------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Warning on plan for Sellafield MOX plant
Revealed: nuclear fission's debt to Mrs Mop
Closure of Dutch nuclear plant postponed
Nuclear Security chief visits Y-12
. . . And Blindness to Shades of Gray
America's Sovereignty in a New World
Bin Laden's family link to Bush

MILITARY
How Can the US Bomb This Tragic People?
Anti-Taliban Rebels Eager to Join U.S. Retaliation
Bush Seeks Power to Lift Arms Curbs
Groups Could Help Find bin Laden and Assist American Attacks
China rushes to seal border from extremists
Putin: Russia ready to aid Afghan opposition
Russia Embraces U.S. - Led Effort
Saudis reject US plea to use bases
Pentagon loses spy plane
U.S. Debating Whether to Overthrow Taliban
US Increases Use of Airborne Drones

OTHER
Misery Hangs Over Afghanistan After Years of War and Drought
Third of New Yorkers support internment camps for some
War on Terrorism Stirs Memory of Internment
Europe uses drastic laws to beat terror
FBI Agents Ill-Equipped to Predict Terror Acts
Journalists Worry About Limits on Information, Access
Shays hearings on terrorism a must read
Nuclear materials difficult for terrorists to use

ACTIVISTS
By any name, it's still war, pacifists say
Europe dissent - Peace rallies spread
Echoes of Vietnam stir US campuses
Echoes of war protests mock terror concerns
Focus of D.C. Protests Turned to Peace Effort
TVA WANTS TO PRODUCE TRITIUM FOR WEAPONS



-------- NUCLEAR

-------- britain

Warning on plan for Sellafield MOX plant

By Mark Hennessy, Political Reporter,
Monday, September 24, 2001
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/ireland/2001/0924/hom11.htm

The British government has yet to decide if it will finally approve the commissioning of British Nuclear Fuels' £470 million plutonium recycling plant at Sellafield in Cumbria, sources said last night.

Last night, however, the Green Party TD, Mr Trevor Sargent, warned that an announcement about the plant, which has lain idle for four years, could be made as early as Thursday.

The mixed-oxide (MOX) plant is designed to process nuclear reactor fuel from uranium and plutonium imported from a large number of countries, though a lucrative Japanese order has already been lost.

The danger posed by Sellafield to Ireland has been highlighted further by the terrorist attacks in the United States, since environmentalists now argue that the Cumbrian plant is a prime target.

Anti-aircraft batteries should be built to protect it as "a matter of extreme urgency", a Paris-based environmental organisation concentrating on energy issues warned last week.

The rupturing of the plant's tanks of lethally radioactive waste would cause more carnage than any other single act of terrorism that could be inflicted on the United Kingdom, said Wise-Paris.

Sellafield could spray up to two tonnes of caesium-137 into the atmosphere if struck by a hijacked large commercial airliner - compared with the 50lb of caesium released by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Ms Mycle Schneider, one of the report's authors, said: "After what happened on 11 September, we know what terrorists are capable of. It is a question of calculating what the impact will be." British Nuclear Fuels insists that its buildings are capable of surviving aircraft crashes, though sources suggest that this would not include large airliners loaded with fuel.

The United States Energy Secretary, Mr Spencer Abraham, warned the International Atomic Energy Agency last week that Sellafield and its French equivalent in Cap de la Hague in Normandy are now major terrorist targets.

The UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs insists that no final decision has been made by its Minister, Ms Margaret Beckett, and the UK Health Secretary, Mr Alan Milburn.

"They are still reviewing the reports that have been put in front of them," a spokesman for the Department told The Irish Times.

-------- italy

Revealed: nuclear fission's debt to Mrs Mop

Rory Carroll in Rome
Monday September 24, 2001
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,556835,00.html

Sixty-seven years after an incident while she was mopping the floor of a Rome physics institute, Cesarina Marani and her buckets have been hailed for helping to usher in the atomic age.

According to a new book, she inspired Enrico Fermi, one of the last century's greatest physicists, to overcome a hurdle to splitting the uranium atom, setting him on the road to building the first atom bomb a decade later in Los Alamos.

As head of Rome's legendary physics institute on Via Panisperna, Fermi pioneered experiments in using neutrons to bombard different elements. But he could not harness their power because he could not find a way to predict then ensuing radiation levels.

Mrs Marani's buckets contained the missing ingredient that stabilised the experiments - water.

While she was mopping the tiles in a hallway she left three buckets under the desk of a researcher who was noted for producing anomalous results.

Two colleagues spotted the buckets and, suspecting that they might be causing the anomalies, told Fermi.

According to Enrico Fermi and the Buckets of Cesarina, he instantly recognised the solution to his own problem. Trying his experiment over a bucket of water, he found it made the neutrons' impact more powerful and consistent.

Over the decades Fermi and his colleagues, now dead, were interviewed many times about the discovery, but never spoke of the role of Mrs Marani who also died some years ago.

It was uncovered by two physicists, Fabio Cardone and Roberto Mignani, who revisited Fermi's experiments for a book marking the centenary of his birth, which falls this Saturday. They were told about the cleaner by Mario Berardo, the institute's retired caretaker, who witnessed the bucket experiment just before lunch on October 22 1934.

Mrs Marani continued working at the institute until anonymous retirement while Fermi went on to fame, glory and a Nobel prize.

He demonstrated that nuclear transformation occurred in almost every element subjected to neutron bombardment, opening the way to the discovery of slow neutrons, nuclear fission and the so-called B-decay theory.

On the eve of the second world war Fermi fled to the US to save his Jewish wife from Mussolini's fascist regime.

In 1944 he designed and built the first nuclear reactor in Chicago, before moving to the Los Alamos national laboratory in New Mexico to join the Manhattan project, which was building the first atomic bomb.

-------- netherlands

Closure of Dutch nuclear plant postponed - paper

NETHERLANDS: September 24, 2001
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/12496/newsDate/24-Sep-2001/story.htm

AMSTERDAM - Closure of the Netherlands' only operating nuclear power plant has been postponed for the time being pending the outcome of court hearings, a Dutch newspaper reported last week.

Evening newspaper NRC Handelsblad said that electricity generator EPZ, which owns the 450 megawatt power station in Borssele, is contesting that it reached an agreement in 1994 with the Dutch government to close the plant.

Under the contested deal the plant was to be closed in January 2004, but EPZ says it has permission to keep the plant open for an indefinite period.

The government now has to prove to the court in hearings starting November 9 that an agreement was reached for closing the plant, the Netherlands' sole operating nuclear plant.

Environmental activist group Greenpeace was quoted by the newspaper as saying it was unlikely the plant will be closed in January 2004 due to the risk of protracted legal wrangling.

EPZ is owned by Dutch utilities Essent and Nutsbedrijven.

The Dutch government was not immediately available to comment.

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

-------- tennessee

Nuclear Security chief visits Y-12

September 24, 2001
http://www.oakridger.com/

Gen. John Gordon, left, under secretary for nuclear security and administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, visited the Y-12 National Security Complex Wednesday for a review of security measures at the plant.

During the visit, Gordon thanked security personnel for their work providing high levels of security at the site. Pictured with Gordon are, from left, Ann Underwood, security police officer; Lynn Calvert, senior vice president and general manager of the Wackenhut Services Oak Ridge team, Commanders Larry Osborn and Pitt Tarrant; and Bill Brumley, manager of the Y-12 office of the National Nuclear Security Administration, the quasi-independent agency within the Department of Energy that oversees the nuclear weapons complex.

-------- us nuc politics

. . . And Blindness to Shades of Gray

By Sebastian Mallaby
Monday, September 24, 2001; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14192-2001Sep23?language=printer

When World War II ended, Americans didn't think much about the coming Soviet threat. They felt safe in their nuclear monopoly; a joke of the time held that the Russians couldn't smuggle suitcase nukes into the country because they had yet to perfect a suitcase. In 1946 Harry Truman told Robert Oppenheimer, the head of Los Alamos, that he knew when the Soviets would get the atom bomb. "When?" asked Oppenheimer. "Never," Truman said.

There's been much talk of American complacency recently. Hard though it is to say so after thousands have been murdered, the U.S. stance toward terrorism prior to Sept. 11 was only moderately delusional. Initially thinking that the United States could stay out of both world wars: That was complacent. Greeting the new fragile democracies in the 1990s with a massive cut in the foreign aid budget: Also complacent. Allowing the engine of our prosperity to be assaulted by anti-trade protesters: Complacent again.

But policy on terrorism? In 1998 Bill Clinton declared that the United States was in "a long, ongoing struggle between freedom and fanaticism, between the rule of law and terrorism." He later told the U.N. General Assembly that "terrorism is at the top of the American agenda -- and should be at the top of the world agenda." This wasn't just rhetoric. The budget for fighting terrorism more than doubled during Clinton's tenure.

This brings us to the first point about President Bush's eloquent speech on Thursday. His challenge was not to unite Americans against terrorism, because they were united already. Even before this month's outrage, terrorism was perceived as the top threat to U.S. interests, according to the authoritative opinion survey conducted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. Rather, Bush's task was to explain how terrorism should be countered. By this measure, he fell short.

The president's central error is the idea that not only terrorists but state sponsors should be hunted down without mercy. "Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists," Bush declared on Thursday. "From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime."

Really? If all state sponsors of terrorism were truly our enemies, we would not now be working with Pakistan, which has assisted anti-Indian terrorists in Kashmir. We would not be working with Saudi Arabia, which has dragged its feet in cooperating with investigations into terrorist attacks on U.S. citizens and which allows some government money to find its way into the coffers of Osama bin Laden. Bush may hope that both countries have now turned their backs on terrorism. But their records make a decisive break seem unlikely.

The Bush administration is working with these countries anyway, and for good reason. Pakistan may not be about to end support for murderous jihad in Kashmir, but that terrorism has killed few Americans, and we want Pakistan's help in going after other terrorists in Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia may appease Islam's terrorist fringe sometimes, but the kingdom is vital to U.S. interests as a source of energy and as a bulwark against Saddam Hussein. "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists," Bush says. But the truth is that some countries straddle the division, and it would not serve U.S. interests to brand every straddler "hostile."

In fact, a case can be made that even egregiously pro-terrorist governments should not be so branded. In an excellent new book on terrorism, Paul Pillar, a former deputy head of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, cites Iran's example. Iran's government openly harbors terrorist groups. But political moderates did well in last year's elections, and U.S. engagement might help the good guys reduce support for terrorism. It also might give the United States a chance to press other important interests, such as reining in Iran's nuclear program or its violation of Iraqi sanctions. Of course, Iran might not cooperate. Branding it "hostile" then would be justified, but should be based on Iran's performance on a range of questions, not just on terrorism.

Unfortunately, the administration dislikes balancing ranges of questions. Before the terrorist attacks, it subjugated most of foreign policy to its desire for missile defense. Now it sees in anti-terrorism a new organizing principle to replace the anti-communism of the Cold War. But anti-terrorism cannot become the sole prism through which we view international relations, because we still face other mortal dangers. Rogue states are still amassing weapons of mass destruction. North Korea still threatens peace in Asia. China hasn't suddenly become an ally just because its government hates terrorists.

It would take extreme tunnel vision to subjugate these issues to the goal of fighting terrorism. But recalling the administration's missile-defense monomania and listening to Bush on Thursday, you could not help but wonder. "I will not yield, I will not rest, I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people," declared the president. It was a rousing moment. But it was also unnerving.

The writer is a member of the editorial page staff.

--------

America's Sovereignty in a New World

New York Times
September 24, 2001
By ROBERT WRIGHT
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/24/opinion/24WRIG.html?searchpv=nytToday

PHILADELPHIA -- President Bush says that the Sept. 11 attack on the United States marks a new kind of war, the first war of the 21st century. There is a sense in which that's true, but what's chilling is the sense in which it's not, the sense in which the attack was old-fashioned. The terrorists didn't use biological or nuclear weapons, and next time they well could. A future enemy assault could kill not 6,000 people on American soil, but 600,000.

What would it mean for the United States to get serious about fighting that kind of war? For one thing, Colin Powell would have to prevail over Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in a struggle for the administration's foreign-policy soul. This is not just a question of "multilateralism" versus "unilateralism." President Bush has been consulting with our allies during this crisis, and that's good. But to keep nuclear and biological weapons out of the hands of terrorists, the president will have to go further and rethink an issue that has long divided Republican moderates and conservatives: the extreme devotion of the conservatives to national sovereignty.

The problem of sovereignty, in this context, is that controlling the spread of lethal technologies outside your borders often means giving the world more control over your own behavior. One example is the nuclear test ban treaty, which Mr. Powell endorsed years ago but the Bush administration opposes. Though President Bush would be happy for other nations never again to test nuclear weapons, he isn't willing to have America's hands tied.

Will the president now reconsider this policy? After all, the testing of nuclear weapons often leads to their development, creating more weapons-grade materials that could fall into the hands of the well-financed, well-organized and infinitely hate- filled terrorists whose existence is now manifest. If the president won't reconsider, that is a bad sign. The sacrifice of sovereignty entailed by the test-ban treaty is trivial compared with the sacrifice necessary to address the nuclear and biological threats in truly serious fashion.

What would an accord that was up to this challenge look like? The best existing model is the Chemical Weapons Convention, which Mr. Powell supported and Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld opposed. Under the convention, any member nation can demand, on short notice, that an international team inspect a given building in any other member nation.

This agreement had a loophole to address concerns over sovereignty. Though a nation would be obliged to escort inspectors to the perimeter of a search site, it could thereafter stall them indefinitely through legal maneuvering (though such resistance would draw global attention and suspicion - a service in its own right). Even with this weakness, the convention is the closest thing yet to a weapons-of-mass-destruction accord with teeth: intrusive, short-notice inspections, and trade sanctions (if mild) against nonmember nations.

Conservative concerns about sovereignty aren't wholly frivolous. Which American buildings get searched has always been determined by American courts. Ensuring that searches authorized by an international body are constitutional - and that they don't become tools of espionage or simple harassment - is a stiff challenge. (And it is only one of many challenges. For example, enticing or even coercing reluctant states to participate is vital in the long run, since the strongest accord is a global one.) But the point is that however stiff the challenges seem, we can no longer dodge them.

Yet so far President Bush has done just that. In July, the United States angered Europe and much of the world by rejecting a draft protocol that would have added enforcement mechanisms to the 1972 ban on biological weapons.

By itself, the administration's decision is not inexcusable. Controlling biological weapons is much harder than controlling nuclear weapons. They're microscopic, after all, and the devices that make them have legitimate medical and industrial uses. Further, inspections raise particularly thorny issues of industrial or national espionage. So inevitably this first stab at controlling biological weapons, even though seven years in the making, had real flaws. What is alarming is that the administration has so far offered no alternative.

And how could it? An administration whose currently dominant foreign-policy faction opposed both the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty - both tame compared to what is needed - is just not up to the challenge. Unless, that is, it recognizes that the war on terrorism truly is of a wholly new kind - that it must be fought on many fronts, including the creation of international policing mechanisms that could impinge on national sovereignty as never before.

To some, agreements among nations may seem like hopelessly weak weapons against the Osama bin Ladens of the world, who aren't known for consulting international law before acting. But terrorists have to get their weapons of mass destruction somewhere. The tighter the world's control on the ingredients of those weapons, the more trouble they'll have.

Clinging to American sovereignty at all costs isn't just wrong. It's impossible. When a few dozen people can destroy the two largest buildings in your largest city, it's safe to say that some portion of your national sovereignty has been lost. And technological evolution will make it easier and easier for small groups to violate sovereignty on a larger and larger scale.

And the problem is not limited to nuclear and biological weapons. The Internet can spread dangerous information relentlessly and offers terrorists a cheap means of international organization. If governments don't respond with new forms of international organization, civilization as we've come to know it could truly be over.

So the question isn't whether to surrender national sovereignty. The question is how - carefully and systematically, or chaotically and catastrophically? Would you rather that your office building face a remote risk of being searched by international inspectors, or the risk of being blown up? Like everyone else, I wish we didn't have to make that choice, but the direction of history demands that we do.

Robert Wright, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of ``Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.''

--------

Bin Laden's family link to Bush

by PETER ALLEN,
Daily Mail
September 24, 2001
http://www.femail.co.uk/pages/news/article.html?in_article_id=74355&in_page_id=1263

In summer 1971, Osama and Salem Bin Laden enjoyed a holiday in Sweden with some of their 55 brothers and sisters.

Yet within a few years, the two teenagers' lives had taken stunningly different turns.

As the world knows to its cost, Osama embraced Islamic fundamentalism and 30 years later was named the world's most wanted man. He is prime suspect in the murder of nearly 7,000 in the worst ever terrorist atrocities in the U.S. earlier this month.

Incredibly, Salem went on to become a business partner of the man who is leading the hunt for his brother. In the 1970s, he and George W Bush were founders of the Arbusto Energy oil company in Mr Bush's home state of Texas.

