------- Index of Articles

U.S., Britain strike Afghanistan
U.S. Clearing Way for 'Relentless Campaign,' Bush Says

NUCLEAR
Angry India 'waives' sanctions waiver
Japan to dismantle first commercial reactor
Proposed Utah Nuclear Dump Is Vulnerable to Deadly Attack
Text Of Pres Bush's Address On Attack On Afghanistan
FLOW OF INFORMATION

MILITARY
US has created Taliban: Rabbani
Rabbani says bin Laden can be captured without war
Bin Laden Calls Americans 'Sinners'
Taliban: Assault 'Terrorist Attack'
Text of bin Laden's videotaped statement
NATO to Deploy AWACS Aircraft in U.S.
Bush Says 'Time Is Running Out,'
A New Kind of War Plan
Salvage Team Lifts Bow Of Sunken Ehime Maru
Army, Hawaiian Group Reach Deal on Training

OTHER
A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance
Egypt's Brutal Response to Militants
In Hindsight, C.I.A. Sees Flaws That Hindered Efforts on Terror
What's Classified? Sorry. It's a Secret.
To Fight in the Shadows, Get Better Eyes

ACTIVISTS
Women's activist calls Afghans 'hostages' to Taliban terror
Scores protest in London against military strikes
In NYC, Thousands Rally & March for Peace
Peace protesters hit street to denounce air strikes
Socialist Party Statement on Bombing of Afghanistan
Rage against the war machine
Peace Rally in DC
Two Who Voted Against War, 60 Years Apart


-------- top news

U.S., Britain strike Afghanistan

USA TODAY
10/07/2001
The Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/10/07/usattack.htm

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - Thunderous explosions and the rattle of anti-aircraft fire were heard Sunday night in the Afghan capital Kabul, as the United States and Britain launched military retaliation in Afghanistan. Electricity was shut off throughout the city. CNN meanwhile reported explosions in the northeast Afghan city of Jalalabad and the southern city of Kandahar, where the headquarters of the ruling Taliban militia is located. Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar lives in Kandahar. After the strikes began, Prime Minister Tony Blair said of the Taliban, "They were given the choice of siding with justice or siding with terror and they chose terror."

Blair said Sunday that British missile-firing submarines were taking part in operations against Afghanistan. Blair said the submarines had joined in a U.S.-led attack on Taliban military facilities and forces in Afghanistan at the request of Washington.

He said British warplanes would join the attack in the next few days.

In Washington, President Bush said U.S. and British military action had begun in Afghanistan. He said forces are taking "targeted actions" against Taliban military capabilities and the al-Qa'eda network of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden.

In the days following the strikes at the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the president had issued a series of demands for the Taliban to hand over bin Laden, a Saudi exile and the main suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. The Taliban offered to negotiate but refused a handover.

"Now the Taliban will pay a price," Bush vowed.

A senior Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched from American and British vessels, including American submarines, in the Arabian Sea. This official said targets included air defenses, military communications sites and terrorist training camps inside Afghanistan.

The first explosions could be heard about 8:57 p.m. local time, or 12:27 p.m. EDT, after nightfall in Kabul. Five large explosions shook the city, followed by the sounds of anti-aircraft fire.

A Taliban official in Kabul contacted by telephone from Pakistan said "we are under attack. They bombed in the south of Kabul. Our guns are firing." The official, who gave his name only as Mudir, gave no further details.

The private, Islamabad-based Afghan Islamic Press agency quoted the Taliban as saying American planes had bombed areas near the Kabul airport in the northern part of the city. The agency said there were no details of casualties and no reports of damage to the city itself. It added, however, that "huge smoke is rising near Kabul airport."

In Karachi, Pakistan, the Taliban's consul-general said the Islamic militia is ready for holy war, following the U.S. and British attack.

"We condemn this attack," Rehmatullah Kakazada told The Associated Press. "We have received word that a plane has bombed Kabul. We don't have any more information. We are ready for jihad."

About two hours after the attack, electricity was still off in Kabul but the city was quiet and there was no sign of panic. Kabul's one million people are inured to war after more than two decades of relentless fighting that has destroyed most of the city.

Earlier Sunday, the Taliban had made an 11th-hour appeal to prevent U.S. attacks: They offered to detain bin Laden and try him under Islamic law if the United States made a formal request. The Bush administration quickly rejected the Taliban proposal, with White House spokesman Scott McClellan saying Bush's demands "are clear and nonnegotiable."

Washington has also rejected Afghanistan's attempt to use eight jailed foreign aid workers as bargaining chips to pressure the United States to halt its planned anti-terrorist offensive. The eight aid workers in Kabul - four Germans, two Americans and two Australians - were arrested in August on charges of trying to convert Muslims to Christianity.

Power went off throughout Kabul almost immediately after the first of five thunderous blasts Sunday night, which appeared to have been in the southwest of the city. The southwestern part of Kabul includes the Darulaman Palace, an ancient royal residence, and the Balahisar Fort, an old Mogul style installation.

The firing tapered off for a few minutes but resumed after a jet aircraft could be heard passing over the city.

A curfew was in effect in the city, making it impossible to independently determine further details.

In a statement before the U.S. attacks began, the Taliban said they had sent thousands of troops to the border with Uzbekistan, whose president has allowed U.S. troops use of an air base for the anti-terrorism campaign.

"We have deployed our forces there at all important places. This is the question of our honor, and we will never bow before the Americans and will fight to the last," said a Taliban defense ministry source, quoted Sunday by the Afghan Islamic Press.

Taliban claims about sending troops to the Uzbekistan border could not be independently verified.

However, Russia's Interfax news agency reported Saturday that Taliban troops were moving long-range artillery and multiple rocket launchers toward the border. More than 10 guns and rocket launchers had moved within range of the Uzbek border town of Termez, Interfax said, quoting Afghan opposition sources.

The Taliban are estimated to have some 40,000 fighters - around a quarter of them from bin Laden's organization - and many of those are involved in fighting a coalition of opposition forces in northern Afghanistan. The Taliban's enemies had made little progress against the larger, better-armed Taliban, but their fortunes have been bolstered since the Sept. 11 attacks with a decision by Russia to step up weapons shipments.

--------

U.S. Clearing Way for 'Relentless Campaign,' Bush Says

New York Times
October 7, 2001
By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN and JACQUES STEINBERG
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/international/07WIRE-ATTACK.html

The United States today launched its long-anticipated attack on Afghanistan, firing devastating volleys of cruise missiles against military and communications facilities and suspected terrorist training bases.

The offensive followed the ruling Taliban's defiant refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden and close down terrorist training camps.

"None of these demands were met and now the Taliban will pay a price," President George W. Bush said in a televised address from the White House.

President Bush said that Britain joined the United States in committing forces to the attack today, opening what he called "a sustained and relentless campaign" against terrorists based in Afghanistan and their Taliban protectors.

In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair disclosed that British submarines fired some of the cruise missiles that hit Afghanistan. Mr. Blair said Britain was also providing aircraft and its base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

While no country lightly committed forces to such an operation, Mr. Blair said, "we made clear we would take action once it was clear who was responsible" for the terrorist attacks in the United States last month.

He said there was no doubt that the attack was masterminded by Mr. bin Laden and carried out by his Al Qaeda terrorist network.

President Bush said that Canada, Australia, Germany and France have also pledged forces as the campaign unfolds.

"We are supported by the collective will of the world," the president said.

"The battle is now joined on many fronts," President Bush said. "We will not waiver, we will not falter, and we will not fail. Peace and freedom will prevail."

A Pentagon official said that the cruise missiles had struck terrorist camps, air bases and air defense installations. "It's going to be shake-and-bake until we smoke them out," the official told The Associated Press.

Details of today' attack were initially sketchy. But CNN reported that three explosions were heard in Kandahar, the seat of the ruling Taliban, and that the strikes there had destroyed the Taliban's command base at the airport.

Other explosions rocked in the Afghan capital, Kabul, where electricity supplies were cut.

While bombing attacks are very much a part of the Pentagon's plan, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld previously stressed that the effort would be "measured."

The Times's military analyst, Michael Gordon, reported that the Pentagon's new approach stems from the unique challenges of going to war against Mr. bin Laden and his Taliban sponsors in Afghanistan. The rulers of Afghanistan have headquarters, military forces, airfields and supplies that can be attacked. But they lack the vast armies that the United States military has confronted in past conflicts, reducing the number of military targets.

The Pentagon's planning, Mr. Gordon reported, also reflects a larger political strategy: that the battle is against terrorists and not the Afghan people.

To that end, Mr. Bush said in his national address on Sunday afternoon: "The United States of America is a friend of the Afghan people." Mr. Bush said that American forces, while striking against terrorists and the Taliban government, would also be airlifting food, medicine and supplies to civilians caught in the crossfire.


-------- NUCLEAR

-------- india / pakistan

Angry India 'waives' sanctions waiver

THE TIMES OF INDIA
CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 07, 2001
http://www.timesofindia.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=1286794026

WASHINGTON: Angry and upset over the seismic shift in American policy in South Asia following the September 11 terrorist attacks, India has asked to be de-linked from Pakistan in various legislation being considered by the US Congress.

Hill sources said the unusual and explicit request, clearing arising from a sense of pique over the turn of events, was made earlier this week to at least two law-makers, Senator Joseph Biden and Senator Sam Brownback. They have been at the forefront of the administration's move to ease sanctions against Pakistan and India with the obvious intent of buying cooperation from Pakistan in its proposed war against terrorism.

Indian sources confirmed such a request had been made and said there was no need to club India and Pakistan in the same legislation because India gained very little from it. Specifically, they pointed to legislation relating to waiver of the so-called democracy sanctions, and said it was "gratuitous" to mention India in the context since it has been and continues to be a democracy.

