to the U.S. president, declared his country's support in the fight against terrorism.

SOMALIA: President Abdiqasim Salad Hassan expressed his condolences for the attack.

SOUTH AFRICA: President Thabo Mbeki offered humanitarian support to help the United States cope with the tragedy. ``The South African government calls on the international community to unite to defeat global terrorism,'' he said.

SOUTH KOREA: Observed a national day of mourning on Friday. South Korean President Kim Dae-jung said the two Koreas should issue a joint statement against terrorism in reconciliation talks now underway in Seoul. The North has not commented on the proposal.

SPAIN: Defense Minister Federico Trillo said U.S. forces could use Spanish military bases for any retaliation.

SUDAN: President Omar el Bashir's Islamic government has been treated as an international pariah for the last 10 years, but was quick to condemn the attacks on Washington and New York. A Foreign Ministry statement said Sudan ``rejects all kinds of violence.'' El-Bashir said the attacks showed that no nation, even the powerful United States, was completely secure.

SWEDEN: Swedish Prime Minister Goeran Persson canceled the so-called Progressive Summit of 14 center-left leaders that was to have been held in Stockholm on Sept. 14-15. The Swedish government has expressed concerns about a backlash against Muslims, meeting with Islamic leaders and stepping up security around Stockholm's mosque, which reported receiving threatening phone calls.

SWITZERLAND: Switzerland, which had already frozen all bank accounts linked to the Taliban, said one of the suspected hijackers bought two knives in Switzerland, using a credit card. No further details were given. One of bin Laden's many siblings, a half-brother who has distanced himself from the fundamentalist leader, has lived in Geneva since 1973.

TAIWAN: President Chen Shui-bian offered to ``provide any necessary assistance'' to the United States against terrorism. Chen ordered security to be stepped up at airports, ports and nuclear plants, and appointed a panel to study how the attacks would affect Taiwan's and the world's economy.

TAJIKISTAN: Ruled out the possibility of launching any Western-led reprisal attacks from its territory, which borders northern Afghanistan. Prime Minister Akil Akilov had indicated he might consider a U.S. request to provide air corridors, but only with approval from Russia and the international community.

TANZANIA -- President Benjamin Mkapa condemned the ``heinous crime.'' The Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement saying, ``We sincerely hope that the perpetrators of this heinous crime will be tracked down, apprehended and brought to justice.'' Security at the American embassy was increased.

THAILAND: Agreed to help the United States ``just as we did in the past.'' During the 1990 Gulf War, Thailand was used by U.S. aircraft as a refueling stop. The government has pledged to exchange intelligence on terrorists and will support any United Nations resolution against terrorism.

TURKEY: Would allow the use of Incirlik Air Base for a possible military response. Incirlik hosts U.S. and British warplanes enforcing a no-fly zone over northern Iraq and was a launching pad for U.S. attacks on Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War.

TURKMENISTAN: Turkmenistan, which borders Afghanistan, has condemned the terror attacks and offered support to the United States against terrorism. However, President Saparmurat Niyazov has been noncommittal about any possible assistance to the United States for staging strikes on Afghanistan.


-------- activists

Street Demonstrations Postponed;
Peoples' Summit, Educational Events to Continue;
Coalition Calls for End to Cycle of Violence

Mobilization for Global Justice Cancels its Call for Street Demonstrations Against World Bank/IMF at End of September

From: Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 18:18:29 -0400 (EDT)

Washington, DC -- Participants of the Mobilization for Global Justice (MGJ) are shocked and deeply saddened by last week?s terrorist attacks. We express our deepest sympathies for the victims of this tragedy, their families, friends and communities. We unequivocally condemn these horrific attacks, and we call for an immediate end to the cycle of violence. We urge all leaders to seek justice in this situation rather than revenge.

In this time of grief, the MGJ is postponing the nonviolent demonstrations against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) our coalition was planning to host later this month. We choose this course of action regardless of the plans of the World Bank and IMF, and we respect other organizations that choose a different path.