Photos reveal the brothers on family holiday to the Swedish town of Falun, 150 miles north-west of Stockholm, when Osama was 14 and Salem around 19.

The brothers had recently inherited a fortune from their construction magnate father, Mohammed. He left millions to each of his 57 children by 12 wives after dying in a plane crash in 1968.

Osama and Salem first visited Falun in 1970, arriving in a blue Rolls-Royce flown to Copenhagen by private jet. They liked the town so much they returned with other family members a year later.

Learning that the Bin Ladens, originally from Saudi Arabia, were staying at the Astoria Hotel, a local photographer asked the unusual visitors to pose.

Astoria owner Christina Akerblad said last night: 'They were beautiful boys, so elegantly dressed. Everybody loved them.

'Osama played with my two boys, Anders and Gerk.

'What's happened since is absolutely terrible. The first time I realised Osama had turned into a terrorist was when I saw his photograph in a magazine article about the bombing. He and his brother were such nice boys.'

At that time the brothers both delighted in their enormous wealth. Salem - wearing a polo neck and slacks as he crouches three places from Osama, in jeans and a skinny rib jumper - put a large part of his money into business ventures, including Arbusto Energy.

Mr Bush was not long out of Harvard Business School when he started the company in 1978.

Salem watched it grow into a hugely successful business until his death in a microlight plane crash in Texas in 1983.

As he built his own business empire, Salem Bin Laden had an intriguing relationship with the president-to-be.

In 1978, he appointed James Bath, a close friend of Mr Bush who served with him in the Air National Guard, as his representative in Houston, Texas.

It was in that year that Mr Bath invested $50,000 (about £34,000) in Mr Bush's company, Arbusto. It was never revealed whether he was investing his own money or somebody else's.

There was even speculation that the money might have been from Salem. In the same year, Mr Bath bought Houston Gulf Airport on behalf of the Saudi Arabian multimillionaire. Three years ago, Mr Bush said the $50,000 investment in Arbusto was the only financial dealing he had with Mr Bath.

Last night a White House spokesman was unavailable for comment.

Before his death, Salem was married to Briton Caroline Carey, now 35.

She has never spoken about her brother-in-law Osama, who was disowned by the rest of his family in 1991 when he was expelled from Saudi Arabia for his anti-government activities.

Now living in luxury in a Cairo villa, she has married twice into the Bin Laden family - first to Salem, and now to a younger brother, Khaled. She has a daughter by each brother.

Three years ago a family friend said: 'She first met Salem when she was just a child - no more than five years old.

'He was a friend of the family but at that stage no one would have dreamed that they would end up marrying.

'When they met again as adults, Caroline was 20 and Salem twice her age.

'Salem was the head of the Bin Laden family as the oldest of all the brothers and sisters.

'He was a man with a powerful presence.'

They married and, after his death, Caroline decided to bring up her daughter in Saudi Arabia.

'Caroline was a widow for nearly ten years before deciding to marry Khaled,' said the friend. 'He is one of the younger brothers and very quiet and loving.

'She can never speak publicly about her marriage, or anything else for that matter, or she would be cut off from the family.'

Caroline's father, a retired psychology lecturer from Hampstead, said: 'My daughter is very happy with Khaled. She decided to stay on in Saudi Arabia because she found her family there to be so loving and supportive.'

Yesterday FBI agents swooped on a Boston suburb where around 20 of the wealthy relatives of Bin Laden live. They questioned them at a condominium complex in Charlestown. Agents even began visiting nightclubs to collect credit cards of younger members of the family.

Bin Laden's younger brother Mohammed, who is said to have moved back to Saudi Arabia with his wife and children several years ago, owns a ten-bedroom mansion in nearby Wayland.

Another younger brother, Abdullah, is a 1994 graduate of Harvard Law School. The family has given it £2million in endowments to research Islamic law.

Most of Bin Laden's family have in the past strongly denounced the 44-year-old fugitive, now living in Afghanistan.

The FBI in Boston has long been aware of his extended family and began monitoring their activities after the 1998 terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa.

The Bin Ladens still run one of the biggest construction companies in the world.


-------- MILITARY

-------- afghanistan

How Can the US Bomb This Tragic People?

by Robert Fisk,
Sunday, September 23, 2001
the Independent/UK
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0923-10.htm

We are witnessing this weekend one of the most epic events since the Second World War, certainly since Vietnam. I am not talking about the ruins of the World Trade Center in New York and the grotesque physical scenes which we watched on 11 September, an atrocity which I described last week as a crime against humanity (of which more later). No, I am referring to the extraordinary, almost unbelievable preparations now under way for the most powerful nation ever to have existed on God's Earth to bomb the most devastated, ravaged, starvation-haunted and tragic country in the world. Afghanistan, raped and eviscerated by the Russian army for 10 years, abandoned by its friends - us, of course - once the Russians had fled, is about to be attacked by the surviving superpower.

I watch these events with incredulity, not least because I was a witness to the Russian invasion and occupation. How they fought for us, those Afghans, how they believed our word. How they trusted President Carter when he promised the West's support. I even met the CIA spook in Peshawar, brandishing the identity papers of a Soviet pilot, shot down with one of our missiles - which had been scooped from the wreckage of his Mig. "Poor guy," the CIA man said, before showing us a movie about GIs zapping the Vietcong in his private cinema. And yes, I remember what the Soviet officers told me after arresting me at Salang. They were performing their international duty in Afghanistan, they told me. They were "punishing the terrorists" who wished to overthrow the (communist) Afghan government and destroy its people. Sound familiar?

I was working for The Times in 1980, and just south of Kabul I picked up a very disturbing story. A group of religious mujahedin fighters had attacked a school because the communist regime had forced girls to be educated alongside boys. So they had bombed the school, murdered the head teacher's wife and cut off her husband's head. It was all true. But when The Times ran the story, the Foreign Office complained to the foreign desk that my report gave support to the Russians. Of course. Because the Afghan fighters were the good guys. Because Osama bin Laden was a good guy. Charles Douglas-Home, then editor of The Times would always insist that Afghan guerrillas were called "freedom fighters" in the headline. There was nothing you couldn't do with words.

And so it is today. President Bush now threatens the obscurantist, ignorant, super-conservative Taliban with the same punishment as he intends to mete out to bin Laden. Bush originally talked about "justice and punishment" and about "bringing to justice" the perpetrators of the atrocities. But he's not sending policemen to the Middle East; he's sending B-52s. And F-16s and AWACS planes and Apache helicopters. We are not going to arrest bin Laden. We are going to destroy him. And that's fine if he's the guilty man. But B-52s don't discriminate between men wearing turbans, or between men and women or women and children.

I wrote last week about the culture of censorship which is now to smother us, and of the personal attacks which any journalist questioning the roots of this crisis endures. Last week, in a national European newspaper, I got a new and revealing example of what this means. I was accused of being anti-American and then informed that anti-Americanism was akin to anti-Semitism. You get the point, of course. I'm not really sure what anti-Americanism is. But criticizing the United States is now to be the moral equivalent of Jew-hating. It's OK to write headlines about "Islamic terror" or my favorite French example "God's madmen", but it's definitely out of bounds to ask why the United States is loathed by so many Arab Muslims in the Middle East. We can give the murderers a Muslim identity: we can finger the Middle East for the crime - but we may not suggest any reasons for the crime.

But let's go back to that word justice. Re-watching that pornography of mass-murder in New York, there must be many people who share my view that this was a crime against humanity. More than 6,000 dead; that's a Srebrenica of a slaughter. Even the Serbs spared most of the women and children when they killed their menfolk. The dead of Srebrenica deserve - and are getting - international justice at the Hague. So surely what we need is an International Criminal Court to deal with the sorts of killer who devastated New York on 11 September. Yet "crime against humanity" is not a phrase we are hearing from the Americans. They prefer "terrorist atrocity", which is slightly less powerful. Why, I wonder? Because to speak of a terrorist crime against humanity would be a tautology. Or because the US is against international justice. Or because it specifically opposed the creation of an international court on the grounds that its own citizens may one day be arraigned in front of it.

The problem is that America wants its own version of justice, a concept rooted, it seems, in the Wild West and Hollywood's version of the Second World War. President Bush speaks of smoking them out, of the old posters that once graced Dodge City: "Wanted, Dead or Alive". Tony Blair now tells us that we must stand by America as America stood by us in the Second World War. Yes, it's true that America helped us liberate Western Europe. But in both world wars, the US chose to intervene after only a long and - in the case of the Second World War - very profitable period of neutrality.

Don't the dead of Manhattan deserve better than this? It's less than three years since we launched a 200-Cruise missile attack on Iraq for throwing out the UN arms inspectors. Needless to say, nothing was achieved. More Iraqis were killed, and the UN inspectors never got back, and sanctions continued, and Iraqi children continued to die. No policy, no perspective. Action, not words.

And that's where we are today. Instead of helping Afghanistan, instead of pouring our aid into that country 10 years ago, rebuilding its cities and culture and creating a new political center that would go beyond tribalism, we left it to rot. Sarajevo would be rebuilt. Not Kabul. Democracy, of a kind, could be set up in Bosnia. Not in Afghanistan. Schools could be reopened in Tuzla and Travnik. Not in Jaladabad. When the Taliban arrived, stringing up every opponent, chopping off the arms of thieves, stoning women for adultery, the United States regarded this dreadful outfit as a force for stability after the years of anarchy.

Bush's threats have effectively forced the evacuation of every Western aid worker. Already, Afghans are dying because of their absence. Drought and starvation go on killing millions - I mean millions - and between 20 and 25 Afghans are blown up every day by the 10 million mines the Russians left behind. Of course, the Russians never went back to clear the mines. I suppose those B-52 bombs will explode a few of them. But that'll be the only humanitarian work we're likely to see in the near future.

Look at the most startling image of all this past week. Pakistan has closed its border with Afghanistan. So has Iran. The Afghans are to stay in their prison. Unless they make it through Pakistan and wash up on the beaches of France or the waters of Australia or climb through the Channel Tunnel or hijack a plane to Britain to face the wrath of our Home Secretary. In which case, they must be sent back, returned, refused entry. It's a truly terrible irony that the only man we would be interested in receiving from Afghanistan is the man we are told is the evil genius behind the greatest mass-murder in American history: bin Laden. The others can stay at home and die.

--------

Anti-Taliban Rebels Eager to Join U.S. Retaliation

By Peter Baker and Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, September 24, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14095-2001Sep23?language=printer

JABAL SARAJ, Afghanistan, Sept. 23 -- The road through the Panjshir Valley that leads to this rebel outpost is littered with the detritus of past invaders.

Every 100 yards or so lies the rusted hulk of yet another demolished Soviet tank or armored personnel carrier -- some with weeds growing through them, some buried so deeply in the mud they have become part of the landscape, at least one upended in the shallow waters of the Panjshir River.

The parade of wreckage, now a generation old, offers a haunting reminder of what happens to foreign powers that send troops over Afghanistan's majestic mountains to try to conquer this ancient, defiant land. It also helps explain why Pentagon planners, as they map out strategy for President Bush's war on terrorism and weigh the option of introducing ground forces into Afghanistan, are considering the role that could be played by rebel forces already based here.

The rebels, known as the Northern Alliance, have been fighting the Taliban, the radical Islamic militia that controls most of Afghanistan, since the mid-1990s, and no one knows the territory better than they do. The rebel alliance is made up partly of elements of Afghanistan's former government, and they are eager to sign up for a U.S. war on the group that drove them out of Kabul in 1996.

"A unique opportunity is on the horizon," said Abdullah, a leader of the alliance who, like many Afghans, uses only one name. "If it is utilized for the will of the people of Afghanistan, I think there is a chance for establishment of peace and stability."

It is not clear how useful the rebels could really be to the United States. Bush has targeted the Taliban because the group has sheltered Osama bin Laden, the leading suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington. While the Northern Alliance has frustrated the Taliban's attempts to seize the entire country for five years, it holds just 5 to 10 percent of the territory -- and has yet to make significant inroads in recapturing the rest.

Yet the rebel alliance has clearly captured attention in Washington, where Bush talked last week about replacing the Taliban regime in Kabul. Congressional leaders have discussed funneling money, weapons, training and supplies to build up rebel forces, though officials in Washington and elsewhere are not proposing that the alliance be installed as Afghanistan's next government.

The object of Washington's interest is a sometimes fractious coalition of tribal, ethnic and religious groups united mainly by their mutual desire to rid Afghanistan of the ultra-strict Taliban. Sometimes called the United Front -- and still claiming to be the rightful government of the Islamic State of Afghanistan -- the Northern Alliance is a loose group of four factions whose commanders led guerrilla forces against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, then turned on each other in the early 1990s.

As the extremist Taliban militia swept across the country, ousting or co-opting local warlords, opposing factions were shoved deeper into the mountains and valleys of the northeast. Eventually they joined forces, largely due to the charisma and tenacity of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the ethnic Tajik guerrilla leader whose exploits against the Soviet army earned him the name "Lion of Panjshir."

The rebels' antipathy toward the Taliban is shared by Central Asian neighbors such as Tajikistan and great powers such as Russia, the old enemy of Afghanistan's guerrillas. With financial, military and logistical backing from capitals such as Moscow and Tehran, Massoud held the fragile coalition together and waged particularly intense battles against the Taliban over the past two years. But suicide bombers posing as Arab journalists fatally wounded him during a sham interview on Sept. 9, two days before the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.

Massoud's death presents a challenge: Can the rebel alliance survive without his vision and force of personality? While the alliance's political leader, Berhanuddin Rabbani, another Tajik, still claims the title of Afghan president, Massoud was the real spiritual leader here. "They killed the symbol, not simply the person," said Suhrob Sharipov, an analyst at the Tajik government's Center for Strategic Research in Dushanbe.

Massoud has been replaced as military commander by his deputy, Gen. Mohammed Fahim, and rebel leaders said they have continued the strategy devised by Massoud before his death.

In the last three days, the rebels have gone on the offensive in northern Afghanistan, launching guerrilla attacks aimed at isolating Taliban forces in the strategic city of Mazar-e Sharif. Abdullah said the alliance hoped to make a breakthrough south of the city tonight.

The drive follows a quieter period that Abdullah described as a defensive phase, in which rebels sought to hold and consolidate their lines while limiting themselves to a few minor thrusts. Although Abdullah said the offensive phase now underway was planned before Massoud's death, it appears aimed at least in part at taking advantage of a moment when the Taliban is retrenching in anticipation of a U.S. attack.

"It's a good opportunity for us to attack, too," said Saleh Registani, the rebels' military representative in Dushanbe, the Tajik capital. "We're ready."

The alliance says it can field 15,000 trained troops, a polyglot blend of ethnic Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras. The Taliban, by contrast, commands an estimated 45,000, mostly from the Pashtun ethnic group, which accounts for 40 percent of the country's 25 million people. The Taliban also counts on a large contingent of foreigners.

Though Russia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, India and Iran have supplied political, financial and logistical assistance to the rebels, the level of that assistance has been limited by geography and regional politics. The alliance controls only one small airfield in the northern village of Faizabad, so moving supplies from Iran to rebel-held territory requires a circuitous route across five countries.

Iran, with a largely Shiite Muslim population, strongly opposes the extremist Sunni Muslims of the Taliban. For most of the past three years, Russia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have facilitated the shipment of howitzers, multiple rocket launchers, boots and blankets from Iran across Afghanistan's northern borders, according to a recent report by the New York-based Human Rights Watch. Witnesses have also reported seeing Russian planes airlifting supplies into Northern Alliance territory.

Here in the Panjshir Valley, Northern Alliance guerrilla fighters walk the streets with their machine guns, while tanks rumble through town leaving traffic jams in their wake. Along the road from Astana to Jabal Saraj, several bases for heavy weaponry are visible, including one with 15 tanks and armored personnel carriers and another with about 50. Gunfire and artillery can be heard in Jabal Saraj, which is just 40 miles north of Kabul and about 12 miles north of the front lines at Bagram.

Abdullah said Massoud had made capturing Kabul a top goal, but his successors have not. "Kabul is not the priority," he said. "We know politically it is a unique symbol," but it is not a prime military target -- a grudging nod to the reality that they probably could not muster the force to take the heavily defended capital.

The Panjshir Valley is where Massoud reigned for decades and has become a haven for anti-Taliban Afghans in recent years. Vegetation along the river meandering through the valley seems a haven, too, from the desert mountains that ring both sides.

In some ways, Panjshir is its own country, complete with immigration officers checking passports. But like the rest of Afghanistan, it is an impoverished, isolated place.

The stalls at bazaars offer slabs of beef slung on hooks, dozens of bugs sampling it before customers get a chance. Virtually no signs of Western influence are visible, not even the Coca-Cola ubiquitous in most of the rest of the world. What few exceptions there are seem all the more striking, such as the T-shirt on sale at one stand assuring that the wearer would be a "Sex Machine."