"Besides, we are supporting the war on terrorism not out of any sense of expectation or reward," one Indian source said in a needling reference to Pakistan's reasons, which is thought to be made under duress and for a financial bail-out. "We don't need sops. We are in it for the long haul and because we have been hurting from nearly two decades of terrorism," the source added.

In fact, things have become so testy between India and its friends on the Hill that External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh cancelled a meeting with Senator Biden at just 20 minutes notice, leading to a great deal of heartburn in the law-maker's office.

Biden, who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was a trenchant critic of Pakistan's nuclear proliferation and was opposed to sanctions against Pakistan being eased while supporting a waiver for India. But he changed his views following the September 11 attacks and is now proposing a long-term alliance with Pakistan, including massive doses of capital from a $1 billion dollar "recovery package" he is pushing for Central Asia.

Singh apparently cried off from the meeting citing illness. "But he was on CNN an hour later looking hale and hearty," a Congressional source fumed. "You don't do this to a Senator at such short notice when you have sought the meeting."

Indian sources denied deliberating dissing Biden and said the meeting had to be cancelled because of scheduling problems. But evidently, a CNN gig was considered more germane than a meeting with a Senator who had already made up his mind.

Biden is not only an influential law-maker and an authoritative foreign policy voice, but also a prospective presidential candidate.

Despite India's irate demand that it be de-linked from Pakistan in various legislative endeavours, the US Senate later on Thursday to lift virtually all remaining sanctions against Islamabad and New Delhi.

By unanimous consent, senators approved a bill that authorises President Bush to sell weapons, dual-use items and provide financial assistance to Islamabad and New Delhi "that he deems important to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism."

Indian officials are taking a dim view of such moves, presuming, from past experience, that the administration will use it to only refurbish a Pakistan.

-------- japan

Japan to dismantle first commercial reactor

Planet Ark
JAPAN: October 7, 2001
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/12698/story.htm

TOKYO - Japan Atomic Power Co will begin dismantling in December Japan's oldest commercial nuclear reactor, located northeast of Tokyo, a company spokesman said last week.

The 166,000-kilowatt nuclear reactor, commissioned in 1966, will become the first commercial Japanese nuclear power plant to be dismantled.

The cost of scrapping the plant and other related measures, which is expected to take until fiscal 2017/2018, is estimated at 93 billion yen ($772 million), the spokesman said.

The spokesman said that about 18,100 tonnes of low-level radioactive waste is expected to be produced from the demolition of the plant. The reactor, located in Tokaimura on the Pacific Coast ended operations in 1998.

It was the only plant in Japan that used graphite as its moderator and carbon dioxide gas as its coolant.

Japan's 51 other commercial nuclear reactors use water as a moderator and coolant.

About a third of Japan's electricity needs is covered by nuclear power.

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

-------- utah

Proposed Utah Nuclear Dump Is Vulnerable to Deadly Attack

Sunday, October 7, 2001
BY DIANNE R. NIELSON,
Salt Lake Tribune (Utah)
http://www.sltrib.com/10072001/commenta/138008.htm

Because of the extraordinary importance of the subject -- the security of nuclear materials facilities -- The Tribune editorial titled "Nuclear Hyperbole" merits a thoughtful response.

The background facts are these. A small consortium of utilities (commonly referred to as PFS) proposes placing the nation's entire current inventory of commercially generated spent nuclear fuel on open concrete slabs. The size of that inventory: 40,000 metric tons of highly lethal radioactive material, to be contained in 4,000 casks. (No one site in the United States presently contains more than 50 casks of spent nuclear fuel.) The proposed place: a 99-acre site in Skull Valley, 11 miles from two commercial flight paths, about 45 miles from Salt Lake's busy airport, and therefore just minutes of flight time away for a diverted airliner.

The quickly unfolding events of Sept. 11 almost immediately brought to the minds of thoughtful and informed Utahns a horrid scenario very close to home. State officials, in discharge of their duties, began the very next day a careful analysis of that scenario.

Although our analysis is not yet complete, some truths are already known, with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) having admitted most of these in its Sept. 21, 2001, bulletin. The casks will not withstand impact from a large aircraft. The casks will not withstand a jet fuel fire of the intensity and duration experienced in the Sept. 11 attacks. The resulting failure of the casks could, at the very least, release lethal doses of cesium or cobalt 60 into the atmosphere. Relative to the proposed Skull Valley nuclear waste dump, neither PFS nor the NRC has analyzed attacks of the kind that destroyed our greatest buildings on Sept. 11. Neither PFS nor the NRC has developed protective measures against such attacks.

The unthinkable terrorist acts of Sept. 11 changed many things in this world. One of the most important changes for Utahns is an even greater safety concern about the shipment and storage of spent nuclear fuel in our state. Our analysis of this risk must continue.

Dianne R. Nielson is executive director of the Utah Department of Environmental Quality.

-------- us nuc politics

Text Of Pres Bush's Address On Attack On Afghanistan

Dow Jones Newswires
07-10-01
http://news.ino.com/intraday/?storyid=DJN618879200

NEW YORK (AP)--President George W. Bush's address to the nation following the beginning of air strikes in Afghanistan, as transcribed by eMediaMillWorks, Inc.

BUSH: "On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against al-Qaida terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

"These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.

"We are joined in this operation by our staunch friend, Great Britain. Other close friends, including Canada, Australia, Germany and France, have pledged forces as the operation unfolds.

"More than 40 countries in the Middle East, Africa, Europe and across Asia have granted air transit or landing rights. Many more have shared intelligence. We are supported by the collective will of the world.

"More than two weeks ago, I gave Taliban leaders a series of clear and specific demands: Close terrorist training camps. Hand over leaders of the al-Qaida network, and return all foreign nationals, including American citizens unjustly detained in our country.

"None of these demands were met. And now, the Taliban will pay a price.

"By destroying camps and disrupting communications, we will make it more difficult for the terror network to train new recruits and coordinate their evil plans.

"Initially, the terrorists may burrow deeper into caves and other entrenched hiding places. Our military action is also designed to clear the way for sustained, comprehensive and relentless operations to drive them out and bring them to justice.

"At the same time, the oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies. As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering men and women and children of Afghanistan.

"The United States of America is a friend to the Afghan people, and we are the friends of almost a billion worldwide who practice the Islamic faith.

"The United States of America is an enemy of those who aid terrorists and of the barbaric criminals who profane a great religion by committing murder in its name.

"This military action is a part of our campaign against terrorism, another front in a war that has already been joined through diplomacy, intelligence, the freezing of financial assets and the arrests of known terrorists by law enforcement agents in 38 countries.

"Given the nature and reach of our enemies, we will win this conflict by the patient accumulation of successes, by meeting a series of challenges with determination and will and purpose.

"Today we focus on Afghanistan, but the battle is broader. Every nation has a choice to make. In this conflict, there is no neutral ground. If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocence, they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril.

"I'm speaking to you today from the Treaty Room of the White House, a place where American presidents have worked for peace.

"We're a peaceful nation. Yet, as we have learned, so suddenly and so tragically, there can be no peace in a world of sudden terror. In the face of today's new threat, the only way to pursue peace is to pursue those who threaten it.

"We did not ask for this mission, but we will fulfill it.

"The name of today's military operation is Enduring Freedom. We defend not only our precious freedoms, but also the freedom of people everywhere to live and raise their children free from fear.

"I know many Americans feel fear today. And our government is taking strong precautions. All law enforcement and intelligence agencies are working aggressively around America, around the world and around the clock.

"At my request, many governors have activated the National Guard to strengthen airport security. We have called up reserves to reinforce our military capability and strengthen the protection of our homeland.

"In the months ahead, our patience will be one of our strengths - patience with the long waits that will result from tighter security, patience and understanding that it will take time to achieve our goals, patience in all the sacrifices that may come.

"Today, those sacrifices are being made by members of our armed forces who now defend us so far from home, and by their proud and worried families.

"A commander in chief sends America's sons and daughters into battle in a foreign land only after the greatest care and a lot of prayer. "We ask a lot of those who wear our uniform. We ask them to leave their loved ones, to travel great distances, to risk injury, even to be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice of their lives.

"They are dedicated. They are honorable. They represent the best of our country, and we are grateful.

"To all the men and women in our military, every sailor, every soldier, every airman, every Coast Guardsman, every Marine, I say this: Your mission is defined. The objectives are clear. Your goal is just. You have my full confidence, and you will have every tool you need to carry out your duty.

"I recently received a touching letter that says a lot about the state of America in these difficult times, a letter from a fourth-grade girl with a father in the military.

"'As much as I don't want my dad to fight,' she wrote, 'I'm willing to give him to you.'

"This is a precious gift. The greatest she could give. This young girl knows what America is all about.

"Since September 11, an entire generation of young Americans has gained new understanding of the value of freedom and its cost and duty and its sacrifice.

"The battle is now joined on many fronts. We will not waver, we will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail. Peace and freedom will prevail.

"Thank you. May God continue to bless America."

----

FLOW OF INFORMATION
New Slogan in Washington: Watch What You Say

New York Times
October 7, 2001
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/national/07PRES.html

WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 - A few Sundays ago, shortly after returning from a weekend of national security briefings at Camp David, President Bush walked into the White House with a small group of advisers and delivered a stern warning. "Anybody who discloses classified information could literally endanger somebody's life," he told the group, according to Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, who was there.

On Friday, the president's worries about information in the capital extended to members of Congress. Angry about senators who had evidently disclosed information about the threat of future terrorist attacks provided to them by American intelligence officials, Mr. Bush called a member of the leadership and told him, a legislative aide said, that he might have to restrict the amount of classified information given to senators.