MGJ is proceeding with plans to co-sponsor the Peoples? Summit, an educational forum and teach-in scheduled for September 26th-28th, which will include issues that have been brought to the forefront this past week. We extend our invitation for people to come to Washington DC for the Peoples? Summit and for the Interfaith Service for Justice and Restoration on September 29th. We also encourage groups working around the world for peace and global justice to organize teach-ins, educational events and vigils in their own communities.

Our decision to postpone was made out of respect for the victims of this tragedy. However the policies of the World Bank and the IMF remain unchanged, and the MGJ, as part of a global movement, will continue its efforts to hold these institutions accountable for their role in structuring an unjust and inequitable global economy. Our commitment to global justice demands no less. The MGJ stands committed to achieving social, racial, economic and environmental justice, which we see as the only path to a lasting peace.

During these difficult times, we call on people in the U.S. and around the world to stand firm against all racist persecution of Arab and Muslim peoples. Furthermore we oppose any opportunistic attack on our constitutional freedoms and Americans? civil liberties. Despite the disheartening acts of hatred we observed last week, we believe that another world is not only possible, but more necessary than ever.

Mobilization for Global Justice

Contact: Robert Weissman, 202-387-8030, 202-904-4068 (cell) Steve Kretzmann, 202-497-1033 (cell) Celia Alario, MGJ Media Office: 202-969-1593

----

Peace & Justice Events, Sept. 20, 22 & 30 - DC

Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001
From: copa <copa@tidalwave.net>

Friends,

Please be aware of the following important events concerning local DC efforts to bring a message of peace and justice from our community into the broader discussion and comprehension of recent events:

September 20, Thursday

Peace and Justice Teach-In: Don't Turn Tragedy Into WAR When: Thursday, September 20th, 7 pm Where: Meridian Hill Baptist Church, Basement - 16th and Lamont St. NW

September 22, Saturday St. Aloyisius Church, North Capitol Street between H & I. 1:00 pm

Washington Peace Center is hosting another open gathering of local activists and organizational representatives to plan for a peaceful community event on Sunday, September 30, to serve as an alternative to the cancelled demonstration against the World Bank/IMF and globalization. This event will not involve any direct action, CD or confrontational tactics. It will express our concern that we end the cycle of violence and tragedy and support global justice instead. Details for the Sunday event will follow this planning dicussion.

Please keep these dates open and attend, and please invite others who might not otherwise join us. Reach out now to all those who want an alternative to the coming military operations.

Thank you, John Judge Washington Peace Center 202-234-2000

---

At White House on Sept. 29th - "War and Racism Are Not the Answer"
NYC Anti-War Planning Meeting Tuesday, Sept. 18th

From: "Action Center" <actioncenter@action-mail.org>
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001

As you know, the Sept. 29th national march on Washington has been transformed into a mobilization that will say "War and Racism Are Not the Answer" in the aftermath of the horrific events of Sept. 11th.

Organizations and individuals are meeting together on Sept. 18th at 6:30 PM to plan for the Sept. 29th demonstration. Please join us at the all important meeting and feel free to invite friends, neighbors and family members.

We are so grateful and heartened by the response we are receiving for the national march that we are confident that many thousands of people will be joining together in front of the White House on Sept. 29th . We have obtained permits for Lafayette Park and for the sidewalk in front of the White House.

At the Tuesday Night planning meeting we will outline all the work that needs to be done in the next ten days which will include mailings, phone-banking, fundraising, and more.

Unless we all act now, the cycle of violence will escalate and the number of innocent victims will grow from the thousands to the tens of thousands and possibly more.

----

Group Destruction Manual [does this sound familiar?]
excerpted from "Disconnect the Dots" (about anti-terrorism)

Washington Post,
September 17, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41015-2001Sep16?language=printer

... In 1996, John Arquilla (senior consultant to the international security group Rand) and David Ronfeldt (a senior social scientist at Rand) wrote a slim but highly prescient volume called "The Advent of Netwar" for the National Defense Research Institute, a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the defense agencies.