The costs of war, on the other hand, are distinctly visible throughout the valley. Along the road lie scores of random, crude graves of fighters who died in battle, usually marked by small green rebel flags, sometimes set off by a simple fence, more often by just rocks. A few tent cities populated by refugees sit just off the road as well, filling up even more lately, thanks to the influx of Afghans abandoning their homes before an anticipated U.S. attack.

In recent days, the rebels have sought additional assistance to invigorate their campaign in light of the expected U.S. intervention. Abdullah returned here today from Dushanbe, where he met with Gen. Anatoly Kvashnin, chief of the Russian general staff, as well as senior Tajik officials. While Abdullah did not describe the conversations in detail, he said he won pledges of continuing support from Russia.

Abdullah said he did not meet with U.S. envoys in Dushanbe, although he noted alliance representatives had been in touch with State Department officials in Washington in the two weeks since the terrorist attacks.

"Of course we are willing to fight against terrorism," he said. "Then the issue is how to coordinate our efforts with what is supposed to come from the United States of America. In that regard, we are open to ideas. Recently our contacts have increased with the United States. Not only us, I think the people of Afghanistan would support an effort to eradicate terrorism in Afghanistan."

Asked if the alliance would resist the United States using its territory for military strikes against the Taliban, he said: "We don't see any objections. It is not like inviting an army to Afghanistan to do the job for us. Rather, we're in a situation where part of Afghanistan is being occupied by terrorists."

Rebel commanders report that the Taliban has been redeploying in preparation for U.S. bombing, including moving ammunition depots. The regime has been pulling back its forces to concentrate on defending three cities, Kabul, Kandahar and Jalalabad.

As a result, U.S. military planners should not look to hit empty bases first but instead concentrate on Taliban airports, according to rebel officers. The alliance would recommend that U.S. missiles and warplanes take out airports in Shindand, Jeezakh, Herat, Mazar-e Sharif and Kunduz, said Registani, the military representative.

Although the Taliban has only about 13 aircraft, by rebel estimates -- old Soviet Su-22 and MiG-21 jets -- getting rid of them would make a difference, Registani said. "These will be one of the first targets. There's no question there. If they destroy the Taliban air power," it would weaken the regime.

If anything, alliance officials appear a bit impatient for Washington to take action, pleading publicly for support. Gen. Abdurrashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek warlord who fought on both sides of almost every Afghan conflict of the last decade and is now on the side of the Northern Alliance, has appealed for U.S. assistance by satellite telephone from his northern command post.

"The terrain in Afghanistan devours people," Dostum, who resided in Turkey from 1997 until last spring, said in an interview with the daily Sabah newspaper. "The U.S. and NATO have to work with us. The U.S. should give us logistic support. We are ready to give them help in the region."

Delay only would invite more terrorist attacks, Abdullah said today. "Every other day will provide another opportunity for the people the United States is looking to punish," Abdullah said. But he added he was confident the result of possible U.S. action would be decisive. "In my opinion, Taliban is on the verge of collapse, though some of them may not know it."

Baker reported from Jabal Saraj, Moore from Islamabad, Pakistan.

-------- arms sales

Bush Seeks Power to Lift Arms Curbs
Waiver Would Allow Military Assistance to Once-Shunned Nations

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 24, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14035-2001Sep23?language=printer

President Bush has asked Congress for authority to waive all existing restrictions on U.S. military assistance and weapons exports for the next five years to any country if he determines the aid will help the fight against international terrorism.

The waiver would cover those nations currently ineligible for U.S. military aid because of their sponsorship of terrorism, such as Syria and Iran, or because of their nuclear and offensive-weapons programs or lack of commitment to democracy, which would include Pakistan and China.

Separately, on Saturday, Bush lifted all military and economic restrictions on India, and he also removed restrictions that barred Pakistan from economic assistance and that prevented it from making commercial military purchases from U.S. companies.

The new proposal would also allow the president to lift restrictions based on human rights concerns that had been imposed by Congress on U.S. military cooperation with other countries.

The blanket approach has raised concern on Capitol Hill and among human rights groups that it risks undermining the hard-fought legal architecture that ensures that U.S. moral and political values remain an integral part of U.S. foreign and defense policy.

"We all want to be helpful, and I will listen to what they have in mind," said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of both the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Appropriations foreign operations subcommittee, which are considering the legislation.

"But we also want to be convinced that what is being proposed is sound, measured and necessary and not merely impulsive," said Leahy, who sponsored the provision that restricts military aid to human rights violators. "Moral leadership in defense of democracy and human rights is vital to what we stand for in the world. Acts of terrorism are violations of human rights. Now is the time to show what sets us apart from those who attack us."

So far, the administration has not disclosed specific plans to give aid to any country as part of the anti-terrorism fight. But options being considered in response to the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington include potential cooperation with virtually every Middle Eastern and South and Central Asian nation near Afghanistan -- some of which are currently under U.S. aid restrictions.

In his speech Thursday, Bush established an overriding test for alliance with the United States, saying, "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." This is a standard that many in Congress have said they are willing to support, despite human rights and other concerns.

"I don't think anybody has missed the fact that we're in a war. We were attacked," said Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), ranking minority member of the appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations. He added that Congress should give the administration "any and all" assistance it needs.

China, which is barred from U.S. aid and defense exports under nearly every category of restriction, and is the object of substantial U.S. intelligence surveillance, has agreed to share intelligence on terrorists. After a meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan here Friday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said U.S.-China cooperation "might have a military component," although it had not been discussed.

Many of the restrictions on military cooperation currently in place give the president the power to lift them for an individual country, if he cites a national security need. In the case of Pakistan, several different restrictions have been applied. Under the Arms Export Control Act, President Bill Clinton was required to impose military and economic sanctions on both Pakistan and India after they tested nuclear devices in May 1998. Those sanctions were waived Saturday for both countries.

Another law, the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act, required additional restrictions on Pakistan after its democratically elected government was overthrown by the current military regime in October 1999. This law barred all development aid, and also blocked any government-to-government weapons deals or military training for Pakistan from the United States. The law contains no waiver authority, but could be overridden, with the proposed blanket waiver.

The proposed new legislation requires consultation with the appropriations committees that would fund such activity, although Congress has rarely objected to a presidential determination of national security need.

One exception came during the Reagan administration, when the House barred U.S. funding for the Nicaraguan contras. Subsequent congressional investigation of the Iran-contra scandal determined that the administration had covertly supplied the assistance anyway, leading to a number of the human rights and other restrictions that Bush now wants the power to waive.

A State Department legal spokesman said the blanket waiver would apply to all current prohibitions, including those related to human rights, terrorism and non-payment of debt. "It gives the president authority to be able to provide assistance even though it might ordinarily be restricted [by] one or more types" of prohibitions, the spokesman said.

McConnell has been at the forefront of efforts to impose sanctions on some countries in the name of human rights; in 1995 he sponsored legislation that cut off virtually all U.S. cooperation with Burma in order to protect "the rights of 43 million Burmese citizens." That law could also be waived if the administration found it useful to cooperate with Burma's oppressive military regime in the battle against international terrorism.

The most sweeping human rights provision currently in effect is the so-called Leahy law, which since 1997 has imposed limits on U.S. military assistance to all countries where rights abuses have been found within military and security forces.

Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch, whose reports the State Department uses to compile much of its own annual human rights reviews, wrote to Bush on Thursday urging "caution against ill-considered changes to U.S. law and policy that would put at risk the basic rights that were so brazenly flouted a week ago."

The organization said it was particularly concerned about proposals to end a 26-year-old ban on U.S. assassination of foreign enemies, and to ease 1995 CIA guidelines restricting recruitment of informants who are known human rights violators.

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COMPLEX PROBLEM
Groups Could Help Find bin Laden and Assist American Attacks

September 24, 2001
By MICHAEL R. GORDON and ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/24/international/24MILI.html

WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 - The Bush administration is backing efforts to build an internal coalition in Afghanistan against Osama bin Laden and his Taliban supporters. Such a coalition could collect crucial intelligence, provide political support and cooperate militarily in the war on terrorism.

The United States has stepped up contacts with the Northern Alliance, a coalition also known as the United Front, which has been fighting the Taliban. Officials said there were plans for the United States to provide it with financial support.

The group controls only a sliver of territory in northern Afghanistan, and it suffered a grievous setback when its military leader was assassinated, just days before the attacks in the United States on Sept. 11. But it has fought back by carrying out an attack in Kabul and stepping up other operations in the north.

Recognizing the complex ethnic mix of Afghanistan, the United States has also initiated contacts with the Pashtuns, the dominant tribe in the south.

There has been enormous attention given to the need to build an external coalition involving nations like Britain, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and others in the region. This external coalition is important. Britain, for instance, is expected to join the military operation.

Forging an internal coalition of ethnic groups that could increase pressure on the Taliban government is just as crucial, though the effort to meld together different tribes and factions in a country that has long been at war could be very complex.

One reason for the effort is military. The United States needs allies inside Afghanistan who can help track Mr. bin Laden and those Taliban leaders who harbor him, and can provide information on possible attack targets, as well as a possible base of operations in the country for American forces. They could also do some of the fighting.

There are key political reasons as well to build a coalition inside Afghanistan. The administration is trying to counter the impression that the fight against Mr. bin Laden is a war against Afghanistan or Islam.

A plan for bringing stability to Afghanistan is also needed to attract help for the United States military campaign. To encourage that cooperation, Washington wants to offer the groups a role in governing Afghanistan after the conflict. A plan for bringing stability for the nation is also important to persuade Pakistan and other neighbors to cooperate. The last thing Washington wants is a chaotic situation that creates a haven for terrorists and destabilizes the neighboring countries.

Today, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld indicated that the United States was trying to encourage defections within Taliban ranks, and that those people could be part of a new governing structure for Afghanistan.

"Some of the Taliban say, `Well, it could get uncomfortable supporting those people, so I think I'll shift sides,' " Mr. Rumsfeld said today.

Efforts to form a grand coalition involve the 86-year-old former king of Afghanistan, Mohammad Zahir Shah, who lives in Rome. The exiled king is a Durrani Pashtun, like the Taliban leaders. The thinking is that he could serve as the symbolic head of a broad group that would include other Afghans who are not Pashtuns.

Mostapha Zahir, the 37-year-old grandson of the king, said in a telephone interview from Rome that the king was willing to serve as a rallying point for the Afghans but had no intention of trying to re-establish the monarchy.

He said the king planned to meet in Rome this week with commanders from the Northern Alliance and other groups.

There are, however, many obstacles to the effort to form a grand coalition, including tensions among the ethnic groups. Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, foreign minister of the Northern Alliance, recently blamed Pakistan for regional instability. Pakistan has close ties to the Pashtun tribes that would supposedly be in the grand coalition.

John Moore, who until last year was the chief Middle East analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said: "People have talked about this as a great alliance, but that's going to be subject to fractious politics. This is not going to be an easy or quick process."

Influential lawmakers here have been briefed on the administration's emerging strategy to encourage the creation of a pan-Afghan coalition to combat the Taliban government.

"It could be very useful if it can hold together," said Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who heads the Armed Services Committee. "In the past, there have been such differences among the groups, it's been difficult. It'll take a special effort, and I'm glad the administration is looking at it."

Washington's efforts to encourage an anti-Taliban coalition are coming in the midst of continuing military preparations. Administration officials said a C.I.A. reconnaissance drone had crashed in Afghanistan. The Taliban claimed on Saturday that they had shot it down, but American officials said the unmanned aircraft was gathering intelligence and might simply have crashed.

The Northern Alliance, one of the anti-Taliban groups, is dominated by Tajiks and Uzbeks, and has 10,000 to 15,000 fighters. It draws financial support from Iran and weapons from Russia. It lost its military leader, Ahmed Shad Massoud, when two suicide assassins, posing as journalists, set off a bomb in his presence. He died of the wounds several days later.

American intelligence officials now say the attack on Mr. Massoud was orchestrated by Mr. bin Laden. The aim was to decapitate the leadership of the primary anti-Taliban resistance, they say, therefore depriving the Bush administration of a potential ally in any retaliation.

Dr. Abdullah and the Northern Alliance's new military chief, Muhammad Fahim, also met in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, with the head of the Russian general staff, Gen. Anatoly Kvashnin.

As for relations with the Americans, Muhammad Eshaq, the Washington representative of the Northern Alliance, said there had been intense contacts with the Bush administration. The administration plans to offer financial assistance, officials say, but Mr. Eshaq said it had not yet done so.

Nonetheless, the Pentagon seems to be counting on the Northern Alliance's help. Mr. Rumsfeld has talked openly about a military collaboration with the alliance.

"These folks, they know the lay of the land," Mr. Rumsfeld said on Friday, referring to the Northern Alliance. "They know, in some cases, some targets that are useful; they have ideas about how to deal with the Taliban. I think that one has to say that they can be useful in a variety of ways."

There was concern in the administration that Mr. Rumsfeld's comments could complicate Washington's dealings with other factions, including the dominant Pashtun group, which has close ties to Pakistan. So today Mr. Rumsfeld made the point that opponents of Mr. bin Laden might also include "tribes in the south."

A coalition would help the United States balance the interests of its outside partners. The Iranians and Russians, for instance, are supporting the Northern Alliance. The Iranians also have ties to the Hazaras, another minority.

"There is a coalition dimension to this, so we want to make clear that we are working with several groups," a United States official said. "We are not only reaching out to the Pashtun leaders; there are tribes and leaders reaching out to us."

A final reason for the administration's attempts to forge relations with disparate groups inside Afghanistan is its desire to portray the impending military campaign as a fight against terrorism, and not against the Afghan people or against Islam. It is not only a public relations consideration, but also a factor in picking targets and devising the war plan.

"It is important to avoid actions at all cost that will unify the Afghans in support of bin Laden and against a foreign invader," said Karl F. Inderfurth, who was the senior State Department official responsible for South Asia in the Clinton administration.

-------- china

China rushes to seal border from extremists

September 24, 2001
By Damien McElroy
LONDON SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010924-16031844.htm

KASHGAR, China - Convoys of Chinese military trucks roared along the Karakoram Highway last week, heading for the country's northwest borders, which are rimmed by Afghanistan and Pakistan, as Beijing scrambled to protect its far-western Muslim region from infiltration by Islamic extremists.

As tourist buses and goods vehicles dwindled to a trickle along the highway that ascends 11,000 feet in 500 miles to the Pakistan border, People's Liberation Army trucks roared by, loaded with troops and supplies.

At the Khunjerab Pass border point, 14,000 feet above sea level at the foot of the spectacular snow-capped peaks of the Pamir mountain range, the chaotic process of entering China from Pakistan has invited interminable Chinese scrutiny.

From behind the concrete block of customs posts comes the sound of PLA officers preparing expeditions to scour the nearby mountains and thwart attempts by Afghan refugees to flee the turmoil of their homeland.

Fifty miles north through a patchwork of villages populated by ethnic Tajiks, the single dirt track that leads up the narrow Wakhan Corridor to Afghanistan is out of bounds to all but local villagers and Chinese soldiers. Because the area across the border is controlled by Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, which last week buried its commander, Ahmed Shah Masood, there is increased risk of refugees attempting to flee down this wild and verdant pass.

For fleeing Afghans, heading east to China would be an act of complete desperation because Beijing is determined not to allow a single refugee into its territory. With the border sealed, refugees are a minor part of Beijing's Central Asian fears. The Chinese have a much larger worry: Fundamentalists could one day launch a terror campaign inside China.

The prospect of an arc of Islamic instability engulfing Central Asia clouds Beijing's attempts to exploit the vast natural resources of Xinjiang province, where more than half the population is non-Chinese Muslim.

Because of this, Washington's decision to launch a war on terrorism has tantalized Beijing. Senior officials have made it clear that China expects to back the Bush administration even though the leadership remains wary of triggering a nationalistic backlash if it signs up as a full ally.

In return, Beijing will demand American support as it quashes what it calls "splittism" in Xinjiang. "The United States has asked China to provide assistance in the fight against terrorism," said Zhu Bangzao, a foreign ministry spokesman. "China, by the same token, has reasons to ask the U.S. to give its support and understanding in the fight against terrorism and separatists. We should not have double standards."

While Chinese officials want to give the impression that they face an equally grave threat from Islamic terrorists, most Chinese Muslims are moderates who wear Western-style suits, shave and do not order their wives to cover their faces with scarves.

There were no West Bank-style celebrations at Kashgar's Muslim Restaurant, a ramshackle two-story teahouse overlooking the teeming market stalls and fruit peddlers who gather behind the Id-Kha mosque. When the first television pictures of the attack on New York and Washington were broadcast, most people watched in stunned silence, shook their heads and stared away in wonder.