If the United States is embarking on the first war of the 21st century, and one that the president has said may be "secret even in success," then the damming up of information out of Washington is part of the strategy. Although the administration says it is not engaged in censorship, officials throughout the government readily say they have been ordered to be circumspect about their remarks. The caution extends even to the sanitizing of government Web sites as agencies remove information - including large-scale digital maps and a report on the poor security at some chemical plants - for fear that it could be used for terrorist attacks.

It is a sign of the times that Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld stood at a Pentagon podium last month and cited Winston Churchill's famous words that "in wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." Mr. Rumsfeld, who has repeatedly said from the same podium that disclosing classified information is not only dangerous but against federal law, added that he did not "intend to" lie to the press about present and future military operations.

It is a more bizarre sign of the times that Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters three times as he uttered Churchill's words that he did not want to be quoted - as he was appearing live on CNN.

The current secrecy is reminiscent of the government management of information during the Persian Gulf war, a strategy overseen by Dick Cheney, then the secretary of defense. "If we had to do it tomorrow, I would start with what we've just done," Mr. Cheney said about press restrictions and censorship in an interview after the war.

Last week a senior aide to Vice President Cheney, Mary Matalin, dismissed any comparison between the Gulf War restrictions and those of the moment as "apples and oranges" and said that there was "no new directive" to limit information. But she acknowledged that there was a "new consciousness" among White House advisers to be disciplined in what they said.

Although the clampdown on information is justified as a way to protect lives and military operations, it can also be used to avoid scrutiny of government action. The effects are felt all over Washington.

At the White House, Mr. Fleischer has asked newspaper editors and wire services not to publish the president's schedule or describe any additional security measures at the White House, among other things.

At the Pentagon, there has been sparse information about the movements of troops and weapons, far less than during the gulf war. "It's not that this place has not for decades tried to keep things quiet," said Charles Aldinger of Reuters, the dean of Pentagon correspondents. "But it's become much more strict."

Officials at the Pentagon even expressed private aggravation when the White House, eager to show that it was moving ahead against terrorism, released very general figures on Monday cataloging the military buildup so far. The Pentagon spokeswoman, Victoria Clarke, seemed to dismiss the figures publicly when she called them "approximate."

On Capitol Hill, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell declined an invitation from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to testify on the state of the coalition against terrorism because, officials said, it would have been awkward while Mr. Rumsfeld was in Saudi Arabia and headed to three other key partners - Egypt, Oman and Uzbekistan - for closed- door talks. Instead, Mr. Powell took the unusual step of inviting the senators to lunch last Wednesday at the State Department, where they were given information in private. And when evidence of Osama bin Laden's connection to the Sept. 11 attacks was finally made public, it came from Britain.

Along with Mr. Cheney during the gulf war, it was Mr. Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who helped make the decision to manage the information flow in the Persian Gulf in a way that supported the operation's political goals. Newspaper articles were vetted by military censors, and reporters were confined to escorted pools. Mr. Powell said at the time that the restrictions were necessary to stop security lapses.

"It isn't like World War II, when George Patton would sit around in his tent with six or seven reporters and muse," he said, adding that "if a commander in Desert Shield sat around in his tent and mused with a few CNN guys and pool guys and other guys, it's in 105 capitals a minute later."

Marlin Fitzwater, who was White House press secretary to the first President Bush during the gulf war, later expressed regret over the decision to censor. "I don't like the idea of anybody in the government ever reading a piece of copy by a reporter," he said.

But last week Mr. Fitzwater said in an interview that he did not necessarily feel the same way about the war against terrorism. "I think this conflict is going to require a suspension of freedom and rights unlike anything we have seen, at least since World War II," he said.

Mr. Fleischer argued that the current White House had made top government officials - Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Powell, Mr. Cheney - more available than ever through frequent news conferences, and that Mr. Bush, who until now rarely veered from a script, was taking far more questions from reporters. Mr. Fleischer acknowledged that the officials were not always forthcoming, but said the public liked it that way.

"It's not what government officials are saying that's the issue," he said. "It's the type of questions that reporters are asking that's the issue. The press is asking a lot of questions that I suspect the American people would prefer not to be asked, or answered. Is the White House staff going to keep secret sensitive or classified information? I certainly hope so."

There has also been wrong information that has come out of the White House during the crisis, most notably a statement by a senior official that a credible threat had been phoned in to the Secret Service on Sept. 11, shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, that "Air Force One is next." The official gave the information to reporters on Sept. 12 to explain why Mr. Bush, who was on Air Force One when the threat was received, had delayed his return to Washington. Mr. Bush was criticized for spending the day zigzagging across the country, mostly out of sight, before arriving at the White House at 7 p.m.

But by Sept. 26, a senior administration official said last week, the administration had determined that the threat against Air Force One was not real. "What was said about Air Force One was said because it was accurate at the time," the official said. The reluctance of officials to admit the threat wasn't credible has fed criticism that the White House was passing out disinformation to protect the president politically.

Certainly there is a recent history of disinformation in Washington, if not outright lying. In April 1980, when the Carter White House was about to launch a rescue mission of the hostages in Iran, Jody Powell, the White House press secretary, was asked by Jack Nelson of The Los Angeles Times if the administration was planning such a mission.

"And I said, `No,' " Mr. Powell recalled last week. "And then I went on at some length to try to make convincing arguments about why we weren't about to do that." Mr. Powell said that had he replied simply "no comment," it would have tipped off Mr. Nelson. He said he was still disturbed about his words, but had decided that "I did not have the right to endanger people's lives."

In conclusion, Mr. Powell said, "If you are prepared to lie to protect people's lives, not to be too flip about it, but it had better be a good lie."


-------- MILITARY

-------- afghanistan

US has created Taliban: Rabbani

AFP
October 6, 2001
http://www.hindustantimes.com/nonfram/071001/dLAME09.asp

Berlin, Deposed Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani on Saturday hit out at United States policy in Afghanistan, accusing it of having created the ruling Taliban.

"After the defeat of Soviet troops, the United States completely forgot our country," he said.

"Washington afterwards created the Taliban, at the side of Pakistan, supported and armed them to overcome my Islamic government", Rabbani said in an interview with the Sunday edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Rabbani, deposed by the Taliban in 1996 and Afghanistan's UN-recognised president, urged the United States to be "involved" in all negotiations on the future of the country.

Washington is expected to launch a military attack on Afghanistan for harbouring Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

Rabbani, who lives in northern Afghanistan among the opposition Northern Alliance, said it has at its disposal more than 25,000 armed men, faced with from 30,000 to 50,000 well-armed Taliban, of which, he said, around 2,000 have changed camp over the the last few days.

Rabbani, spoke out in the interview against the return to the throne of the former Afghan monarch Mohammed Zahir Shah, 86, who has been in exile in Rome since 1973.

"Today nobody is in a position to set up a post-war government," he said.

He said that without the Northern Alliance "nothing goes."

----

Rabbani says bin Laden can be captured without war

Sunday October 7,
Reuters
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/011007/80/c7id1.html

BERLIN - The United States can capture Osama bin Laden without going to war, the leader of Afghanistan's anti-Taliban Northern Alliance opposition was quoted as saying.

Burhanuddin Rabbani, president of the country until he was forced from power by the Taliban in 1996, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung newspaper that outside pressure could be enough to ensure bin Laden was brought to justice.

"If the Americans are really only interested in bin Laden, then the problem can be solved through cooperation with Pakistan and by increasing the pressure on the Taliban," Rabbani said, according to a transcript of the interview due to be published on Sunday.

"You don't need a war to catch him," he added. Washington has demanded the Taliban hand over bin Laden, blamed for the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

The United States has moved forces towards Afghanistan's borders but has also launched a concerted campaign of diplomatic and political moves which Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Friday would be "more like a Cold War than a hot war".

Rabbani said the Northern Alliance had felt abandoned by Washington in its fight against the Taliban in recent years. He said the Alliance had warned "loud and clear" about the danger posed by the regime. "Nobody wanted to believe us," he said.

Rabbani said the Northern Alliance should play a crucial role in any formation of a new government for Afghanistan if the Taliban were dislodged. He said he had been in diplomatic contact with the United States, but had not been in contact with President George W. Bush directly.

"We are the ones who have been fighting the Taliban and their foreign backers for years to save our people," he said.

"Without us there would be nothing. Our Islamic government and the United Front, that the West calls the Northern Alliance, are the only power capable of getting rid of the terrorism of the Taliban and to restore peace," he added.

Rabbani was quoted as saying the Alliance had "over 25,000" fighters against an estimated 30,000 to 50,000, plus "thousands of Arabs and Pakistanis", on the Taliban side.

He said Afghanistan's former king, Zahir Shah, deposed in 1973 and living in exile in Rome, could not come back. A ruler would have to be picked by the Afghan people using a traditional meeting of elders, known as a "Loya Jirga".

--------

Bin Laden Calls Americans 'Sinners'

October 7, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-Bin-Laden.html

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Osama bin Laden called Americans ``sinners'' in a tape carried by Al-Jazeera satellite channel Sunday and released after the strikes launched by the United States and Britain.

Bin Laden was shown dressed in fatigues and an Afghan headdress. It appeared to be daylight, which would mean that the tape was made before the nighttime attack in Afghanistan.

``America was hit by God in one of its softest spots,'' bin Laden said. ``America is full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that.''

He continued: ``Our nation has been tasting fear, hatred and injustices for years.''

``Millions of innocent children are being killed in Iraq and in Palestine and we don't hear a word from the infidels. We don't hear a raised voice.''