It predicts that in a war between human networks, the side with superior intelligence wins. It also makes some tactical suggestions about countering human networks with counter-networks that actually have been used to combat computer hackers.

They include:

• Find a member of the enemy group who is clearly a harmless idiot; treat him as if he were the most important figure and the only one worthy of being taken seriously.

• Single out competent and genuinely dangerous figures; write them off or call their loyalty to the cause into question.

• Control the stories people tell each other to define their reason for living and acting as they do. The terrorist story, says Ronfeldt, "gives these people common cause -- us versus them. Right now the U.S. would seem to have the edge at the worldwide level. But within the region, there was the dancing in the streets in Palestine. Part of the story is that America's evil, and that America's presence is to blame for so many of the problems in the Middle East. We have to attack that part."

• Find the list of demands extorted by the network; grant some that make no sense and/or disturb and divide their political aims.

• Paint the enemy with PR ugly paint so that they seem beyond the pale, ridiculous, alien, maniacal, inexplicable.

• Destroy their social support networks by using "helpful" but differently valued groups that are not perceived as aggressive.

• Divide and conquer; identify parts of the network that can be pacified and play them against former allies.

• Intensify the human counter-networks in one's own civil society.

Adds Manuel Castells: "We should be organizing our own networks, posing as Islamic terrorist networks. We should then demand to join one of these networks and then destroy the trust structures. Only way to infiltrate. Oldest technique in the world."

Few of these ideas involve flattening Kabul, all of these analysts note.

Stephenson worries that massing the Navy near Afghanistan is "a symbolic show of old-fashioned strength. It's not about that anymore. This whole playing ground has shifted."

"In order to do anything, you cannot be blind," says Castells. "The most extraordinary vulnerability of the American military is it looks like they do not have many informants inside Afghanistan. It also looks like the majority of the components of this network do not relate directly or essentially to nation-states. That is new. Unless we have a fundamental rethinking of strategic matters, it's going to be literally, literally exhausting and impossible. It will be desperate missile attacks at the wrong targets with a lot of suffering. Massive bombardments turn around the opinion in many ways."

"Basically," says Ronfeldt, "you have to find somebody to wipe out."

----

'Eye for an Eye' Has Its Detractors
While Most Americans Support Strike Against Terrorists, Some Decry Retaliation

By Valerie Strauss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 17, 2001; Page B07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40980-2001Sep16?language=printer

With the United States gearing up for war, seventh-grade teacher Janice Meade is worried. Meade fears not only for U.S. soldiers, but also for innocent civilians who might die in an attack.

Frank Massey, a Quaker who opposes killing for any reason, is concerned, too, as are 15-year-old Lyndsey Wilson and Georgetown University Law Center Professor Emeritus Norman Birnbaum, who says governments must protect themselves but be smart about it.

Although a Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that 77 percent of respondents support military action to retaliate for last week's terrorist attacks in Washington and New York even if innocent civilians are killed, there are Americans who oppose that thought.

"My own belief is that you don't treat people the same across the board," said Meade, who teaches at Backus Middle School in Northeast Washington, which lost an 11-year-old girl and a teacher on Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon.

"If one kid acts up in a class, it's not fair to punish the whole class," Meade said. "You have to isolate whoever is causing the problem and then go after that person. I don't believe in whole-hog terrorism to combat terrorism."

Reasons for opposing an assault that leaves many civilians dead vary. Some people are pacifists who believe violence is never appropriate. Others said such action would drag the country to the level of the suspected mastermind, Osama bin Laden. And others say a massive military attack is the wrong thing to do for historical and political reasons, especially if one on Afghanistan results in destabilizing Pakistan and allowing Islamic fundamentalists to seize control there.

Killing is anathema to Quakers, who refused to take up arms in World War II and other wars because they believe that every human being has a piece of God inside.

"We are against the taking of any human life, and for me that would include bin Laden," said Massey, head administrator for the Baltimore Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, which includes about 5,000 Quakers in Virginia, Maryland, parts of Pennsylvania and the District.