American residents of the city said they received dozens of telephone calls from locals offering their condolences in the aftermath of the attack.

-------- russia

Putin: Russia ready to aid Afghan opposition

USA TODAY
09/24/2001
The Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/09/24/russia-opposition.htm

MOSCOW (AP) - Russia will intensify its support of Afghan opposition forces and is prepared to supply them with weapons and military equipment, President Vladimir Putin said Monday. In a speech on national television, Putin also said that former Soviet states in Central Asia, which Russia considers its sphere of influence, had not ruled out providing their airfields for anti-terrorist operations.

The address from the Kremlin marked Putin's most specific outline of steps his country plans to take to help the United States following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The speech came two days after Putin spent and hour on the phone with President Bush.

"We are broadening cooperation with the internationally recognized government of Afghanistan headed by Mr. Rabbani and will render additional aid to its armed forces in the form of the supply of weapons and military equipment," Putin said.

Putin was referring to the government-in-exile of President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was ousted by the Taliban. The Russians already have been helping the Afghan opposition, which controls about 5% of the territory of Afghanistan, by allowing helicopters to fly in and out of Tajikistan, where the Rabbani forces pick up supplies.

Rabbani leads the very forces that battled Soviet forces and finally defeated them. But Russia sees the Afghan opposition as the best bet to defeat the Taliban and prevent the spread of Islamic fundamentalism into Central Asia.

The Russian leader did not say whether Moscow would provide direct military assistance or troops to any U.S. operation to hunt down the perpetrators of the the attacks.

He did say, however, that Moscow would be ready to help in search-and-rescue operations, and that Russia was ready to open its airspace for humanitarian aid in case of an attack on Afghanistan.

He also said his country would provide active cooperation with international anti-terrorism efforts by further sharing intelligence on the infrastructure of international terrorist groups and their bases.

Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Putin has remained noncommittal in public about Russia's strategy on possible U.S. strikes on Afghanistan, whose Taliban rulers refuse to hand over prime suspect Osama bin Laden and his fighters to the United States. Russia's position is crucial, especially if an operation is staged from Central Asia.

Putin has said that Russia is ready for wide cooperation with the United States but officials have indicated Moscow would not offer troops for any U.S. military action - and would not welcome any unilateral decisions by the United States.

In his speech Monday, Putin also called for greater reliance on international organizations such as the United Nations and its Security Council in determining what steps to take against international terrorism.

He said his position was shared by Russia's allies in Central Asia, nations that are near Afghanistan and "do not rule" out providing their air bases in the fight against terrorism.

"Other, deeper forms of cooperation between Russia and participants in the anti-terrorist operation are possible. The depth and character of this cooperation will directly depend on the general level and quality of our relations with these countries and on mutual understanding in the sphere of fighting international terrorism," Putin said.

Russia and the Central Asian states fear a refugee flood or spillover violence from U.S. strikes on Afghanistan could further rock the restive region and drain its scarce finances.

He made the remarks in a television address following a meeting with Russian parliamentary leaders following the devastating attacks Sept. 11 in the United States.

"I decided I should not make the final decision before meeting you and consulting you on this issue, which is very important for Russia's place in the world now and in the future," Putin told about two dozen party leaders from both houses of the Russian parliament, the State Duma and the Federation Council, who were gathered around a huge round table in the Kremlin.

--------

Russia Embraces U.S. - Led Effort

September 24, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-Russia.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- The Russian president on Monday opened his airspace to humanitarian flights by the anti-terrorist coalition led by the United States and said Central Asia governments had not ruled out the use of their air bases for Washington-led military action against Afghanistan.

In a speech on national television, Vladimir Putin also said Russia would intensify its support of Afghan opposition forces fighting the Taliban in the northeast of that country and was prepared to supply them with weapons and military equipment,

``We have coordinated this position with our allies among the Central Asian states. They share this position and do not rule out providing the use of their airfields,'' Putin said.

The address from the Kremlin marked Putin's most specific outline of steps his country plans to take to help the United States after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The speech came two days after Putin spent an hour on the phone with President Bush.

Putin's speech signals the Kremlin's readiness to openly help the United States in its drive to capture Osama bin Laden, the Saudi born Islamic fundamentalist that Washington holds responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11. Use of air bases in Central Asia -- considered under Moscow's sphere of influence -- are believed key to the effort against bin Laden and terrorist camps he operates in neighboring Afghanistan.

``We are broadening cooperation with the internationally recognized government of Afghanistan headed by Mr. Rabbani and will render additional aid to its armed forces in the form of the supply of weapons and military equipment,'' Putin said.

Putin was referring to the government-in-exile of President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was ousted by the Taliban. The Russians already have been helping the Afghan opposition, which controls about 5 percent of the territory of Afghanistan, by allowing helicopters to fly in and out of Tajikistan, where the Rabbani forces pick up supplies.

Meanwhile Monday, Kazakstan's president said his nation was ready to offer airspace and military bases for an anti-terrorist coalition.

``We've already given our general agreement that we'll provide all necessary support. But there has been no concrete request yet,'' President Nursultan Nazarbayev told a news conference in the Kazak capital Astana.

Of the five former Soviet republics in Central Asia, Kazakstan is the farthest from Afghanistan, the target of potential retaliatory strikes for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States. Washington has expressed more interest in using bases in Uzbekistan or Tajikistan, which border Afghanistan.

The Central Asian nations and Russia -- which wields considerable influence in the region -- publicly had given conflicting signals about whether they will provide military assistance to the United States.

The Russian Interfax news agency, quoting unidentified sources, said three U.S. Air Force transport planes had arrived in Uzbekistan this weekend carrying about 200 U.S. troops and reconnaissance equipment. Russia's RTR television also reported the arrival of U.S. forces in Uzbekistan.

But Uzbek Defense Ministry spokesman Bakhtiar Shakirov denied Monday that any U.S. planes had landed in Uzbekistan, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

At the same time, ITAR-Tass cited a witness saying he saw two large planes which looked like U.S. C-130 Hercules transports landing at a military field near Tashkent.

A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, refused to comment on the reports. Secretary of State Colin Powell, asked in an interview on ABC on Sunday whether troops had landed in Uzbekistan, said ``not to my knowledge.''

AP reporters visited the military airfield outside Tashkent where the planes allegedly landed and saw no signs of any American presence there. The capital's civilian airport is now heavily guarded and open only to ticketed passengers.

There were also unconfirmed media reports that U.S. forces had landed at an air base in Tajikistan. Officials would not immediately comment on the reports.

The northern alliance forces led by Rabbani, and now promised increased Russian support, are made up of the same rebel fighters that battled Soviet forces and finally defeated them in 1989. But Russia sees the Afghan opposition as the best bet for defeating the Taliban and preventing the spread of Islamic fundamentalism into Central Asia and Chechnya in the Caucuses region far to the west.

Putin also said a Pentagon delegation was due in Moscow late next week to discuss possible military action against the Taliban, though he ruled out Russian participation in such a campaign.

The Russian leader did not indicate if Moscow would give direct military assistance or troops to any U.S. operation. He did say, however, that Moscow would be ready to help in search-and-rescue operations.

Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov later said Washington had already requested -- and been provided with -- intelligence on international terrorist groups and their bases.

Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Putin had remained noncommittal in public about Russia's strategy on possible U.S. strikes on Afghanistan, whose Taliban rulers refuse to hand over prime suspect Osama bin Laden and his fighters to the United States. Russia's cooperation is crucial, especially if an operation is staged from Central Asia.

Putin has said that Russia is ready for wide cooperation with the United States but other officials have indicated Moscow would not offer troops for any U.S. military action -- and would not welcome any unilateral decisions by the United States.

In his speech Monday, Putin also called for greater reliance on international organizations such as the United Nations and its Security Council in determining what steps to take against international terrorism.

``Other, deeper forms of cooperation between Russia and participants in the anti-terrorist operation are possible. The depth and character of this cooperation will directly depend on the general level and quality of our relations with these countries and on mutual understanding in the sphere of fighting international terrorism,'' Putin said.

Russia and the Central Asian states fear a refugee flood or spillover violence from U.S. strikes on Afghanistan could further rock the restive region and drain its scarce finances.

Before making his statement, Putin met with leading parliament members, saying he felt he should consult with them before making a final decision on Russia's involvement.

He also met with a group of Russia's Islamic leaders, urging them to help maintain stability in a country where an estimated one out of seven citizens is Muslim.

``We are living through a difficult time now because of attempts by some indecent people to use Islam as a cover for deeds that don't have anything in common with it,'' Putin said. He said that breaking the current ``harmony'' between Islam and Christianity ``would be disastrous for our multiethnic country.''

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

Saudis reject US plea to use bases
US ally is also source of Bin Laden cash and recruits.

Special report: terrorism crisis
Brian Whitaker
Monday September 24, 2001
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,556993,00.html

Saudi Arabia, fearful of stirring up long-suppressed internal conflicts, yesterday rejected a US request to use its air bases for an offensive against Osama bin Laden.

The rejection came only hours after the US announced that it had opened a command and control centre at Prince Sultan air base, south of Riyadh, and praised the kingdom for its "excellent" military cooperation.

Saudi officials said the US cannot use the Prince Sultan base, which is host to 4,500 US military personnel and an undisclosed number of planes, for retaliatory attacks. "Saudi Arabia will not accept any infringement on its national sovereignty, but it fully backs action aimed at eradicating terrorism and its causes," said an official, who refused to be identified.

Saudi Arabia, which has 25% of the world's known oil reserves, is of enormous strategic and diplomatic importance to the US and officials are hoping that its support will help to deflect Arab and Muslim criticism of American actions.

But the extent and nature of Saudi support was thrown into confusion by yesterday's statement from the Riyadh government, which has to take into account the reaction from Saudis who support and even help to fund Bin Laden. According to one estimate, 80% of his network's recruits come from the kingdom.

Hegemony

"The Osama bin Laden syndrome is strong in Saudi Arabia," Mai Yamani, a Saudi social anthropologist, told Reuters. "I spoke to young people in Saudi and to my surprise they are very pleased about Osama because they think he is the only one who stands against US hegemony."

The kingdom, along with Pakistan, is one of only two countries that recognise the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The United Arab Emirates withdrew its recognition over the weekend.

The FBI claims up to 13 of the hijackers involved in the September 11 attacks were Saudis. Although three or four of the names released now appear to be cases of mistaken identity, Muslim sources say that most of Bin Laden's recruits over the last few years have been drawn from the kingdom or neighbouring Gulf states.

The Saudi interior minister, Prince Nayef, said yesterday that seven Saudis named by the FBI were innocent. "There are seven names of people who did not participate and are present in the kingdom and who are known [to us]," the official Saudi Press Agency quoted Prince Nayef as saying.

The level of support for radical Islamic groups, including Bin Laden's, is never discussed in public by the Saudi authorities. "They don't want to admit that they have got a dissident problem," said Josh Mandel, of Control Risks, which advises businesses on international risks.

The company places Saudi Arabia, along with Kuwait, in the second of three risk categories - behind Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen. This category is explained, Mr Mandel said, by "Bin Laden connections and the fact that support for Islamic groups is greater than people think".

The US military presence in the kingdom has always been controversial, even among mainstream Muslims, who regard the Arabian peninsula as holy soil, not to be defiled by unbelievers. In 1990, when it seemed that Iraq might attempt to invade Saudi Arabia as well as Kuwait, King Fahd broke with tradition and allowed US forces in.

"For all the billions spent on the latest weapons technology, when it came to the crunch, Saudi Arabia's first - and only - line of defence was the Americans," a former British diplomat in the region said. "It was humiliating and it struck a chord which Bin Laden was able to tap into."

After the Gulf war the US forces remained, as part of the policy of containing Iraq.

Saad al-Fagih, of the London-based opposition group, the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, said: "The Saudi government's insistence on keeping US military forces there is seen as a direct insult, a continuing irritant and a challenge to Muslims in Saudi Arabia. People look at the US as conspiring with the royal family to loot the country's resources."

Dr Fagih claims that 80% of Bin Laden's recruits in the last three years have come from Saudi Arabia.

A British expert on Islamic movements disputes the figure but agrees on the general trend. He attributes this partly to a collapse of internal opposition in the kingdom. "The people who would be drawn to radical causes have lost a voice. They can't effectively engage in domestic campaigns, so they look elsewhere, but they are often inspired by circumstances in their own country," he said. The expert, who asked not to be named, added that the predominant trend among radicals is towards salafi views, which are close to those of Bin Laden.

"The salafi interpretation of Islam emerges from the Hanbali school of Islamic law, which is one of the most literalistic. It has a strict puritanical vision.

"Salafis look back to the way the first three generations of Muslims behaved, which they use as a prism for viewing the Koran and the hadith [the traditions of the Prophet]."

By reverting to - in their eyes - the purest form of Islam, salafis reject nation-states and man-made laws in favour of God's law. The political appeal is that it contradicts the edicts of the official religious scholars, who are perceived as distorting Islam in order to serve the Saudi regime.

Several of the suspects named by the FBI are believed to come from socially marginalised groups in the kingdom, particularly the south-western provinces of Asir and Najran, where many people - like Bin Laden - are of Yemeni descent.

Salafi views are also popular among Islamic radicals in Yemen itself. The Islamic Army of Aden-Abyan, which kidnapped a group of mainly UK tourists in 1998, was led by a salafi with Afghan connections.

During the 1990s, the southern Saudi provinces came to be regarded as a hotbed of support for Islamic struggles in Bosnia and Chechnya. Others aligned themselves with Bin Laden.

"After the Nairobi embassy bombing and the US response, which gave Bin Laden a big name, many people from the south flocked to Afghanistan," Dr Fagih said.

Apart from providing fighters, Saudi Arabia is a major source of funds for Islamic guerrillas, including Bin Laden. Much of this money comes from respectable Saudis.

The system of zakat - one of the five "pillars" of Islam - requires Muslims to donate 2.5% of their wealth each year to good causes. This has produced large numbers of well-endowed charities in the kingdom but some funds have been diverted to support armed struggles, and Bin Laden is widely regarded as a beneficiary.

In 1995, under international pressure, the Saudi government set up a committee to police the charities, though there are doubts about its effectiveness. As part of the campaign against Bin Laden, analysts expect the US to press for a more serious clampdown but the risk is that some will interpret this as a further attack on Islam.

--------

Pentagon loses spy plane

September 24, 2001
By Bill Sammon
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010924-9748684.htm

President Bush yesterday ordered American flags raised to full staff as U.S. troops reportedly arrived near Afghanistan and the Pentagon confirmed it had lost contact with a unmanned spy plane the Taliban claims to have shot down.

There were reports that a pair of C-130 transport planes carrying hundreds of American troops have arrived in Uzbekistan, just north of Afghanistan. American ships and warplanes continued to speed toward the region with plans to take up positions in several other nations neighboring Afghanistan.

Mr. Bush returned to the White House after a weekend at Camp David during which he lifted sanctions against Pakistan for conducting underground nuclear tests in 1998. The move was designed to reward Pakistan for enlisting in the offensive against terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, based in Afghanistan, and his al Qaeda network. The president also lifted sanctions on India, which conducted similar tests in 1998.

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld confirmed that the United States has lost contact with a drone spy plane that was gathering intelligence over Afghanistan. Taliban forces had been crowing about downing the plane since Saturday, although they were not initially certain it was American.

"The United States has, in fact, lost a - lost contact, I should say - with an unmanned aerial vehicle," Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters. "That happens from time to time in terms of the controls. We have no reason to believe it was shot down, as the press is reporting." The Washington Times reported Saturday that the Air Force is operating Predator unmanned reconnaissance planes in the region.

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice yesterday made clear that any military strikes against terrorism would be controlled by the United States, not the United Nations, as some Middle Eastern nations have suggested.

Although Miss Rice said the United Nations might be used to help choke off financing to terrorists, it will not be making military decisions.

"Let's be very clear about what happened here," she said on "Fox News Sunday." "There was an attack on the United States, an act of war against the United States.

"The United States has the right to self-defense," she added. "That is fully recognized in international law. The right to self-defense is recognized by the United Nations itself."

Mr. Rumsfeld emphasized that not every nation in the global coalition that Mr. Bush is assembling will "agree with or be involved in everything we do. The message I would leave is this: that the mission determines the coalition. And we don't allow coalitions to determine the mission."

Miss Rice also said the United States will "possibly" secure the cooperation of Iran, which itself is a state sponsor of terrorism, according to the State Department. Although there is still much antipathy over the taking of American hostages by Iranian extremists in 1979, Iran is believed to despise the Taliban more than the United States, making it a potential ally in the hunt for bin Laden.

Syria is another state sponsor of terrorism that might be enlisted in the administration's effort. But such nations might be required to renounce terrorism within their own borders before going after bin Laden.

"Let me be very clear," Miss Rice cautioned. "We are not going to declare that there are good terrorists and bad terrorists. There's terrorism. And if you sponsor terrorism, you are hostile to the United States."