``When the sword falls on the United States, they cry for their children and they cry for there people. The least you can say about these people is that they are sinners. They have helped evil triumph over good.''

The video was made in what appeared to be a cave. Bin Laden appeared composed and often pointed his finger to stress his point.

Bin Laden was shown speaking after an aide read a statement on his behalf. The statement called the war against Afghanistan and bin Laden a ``war on Islam.''

``What happened in the United States is a natural reaction to the ignorant policy of the United States,'' the statement read by Suleiman Abu Gheit said.

``If it continues with this policy, the sons of Islam will not stop their struggle. The American people have to know that what is happening to them now is the result of their support of this policy,'' the statement said.

``The war against Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden is a war on Islam.''

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Taliban: Assault 'Terrorist Attack'

October 7, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-Taliban-Statement.html

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- In their first official reaction to U.S.-led strikes on Afghanistan, the ruling Taliban militia declared the assault to be a ``terrorist attack'' and vowed that America ``will never achieve its goal.''

The statement was issued by the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef, soon after American and British forces launched strikes to force the Islamic movement to hand over terrorist suspect Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants.

--------

Text of bin Laden's videotaped statement

Reuters News Service
October 7, 2001
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/special/terror/front/1079137

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Following is the text of a videotaped statement made by Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden and broadcast on Qatar-based al-Jazeera television today. It has been translated from Arabic:

"Here is America struck by God Almighty in one of its vital organs, so that its greatest buildings are destroyed. Grace and gratitude to God. America has been filled with horror from north to south and east to west, and thanks be to God that what America is tasting now is only a copy of we have tasted.

"Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more 80 years, of humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated.

"God has blessed a group of vanguard Muslims, the forefront of Islam, to destroy America. May God bless them and allot them a supreme place in heaven, for He is the only one capable and entitled to do so. When those have stood in defence of their weak children, their brothers and sisters in Palestine and other Muslim nations, the whole world went into an uproar, the infidels followed by the hypocrites.

"A million innocent children are dying at this time as we speak, killed in Iraq without any guilt. We hear no denunciation, we hear no edict from the hereditary rulers. In these days, Israeli tanks rampage across Palestine, in Ramallah, Rafah and Beit Jala and many other parts of the land of Islam, and we do not hear anyone raising his voice or reacting. But when the sword fell upon America after 80 years, hypocrisy raised its head up high bemoaning those killers who toyed with the blood, honour and sanctities of Muslims.

"The least that can be said about those hypocrites is that they are apostates who followed the wrong path. They backed the butcher against the victim, the oppressor against the innocent child. I seek refuge in God against them and ask Him to let us see them in what they deserve.

"I say that the matter is very clear. Every Muslim after this event (should fight for their religion), after the senior officials in the United States of America starting with the head of international infidels, (U.S. President George W.) Bush and his staff who went on a display of vanity with their men and horses, those who turned even the countries that believe in Islam against us -- the group that resorted to God, the Almighty, the group that refuses to be subdued in its religion.

"They (America) have been telling the world falsehoods that they are fighting terrorism. In a nation at the far end of the world, Japan, hundreds of thousands, young and old, were killed and (they say) this is not a world crime. To them it is not a clear issue. A million children (were killed) in Iraq, to them this is not a clear issue.

"But when a few more than 10 were killed in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Afghanistan and Iraq were bombed and hypocrisy stood behind the head of international infidels, the modern world's symbol of paganism, America, and its allies.

"I tell them that these events have divided the world into two camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp of infidels. May God shield us and you from them.

"Every Muslim must rise to defend his religion. The wind of faith is blowing and the wind of change is blowing to remove evil from the Peninsula of Mohammad, peace be upon him.

"As to America, I say to it and its people a few words: I swear to God that America will not live in peace before peace reigns in Palestine, and before all the army of infidels depart the land of Mohammad, peace be upon him.

"God is the Greatest and glory be to Islam."

-------- nato

NATO to Deploy AWACS Aircraft in U.S.

October 7, 2001
Reuters
http://news1.iwon.com/article/id/173373|top|10-07-2001::08:35|reuters.html

BRUSSELS - NATO will soon deploy AWACS surveillance aircraft for anti-terrorist operations in the United States in response to the attacks on New York and Washington, NATO officials said Sunday.

NATO officials said the United States had asked Friday for the AWACS to be deployed.

"The planes will be deployed quite soon," a NATO official said. "They will be deployed in the United States in support of anti-terrorist operations."

NATO officials declined to say why the United States had asked for the AWACS to be deployed there, or whether they would be used to free up U.S. aircraft for deployment in other regions.

The United States itself has a fleet of 33 AWACS planes, 28 of which are stationed at an airbase in Oklahoma.

All that is needed before the AWACS are deployed is final approval by national representatives at NATO headquarters in Brussels and military advice, NATO officials said.

NATO allies agreed Thursday to provide the United States with a complete eight-point list of assistance it had requested, including the use of some of its fleet of 17 modified Boeing 747 AWACS airborne surveillance and control aircraft, based in Geilenkirchen, Germany.

A NATO representative would not say whether the planes would be flown from Geilenkirchen or from another location.

The deployment grows out of the decision "to provide a NATO presence and demonstrate resolve," an official NATO statement said Thursday.

NATO also used AWACS in Bosnia and the Balkans to assist in air operations.

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

Bush Says 'Time Is Running Out,' as U.S. Forces Move Into Place

New York Times
October 7, 2001
By ELAINE SCIOLINO and STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/international/07COAL.html

WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 - Assured of logistical and political support from several partners in the region, President Bush warned the Taliban government of Afghanistan today that "full warning has been given, and time is running out."

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld returned to Washington early this morning from military consultations with five of the region's friendly nations in as many days, and immediately went to confer with the president and senior advisers. Mr. Bush repeated his call for all nations to "stand with the terrorists, or stand with the civilized world."

The mobilization of American forces continued as elements of the 10th Mountain Division moved into Uzbekistan under a new agreement that allows them to protect American operations there, but not to cross the border to attack Afghanistan. By air and sea, other forces advanced on the region.

Nor did any other country Mr. Rumsfeld visited grant permission to carry out strikes directly from its soil, at least not publicly. Still, the administration sounded confident that it has obtained enough of the essentials - overflight rights, limited basing rights and open political support - to wage what it concedes will be a difficult war against Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network and its hosts in Afghanistan.

As antiaircraft fire was reported over the Afghan capital, Kabul, possibly aimed at an unmanned reconnaissance drone, the Taliban offered to free eight foreign aid workers, including two Americans, it has jailed - but only if the United States backed down from its threats of a military strike. [Page B5.]

The Bush administration rejected the offer and restated its insistence that its demand that Mr. bin Laden be handed over was not negotiable.

In the leadup to a possible military strike, senior administration and allied officials said Mr. Rumsfeld's approach this week had underscored that the United States intends to make this as much as possible an all- American campaign, with only logistical aid and political support from most other nations.

One reason, they said, is that the Pentagon is intent on avoiding the kind of limitations on its targets and methods that were imposed by NATO allies during the 1999 war in Kosovo, or the kind of hesitance to topple a leader that some members of the gulf war coalition felt.

"Coalition is a bad word, because it makes people think of alliances," said Robert Oakley, former head of the State Department's Office of Counterterrorism and former ambassador to Pakistan.

A senior administration official put it more bluntly: "The fewer people you have to rely on, the fewer permissions you have to get."

After meeting Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, Mr. Rumsfeld even denied in Cairo on Thursday "that there is a singular coalition, which of course is not the case. Well no, there are many coalitions. We recognize that each country has a distinctive situation and a different perspective and we want to cooperate with countries in ways that they want to cooperate with us."

But he expressed not a word of disappointment, instead adopting an approach that could almost be summed up in the phrase: Don't ask, don't tell. At least publicly, he did not ask the leaders of Oman, Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Uzbekistan for anything but what he knew they would offer, and he studiously avoided telling much of anything about their pledges of military support.

Even in Turkey, a NATO partner where United States planes have routinely launched strikes against Iraq, he was careful not to speak for his host. "We do not make demands," he said in Ankara on Friday after meeting with Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit and members of the cabinet. "We do not have any view other than that each country should decide for itself how it can best help. Some help in one way; others help in another way."

"Some will do it publicly; some will do it privately; each will do it in his own way, and all of it will be helpful," he said.

While Mr. Bush's remarks today were hardly an ultimatum, the urgency of the diplomacy and the pace of mobilization seemed driven by the calendar and the weather. Winter is about to set in, the holy month of Ramadan begins in mid-November, and the skies over Afghanistan are expected to be clear under a bright moon for the next few days.

One by one, in public statements and private meetings, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Oman and Uzbekistan signaled that their airfields are basically open for supporting military operations rather than offensive American strikes.

Oman, though, which has long ties with Britain, agreed to allow refueling by American tankers and reconnaissance aircraft, while Uzbekistan will allow things like search and rescue missions from their territory. The former Soviet republic of Georgia also offered its facilities and airspace.

"The support they will provide is all of the backup and logistics so they can say that nothing is being launched from their territory that hits Afghanistan," said one senior administration official involved in the administration's delicate negotiations in the region. "It's just as far as they're willing to go for now."

All together, it will help meet the practical needs of the American military in carrying out its mission, which the administration has said will be long and unpredictable. The patchwork of supportive pledges should be sufficient for a sustained campaign, as long as the Pentagon continues to avoid conventional ground operations.

One sign of Washington's insistence that its hands not be tied was its rejection of United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan's entreaties that any American military action be subject to Security Council approval, administration officials said.

At first, the Pentagon was even reluctant for NATO to invoke the alliance's mutual defense clause requiring members to defend each other against an armed attack, senior administration and European officials said. "The allies were desperately trying to give us political cover and the Pentagon was resisting it," said one senior administration official. "It was insane. Eventually Rumsfeld understood it was a plus, not a minus, and was able to accept it."