"That is not to say he should not spend the rest of his life in prison somewhere."

Lamar Matthew, clerk of the Baltimore meeting, said the way to resolve conflict is always through communication, by building relationships, even with enemies. Indeed, he said, he believes the terrorists acted because of a "lack of communication" on a global scale.

Birnbaum said he believes that massive military action won't help achieve the eradication of terrorism.

"The most immediate step we should take is to fire the people in the CIA and the FBI who were so lamentably deficient" in stopping the attacks, said Birnbaum, author of "After Progress" and other books about politics, culture and society.

"But I think we also have to realize that hatred and violence are self-perpetuating," he said.

Ian Harris, who runs the Peace Studies Resource Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said an international tribunal should be created to handle terrorists. Harris said about 70 nations have supported creating an International Criminal Court, but the U.S. Congress and military rejected the idea, in part because they did not want to give up sovereignty over such issues.

Birnbaum said an international trial, like the Nuremberg trials after World War II, would help educate the world about terrorism, though, he noted, it could have "rather inflammatory effects which his [bin Laden's] people might enjoy."

Harris said the United States is advocating "being more barbaric than the terrorists."

"On one hand, we saw we are a civilized society and on the other hand, we say we are going to do one up," he said. "We are going to obliterate whole countries. . . . I'd like to remind everyone that Gandhi said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth leaves you blind and toothless.' "

Members of ethical societies across the country said yesterday that while they do not oppose going to war to defend freedom, they don't view Tuesday's attacks in that light.

"I don't think it's an attack on freedom and democracy. It's an attack on how we use our wealth and power," said Donald Montagna, leader of the Washington Ethical Society.

Instead of going to war, he said, "the nation should engage in a more targeted response that also looks at the root causes of the hatred that fuels terrorist violence."

"We have to be better at community-building," Montagna said. "I don't think any military response is going to deal with the underlying causes."

Richard Reichart, a member of the Princeton Ethical Humanist Fellowship in New Jersey, said he opposes killing bin Laden.

"I am personally against capital punishment," he said. "What difference does it make if it is one person or 10,000?"

Lyndsey Wilson, 15, a 10th-grader at Whitman High School in Bethesda, argued for a thoughtful approach.

"I don't think we should go back and do everything they did to us, like killing innocent citizens. . . . We have to do this right," Wilson said.

When her students cited the 'eye for an eye' passage from Leviticus 24 in the Bible, Meade had this for a response: "Are you going to wipe out everybody's eyes?"

Staff writer D'Vera Cohn contributed to this report.

----

RETALIATION--A MODEST PROPOSAL

by Alex Levine <ear@peacewire.org>
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001

("The only suggestion I've seen so far that makes any sense." John Hallam <nonukes@foesyd.org.au>) - Excerpt:

... First we must ask what we hope to gain from our response to Tuesday's attacks. What we want, it seems, is to end the threat of terrorism, to restore our feelings of safety, to assert our national self-confidence, and yes, to impress upon the world the extent of our wealth and power. The following proposal has, I believe, a good chance of helping to achieve all of these goals. It provides no guarantee of an end to the violence--and the only such guarantee within our power is the complete destruction of humanity--but it offers some hope of relief from the cyclic destruction of the past.

Like other solutions now being contemplated, this proposal will be massive, expensive, and dangerous for the service personnel whose task it will be to implement it. It will involve harnessing the full resources of our military, and the vast riches of our civilian economy. It will take some time to prepare.

Once preparations are complete, here is how I envision it working: our bombers fly low over Kabul, Qandahar, Gaza, Aman, Khartoum, Bagdad, Beirut, over all the surrounding countryside, over villages and refugee camps. They will be in harm's way, but we will not ask them to linger.