Miss Rice also indicated the Northern Alliance, a rebel group that controls a small portion of Afghanistan, might be useful in thwarting the Taliban, which rules most of the country.

The Northern Alliance is recognized by the United Nations as Afghanistan's legitimate government.

"The Northern Alliance, which has been fighting the Taliban for some time, obviously is playing something of a role in dealing with the Taliban," she said.

Although Miss Rice denounced the Taliban yesterday as a "very repressive and terrible regime," Mr. Rumsfeld said the United States might be able to exploit elements of the regime that do not support al Qaeda, the terrorist network headed by bin Laden and intertwined with the Taliban.

"There are many people in the Taliban who don't agree with the leadership of the Taliban," Mr. Rumsfeld said.

"There are a lot of people in the Taliban who do not support the al Qaeda organization and would dearly love to see that group expelled from that country.

"So this is not something where you're going to see a front, and a Battle of the Bulge and some trench warfare against good people and bad people," he added. "What we're seeing here is all of the complicated gradations and dimensions of this problem."

Before departing Camp David, the president and his wife, first lady Laura Bush, placed their hands over their hearts and presided over a ceremony in which Marines hoisted the American flag to full staff. It ended a 12-day period of flying flags at half staff as a symbol of mourning for some 6,500 people killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks against the United States.

No words were spoken during the three-minute ceremony, held in a meadow in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland.

As the Bushes watched solemnly, four Marines in full dress uniform raised a smallish flag to the top of a flagpole, where it hung limp in the still morning air. A Marine band played "The Star-Spangled Banner" as Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans, observing from a distance, sang along.

The arrival of military assets in Uzbekistan, reported by Agence France-Presse, suggested that the former Soviet republic would play a crucial role in any U.S. military strikes against Afghanistan. It has an 85-mile common border with Afghanistan and a number of air bases that were used as staging areas by the Soviet Union during that nation's decade-long assault on Afghanistan, which ended in failure and retreat.

The Washington Times, quoting military sources, reported on Saturday that Uzbekistan and Tajikistan had agreed to allow American special-operations troops to launch raids from their soil.

An Uzbek military source told AFP on Saturday that the C-130 transport planes were carrying reconnaissance equipment. Others said the United States still had helicopters in Uzbekistan that were used in joint exercises between that nation and NATO forces. Although there is some anti-American sentiment in Uzbekistan, the country is considered a more stable environment for U.S. troops than Pakistan, where larger segments of the population are sympathetic to the Taliban.

U.S. forces are expected to take up positions in other nations that neighbor Afghanistan, but Mr. Rumsfeld declined to give specifics.

"What we've been hoping is getting our capabilities located, positioned, arranged around the world so that at that point where the president decides that he has a set of things he would like done, that we will be in a position to carry those things out," he said on CBS' "Face the Nation."

He added that the name of the operation was being changed because some Muslims had objected to the original moniker, "Operation Infinite Justice." He did not reveal the new name.

"We want to find a name that is representative of the effort, and it certainly in no way at all would raise any question on the part of any religious or any group of people," Mr. Rumsfeld said.

--------

U.S. Debating Whether to Overthrow Taliban
Strength of Afghan Opposition Groups Being Gauged;
Decision on Support Could Come This Week

By Alan Sipress
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 24, 2001; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13819-2001Sep23?language=printer

The Bush administration is debating whether to make the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan an explicit objective of the upcoming military campaign against Saudi exile Osama bin Laden and his followers, according to senior U.S. officials.

Although President Bush warned in his speech to Congress last week that the Taliban must move immediately against bin Laden's cadres in Afghanistan or share their fate, American officials are still exploring the practicality of ousting Kabul's radical Islamic government.

"We have had a discussion and debate among ourselves whether it is wise [to] embrace the overthrow of the Taliban as part of the strategy or not. That continues," a senior administration official said.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other State Department officials have counseled that the United States be cautious about broadening the campaign's objectives to include the removal of the Taliban government, which is headed by Mullah Mohammad Omar. These officials worry that such an effort, even if pursued through covert support to rebel groups, could entangle the United States in Afghanistan's civil strife with little guarantee that a stable, pro-American government would emerge from the country's notoriously feuding militias.

Some Pentagon officials have urged that the war effort directly take on the Afghan regime. If successful, these officials say, this strategy would deprive bin Laden's organization of a safe haven for its cadres and training camps while sending a blunt message to other governments considered by the United States to be state sponsors of terrorism.

There is, however, no disagreement among Bush's chief advisers that the United States would welcome the removal of the current rulers and should step up its support for rebel groups. Administration officials reason that this backing would aid the American military effort by intensifying pressure on bin Laden's Taliban protectors, even if the United States stopped short of seeking a new regime in Kabul.

Though the administration has yet to provide new financial or organizational backing to opposition groups, the senior official said some decisions about support could come early this week. A determination about seeking the overthrow of the Taliban is further off, the official said.

When Powell was asked yesterday on ABC's "This Week" whether the administration intends to remove the Taliban leadership from power, he said the focus remains on bin Laden and his al Qaeda network.

"With respect to the nature of the regime in Afghanistan, that is not uppermost in our minds right now. It wasn't 15 days ago, and it isn't right now, except to the extent that the Taliban regime continues to support Osama bin Laden," Powell said.

The debate over whether to seek the Taliban's downfall has parallels with the disagreement last week over whether the United States should widen its military campaign to target the forces of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Some in the administration, most notably Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, pressed for action against Iraq. Powell countered that this could "wreck" the international coalition now backing a firm U.S. response to the Sept. 11 attacks.

In the debate over whether to try toppling the Taliban, the outcome is likely to turn primarily on the capability and willingness of dissident forces in Afghanistan to tackle Omar's loyalists with American support.

"It's a very repressive and terrible regime," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said on "Fox News Sunday." "The Afghan people would be better off without it. We will see what means are at our disposal to do that."

Since the terrorist attacks, U.S. officials have been working to gain insight into the capabilities of different opposition forces and, in particular, have been seeking a deeper understanding of disgruntled factions within the Taliban itself.

U.S. officials have been stepping up their contacts with commanders from the ethnic Pashtun community in southern Afghanistan that forms the Taliban's base of support, including contacts with elements inside the movement, according to sources in the administration and close to the opposition.

"There are any number of factions within the Taliban that don't agree with Omar," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday on CBS's "Face the Nation." ". . . There are many in the Taliban who prefer that the Taliban not harbor Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda network."

The administration hopes to tap into resentment within the highly nationalistic Taliban against the safe haven being provided to bin Laden and his followers, who are non-Afghan Arabs, and the international isolation this has engendered, U.S. officials said.

At the same time, American officials have continued their long-standing talks with the opposition Northern Alliance, a coalition of Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras that controls about 10 percent of Afghanistan.

"We want to be in a position to be able to assist those in the south as well as those in the opposition in the north to move against the Taliban," the senior administration official said. "Any use of force, when it comes, could produce a situation in which these forces might be able to take advantage to make a change in Afghanistan."

Administration officials would prefer that Afghan rebels end Omar's rule themselves, without a new government being imposed from outside by the United States.

Afghanistan has repeatedly proven to be a quagmire for outside powers, most notably the Soviet Union, which suffered tremendous losses after its 1979 invasion. So, too, the United States has been burned by its covert support for Islamic militants who battled the Soviets before turning against their American sponsors in the 1990s.

But it remains unclear whether any indigenous force has the means to expel the Taliban from Kabul, which the radical militia captured almost exactly five years ago. Though Burhanuddin Rabbani's Northern Alliance continues to be recognized by most countries as the legitimate government, it has suffered one military setback after another and has little following among the Pashtun, the country's largest ethnic group.

A survey commissioned by the State Department found that about three-quarters of Afghans living in Taliban-controlled areas favor the convening of a tribal assembly to form a new government, U.S. officials said.

Though the reliability of a study conducted in areas of Taliban domination must remain suspect, the survey cast serious doubt on Omar's standing, finding that only about one-eighth of those polled believed he was the Afghan commander best able to deal with the country's problems. About half named exiled King Mohammad Zahir Shah, heir to a Pashtun dynasty, as the best-suited leader.

In recent days, the king, 86, has become much more active in trying to rally Afghan opponents of the Taliban. Administration officials said they welcome the king's initiative but have so far provided no official encouragement or financial support.

--------

US Increases Use of Airborne Drones

September 24, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Spy-Planes.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The use of unmanned aircraft has become an increasingly common tool for U.S. intelligence-gathering operations.

Over the weekend, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld confirmed U.S. officials had lost contact with an unmanned spy craft over Afghanistan. The report came as the United States increased its monitoring of the region.

Although officials at the Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency declined further comment, there are several types of long-range monitoring craft available:

-- GNAT-750 Lofty View: A long-endurance surveillance aircraft that has been flying since 1989. It is able to stay aloft up to 48 hours without landing or refueling and has a range of 500 miles. Capable of transmitting live televised pictures day or night, it has seen use in Bosnia, Croatia and Albania. It was used to monitor troop movements, surface-to-air missile sites and airfields. The craft is 16.4 feet long with a 35.3-foot wingspan.

-- RQ-1 Predator: An evolution of the GNAT, this craft has been used extensively in support of NATO forces in the Balkans. An all-weather craft, it carries two color video cameras and can remain airborne for more than 40 hours. It can provide information via satellites with near-real time video. It is 26 feet, 8 inches long with a wingspan of 48 feet, 5 inches.

-- Hunter UAV: An ancestor of the Predator, the Hunter system has been plagued with problems and criticized by congressional investigators. Prototypes crashed several times and had problems with computer software, data links and engines. The Pentagon stopped buying them in 1996. The Hunter is 23 feet long with a 29-foot wingspan.

-- RQ-2 Pioneer: Pioneers have logged more than 12,000 flight hours with the Army, Navy and Marine Corps. The system was first deployed on the battleship USS Iowa in 1986. It saw use in Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm, flying over 300 missions to aid in target selection, reconnaissance for advance troop movements and directing air strikes. The system is to be phased out once the Navy's Tactical UAV system enters the inventory. It is 9 feet, 7 inches long with a wingspan of 17 feet, 1 inch.

-- Shadow 600: An upgraded version of the Pioneer, the Shadow 600 can fly longer -- up to 14 hours. It can be fitted with 17 different kinds of sensors. The model logged more than 700 hours in the Gulf War. It is 15.4 feet long with a 22.4-foot wingspan.

-- RQ-4A Global Hawk: A high-altitude, long-range spyplane. Still in final testing, the Global Hawk can use cameras, infrared sensors and radar during flights up to 40 hours from as high as 66,000 feet. The jet also has jamming equipment and other countermeasures to avoid being shot down. The Global Hawk is designed to fly automatically from takeoff to landing. It is nearly the size of a U2, at 44 feet, 5 inches long with a wingspan of 116 feet, 2 inches.


-------- OTHER

-------- human rights

REFUGEES
Misery Hangs Over Afghanistan After Years of War and Drought

New York Times
September 24, 2001
By BARRY BEARAK
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/24/international/24REFU.html

BESHAWAR, Pakistan, Sept. 23 - Before it became notorious as a sanctuary for terrorism, Afghanistan was already home to what may be the world's biggest humanitarian crisis.

Four years of ruthless drought had forced nearly a million people to abandon their homes in search of food, while countless others have stayed behind to live off unsavory meals of animal fodder and boiled grass.

One night last winter, a hasty settlement of tents was hit by a freak storm of heavy snows and sub-zero cold. In the morning, more than 150 people - mostly children - were found dead of exposure, leaving many to wonder what worse horrors could befall the Afghan people.

Now, it seems, they will find out.

With an American attack expected, hundreds of thousands of Afghans are suddenly on the move, heading for the presumed safety of ancestral villages or crossing the border into Pakistan and Iran. Their flight follows the prudent departure of virtually all foreign relief workers, the linchpins of a charitable distribution system that was expected to be feeding 5.5 million Afghans by mid-fall, about a quarter of the population.

The delivery of foodstuffs within Afghanistan is now nearly at a halt. Making matters worse, the Taliban have issued a new decree threatening death to any relief worker caught using a satellite telephone, an essential means of communication.

"A major crisis had already existed, and now there's a potential crisis even bigger," said Andrew Wilder, in charge of field operations in Afghanistan for the American branch of Save the Children.

"The World Food Program is not sending in any food, and we're worried that time may be running out. We need to get food in there. This is the time of year we all gear up for winter, and now there is not only winter to worry about but the aftermath of an attack."

For nearly a year, huge migrations of Afghans have made their way to refugee camps of one kind or another. These people, oddly enough, are often considered the better off. They at least could afford transportation in their escape from hunger. Left behind are those less fortunate, with no water, no seeds, no food and no savings.

Relief agencies had been attempting to keep people on their land - bringing food into remote areas through the mammoth, winding mountain passes. But on Sept. 12, the day after the attacks against America, the United Nations World Food Program, the primary source of nourishment for nearly four million Afghans, stopped transporting wheat into Afghanistan.

There were two reasons, said Khaled Mansour, spokesman for the program. One, it became impossible to hire local trucks to deliver grain to outlying regions; drivers were using their vehicles for the more lucrative work of carrying the fleeing. Two, with foreign aid workers gone, there was no longer adequate oversight. "We can't allow food to be diverted," Mr. Mansour said. "We have to be assured that the people who deserve the food will get it."

About 15,000 tons of food are stockpiled in Afghanistan, enough for about two weeks, he added. What follows is just another of that nation's coming cataclysms.

"The situation grows worse in Kabul everyday," said Dr. Muhammad Haider Toryali, a neurologist in Afghanistan's capital. He arrived here today with his wife and four children in Peshawar, in northwest Pakistan. The trip, by minibus, cost about $60.

"In normal times, the young, the old, so many children go to sleep at night without food. And now, what can I say? I want to ask Mr. Bush how he will rationalize attacks on hungry, innocent people. I cry for the Afghan people. I am leaving my family here in safety and then I will return to Kabul. I am a doctor and my people will need me."

In the few days after the terrorist attacks, few Afghans even knew of America's tragedy. Television is forbidden by the ruling Taliban, and radio bulletins were sketchy. But eventually, the news began to pass freely, and the panic followed the news. "The government of Pakistan is looking at 800,000 to one million people flooding into the Northwest Frontier Province and another 500,000 into Baluchistan," said Yusuf Hassan, a spokesman for the United Nations high commissioner on refugees. "Of course, the scale depends on what happens in the coming weeks in Afghanistan, but whatever happens, there is going to be a problem with funding. These countries, Pakistan and Iran, say they cannot support any more Afghan refugees."

Syed Iftikhar Shah, the governor of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier, this morning told reporters: "No more refugees! I have told the United Nations. I will not allow any more."

The Peshawar area itself has about one million Afghan refugees, a result of 22 years of war within Afghanistan as well as the current drought. Though the Pakistanis have sealed their border crossings with their neighbor, thousands of new arrivals are nevertheless snaking across the border on clandestine smuggler trails.

The plan, according to the governor, is to place an additional one million refugees in dozens of fenced camps in a "no man's land, a zero line" between Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is something of a fiction, allowing the governor to say he has stood firm against the refugee tide. The "no man's land" does not actually exist.

The camps will be built in Pakistan's so-called tribal areas, which by reputation are something like America's lawless Wild West - and while technically separate from the country's four provinces, are definitely part of the nation.

There, fenced in and fenced out, another horde of unfortunate Afghans will live in a limbo, waiting to be fed.

----

Poll: Third of New Yorkers support internment camps for some

By MARC HUMBERT
Associated Press Writer
September 24, 2001
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/ny-bc-ny--attacks-newyorkpo0924sep24.story

ALBANY, N.Y. -- One third of New Yorkers favor establishing internment camps for "individuals who authorities identify as being sympathetic to terrorist causes," according to a poll from the Siena College Research Institute.

Fifty percent of those surveyed for the statewide poll said they were opposed to that idea while 15 percent had no opinion.

The telephone poll of 610 New York state residents over age 18 was conducted from Sept. 12, the day after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, through Sept. 19. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

The poll found 75 percent of respondents felt terrorist attacks would continue and 40 percent said they were very concerned they or family members could become victims.

Forty-six percent said the attacks make it less likely they will use commercial flights even though two-thirds of those surveyed said they believe the airlines can be made safe from terrorism. Ninety percent said undercover, armed security guards should be put on the planes.

Internment camps have been controversial since World War II when the United States ordered thousands of Japanese-Americans into such facilities.

Douglas Lonnstrom, director of the research institute, said that given that World War II experience he found it "startling" that 34 percent of those polled supported the creation of new internment camps.

Lonnstrom said he didn't know if those questioned equated the phrase "sympathetic to terrorist causes" to Arab-Americans.