--------

MILITARY ANALYSIS
A New Kind of War Plan

New York Times
October 7, 2001
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/international/07MILI.html

WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 - There has already been one casualty in the Bush administration's war on terrorism: the much-vaunted Powell doctrine.

For several Democratic and Republic administrations, it has been an article of faith that military force, when used, would be overpowering and unrelenting. Washington would not strike a blow before it had a clear political goal and a plan for extracting American forces from the battlefield.

President Bush has a clear political goal: the eradication of the AlQaeda terrorist network and the toppling of the Taliban regime that supports it. But before the Pentagon has fired a single missile at Osama bin Laden or his hosts in Afghanistan, it has signaled that its military planning is guided by an entirely new set of rules.

The war the Pentagon is planning has more do with special forces than overwhelming force. While bombing attacks are very much a part of that plan, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has also stressed that the Pentagon is taking a "measured approach."

In part, the Pentagon's new approach stems from the unique challenges of going to war against Mr. bin Laden and his Taliban sponsors in Afghanistan. The rulers of that poor and bloodied nation have headquarters, military forces, airfields and supplies that can be attacked. But they lack the vast armies that the United States military has confronted in past conflicts, reducing the number of military targets.

The Pentagon's planning also reflects a larger political strategy. The administration is trying to make the case that its battle is against terrorists and not the Afghan people. So dropping food to starving refugees may be as important as attacks with laser-guided bombs.

But it is also the case that the Powell doctrine seems inappropriate for many of the terrorist threats that the United States is likely to confront in future years. These foes may well be tiny terrorist cells interspersed among civilian populations, and episodic bombing runs and commando raids may be the best way of taking the fight to the enemy.

The Powell doctrine was born out of the American military's longstanding frustrations in Vietnam. In the Vietnam War, the United States gradually escalated the use of force and declared periodic pauses in its bombing campaign. That gave the diplomats time to talk and the enemy, critics said, time to recoup prepare for a new round of fighting.

A generation of American officers came out of that conflict vowing never to fight that way again, and Colin L. Powell - a young Army officer in Vietnam who rose to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, now, secretary of state - was one of them.

If American force is to be used, they said, it should be overpowering and decisive. American military power would be like a thunderstorm, furious but brief and, preferably, with no entangling commitments.

The purest examples of the Powell doctrine were the 1989 invasion of Panama, when the United States military stormed the country in a several-day blitz and captured its leader, Manuel Noriega, and, of course, the 1991 war with Iraq.

Mr. Powell touted the approach in an interview before George W. Bush took office.

"Once you have established a clear political objective, then it seems to me very wise to achieve that objective, if military force is required, in a decisive way," he said. "Such as kick the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait, such as get rid of the government of Panama totally - not just kick an army out, but get rid of an entire government - that is what we did in 1989, on 12 hours' notice, with overwhelming, decisive force."

Though he has talked about the utility of overwhelming power, Secretary Powell has sometimes said his real point is that American military power needs to be decisive and used only when the political objectives are clear. Even so, the assumption has been that more force would measurably increase the odds of success. But even before the Bush administration embarked on its counterterrorism campaign, it had become clear that the Powell doctrine had its limitations.

The doctrine was sometimes a poor guide to the post-cold-war world's tangled politics and in fact deterred the United States from intervening in Bosnia as ethnic killing raged. Then-General Powell told the first President Bush that the United States would need to deploy hundreds of thousands of troops to quell the fighting in Bosnia, and the president demurred. After General Powell was succeeded as chairman of the Joint Chiefs by Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, NATO conducted limited air strikes to lift the siege of Sarajevo, which helped lay the basis for a political settlement.

Certainly, there are cases in which the Powell model might still be useful. The Bush administration has made clear that it is not only going after terrorists but will also hold the governments that shelter them accountable as well. In those cases, American military may still be overpowering and decisive - and include every tool in the tool kit, as General Powell famously explained during the Persian Gulf war.

But in many cases the Powell doctrine seems to be an anachronism. "Unconventional approaches, obviously, are more likely and appropriate than the typical conventional approach," Mr. Rumsfeld said about Afghanistan. "There are not high- value targets. There aren't navies to attack. There are not lands to occupy and hold."

Certainly, the Pentagon is planning to use force to disable the Taliban's air defenses. That would make it easier for the American military to intensify its efforts to track Mr. bin Laden and neutralize the Taliban regime, including what military forces and bases it and the Al Qaeda terrorist network does have.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has suggested that air strikes would be used to force Mr. bin Laden and his followers from their sanctuaries so they could be tracked, captured or attacked.

That puts a premium on the use of discriminate air strikes and commando units. And it is not clear that to increase the number of forces would make American military power in Afghanistan any more decisive.

In fact, the Pentagon has suggested that force alone is not sufficient. The Bush administration's broader aims, it said, depend on obtaining good intelligence from allies in the region, cutting off money to the Taliban and winning support from anti- Taliban forces inside Afghanistan, which are now the beneficiaries of covert American assistance.

More generally, Mr. Rumsfeld has likened the fight against terrorism to the strategy the United States had for containing Soviet power during the cold war. In a most un-Powell- like statement, he warned that there was no clear exit strategy.

"The cold war, it took 50 years, plus or minus," Mr. Rumsfeld said during his trip this week to Cairo. "It did not involve major battles. It involved continuous pressure. It involved cooperation by a host of nations."

"And when it ended, it ended not with a bang, but through internal collapse," he added. "It strikes me that might be a more appropriate way to think about what we are up against here, than would be any major conflict."

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Salvage Team Lifts Bow Of Sunken Ehime Maru
Maneuver a Breakthrough to Raising Vessel

By Sally Apgar
The Washington Post
Sunday, October 7, 2001; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17920-2001Oct6.html

HONOLULU, Oct. 6 -- A U.S. Navy-led team on Friday lifted the bow of the Japanese fishing vessel that was accidentally sunk by an American nuclear submarine out of the muddy sea bottom off Diamond Head.

It was a significant step for the salvage team, which has had several setbacks in its expensive, protracted attempt to raise the Ehime Maru. Navy officials said they hoped they could begin raising the 830-ton wreck as soon as Wednesday.

Lifting the bow was critical for the continuation of the Navy's effort to lift the Ehime Maru from its resting place 2,200 feet below sea level and tow it 16 miles to shallow water near Honolulu International Airport. There, in about 115 feet of water, divers should be able to retrieve the remains and personal belongings of the five crewmen and four high school boys who were entombed in the fisheries training vessel when it sank Feb. 9.

The Navy has spent more than $60 million on the effort, which began in mid-August and was expected to cost $40 million. The United States is under intense political and diplomatic pressure to raise the ship so that relatives may claim something from the missing to honor them in accordance with Japanese traditions.

Late Friday, the Navy announced that a salvage team working from the Rockwater 2, a civilian boat contracted for the lift, had been able to raise the bow 10 feet and move it nearly 110 feet to the left and 16 feet forward to flatter sea bottom.

During the three-hour maneuver, the bow was placed on a steel lifting plate. Last month, a similar plate was placed under the stern and it was lifted 24 feet, but that maneuver drove the bow deeper into the mud. Amid fears that the vessel might not be salvageable, dredging equipment was brought in so remotely operated vehicles could place a lifting cable under the unburied part of the bow.

Now the entire vessel is resting on a rig of cables and plates that will be attached to a lifting frame. Computerized winches will then raise the vessel at a level angle 100 feet off the seafloor so it can be towed at a speed of about 1 knot toward Honolulu. That tow could start as early as Wednesday.

Throughout the unprecedented operation, the salvage team of Navy, civilian and Japanese experts has been concerned about whether the Ehime Maru is structurally strong enough to withstand the rigors of the lift and underwater tow. Friday's operation greatly increased their confidence.

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Army, Hawaiian Group Reach Deal on Training
Live-Fire Exercises to Resume in Sensitive Area

By Sally Apgar
The Washington Post
Sunday, October 7, 2001; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17767-2001Oct6.html

HONOLULU -- The U.S. Army and Hawaiian activists have reached a compromise allowing the resumption of limited live-fire training after a three-year hiatus in a valley considered by local residents to be culturally sacred and environmentally fragile.

With America's declared war on terrorism heightening the need to make troops combat-ready, "our need to resume live-fire training in Makua Valley is urgent and immediate," said Maj. Gen. James Dubik, commander of the 25th Infantry Division (Light), announcing the compromise Thursday.

David Henkin, a lawyer representing environmental and native Hawaiian activists who oppose the training, said, "We have decided in this time of national crisis not to stand in the way of the Army."

At Makua Valley, the military faces environmental, health and emotionally charged cultural issues similar to those it faced on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques -- where decades of protests resulted in President Bush telling the Navy in June to halt bombing exercises in 2003.

Home to 45 endangered plant and animal species, the 4,190-acre Makua Valley is also the site of dozens of religious and cultural artifacts dating back as far as 900 years, including heiau (temples), ancestral burial grounds and ko'a (fishermen's shrines).

But since 1929 the area has been used for U.S. military training, and since World War II parts of the valley have been intensively bombed, shelled, assaulted by ground troops and polluted with hazardous waste.

Civilians have been denied access to the valley for the last 60 years.

The Army voluntarily suspended training in Makua in September 1998 after an errant mortar started a fire that consumed 800 acres. The next month, a group called Malama Makua -- "Cherish Makua," in Hawaiian -- filed a lawsuit seeking to ban all military exercises as violations of federal environmental protection laws.