Their bomb bays open, jettisoning their cargo, and our planes return swiftly to base for reloading. Below their fading contrails, parachutes appear, each supporting a crate. When these touch ground, there will perhaps be some panic. But when the crates fail to explode, the daring and curious approach, ready to prize them open. Here is what they will find: water purifiers, iodine tablets, baby formula, portable generators, machine tools, farm implements, olives, salt, shoes, cloth, school books, copies of the Koran, antibiotics, antimalarials, antiseptics, rice, radios, kerosene heaters, power cable, sewing machines, calculators, batteries, solar panels, diapers, safety pins, hair pins, bicycles, candy, toothbrushes, sunscreen, saffron, dried apricots, notebooks, ledgers, ball-point pens, refrigerators, baby bottles, stoves, art supplies, soccer balls, tents, telescopes, and blankets.

There will be some who, in anger or disdain, incite their neighbors to gather our gifts and burn them. In the end, though, as wave after wave of cargo arrives, more practical voices will prevail. Consumables will not, of course, last forever. But the other things may make a difference for years to come, especially if, like the Berlin Airlift, they are followed with a Marshall Plan.

In recent years, in our strategic bombardments of Iraq or Serbia, we have talked about "sending a message," to Saddam Hussein, or to Milosevic. The truth is, a bomb casing is a poor housing for any message worth listening to. We must tell those who despise us more than merely, if they cross us, we will destroy them. We must tell them that, if the world order from which we profit is oppressive to them, that was never our intention, that what we desire for them is nothing less than the liberty and prosperity we ourselves enjoy.

It is also true that people with nothing left to lose will always, inevitably behave like people with nothing left to lose. Force and the threat of force have no hold over them. It is within our power to do with our largesse what can never be done with arms.

No political leader who follows this course of action will ever be accused of weakness, or failure to act decisively. Indeed it strikes me as demanding courage of the highest order.

It is possible that, given the title of this proposal, or its contents, or the admitted and unabashed sentimentality of its tone, it will be taken in the spirit of jest. If so, that is not a bad thing. In times like these, we all need something to laugh about. But if there are those who find in this notion, or others like it, something more than a melancholy joke, then that is a better thing. To lose hope for a better world is to live in a worse one.

Peace and Love. Alex Levine

End the Arms Race Suite 405 - 825 Granville Street Vancouver BC V6Z 1K9 Canada 604/ 687-3223 fax 604/ 687-3277 ear@peacewire.org http://www.peacewire.org

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Re: Attack on US - Message from Nobel Laureate

From: "Abolition 2000" <a2000uk@gn.apc.org>
Mon, 17 Sep 2001
Website: www.gn.apc.org/abolition2000uk

PRESS RELEASE

Nobel Peace Laureate and Cofounder Peace People said today in Belfast, Northern Ireland:

"It is with the greatest sadness that the people of the World watched the tragedy of the horrific events of Tuesday 11th September, 2001, in America.

The day of this atrocity will remain in all our memories; it has moved many millions of people to tears of shock and sadness.

We share in the American peoples' grief during this time of need, and send our condolences to all.

We understand the depth of feelings of loss and pain but we would appeal that there be no retaliation. Violence serves no purpose. Violence solves no problems. Retaliation would mean the further deaths of many more people. This would, in turn, add to an increasing sense of fear, anxiety, and hopelessness, being felt around the world.

As the human family we need HOPE, and this can come from the people of the World, when they rise above their immediate feelings of pain and anger at such inhumanity, and in a calmer atmosphere allow reason to guide their decisions. In this way 'wisdom' can find a response to this terrible atrocity which does not add to the terrible death and destruction already perpetrated on our fellow brothers and sister in the United States.

In this the new millennium, the human family has an opportunity to move away from the old responses of 'an eye for an eye' and deal with their problems in a collective and civilised manner, befitted the great goodness that lives in every human heart.

Mairead Corrigan Maguire 12th September 2001.

Sent by: Claire Poyner Abolition 2000 UK 601 Holloway Road London N19 4DJ Tel: 020 7 281 4281 Fax: 020 7 281 6281 Email: a2000uk@gn.apc.org Website: www.gn.apc.org/abolition2000uk


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