But James Zogby, president of the Washington-based Arab American Institute, said, "You have to be very careful how you go down this road of defining sympathies. I think it's dangerous."

Zogby said creation of such camps would be unconstitutional, but that he wasn't surprised by the poll's findings.

"In the current context, when you ask that question you're going to get that kind of response," Zogby said. "I would say if you asked people, `Should terrorist sympathizers have their toenails forcibly plucked from their toes?', you would probably get something akin to that."

---

War on Terrorism Stirs Memory of Internment

New York Times
September 24, 2001
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/24/national/24LEGA.html

The Bush administration's proposals for increased law enforcement powers to fight terrorism are provoking a debate about whether American courts would repeat the kinds of rulings that restricted the civil rights of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

The debate, some legal experts say, may help define how far courts are willing to go now in giving the government latitude in its treatment of Arabs in this country. Officials have held at least 75 immigrants in the investigation of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Among the most controversial of the administration's proposals are several that would give immigrants who are detained in the terror investigation limited opportunities to get their cases heard in court.

The Justice Department has insisted that the proposals uphold constitutional rights while giving law enforcement the tools it needs to conduct its investigation. But critics say immigrants in particular face new dangers from the proposals that they say parallel the treatment of Japanese in this country during the 1940's.

"Under these provisions," said Jeanne A. Butterfield, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, "there is a much bigger danger than we have ever seen in our history of innocent people being rounded up and held on suspicion that they did something and never having their day in court."

For many years, the most expansive of the World War II rulings, a 1944 Supreme Court decision that approved the internment of Japanese-Americans, has been widely discredited.

But in recent days legal experts of varying political views have said that the principles of the decision may not have been as widely repudiated as had been previously assumed. The 1944 case involved a Japanese-American, Fred T. Korematsu, who was convicted of disobeying an order requiring people of Japanese ancestry to report to assembly centers. The Supreme Court approved his conviction.

"Some people say we've learned the lesson from Korematsu and we would never do that again," said Jerry Kang, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and an expert on the World War II rulings. "I'm much more skeptical; I think there is a chance we would do that again."

In the 1944 case, a divided court approved the internments, saying that "hardships are part of war." The United States government formally apologized for the internments in 1988. But the Supreme Court has never overruled its decision.

Though a blanket detention of Arab-Americans now appears politically implausible, some legal experts say the reasoning of the 1944 ruling could permit limits on the civil liberties of Arab immigrants and even some Americans of Arab descent.

Among limits that might be approved by the courts are detentions of immigrants who give officials cause for concern. For instance, the government might detain individuals who had spent time in countries associated with terrorist activities, said Douglas W. Kmiec, a constitutional law expert at the Catholic University of America in Washington.

The heart of the 1944 decision was that the courts should give deference to government decisions about what was required for national security. "In wartime more latitude is given to the military's judgments," Mr. Kmiec said.

The Supreme Court has said immigrants have some constitutional rights, like the Fifth Amendment's guarantee that "no person" will be "deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law." The language of the amendment, courts have said, means that its protections extend to all people in the country, not just citizens.

In a case decided this June, the Supreme Court held that it was a violation of the Constitution for authorities to hold immigrants indefinitely while awaiting permission to deport them to another country.

The decision said indefinite detention by immigration officials was not constitutional even if there was evidence that the immigrants were dangerous. Long-term detentions are permissible under American law generally after criminal trials where a defendant has extensive right to contest the evidence with many legal protections. Immigration proceedings are considered civil.

But the opinion in June, written by Justice Stephen G. Breyer, seemed to anticipate the current questions about when added powers might be given to immigration officials. In the case before it, Justice Breyer wrote, the court did not have to consider broader questions that were not presented by the case.

But then he suggested that the law might be flexible in times of emergency. "Neither do we consider terrorism or other special circumstances," he wrote, "where special arguments might be made for forms of preventive detention and for heightened deference to the judgments of the political branches with respect to matters of national security."

Several legal experts said there had been many indications that the Supreme Court justices might well consider parts of the World War II internment case as a precedent to restrict civil rights during wartime.

But some defenders of the administration's proposals say civil libertarians' alarm is overstated.

Jan C. Ting, a Temple University law professor who is a former assistant commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said that when the nation was in peril, people ought to assume that the authorities were acting in good faith.

"No one is trying to squash anyone's constitutional rights," Mr. Ting said. "They're looking to protect the American people."

-------- police / prisoners

Europe uses drastic laws to beat terror

September 23, 2001
By Elaine Ganley
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010923-83927108.htm

PARIS - In France, police can detain people on a mere suspicion, hold them for up to four days and, if charged, send them to a terrorism court with no jury.

In Spain, authorities can shut down newspapers and jail editors if they feel the publications defend Basque terrorists. In Britain, authorities can charge someone for wearing a T-shirt promoting an outlawed group.

These methods may seem draconian by U.S. standards but experts say even that isn't enough to track a new kind of cross-border terror.

Terrorism today "is more like an invisible gas coming out of the cracks in the ground," said Paul Wilkinson, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

"To identify that and find ways of destroying the origin of this poison, you require a subtle but carefully honed intelligence battle and a good legal framework," he said.

Terrorism laws in France, Britain, Spain, Germany, Italy and Portugal - enacted mainly in response to attacks by homegrown terrorists - are vastly different in each country, but all tread on territory deemed sacred in the United States.

France has convicted more than 200 people in dozens of trials since a series of deadly bombings in 1995 by the radical Algerian insurgents of the Armed Islamic Group, or GIA.

A 1986 French law created a new section in the state prosecutor's office devoted to terrorism cases. The section includes special judges to investigate, special prosecutors and special no-jury courts to try suspected terrorists.

A unique charge - criminal association with a terrorist enterprise - allows police to detain suspects without firm evidence and hold them for up to four days and four nights.

"We can go after people who furnish logistics, arms, lodging, travel without proving that they themselves will take part in an attack," said an official in the anti-terrorism office who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Britain was long criticized as a haven for groups regarded in their homelands as terrorist organizations.

That has changed. The Terrorism Act of 2000 boldly expands a 1974 law passed after the Irish Republican Army killed 21 persons in pub bombings in Birmingham, England. The new law bans 21 radical groups - including Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda.

The law also broadens the definition of terrorism to include religious or ideologically motivated violence and acts. Significantly, it reaches beyond Britain's borders to allow for prosecution of those involved in activities abroad.

Speaking at meetings of a banned group or even wearing a T-shirt promoting an outlawed organization is forbidden.

In Spain, where some 800 people have been killed during the past 33 years by Basque separatist organization ETA, it is a crime to justify violence by the group. Newspapers and magazines thought by the government to violate that law have been shut down and their editors jailed.

Terrorism suspects in Spain can be held for questioning for up to five days.

In Germany, founding, joining or supporting a terrorist group was made criminal in 1976, a response to attacks by the extreme left Red Army Faction. The law bans public displays - from banners to spray-painted slogans - that support terrorists.

In an exceptional move, the city of Hamburg, where three of the hijackers suspected in the U.S. attacks lived, has begun profiling suspects with the help of computers as well as private and public records.

Despite the efforts, Europe has not been immune to attacks over the past decade. A 1996 bombing in the Paris subway killed three persons. Britain has suffered dozens of attacks, including four bombings in the London area this year.

While Europeans have excelled in the kind of "human intelligence" that critics say is missing in the United States, they are hampered by a lack of coordination. Sometimes, they compete over, rather than share intelligence.

France is powerless to go after a suspect in the Algerian operation because Britain refuses to extradite him.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, however, the European Union is moving faster to create a common arrest warrant and step up extradition procedures across the 15-nation block.

The United States also is considering changes.

In Washington on Friday, U.S. lawmakers introduced two anti-terrorism bills that would make it easier for investigators to wiretap suspected terrorists and require government agencies to share information.

A senior Bush administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said President Bush would soon sign an executive order naming specific terrorists and terrorist organizations around the world and freezing their U.S. assets.

"I think the experience of Britain and other European countries is useful," said Mr. Wilkinson of the University of St. Andrews. "Americans can look at what they have had to contend with and adapt some of the lessons learned in dealing with terrorism for 30 years in Europe."

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FBI Agents Ill-Equipped to Predict Terror Acts

By Joby Warrick, Joe Stephens, Mary Pat Flaherty and James V. Grimaldi
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, September 24, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14081-2001Sep23?language=printer

The FBI in the past decade has tripled its spending to stop terrorism, quintupled the number of intelligence gatherers and revamped its bureaucracy to share information about terrorists across the government.

None of it was enough to stop the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history.

Long before Sept. 11, the urgency was growing: In the past two years, the CIA cabled to the FBI names of about 100 suspected associates of Osama bin Laden thought to be bound for or already in the United States. An Aug. 23 cable bore the names of two, Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi. The FBI sought the men, but failed to locate them before they boarded the airliner that crashed into the Pentagon.

The attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center found the nation's chief domestic law enforcement agency ill-equipped and unprepared. An agency that must track terrorists who rely heavily on technology lacks computers that can quickly access the Internet. Boxes of evidence have piled up in previous terrorist plots, but the FBI has not had translators to decipher them. It lacks Arab agents who can penetrate terrorist cells and has too few veterans who see connections among foreign suspects and far-flung sites.

These weaknesses persist, officials say, despite the 1998 decision by then-Director Louis Freeh to make terrorism a top agency priority. FBI counterterrorism spending grew to $423 million by 2001. The goal, spokesman John Collingwood said, was to move "from a reactive to proactive posture," not just gathering intelligence, but using it to anticipate and plan for a variety of threats.

"We started down this road, but we didn't move as fast as the terrorists," said Jamie Gorelick, former No. 2 to then-Attorney General Janet Reno.

FBI officials say the agency is vastly better prepared than it was five years ago, citing a string of successful prosecutions, most recently in the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Other planned attacks were thwarted, Collingwood said. Current and former officials say, however, that the FBI has always been at its best in making cases against known criminals. The Sept. 11 tragedy shows more basic problems, authorities say.

"There were some people whose activities should have been tracked and they weren't," said Michele Flournoy, a security adviser for the nonprofit Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Lack of Communication

Communications among U.S. intelligence agencies, particularly the FBI and CIA, have always been a problem, cited as recently as last year in a report by the congressionally appointed National Commission on Terrorism. The report faulted the FBI for slowness in disseminating "terrorist information that may not relate to an immediate threat."

Even when it had information, the report said, the FBI sometime did not know what to make of it. One reason, the report said, was that investigators "lack the training or time to make such assessments."

A series of events and specific alerts in the weeks before Sept. 11 did not sound an alarm within the agency that a threat was growing, interviews show.

Since 1996, the FBI had been developing evidence that international terrorists were using U.S. flight schools to learn to fly jumbo jets. A foiled plot in Manila to blow up U.S. airliners and later court testimony by an associate of bin Laden had touched off FBI inquiries at several schools, officials say.

But alarms were not tripped when in mid-August, the owners of a Minnesota flight school alerted the FBI to a man who paid cash to use flight simulators to learn how to fly passenger jets.

The man, Zacarias Moussaoui, was held in a local jail on federal immigration violations, and the FBI says it passed along information about the arrest to other law enforcement agencies. That netted some results: By Sept. 1, French intelligence officials notified the FBI that Moussaoui was a "radical Islamic extremist" with possible ties to Afghani terrorist training camps.

The FBI still did not take him into federal custody. Now, authorities are trying to determine whether Moussaoui sought flight training to participate in the hijacking attacks. He is being held as a material witness.

The agency's inability to find Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi before the attacks illustrates that even improved communication with the CIA does not guarantee swift action -- or success. On Aug. 23, the CIA cabled the FBI and other agencies that they should be on alert for two men with possible links to terrorists. Al-Midhar had been videotaped months earlier meeting with a suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole, and the CIA advisory was "not a routine matter," an official familiar with the events said.

The INS confirmed that the men were in the United States and the FBI launched a search. But stymied by false addresses, agents concentrated on New York and Los Angeles. They did not make it to San Diego, where the suspects had been living, until after the hijackings.

FBI officials contend that without more specific information and sources within the terrorist cells, it would have been impossible to thwart the Sept. 11 attacks.

"It is much easier to penetrate the Gambino crime family than the bin Laden crime family," a senior government official said.

Language Barriers

The growth of bin Laden's terrorist network and its suspected attacks on U.S. targets have brought vexing challenges to the FBI: understanding Arabic, recruiting agents who can blend into foreign cultures, and quickly deciphering obscure information.

The limitations became apparent as early as 1993, when a loosely organized Islamic group planted a bomb under the World Trade Center. When they began building cases against the men, agents discovered to their dismay that some elements of the plot had been outlined in handwritten Arabic documents collected three years earlier in the murder case of Rabbi Meir Kahane. The documents included photos and schematic drawings, but the material was not translated or analyzed.

"You are getting these huge amounts of material and have no way to translate it. We had one guy who spoke Arabic," said Michael Cherkasky, who served as investigations chief in the Manhattan District Attorney's office during the Kahane murder probe.

The problem was still urgent last year after Freeh appealed to Congress for $5 million for translation services: "The FBI has not been able to translate all of the recorded audio conversations and documents it has obtained during investigations."

Last week FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III cited a "critical need" for translators as he pleaded for help from Americans fluent in Arabic, Farsi and Pashto. The bureau has been flooded with applicants, who must undergo background checks to ensure that an undercover terrorist, or "mole," does not burrow into the agency.

The FBI also is hampered by a scarcity of Arab American agents, said Robert M. Blitzer, former FBI chief of domestic counterterrorism. He estimated the number at no more than 25.

"If you don't have an Arab-American agent on your staff, how the hell do you recruit Arabs?" Blitzer said. "You don't even understand the culture."

Beginning in 1995, the FBI began adding hundreds of counterterrorism agents. But funding for computers, secretaries and support service lagged. "You have got to have the tools to do the job," Blitzer said.

FBI translators need more than just language skills. Law enforcement sensibilities and an ability to decipher street jargon are critical. In a 1993 investigation in New York, conspirators referred to bombs as hadduta, which literally translated means a child's bedtime story, the FBI said.

"Wiretaps do you no good if you have no one who can translate, or can be able to understand what they are hearing," said Peter S. Probst, a former terrorism expert for the Defense Department and the CIA.

For veteran FBI agents, accustomed to gumshoe work on the streets, burrowing in on tedious documents can be unappealing.

Chris Whitcomb, a former FBI counterterrorism supervisor, said he considered a career as a Chinese translator, "but if I went that route, I realized most of my career would be spent in a dark room wearing headphones and listening to wire intercepts. And that wasn't for me."

Aging Computers

A badge and a laptop computer -- these were the tools then-director Freeh said all his new agents would carry to demonstrate their technical proficiency.

In fact, for several years under Freeh, agents leaving the training academy did go out the door with a computer. That changed recently when the program was stopped because it was not cost efficient.

It was more than a symbolic loss for an agency that has less capability than many home computer users to collect, transmit and analyze information.

More than 13,000 FBI computers are four to eight years old, meaning they cannot run today's basic software or allow agents to move to different functions with a mouse.

"The productivity loss and frustration that result are enormous," the FBI's Bob E. Dies told a Senate panel in July. Dies is assistant director of the information resources division.

Most smaller FBI offices have low-speed Internet access and agents cannot electronically store photographs, graphics and charts, Dies said. Some sensitive classified and criminal data are available only on paper.

"The FBI is greatest collector of information in the world," but "there is material that is unanalyzed," said Robert M. Bryant, former deputy director under Freeh.

A $242 million, three-year plan to upgrade FBI systems is underway, but "at the dawn of the 21st century, the FBI is asking its agents and support personnel to do their jobs without the tools other companies use or that you may use at home," Dies testified.

Personnel challenges, such as how to retain the most experienced agents and upgrade the quality of FBI analysts, also remain an issue. "They've got a lot of personnel problems which they have been trying to turn around and deal with in the last five or six years," said Nancy Savage, a 24-year FBI veteran who now works in Portland, Ore., and heads the FBI Agents Association, a professional organization.

While some investigators have long track records working with terrorism, nearly half of the FBI's agents were hired since 1993, after the first World Trade Center bombing. Many FBI analysts, who assemble and divine patterns in mountains of intelligence, were hired before 1993, years before the FBI tightened educational requirements for those jobs. This combination gives the FBI a relatively inexperienced workforce of new agents and a group of veteran analysts that needs enhanced educational skills.

Savage and others say the FBI erred by "taking secretaries and turning them into analysts" and are left with the remnants of that personnel system.

A former FBI administrator said, "There is a caste system in the FBI that for a long time placed more value on the agents who collect information than on the non-agent analysts who have to put the pieces together,"

And without a crisis, it also can be tough to get analysts working on "threat assessment," which is supposed to be one of their functions, Savage said. In the FBI's local offices, analysts "get pulled to do all sorts of things: night shifts answering phones, anything that might be administrative."