Negotiations in the suit were moving fitfully until Sept. 11. "The attacks presented us with a whole new set of circumstances," Dubik said. "The issues that once divided us no longer seem as important as the cause that now unites us."

As a result of the compromise announced Thursday, the Army will be allowed to conduct live-fire exercises in a 457-acre section of Makua 16 times in the coming year, nine times the following year and 12 in the third year, with each exercise lasting up to two days. Before 1998, exercises had been held as much as 300 days a year.

In exchange, the Army has made several concessions -- the most significant being an agreement to conduct a comprehensive environmental impact study within three years. The study will assess the impact of chemicals and toxins resulting from the military exercises and various hazardous waste disposals on the soil and water of Makua Valley, and whether they may be responsible for what Malama Makua says is a high incidence of cancer among nearby residents.

In addition, the Army agreed to allow civilians to observe the military exercises and to give the community $50,000 to hire independent experts to investigate specific health or environmental issues.

Civilians will also be given "cultural access" to the valley a minimum of two days a month, and will be allowed to camp for nighttime cultural observances at least twice a year. To allow for such access, the Army has agreed to clear unexploded ordinance from a 3,000-foot swath from the ocean to the mountains.

Henkin called the compromise "a great victory," saying the Army had agreed to conduct only the minimum number of live-fire exercises needed to "meet national security needs."

In seeking to resume training there, the Army has argued that combat readiness has been compromised because training with simulators does not give soldiers the first-hand experience with weaponry and maneuvering or the confidence that comes from live training.

Dubik said that seven of the nine rifle company commanders overseeing the first troops that would be be deployed from Hawaii have never participated in live-fire training.

"Real bullets provide realism," he said. Such exercises, he said, give "27-year-old captains leading their units not only tactical proficiency but confidence. Only live-fire training gives that technical dimension and the human dimension needed" to go into combat.

"This agreement represents a balance between our moral obligation to America's soldiers to be combat-ready by conducting tough, realistic training," Dubik said, "and our obligation to conduct that training in a way that protects the environment and cultural heritage of the state."


-------- OTHER

-------- police / prisoners

BEING WATCHED
A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance

New York Times
October 7, 2001
By JEFFREY ROSEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/magazine/07SURVEILLANCE.html

A week after the attacks of Sept. 11, as the value of most American stocks plummeted, a few companies, with products particularly well suited for a new and anxious age, soared in value. One of the fastest growing stocks was Visionics, whose price more than tripled. The New Jersey company is an industry leader in the fledgling science of biometrics, a method of identifying people by scanning and quantifying their unique physical characteristics -- their facial structures, for example, or their retinal patterns. Visionics manufactures a face-recognition technology called FaceIt, which creates identification codes for individuals based on 80 unique aspects of their facial structures, like the width of the nose and the location of the temples. FaceIt can instantly compare an image of any individual's face with a database of the faces of suspected terrorists, or anyone else.

Visionics was quick to understand that the terrorist attacks represented not only a tragedy but also a business opportunity. On the afternoon of Sept. 11, the company sent out an e-mail message to reporters, announcing that its founder and C.E.O., Joseph Atick, ''has been speaking worldwide about the need for biometric systems to catch known terrorists and wanted criminals.'' On Sept. 20, Atick testified before a special government committee appointed by the secretary of transportation, Norman Mineta. Atick's message -- that security in airports and embassies could be improved using face-recognition technology as part of a comprehensive national surveillance plan that he called Operation Noble Shield -- was greeted enthusiastically by members of the committee, which seemed ready to endorse his recommendations. ''In the war against terrorism, especially when it comes to the homeland defense,'' Atick told me, describing his testimony, ''the cornerstone of this is going to be our ability to identify the enemy before he or she enters into areas where public safety could be at risk.'

Atick proposes to wire up Reagan National Airport in Washington and other vulnerable airports throughout the country with more than 300 cameras each. Cameras would scan the faces of passengers standing in line, and biometric technology would be used to analyze their faces and make sure they are not on an international terrorist ''watch list.'' More cameras unobtrusively installed throughout the airport could identify passengers as they walk through metal detectors and public areas. And a final scan could ensure that no suspected terrorist boards a plane. ''We have created a biometric network platform that turns every camera into a Web browser submitting images to a database in Washington, querying for matches,'' Atick said. ''If a match occurs, it will set off an alarm in Washington, and someone will make a decision to wire the image to marshals at the airport.''

Of course, protecting airports is only one aspect of homeland security: a terrorist could be lurking on any corner in America. In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, Howard Safir, the former New York police commissioner, recommended the installation of 100 biometric surveillance cameras in Times Square to scan the faces of pedestrians and compare them with a database of suspected terrorists. Atick told me that since the attacks he has been approached by local and federal authorities from across the country about the possibility of installing biometric surveillance cameras in stadiums and subway systems and near national monuments. ''The Office of Homeland Security might be the overall umbrella that will coordinate with local police forces'' to install cameras linked to a biometric network throughout American cities, Atick told me. ''How can we be alerted when someone is entering the subway? How can we be sure when someone is entering Madison Square Garden? How can we protect monuments? We need to create an invisible fence, an invisible shield.''

Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity. But in fact, over the past decade, this precise state of affairs has materialized, not in the United States but in the United Kingdom. At the beginning of September, as it happened, I was in Britain, observing what now looks like a glimpse of the American future.

I had gone to Britain to answer a question that seems far more pertinent today than it did early last month: why would a free and flourishing Western democracy wire itself up with so many closed-circuit television cameras that it resembles the set of ''The Real World'' or ''The Truman Show''? The answer, I discovered, was fear of terrorism. In 1993 and 1994, two terrorist bombs planted by the I.R.A. exploded in London's financial district, a historic and densely packed square mile known as the City of London. In response to widespread public anxiety about terrorism, the government decided to install a ''ring of steel'' -- a network of closed-circuit television cameras mounted on the eight official entry gates that control access to the City.

Anxiety about terrorism didn't go away, and the cameras in Britain continued to multiply. In 1994, a 2-year-old boy named Jamie Bulger was kidnapped and murdered by two 10-year-old schoolboys, and surveillance cameras captured a grainy shot of the killers leading their victim out of a shopping center. Bulger's assailants couldn't, in fact, be identified on camera -- they were caught because they talked to their friends -- but the video footage, replayed over and over again on television, shook the country to its core. Riding a wave of enthusiasm for closed-circuit television, or CCTV, created by the attacks, John Major's Conservative government decided to devote more than three-quarters of its crime-prevention budget to encourage local authorities to install CCTV. The promise of cameras as a magic bullet against crime and terrorism inspired one of Major's most successful campaign slogans: ''If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear.''

Instead of being perceived as an Orwellian intrusion, the cameras in Britain proved to be extremely popular. They were hailed as the people's technology, a friendly eye in the sky, not Big Brother at all but a kindly and watchful uncle or aunt. Local governments couldn't get enough of them; each hamlet and fen in the British countryside wanted its own CCTV surveillance system, even when the most serious threat to public safety was coming from mad cows. In 1994, 79 city centers had surveillance networks; by 1998, 440 city centers were wired. By the late 1990's, as part of its Clintonian, center-left campaign to be tough on crime, Tony Blair's New Labor government decided to support the cameras with a vengeance. There are now so many cameras attached to so many different surveillance systems in the U.K. that people have stopped counting. According to one estimate, there are 2.5 million surveillance cameras in Britain, and in fact there may be far more.

As I filed through customs at Heathrow Airport, there were cameras concealed in domes in the ceiling. There were cameras pointing at the ticket counters, at the escalators and at the tracks as I waited for the Heathrow express to Paddington Station. When I got out at Paddington, there were cameras on the platform and cameras on the pillars in the main terminal. Cameras followed me as I walked from the main station to the underground, and there were cameras at each of the stations on the way to King's Cross. Outside King's Cross, there were cameras trained on the bus stand and the taxi stand and the sidewalk, and still more cameras in the station. There were cameras on the backs of buses to record people who crossed into the wrong traffic lane.

Throughout Britain today, there are speed cameras and red-light cameras, cameras in lobbies and elevators, in hotels and restaurants, in nursery schools and high schools. There are even cameras in hospitals. (After a raft of ''baby thefts'' in the early 1990's, the government gave hospitals money to install cameras in waiting rooms, maternity wards and operating rooms.) And everywhere there are warning signs, announcing the presence of cameras with a jumble of different icons, slogans and exhortations, from the bland ''CCTV in operation'' to the peppy ''CCTV: Watching for You!'' By one estimate, the average Briton is now photographed by 300 separate cameras in a single day.

Britain's experience under the watchful eye of the CCTV cameras is a vision of what Americans can expect if we choose to go down the same road in our efforts to achieve ''homeland security.'' Although the cameras in Britain were initially justified as a way of combating terrorism, they soon came to serve a very different function. The cameras are designed not to produce arrests but to make people feel that they are being watched at all times. Instead of keeping terrorists off planes, biometric surveillance is being used to keep punks out of shopping malls. The people behind the live video screens are zooming in on unconventional behavior in public that in fact has nothing to do with terrorism. And rather than thwarting serious crime, the cameras are being used to enforce social conformity in ways that Americans may prefer to avoid.

The dream of a biometric surveillance system that can identify people's faces in public places and separate the innocent from the guilty is not new. Clive Norris, a criminologist at the University of Hull, is Britain's leading authority on the social effects of CCTV. In his definitive study, ''The Maximum Surveillance Society: the Rise of CCTV,'' Norris notes that in the 19th century, police forces in England and France began to focus on how to distinguish the casual offender from the ''habitual criminal'' who might evade detection by moving from town to town. In the 1870's, Alphonse Bertillon, a records clerk at the prefecture of police in Paris, used his knowledge of statistics and anthropomorphic measurements to create a system for comparing the thousands of photographs of arrested suspects in Parisian police stations. He took a series of measurements -- of skull size, for example, and the distance between the ear and chin -- and created a unique code for every suspect whom the police had photographed. Photographs were then grouped according to the codes, and a new suspect could be compared only with the photos that had similar measurements, instead of with the entire portfolio. Though Bertillon's system was often difficult for unskilled clerks to administer, a procedure that had taken hours or days was now reduced to a few minutes.