Gathering and deciphering information from across the globe is "like having five super hard jigsaw puzzles mixed in together that you have to figure out," said terrorism specialist Martha Crenshaw, a professor of government at Wesleyan University. "But that being said, you can't recognize patterns unless you gather information to establish some standard of behavior and then, how do you notice a pattern if you don't have experience?"

Wiretap Reliance

Within the bureau, the priority is on making arrests, which are rare in terrorism cases. Agents assigned to white-collar crime and drug cases accumulate better track records. Other obstacles arise in the bureaucracy, which agents say has made it harder than necessary to take on the terrorist threat.

FBI agents told the congressional terrorism commission that the Justice Department has made the process of wiretapping terrorist suspects "slow and burdensome." That sentiment was echoed in a July report by the General Accounting Office, the auditing division of Congress, which concluded that the Justice Department is unlikely to approve any wiretap if it believes a crime has already been committed and the surveillance findings could be thrown out in court.

"Some of this stuff agents are after is time sensitive and it's not okay to wait six months to get it through," Savage said.

In the last week, the Bush administration has called for broader wiretapping authority for investigators, one of a series of proposed reforms to make it easier to track suspects.

A tougher challenge will be using the Sept. 11 tragedy to redefine the FBI's objectives and mission.

The agency's long-time focus on building criminal cases "is like going out in December 1941 to interview Japanese pilots after the attack on Pearl Harbor to see if indictments were in order," said Gardner Peckham, a member of the National Commission on Terrorism. The emphasis must be on interdiction, not just prosecution, he said.

Gorelick, Reno's former deputy, foresees a radical restructuring. Narcotics cases might be handed off to the Drug Enforcement Administration; white-collar crimes to state and local authorities.

This way, she said, the FBI could focus on terrorism, with a goal of pre-empting future attacks.

"They can surge when something bad happens, like now," Gorelick said. "But as a sustained matter they're not there."

Staff writer Gilbert S. Gaul and staff researcher Alice Crites contributed to this reporter.

-------- press

Journalists Worry About Limits on Information, Access

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 24, 2001; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13786-2001Sep23?language=printer

In 1988, Pentagon officials circulated word that a U.S. aircraft carrier would be delayed in heading to the Persian Gulf, where Iran and Iraq were at war, and the story was promptly leaked to a network correspondent.

The information was wrong -- the carrier was quickly dispatched to the region -- and the military brass were pleased.

"We actually put out a false message to mislead people," said Jay Coupe, then the spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "The idea was not to give information about the movement of our carrier. We were trying to confuse people."

As the administration gears up for what President Bush has described as a new kind of war, many journalists are growing concerned that they will have less information and less access to U.S. troops than ever before. Even the use of deliberate disinformation cannot be ruled out.

"This is the most information-intensive war you can imagine. . . . We're going to lie about things," said a military officer involved in the planning. "If it is an information war, certainly the bad guys will lie."

Whether or not that comes to pass, senior administration officials have made clear in recent days that much of the operation will be shrouded in secrecy.

"Let me condition the press this way: Any sources and methods of intelligence will remain guarded in secret," Bush said. "My administration will not talk about how we gather intelligence, if we gather intelligence and what the intelligence says. That's for the protection of the American people."

At a briefing on Friday, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer was pressed about what proof exists that alleged terrorist Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks in New York and Washington.

"You have the right to ask those questions," he said. "I have the responsibility not to answer them."

In time of war, Fleischer said in an interview, "some things the public wants and demands to know, other things they're satisfied they need not know. The press is caught in the middle and it's frustrating for the press. This administration will be committed to full disclosure of information, which keeps the country strong, while making certain that no information is disclosed that could lose lives or undermine missions."

Journalists, of course, cannot report such information without sources in the government, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has strongly cautioned potential leakers of classified information that "the lives of men and women in uniform" could be jeopardized.

Torie Clarke, the Pentagon spokeswoman, has been consulting with numerous journalists and plans to meet with Washington bureau chiefs this week.

"Our inclination, our desire, is to put out as much information as possible, without, of course, compromising any operations," she said. "We're very much working on this together."

Clarke said the Pentagon would try to have journalists accompany combat troops, or at least "pool" reporters who share their information, although "there may be some operations where it's just not possible."

More than military information is at stake. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft is no longer disclosing the arrests of material witnesses in the probe of the Sept. 11 attacks, citing the confidentiality of grand jury proceedings.

And after the Justice Department said 115 potential suspects had been detained on immigration charges, spokeswoman Mindy Tucker said the figure was wrong and that no further estimates would be made public.

In the wake of the president's ultimatum that Afghanistan's Taliban regime turn over bin Laden or face the consequences, the Pentagon is ground zero.

"The information flow has really clamped down," said Mark Thompson, defense correspondent for Time magazine. "It's not surprising. It's frustrating but also somewhat understandable. We're in a new kind of war and they don't want to telegraph any of the punches, and I'm not going to sit here and grouse about that."

In past conflicts, journalists were allowed onto military bases to interview the departing troops, which generated a wave of sympathetic coverage while sending a clear signal to American adversaries.

CBS News national security correspondent David Martin said government officials are playing "a different game now."

"They used to hope that if Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic saw the nature of the force being arrayed against him, he might relent," Martin said. "In this case, there's no real prospect that the Taliban is going to meet these demands. This force is definitely going to be used."

Retired Air Force Gen. Perry M. Smith said the administration's approach is justified. "Rumsfeld's trying to clamp down on everything and, at least for the moment, he's been very successful," Smith said. "In Kosovo and the Gulf War, keeping secrets wasn't all that important because everyone knew the bombing campaign was coming.

"Now, with a lot of special operations stuff and going into dangerous countries, if you telegraph what you're going to do, it might cause a lot of deaths."

But Thompson suggested a different motive, saying that attempts to capture terrorists will be "like a professional ballplayer -- more misses than hits. I don't know how much attention the military will want focused on repeated forays into the mountains of Afghanistan that come up empty."

Military attitudes toward the news media have undergone a sea change over the past 35 years. During the Vietnam War, journalists had free rein to accompany U.S. troops, and military leaders blamed that unfettered coverage for helping turn the country against the war.

In the Persian Gulf War, the Pentagon slapped severe restrictions on the press, even censoring some dispatches, and made it all but impossible for journalists to accompany U.S. forces during the brief ground war.

The public clearly sided with the first Bush administration. Nearly eight in 10 Americans in a 1991 Times Mirror poll supported the Pentagon's restrictions on journalists, and 60 percent said there should be more limits.

In recent days, Fleischer has called top executives at the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the major networks and other news outlets. He has urged them not to report on the advance schedules of Bush and Vice President Cheney, on security at the White House or on the details of intelligence sources and methods.

"If someone were to say that a cell phone call was intercepted, once it's published, people around the world can see it, including the bad guys," an administration official said.

In the current environment, the reporting of even nonsensitive but unflattering information can trigger a backlash.

One e-mail message to a Washington Post reporter said: "Criticism of the administration at this critical time is more than unpatriotic -- to the extent it undermines our national confidence and political will to proceed, it gives comfort to the enemy."

Coupe, now an international consultant, said the military's restrictive approach should "never be used simply to mask embarrassing situations." He added: "But there's definitely a reason to do it to mask troop movements. There are instances in which the less information put out, the better."

-------- terrorism

Shays hearings on terrorism a must read

From: DSNurse@aol.com
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2001 03:01:52 EDT
http://www.house.gov/reform/ns/past_hearings/combating_terrorism.htm

--------

INTERVIEW - Nuclear materials difficult for terrorists to use

AUSTRIA: September 24, 2001
Story by Richard Murphy
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/12497/newsDate/24-Sep-2001/story.htm

VIENNA - Terrorists would have difficulty in using nuclear materials in an attack or in exploding a nuclear bomb if they managed to obtain one, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said last week. Mohammed ElBaradei, Director-General of the Vienna-based IAEA, also said that a suicide attack on a nuclear power plant from the air would not necessarily lead to a nuclear disaster.

Even if terrorists succeeded in obtaining a nuclear bomb, it would not be easy to detonate, he told Reuters in an interview.

"The weapons are not just sitting ready-made for them. As far as I know, most countries do not keep them ready-assembled," said ElBaradei, who was re-elected this week to a second four-year term as head of the world's nuclear watchdog.

"There are a lot of security measures before you assemble a bomb and put it on a missile and trigger it."

The IAEA's 132 member countries ended their annual conference last week by agreeing "to devote attention to the potential implications of terrorist acts for the physical protection of nuclear material and nuclear facilities."

U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham called on Monday for tougher controls on the export of nuclear materials in the aftermath of last week's attacks in the United States, which killed more than 6,000 people.

NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY NOT INVULNERABLE

ElBaradei said nuclear technology was not invulnerable to possible use by terrorists.

"There is obviously a degree of vulnerability in any technology. Any group with malicious intentions can do a lot of harm - whether it's a bridge, an electric power station, nuclear reactor or a dam. The possibilities are infinite."

But the attacks in New York and Washington had demonstrated that everyday technology could be used to devastating effect and security standards in the nuclear industry were exceptionally high.

"In general, if I look at the nuclear sector, we are much more security-conscious than, say, the chemical or pharmaceutical industry. There is lots of horror which you can do with chemical and biological agents as much as nuclear."

Conceivable scenarios for a nuclear terrorist threat included detonation of a nuclear bomb, deliberate dispersal of radioactive material in a populated area and attacking a nuclear energy plant.

"We are aware that small amounts of materials have been smuggled, but they are mostly radioactive sources and not material that can be used for bombs," ElBaradei said.

Assembling a nuclear bomb was not easy. "It requires a great deal of sophistication - to have the quantity of material, to have the detonation. I think that's quite difficult."

"A scenario which is much easier is just dispersion - dissemination of radioactivity," he added.

Releasing nuclear material from an everyday source such as a hospital could be disruptive and cause a lot of anxiety.

"The scenarios are infinite. You don't need to have nuclear material, it can be radioactive sources. It doesn't have to be explosive material. You can put it in a water supply, you can do a lot."

But strong safeguards are already in place and these will be strengthened after last week's attacks. "We have a physical security system which is, I would say, adequate, not excellent yet. We are trying to work hard to improve that."

"We have a good safeguards system which enables us to detect whether any nuclear material which can be used for detonation is missing. We would know right away."

PLANTS TO WITHSTAND PLANE CRASHES

ElBaradei said the possibility of terrorist attacks, earthquakes and plane crashes had been taken into account in the design of nuclear power plants.

"I would not say they are completely invulnerable, but nor would I say there is an absolute guarantee that any aerial attack would automatically lead to a disaster. The truth is somewhere in between," he said.

"Like with any other technology there is no absolute guarantee. But they are not automatically an easy target."

If terrorists overran a nuclear power plant, they would have difficulty putting the nuclear material to illicit use.

"Material inside the core of a reactor is almost impossible to handle. The terrorists would be the first to die if they came near the core," ElBaradei said. "To move from nuclear material in a reactor to making a bomb - that's almost impossible."

The IAEA had already made extensive efforts to increase the security of nuclear materials but members would review all security procedures in the wake of the attacks in the U.S.

"The conference has asked me to undertake a comprehensive review of all our programmes in the area of physical protection, illicit trafficking, safety, emergency response - we need to look at all that and see what else we can do," ElBaradei said.


-------- activists

By any name, it's still war, pacifists say

By Carl Schoettler
September 24, 2001,
The Baltimore Sun
http://www.sunspot.net/bal-to.peace24sep24.story

Elizabeth McAlister presses her hands together in an arch gripping her head as if in weary despair or sorrow and stares down at the wooden table in Jonah House.

"I am just burning inside right now because of the code name that has been attached to our response," she says. " 'Infinite Justice,' " referring to the original title given to the U.S. response to the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Oh! Infinite Justice," she says in a kind of prolonged sigh.

Her cry echoes around the table among the half-dozen members of the Jonah House community in West Baltimore. They're all Catholic pacifists. They all profess belief in nonviolence. They've all been arrested demonstrating their faith and beliefs.

McAlister helped found this community nearly 30 years ago with her husband, Philip Berrigan, who is in prison now in the aftermath of an anti-war action. McAlister and Berrigan have been active in the Catholic Peace movement since before the Catonsville Nine protest, which he joined in 1968 during the Vietnam War.

"How can I as a human being, conscious of being a creature, conscious of my limitations, surrender that consciousness to a government that assumes that it has the right to infinite justice?" McAlister says, with righteous indignation.

"It doesn't," she says. "That belongs to God. And this government is not God. And George Bush is certainly not God. And that's idolatry, and I can't participate in that.

"Absolute idolatry," she says. "Infinite Justice! How dare they!"

Kristin Betts breathes an assent: "But it's not infinite justice. It's infinite vengeance."

At 26, she's the youngest at the table. Behind her, rain falls on an old cemetery on Moreland Avenue Jonah House residents tend in exchange for their living space.

"No human being," McAlister says, "in my limited understanding, can support that kind of hubris, that kind of assumption of divine retribution, which is God's not human's. And no nation that assumes that can stand."

She sounds like an angry Old Testament prophet.

"It's not anger," she says. "It's horror. It's absolute horror at the extent to which this country has gone to assume it's righteousness before God and the earth."

Someone in government seems to have agreed with her religious objections if not her indignation. The Pentagon abandoned the name Thursday in deference to Muslim beliefs that infinite justice only belongs to God.

Jonah House members have already joined Washington's Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House in demonstrations at the Pentagon. They've also participated in the Friends' vigils in Baltimore. The Washington Catholic Workers have gone to the Pentagon about 7 a.m. nearly every Monday for 14 years. The reaction of Pentagon workers last week seemed to range from curiosity to hostility.

"It was pretty intense down there," Betts says. "A lot of people were really angry that we were there."

They were outside a parking lot at the Pentagon's south entrance. American Airlines Flight 77 had smashed into a northeast corner of the building only six days earlier, killing 189 people. About a dozen people at the vigil held placards with such traditional slogans as "War Is Not Healthy For Children" and "Our Prayer Is For A Disarmed World."

Carol Gilbert, a Dominican nun, described an encounter with a woman arriving for work.

"She came up to me and said, 'I am a Christian, too,' " Gibert says. "She was a Baptist. I would say that she - as I think are many Americans - is torn between her faith - she does believe in the nonviolent Jesus - and nationalism. She is struggling very much and probably is leaning more toward nationalism."

Michelle Naar-Obed says they knew going to the Pentagon was going to be particularly difficult just after the attack.

"We just feel it's really important right now to have a voice of what I see as sanity and temperance," she says, "a voice that calls us to look at an alternative to the instinctual need to go back with revenge, to attack back with violence."

But they also felt compassion for the Pentagon employees. They brought flowers and a sympathy card for the victims along with their protest signs.

"I think that what we're saying is that all the deaths that happened on Tuesday were wrong and tragic," says Betts. "But that has to stop there. We feel like we're part of the world. We're brothers and sisters of the people in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and we don't want to see them die either.

"I think that extra step is what causes rage in people. They would be happy if we had had a vigil and a prayer gathering simply because of the deaths in the Pentagon. That wouldn't create any rage. But it's asking that we not retaliate that is too much."

And around the table there's no lack of sympathy for the victims of Sept. 11.

"Since all this has happened, I feel like I'm in a state of weeping," says Ardeth Platte, 65, also a sister of the Dominican Order.

She raises another question: "What causes antipathy for all of us so deep that people would commit suicide and mass murder?"

She finds an answer in the gospel's "forgiveness for anyone who's hurting."

"When I stand at the Pentagon, I say we must transform this building, these hearts of these planners into providing basic human needs for all of God's people," Platte says. "That's the whole thing for me."

At the Baltimore Catholic Workers' Viva House, Willa Bickham and Brendan Walsh, reflect on the "war on terror" and the wars lost in their neighborhood: the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs.

Their devotion to the peace movement also dates back to the Vietnam War, when many of the Catonsville Nine protesters gathered in the Mount Street house they still live in. They've been running a soup kitchen in Southeast Baltimore for 32 years.

Their hair is gray now, and they've just become grandparents for the second time. They often finish each other's sentences, as people who live together a long time do. And they still join vigils against war and the death penalty.

"There are a lot of folks talking and questioning what is going on," says Bickham.

"The question of violence and nonviolence is right out there again," Walsh adds. "How should we respond to these terrible acts?"

"You know what Martin Luther King said," Bickham reminds him. "'It's not a choice between nonviolence or violence. It's between nonviolence and extinction.'"

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Europe dissent - Peace rallies spread

Andrew Osborn, Rory Carroll, David Pallister, Jon Henley, Kate Connolly
Monday September 24, 2001
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,557041,00.html

London

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament held a silent vigil along Whitehall on Saturday afternoon. To CND's surprise, nearly 5,000 people turned up. "We were amazed at the numbers," said organiser Patrick van den Bulck. "This was a reflection of the disquiet felt by the public."