It wasn't until the 1980's, with the development of computerized biometric and other face-recognition systems, that Bertillon's dream became feasible on a broad scale. In the course of studying how biometric scanning could be used to authenticate the identities of people who sought admission to secure buildings, innovators like Joseph Atick realized that the same technology could be used to pick suspects or license plates out of a crowd. It's the license-plate technology that the London police have found most attractive, because it tends to be more reliable. (A test of the best face-recognition systems last year by the U.S. Department of Defense found that they failed to identify matches a third of the time.)

Soon after arriving in London, I visited the CCTV monitoring room in the City of London police station, where the British war against terrorism began. I was met by the press officer, Tim Parsons, and led up to the control station, a modest-size installation that looks like an air-traffic-control room, with uniformed officers manning two rows of monitors. Although installed to catch terrorists, the cameras in the City of London spend most of their time following car thieves and traffic offenders. ''The technology here is geared up to terrorism,'' Parsons told me. ''The fact that we're getting ordinary people -- burglars stealing cars -- as a result of it is sort of a bonus.''

Have you caught any terrorists? I asked. ''No, not using this technology, no,'' he replied.

As we watched the monitors, rows of slow-moving cars filed through the gates into the City, and cameras recorded their license-plate numbers and the faces of their drivers. After several minutes, one monitor set off a soft, pinging alarm. We had a match! But no, it was a false alarm. The license plate that set off the system was 8620bmc, but the stolen car recorded in the database was 8670amc. After a few more mismatches, the machine finally found an offender, though not a serious one. A red van had gone through a speed camera, and the local authority that issued the ticket couldn't identify the driver. An alert went out on the central police national computer, and it set off the alarm when the van entered the City. ''We're not going to do anything about it because it's not a desperately important call,'' said the sergeant.

Because the cameras on the ring of steel take clear pictures of each driver's face, I asked whether the City used the biometric facial recognition technology that American airports are now being urged to adopt. ''We're experimenting with it to see if we could pick faces out of the crowd, but the technology is not sufficiently good enough,'' Parsons said. ''The system that I saw demonstrated two or three years ago, a lot of the time it couldn't differentiate between a man and a woman.'' (In a recent documentary about CCTV, Monty Python's John Cleese foiled a Visionics face-recognition system that had been set up in the London borough of Newham by wearing earrings and a beard.) Nevertheless, Parsons insisted that the technology will become more accurate. ''It's just a matter of time. Then we can use it to detect the presence of criminals on foot in the city,'' he said.

In the future, as face-recognition technology becomes more accurate, it will become even more intrusive, because of pressures to expand the biometric database. I mentioned to Joseph Atick of Visionics that the City of London was thinking about using his technology to establish a database that would include not only terrorists but also all British citizens whose faces were registered with the national driver's license bureau. If that occurs, every citizen who walks the streets of the City could be instantly identified by the police and evaluated in light of his past misdeeds, no matter how trivial. With the impatience of a rationalist, Atick dismissed the possibility. ''Technically, they won't be able to do it without coming back to me,'' he said. ''They will have to justify it to me.'' Atick struck me as a refined and thoughtful man (he is the former director of the computational neuroscience laboratory at Rockefeller University), but it seems odd to put the liberties of a democracy in the hands of one unelected scientist.

Atick says that his technology is an enlightened alternative to racial and ethnic profiling, and if the faces in the biometric database were, in fact, restricted to known terrorists, he would be on to something. Instead of stopping all passengers who appear to be Middle Eastern and victimizing thousands of innocent people, the system would focus with laserlike precision on a tiny handful of the guilty. (This assumes that the terrorists aren't cunning enough to disguise themselves.) But when I asked whether any of the existing biometric databases in England or America are limited to suspected terrorists, Atick confessed that they aren't. There is a simple reason for this: few terrorists are suspected in advance of their crimes. For this reason, cities in England and elsewhere have tried to justify their investment in face-recognition systems by filling their databases with those troublemakers whom the authorities can easily identify: local criminals. When FaceIt technology was used to scan the faces of the thousands of fans entering the Super Bowl in Tampa last January, the matches produced by the database weren't terrorists. They were low-level ticket scalpers and pickpockets.

Biometrics is a feel-good technology that is being marketed based on a false promise -- that the database will be limited to suspected terrorists. But the FaceIt technology, as it's now being used in England, isn't really intended to catch terrorists at all. It's intended to scare local hoodlums into thinking they might be setting off alarms even when the cameras are turned off. I came to understand this ''Wizard of Oz'' aspect of the technology when I visited Bob Lack's monitoring station in the London borough of Newham. A former London police officer, Lack attracted national attention -- including a visit from Tony Blair -- by pioneering the use of face-recognition technology before other people were convinced that it was entirely reliable. What Lack grasped early on was that reliability was in many ways beside the point.

Lack installed his first CCTV system in 1997, and he intentionally exaggerated its powers from the beginning. ''We put one camera out and 12 signs'' announcing the presence of cameras, Lack told me. ''We reduced crime by 60 percent in the area where we posted the signs. Then word on the street went out that we had dummy cameras.'' So Lack turned his attention to face-recognition technology and tried to create the impression that far more people's faces were in the database than actually are. ''We've designed a poster now about making Newham a safe place for a family,'' he said. ''And we're telling the criminal we have this information on him: we know his name, we know his address, we know what crimes he commits.'' It's not true, Lack admits, ''but then, we're entitled to disinform some people, aren't we?''

So you're telling the criminal that you know his name even though you don't, I asked? ''Right,'' Lack replied. ''Pretty much that's about advertising, isn't it?''

Lack was elusive when I asked him who, exactly, is in his database. ''I don't know,'' he replied, noting that the local police chief decides who goes into the database. He would only make an ''educated guess'' that the database contains 100 ''violent street robbers'' under the age of 18. ''You have to have been convicted of a crime -- nobody suspected goes on, unless they're a suspected murderer -- and there has to be sufficient police intelligence to say you are committing those crimes and have been so in the last 12 weeks.'' When I asked for the written standards that determined who, precisely, was put in the database, and what crimes they had to have committed, Lack promised to send them, but he never did.

From Lack's point of view, it doesn't matter who is in his database, because his system isn't designed to catch terrorists or violent criminals. In the three years that the system has been up and running, it hasn't resulted in a single arrest. ''I'm not in the business of having people arrested,'' Lack said. ''The deterrent value has far exceeded anything you imagine.'' He told me that the alarms went off an average of three times a day during the month of August, but the only people he would conclusively identify were local youths who had volunteered to be put in the database as part of an ''intensive surveillance supervision program,'' as an alternative to serving a custodial sentence. ''The public statements about the efficacy of the Newham facial-recognition system bear little relationship to its actual operational capabilities, which are rather weak and poor,'' says Clive Norris of the University of Hull. ''They want everyone to believe that they are potentially under scrutiny. Its effectiveness, perhaps, is based on a lie.''

This lie has a venerable place in the philosophy of surveillance. In his preface to ''Panopticon,'' Jeremy Bentham imagined the social benefits of a ring-shaped ''inspection-house,'' in which prisoners, students, orphans or paupers could be subject to constant surveillance. In the center of the courtyard would be an inspection tower with windows facing the inner wall of the ring. Supervisors in the central tower could observe every movement of the inhabitants of the cells, who were illuminated by natural lighting, but Venetian blinds would ensure that the supervisors could not be seen by the inhabitants. The uncertainty about whether or not they were being surveilled would deter the inhabitants from antisocial behavior. Michel Foucault described the purpose of the Panopticon -- to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.'' Foucault predicted that this condition of visible, unverifiable power, in which individuals have internalized the idea that they may always be under surveillance, would be the defining characteristic of the modern age.

Britain, at the moment, is not quite the Panopticon, because its various camera networks aren't linked and there aren't enough operators to watch all the cameras. But over the next few years, that seems likely to change, as Britain moves toward the kind of integrated Web-based surveillance system that Visionics has now proposed for American airports and subway systems. At the moment, for example, the surveillance systems for the London underground and the British police feed into separate control rooms, but Sergio Velastin, a computer-vision scientist, says he believes the two systems will eventually be linked, using digital technology.

Velastin is working on behavioral-recognition technology for the London underground that can look for unusual movements in crowds, setting off an alarm, for example, when people appear to be fighting or trying to jump on the tracks. (Because human CCTV operators are easily bored and distracted, automatic alarms are viewed as the wave of the future.) ''Imagine you see a piece of unattended baggage which might contain a bomb,'' Velastin told me. ''You can back-drag on the image and locate the person who left it there. You can say where did that person come from and where is that person now? You can conceive in the future that you might be able to do that for every person in every place in the system.'' Of course, Velastin admitted, ''if you don't have social agreement about how you're going to operate that, it could get out of control.''

Once thousands of cameras from hundreds of separate CCTV systems are able to feed their digital images to a central monitoring station, and the images can be analyzed with face- and behavioral-recognition software to identify unusual patterns, then the possibilities of the Panopticon will suddenly become very real. And few people doubt that connectivity is around the corner; it is, in fact, the next step. ''CCTV will become the fifth utility: after gas, electricity, sewage and telecommunications,'' says Jason Ditton, a criminologist at the University of Sheffield who is critical of the technology's expansion. ''We will come to accept its ubiquitousness.''