The demonstrators were asked to dress in black to mark the solemnity of the occasion. CND distributed 1,000 cards carrying the words "Stand shoulder to shoulder for peace and justice". They were later handed in to 10 Downing Street, along with a petition. The protest passed off peacefully with no arrests.

Brussels

Around 1,000 anti-war demonstrators took to the streets of the Belgian city of Liège on Saturday, converging on a meeting of EU finance ministers in the city. Anti-capitalists and anti-globalisation protesters rubbed shoulders with students, communists, environmentalists and anarchists. The marchers observed a minute's silence in memory of those killed in New York and Washington.

Berlin

Berlin and other German cities staged peace rallies at the weekend as thousands gathered to protest against possible military action by the US and Nato in Afghanistan. Similar demonstrations took place in the university cities of Hamburg, Munich, Cologne and Bremen. A poll released yesterday in Spiegel magazine indidated that 58% of Germans supported German participation in US military retaliation.

Rome

Small but vocal peace demonstrations have sprouted in Italy and appear to be growing stronger, despite widespread support for the country's involvement in a Nato response to the terrorist crisis. Last week up to 10,000 people marched through Rome to urge a non-violent response to the attacks on the US.They carried banners written in Italian, Kurdish and Arabic that read "No to terrorism, No to war", and "Another world is possible". A similar demonstration in Milan drew 1,000 people.

Paris

No anti-war demonstrations of any significance have so far been reported in France, according to Paris police and the interior ministry.

----

Echoes of Vietnam stir US campuses
Students refuse to be drowned out by clamour for reprisals

Matthew Engel in Oberlin, Ohio
Monday September 24, 2001,
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,557032,00.html

As the town clock struck six and the dusk-insects began biting, the Stars and Stripes hung limply at half-mast for the last time before the official mourning period ended yesterday.

It was a sight visible in small towns all over the United States on Saturday night. But in Oberlin, Ohio, the accompanying sound was somewhat unexpected. A speaker was telling about 500 people gathered in the main square: "Just remember that a bomb on Afghanistan is a bomb on us" - and was wildly applauded.

Shortly afterwards, the crowd marched three blocks to the town's memorial to Martin Luther King, chanting the while: "1-2-3-4! We don't want your racist war!" "2-4-6-8! Stop the war! Stop the hate!"

Then they chanted some more and heard more speeches before stopping for vegetarian nibbles and dispersing. A few of the older protesters could be heard gently humming peace songs from the 1960s. It was a gloriously nostalgic moment. It may also be immensely significant.

Oberlin is emphatically not the voice of Ohio, the Midwest or the nation. It is an agreeably funky and viscerally liberal college town in a Republican state that epitomises Middle America. It has a history of activism that pre-dates not only Vietnam but the American civil war. And the Oberlin College bookshop must be the only one in the state where Pencil Puzzles Vacation Special ("A Bountiful Harvest of Puzzle Fun!") sits alongside the latest issue of Spartacist ("A Trotskyite Critique of Germany 1923").

But Oberlin is not alone. Within the past few days, below the radar screens of the mainstream US media, a vast network of peace activists has become established in colleges across the country. Its website (www.peacefuljustice.cjb.net) lists contacts on more than 150 campuses. There have been demonstrations at about a hundred of them.

Leaders are now making plans to march on Washington next weekend, the dates originally set aside for the IMF and World Bank meetings - cancelled because of the atrocities - and accompanying Genoa-style protests. It is possible that this movement's internal contradictions will cause an early collapse. But its growth has been dramatic. At the very least, it is the return of opposition to President George Bush, a role abandoned by Congressional Democrats.

Rebellious

The scene in Oberlin might have been a film director's re-enactment of the anti-Vietnam protests, or a homage to retro-chic: there were rebellious hairstyles, bellbottoms and even a few kaftans. Only the proliferation of nose-studs and the general air of naive good order made it clear that these students were mostly the children of the 60s children, and that the clothes might have been pilfered from their mothers' attics.

But some had longer memories. In the square before the protest began, Chris Baymiller was collecting signatures on a petition to be sent to the local congressman. Now he is the assistant director of the Oberlin students' union; three decades ago he was an undergraduate.

"It was not uncommon to have draft-card burnings on any given day," he recalled. "There was one very famous incident when a group of marine recruiters were trapped in their car and the police had to teargas the entire area. It was a very intense time, a time like no other. But this is the nearest I can remember to that atmosphere."

Oberlin is not far from Kent State University, infamous as the campus where National Guardsmen panicked during a demonstration in 1970 and shot four students dead. Despite its place in history, Kent State has never had Oberlin's reputation for activism - but anti-war protests are planned there this week too.

The major difference is that the message from the current action has to be more complex than the "hell-no-we-won't-go" slogans from 30 years ago. These students are not being drafted - yet. And there is still no serious support anywhere for doing nothing in response to the attacks. The most astute speakers at this rally attempted to get across a cautious and non-rabble-rousing message: yes, but.

It was summed up by the undergraduate organiser, Jim Casteleiro: "On September 11 I felt more pain than I ever imagined. Americans want retribution for what happened. But remember this: Every life we take means there will be retribution for that. There is going to be more war, more violence."

Mr Baymiller explained to a waverer: "We support going after the terrorists, bringing them to justice. And if they find Bin Laden in a cave and bomb the cave, fine. We don't want to see a large part of the world being bombed back to the Stone Age." The waverer signed his petition.

Mr Baymiller was sitting at a stall set up in the square at a routine back-to-college recruitment market for Oberlin's various societies. The Socialist Alternative (membership at Oberlin: eight) was there, as were the Spartacists (membership here: zero - their representatives had driven from Chicago, presumably bringing their magazines with them). But the professional lefties were outnumbered by the folk music club, the karate club and the chess club.

And even the apolitical students were not wholly unsympathetic to the protests. Goldie Greenstein, studying economics and psychology, refused to attend the rally: she was mainly interested in recruiting members to the film club. So what did she feel when she heard Mr Bush's speech on Thursday? "Fear. Terrorists will kill themselves if they wish to do so, and they will bring people down with them."

Oberlin's students are more politicised than elsewhere. But there is evidence that the mood here is merely a more concentrated version of the unease developing on other campuses. The place is considered eccentric, but it has generally been ahead of its time rather than wrong.

The town was founded by anti-slavery campaigners, and helped to precipitate the civil war by refusing, in 1858, to hand over a runaway slave. Oberlin College pioneered coeducation and non-racialism. It is also a town with a reputation for tolerance. There was thus no hint of confrontation, except from one elderly guest at a nearby wedding, who began booing theatrically.

The march to the Martin Luther King memorial drew only a couple of bemused looks, not least from Tracy Michael, who works in a pet shop, and was sitting opposite the monument on her front porch, decked out with the American flag.

She was, in keeping with Oberlin tradition, perfectly indulgent. She just didn't share the sentiments. "I want peace just as much as they all do, but we're not going to get it. The terrorists put us in the war."

----------

Echoes of war protests mock terror concerns

September 24, 2001
By Ralph Z. Hallow
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010924-8732695.htm

The liberal-conservative divide has narrowed but not quite closed.

While public-opinion polls show as much as 95 percent of Americans back Mr. Bush's war on terrorism and more than 80 percent favor military action in Afghanistan, pockets of vocal dissent crossing racial and ethnic lines are appearing.

Some of the dissenting voices echo Vietnam war protests, back for a nostalgic encore. Others are based in racial grievance.

In North Carolina, Curtis Gatewood, chairman of the Durham chapter of the NAACP, urged blacks to sit out the war on terrorism. Many of the companies in the World Trade Center discriminated against blacks, he said, and "our brothers" should not help fight a war on terrorism because America "has not protected our rights."

Kweisi Mfume, national chairman of the NAACP, distanced himself and his organization from Mr. Gatewood. "Mr. Gatewood surely has a right to his beliefs, but they are not the beliefs of the NAACP," he said. Mr. Mfume issued a strong statement of support for President Bush last week in the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.

"This is not a time to sit back and pontificate with pointed fingers about the fact that there are imperfections in our society," he said. "This is a time to find a way as Americans - without the hyphen - to work together to protect our way of life and the lives of innocent people."

The racial divide emerged in other places. In Florida, Miami-Dade County firefighters Terry Williams, James Moore and William Clark refused to mount their fire engine because it flew an American flag.

A Miami newspaper reported that Mr. Clark said "he and the two other firefighters are also grieving, but he's sticking to his opinion that once the country's renewed patriotism is over, racial discrimination will rear its head."

In California, top Democrats reacted differently to angry rhetoric at the same event they were attending. Gov. Gray Davis and Sen. Dianne Feinstein walked out on the Rev. Amos Brown, a black minister, after he blamed America during what was supposed to be a memorial service in San Francisco for the Sept. 11 New York and Washington massacres of Americans.

However, both Mr. Davis and Mrs. Feinstein said they meant no rebuke but left because they were running late for other engagements. Mr. Davis later said Mr. Brown "is a good man," but his remarks were "out of line" because nothing Americans "may or may not have done is justification" for the terrorist attacks.

Neither Sen. Barbara Boxer nor Rep. Nancy Pelosi left the service. Mrs. Pelosi took the stage to say that although she agreed with much the minister had said, the bad things America did around the world didn't justify the terrorism against it.

Board of Supervisors President Tom Ammiano said Mr. Brown's comments reflected the anti-war tradition of the California left. "What can you say? It was largely a lefty and pro-peace crowd, and Amos was playing to the house."

The Women's Fightback Network of the International Action Center in Boston issued a Sept. 21 statement that expressed "heartfelt sympathies" for victims of the Sept. 11 attacks but warned that the Bush administration's response will have negative effects.

The statement quoted Mahtowin James, an American Indian and a Network board member, who said, "Like everyone else, I am unspeakably saddened by what happened [on Sept. 11, but] I am appalled that the Bush administration is attempting to take advantage of this crisis to militarize U.S. society with a vast expansion of police powers that is intended to restrict our basic rights."

A group called the International Act Now to Stop War & Racism called for a Sept. 29 "rally at the White House" and "marches on the West Coast and around the world against war and racism."

Signers of the call to action range from Ramsey Clark, U.S. attorney general under President Johnson and supporter of left-wing causes, to Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, auxiliary bishop of the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit; Barbara Lubin, executive director of the Middle East Children's Alliance; Tom Hansen of the Mexico Solidarity Network; and Kriss Worthington of the Berkeley (Calif.) City Council. Signers include New Hampshire HIV/AIDS Task Force, Al-Awda Palestine Right of Return Coalition, Jews Against the Occupation (of Palestine) and the New Communist Party of the Netherlands.

Movie and television producer Michael Moore blamed U.S. "taxpayer-funded terrorism" for the Sept. 11 atrocities. "In just eight months, Bush gets the whole world back to hating us again," Mr. Moore said.

"He withdraws from the Kyoto agreement, walks us out of the Durban conference on racism, insists on restarting the arms race - you name it, and Baby Bush has blown it all."

----------

Focus of D.C. Protests Turned to Peace Effort

By Manny Fernandez and Petula Dvorak
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, September 24, 2001; Page B03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14252-2001Sep23?language=printer

The world's finance ministers and central bankers may have canceled plans to gather in Washington this weekend, but scores of protesters and activists have not. Organizers campaigning against the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are shifting their focus to the growing antiwar movement.

Demonstrators spent months preparing for the meetings, which were set for Saturday and Sunday, until the World Bank and IMF canceled the sessions last week in light of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Police had estimated that as many as 100,000 protesters would fill the capital for a raucous week of marches calling for reforms.

With the meetings postponed and public attention focused on the devastation at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, many in the movement feared a loss of momentum. But some activists have already tweaked their message from anti-IMF to antiwar and are coordinating marches and rallies in the city this weekend.

"We've refocused our demonstration to address the immediate dangers posed by racism and the grave threat of a new war," said Richard Becker, a coordinator with the International Action Center, which changed the theme of its previously planned "Surround the White House" rally. "It's extremely important now, for those who are opposed to this plunge into the new militarization of society . . . to take a stand now."

Federal and local authorities had taken extraordinary precautions to ready Washington for the demonstrations, developing a $29 million security plan that included fencing off a large swath of downtown. The canceled meetings have not meant a full reprieve for D.C. police, however, who expect about 4,000 protesters for weekend antiwar events, Chief Charles H. Ramsey said.

All D.C. officers will be on duty Saturday and Sunday and plan to work with the uniformed division of the Secret Service and U.S. Park Police to handle the crowd. Authorities have abandoned plans for the two-mile fence and will instead rely on the Civil Disturbance Unit and waist-high barricades used in IMF and World Bank protests last year, Ramsey said.

A slight change of tactics may be in order, as police expect counter-demonstrators to show up to voice support for the Bush administration's response to the crisis. "We're also going to have to protect the demonstrators from one another," Ramsey said.

Protesters characterize the police preparations as an overreaction, saying they expect a less militant tone. Close to two dozen groups, from immigrant-rights supporters to environmentalists to anarchists, planned to protest the meetings. This weekend's events will feature only a fraction of those groups, as several -- including the AFL-CIO labor federation -- have pulled out.

The International Action Center initially planned a march from the White House to the IMF and World Bank headquarters to demand an end to harmful economic policies. But the group switched targets and tactics and will now speak out against the U.S. war effort and recent violence against Arab Americans, Becker said.

Surrounding the White House is also no longer part of the plan. Participants will gather at Lafayette Square at noon Saturday and march to the Capitol. The center, a national activist group based in New York, expects 10,000 to take part.

Park Police said a permit allowing the protest could be voided if security concerns warrant. "If a decision comes down [to void the permit], it will come down from the Secret Service," said Lt. Keith Horton, of the Park Police. "The Secret Service will make the final determination if it's a security concern."

Other rallies will be held in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Another Saturday march is being organized by the Anti-Capitalist Convergence, a D.C.-based network of anarchists and anti-capitalists. The group seeks to draw attention to the ties between the Sept. 11 attacks and U.S. military and foreign policy, a member of the group said. "Until we understand the violence of our economic, military and foreign policies, we will continue to foster the conditions that make this kind of terrorism possible," a statement from the group reads.

The group is no longer calling for militant blocs, a tactic used by some protesters featuring black-clad and masked members. Thousands are expected to attend week-long events, though details of the downtown march are still being worked out.

An interfaith service at St. Aloysius Church in Northwest Washington on Saturday and a peace gathering organized by the Washington Peace Center and the D.C. office of the American Friends Service Committee on Sunday are also planned. "We need to stop and take time to grieve and look for some of the root causes of violence . . . that happens around the planet," said Bette Hoover, local director for the committee, the social service branch of the Quakers.

The Mobilization for Global Justice, one of the main coalitions organizing against the World Bank and IMF, canceled its call for street protests out of respect for attack victims and their families. But global economy teach-ins will go forward, and individual members plan to join antiwar events.

"I think the fight for global justice is not just economic, but it also deals with issues of peace and war," D.C. organizer Adam Eidinger said. "I think there's a sense of breaking through the media blackout of voices that want restraint and justice instead of revenge."

Staff writer Jennifer Lenhart contributed to this report.

----

TVA WANTS TO PRODUCE TRITIUM FOR WEAPONS

September 24, 2001
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/sep2001/2001L-09-24-09.html

SPRING CITY, Tennessee, The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has filed an application to produce tritium at its Watts Bar nuclear power plant for use by the Department of Energy (DOE).

The application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) requests that TVA be permitted to install tritium producing burnable absorber rods at the Watts Bar facility, located near Spring City.

The DOE has developed technology that would produce tritium using lithium, rather than boron, in burnable absorber rods to be installed in commercial pressurized water nuclear reactors, such as Watts Bar. The irradiated rods would then be removed from the power plant and shipped to the Savannah River Site, where DOE would extract the tritium.

The license amendment would allow, for the first time, tritium production by a commercial nuclear reactor to ensure future tritium stockpiling for military use. The United States has not produced tritium - a radioactive form of hydrogen used in the fusion stage of nuclear weapons - since 1988, when DOE closed a special production facility at its Savannah River Site.

Current short term tritium needs are being met by recycling tritium from dismantled nuclear weapons. The DOE is responsible for establishing the capability to produce tritium by the end of 2005, in accordance with a presidential directive.

The NRC determined in September 1997 that TVA could place 32 of the burnable absorber rods in the Watts Bar reactor core to test the technology. TVA irradiated the rods until the spring of 1999 and removed them from the reactor. The DOE shipped the rods to the Savannah River Site, examined them and confirmed that the technology worked.

TVA's license amendment, if approved, would permit it to install 2,304 of the rods into the Watts Bar reactor and irradiate them for one fuel cycle, which lasts about 18 months. TVA would replace the rods as needed and continue the process for the life of the plant.

A public meeting on the proposed amendment will be held in Evensville, Tennessee on October 2.

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