At the moment, there is only one fully integrated CCTV in Britain: it transmits digital images over a broadband wireless network, like the one Joseph Atick has proposed for American airports, rather than relying on traditional video cameras that are chained to dedicated cables. And so, for a still clearer vision of the interconnected future of surveillance, I set off for Hull, Britain's leading timber port, about three hours northeast of London. Hull has traditionally been associated not with dystopian fantasies but with fantasies of a more basic sort: for hundreds of years, it has been the prostitution capital of northeastern Britain.

Six years ago, a heroin epidemic created an influx of addicted young women who took to streetwalking to sustain their drug habit. Nearly two years ago, the residents' association of a low-income housing project called Goodwin Center hired a likable and enterprising young civil engineer named John Marshall to address the problem of under-age prostitutes having sex on people's windowsills.

Marshall, who is now 33, met me at the Hull railway station carrying a CCTV warning sign. Armed with more than a million dollars in public financing from the European Union, Marshall decided to build what he calls the world's first Ethernet-based, wireless CCTV system. Initially, Marshall put up 27 cameras around the housing project. The cameras didn't bother the prostitutes, who in fact felt safer working under CCTV. Instead, they scared the johns -- especially after the police recorded their license numbers, banged on their doors and threatened to publish their names in the newspapers. Business plummeted, and the prostitutes moved indoors or across town to the traditional red-light district, where the city decided to tolerate their presence in limited numbers.

But Marshall soon realized that he had bigger fish to fry than displacing prostitutes from one part of Hull to another. His innovative network of linked cameras attracted national attention, which led, a few months ago, to $20 million in grant money from various levels of government to expand the surveillance network throughout the city of Hull. ''In a year and a half,'' Marshall says, ''there'll be a digital connection to every household in the city. As far as cameras go, I can imagine that, in 10 years' time, the whole city will be covered. That's the speed that CCTV is growing.'' In the world that Marshall imagines, every household in Hull will be linked to a central network that can access cameras trained inside and outside every building in the city. ''Imagine a situation where you've got an elderly relative who lives on the other side of the city,'' Marshall says. ''You ring her up, there's no answer on the telephone, you think she collapsed -- so you go to the Internet and you look at the camera in the lounge and you see that she's making a cup of tea and she's taken her hearing aid out or something.''

The person who controls access to this network of intimate images will be a very powerful person indeed. And so I was eager to meet the monitors of the Panopticon for myself. On a side street of Hull, near the Star and Garter Pub and the city morgue, the Goodwin Center's monitoring station is housed inside a ramshackle private security firm called Sentry Alarms Ltd. The sign over the door reads THE GUARD HOUSE. The monitoring station is locked behind a thick, black vault-style door, but it looks like a college computer center, with an Alicia Silverstone pinup near the door. Instead of an impressive video wall, there are only two small desktop computers, which receive all the signals from the Goodwin Center network. And the digital, Web-based images -- unlike traditional video -- are surprisingly fuzzy and jerky, like streaming video transmitted over a slow modem.

During my time in the control room, from 9 p.m. to midnight, I experienced firsthand a phenomenon that critics of CCTV surveillance have often described: when you put a group of bored, unsupervised men in front of live video screens and allow them to zoom in on whatever happens to catch their eyes, they tend to spend a fair amount of time leering at women. ''What catches the eye is groups of young men and attractive, young women,'' I was told by Clive Norris, the Hull criminologist. ''It's what we call a sense of the obvious.'' There are plenty of stories of video voyeurism: a control room in the Midlands, for example, took close-up shots of women with large breasts and taped them up on the walls. In Hull, this temptation is magnified by the fact that part of the operators' job is to keep an eye on prostitutes. As it got late, though, there weren't enough prostitutes to keep us entertained, so we kept ourselves awake by scanning the streets in search of the purely consensual activities of boyfriends and girlfriends making out in cars. ''She had her legs wrapped around his waist a minute ago,'' one of the operators said appreciatively as we watched two teenagers go at it. ''You'll be able to do an article on how reserved the British are, won't you?'' he joked. Norris also found that operators, in addition to focusing on attractive young women, tend to focus on young men, especially those with dark skin. And those young men know they are being watched: CCTV is far less popular among black men than among British men as a whole. In Hull and elsewhere, rather than eliminating prejudicial surveillance and racial profiling, CCTV surveillance has tended to amplify it.

After returning from the digital city of Hull, I had a clearer understanding of how, precisely, the spread of CCTV cameras is transforming British society and why I think it's important for America to resist going down the same path. ''I actually don't think the cameras have had much effect on crime rates,'' says Jason Ditton, the criminologist, whose evaluation of the effect of the cameras in Glasgow found no clear reduction in violent crime. ''We've had a fall in crime in the last 10 years, and CCTV proponents say it's because of the cameras. I'd say it's because we had a boom economy in the last seven years and a fall in unemployment.'' Ditton notes that the cameras can sometimes be useful in investigating terrorist attacks -- like the Brixton nail-bomber case in 1999 -- but there is no evidence that they prevent terrorism or other serious crime.

Last year, Britain's violent crime rates actually increased by 4.3 percent, even though the cameras continued to proliferate. But CCTV cameras have a mysterious knack for justifying themselves regardless of what happens to crime. When crime goes up the cameras get the credit for detecting it, and when crime goes down, they get the credit for preventing it.

If the creation of a surveillance society in Britain hasn't prevented terrorist attacks, it has had subtle but far-reaching social costs. The handful of privacy advocates in Britain have tried to enumerate those costs by arguing that the cameras invade privacy. People behave in self-conscious ways under the cameras, ostentatiously trying to demonstrate their innocence or bristling at the implication of guilt. Inside a monitoring room near Runnymede, the birthplace of the Magna Carta, I saw a group of teenagers who noticed that a camera was pivoting around to follow them; they made an obscene gesture toward it and looked back over their shoulders as they tried to escape its gaze.

The cameras are also a powerful inducement toward social conformity for citizens who can't be sure whether they are being watched. ''I am gay and I might want to kiss my boyfriend in Victoria Square at 2 in the morning,'' a supporter of the cameras in Hull told me. ''I would not kiss my boyfriend now. I am aware that it has altered the way I might behave. Something like that might be regarded as an offense against public decency. This isn't San Francisco.'' Nevertheless, the man insisted that the benefits of the cameras outweighed the costs, because ''thousands of people feel safer.''

There is, in the end, a powerfully American reason to resist the establishment of a national surveillance network: the cameras are not consistent with the values of an open society. They are technologies of classification and exclusion. They are ways of putting people in their place, of deciding who gets in and who stays out, of limiting people's movement and restricting their opportunities. I came to appreciate the exclusionary potential of the surveillance technology in a relatively low-tech way when I visited a shopping center in Uxbridge, a suburb of London. The manager of the center explained that people who are observed to be misbehaving in the mall can be banned from the premises. The banning process isn't very complicated. ''Because this isn't public property, we have the right to refuse entry, and if there's a wrongdoer, we give them a note or a letter, or simply tell them you're banned.'' In America, this would provoke anyone who was banned to call Alan Dershowitz and sue for discrimination. But the British are far less litigious and more willing to defer to authority.

Banning people from shopping malls is only the beginning. A couple of days before I was in London, Borders Books announced the installation of a biometric face-recognition surveillance system in its flagship store on Charing Cross Road. Borders' scheme meant that that anyone who had shoplifted in the past was permanently branded as a shoplifter in the future. In response to howls of protest from America, Borders dismantled the system, but it may well be resurrected in a post-Sept. 11 world.

Perhaps the reason that Britain has embraced the new technologies of surveillance, while America, at least before Sept. 11, had strenuously resisted them, is that British society is far more accepting of social classifications than we are. The British desire to put people in their place is the central focus of British literature, from Dickens to John Osborne and Alan Bennett. The work of George Orwell that casts the most light on Britain's swooning embrace of CCTV is not ''1984.'' It is Orwell's earlier book ''The English People.''

''Exaggerated class distinctions have been diminishing,'' Orwell wrote, but ''the great majority of the people can still be 'placed' in an instant by their manners, clothes and general appearance'' and above all, their accents. Class distinctions are less hardened today than they were when I was a student at Oxford at the height of the Thatcher-era ''Brideshead Revisited'' chic. But it's no surprise that a society long accustomed to the idea that people should know their place didn't hesitate to embrace a technology designed to ensure that people stay in their assigned places.

Will America be able to resist the pressure to follow the British example and wire itself up with surveillance cameras? Before Sept. 11, I was confident that we would. Like Germany and France, which are squeamish about CCTV because of their experience with 20th-century totalitarianism, Americans are less willing than the British to trust the government and defer to authority. After Sept. 11, however, everything has changed. A New York Times/CBS news poll at the end of September found that 8 in 10 Americans believe they will have to give up some of their personal freedoms to make the country safe from terrorist attacks.

Of course there are some liberties that should be sacrificed in times of national emergency if they give us greater security. But Britain's experience in the fight against terrorism suggests that people may give up liberties without experiencing a corresponding increase in security. And if we meekly accede in the construction of vast feel-good architectures of surveillance that have far-reaching social costs and few discernible social benefits, we may find, in calmer times, that they are impossible to dismantle.

It's important to be precise about the choice we are facing. No one is threatening at the moment to turn America into Orwell's Big Brother. And Britain hasn't yet been turned into Big Brother, either. Many of the CCTV monitors and camera operators and policemen and entrepreneurs who took the time to meet with me were models of the British sense of fair play and respect for the rules. In many ways, the closed-circuit television cameras have only exaggerated the qualities of the British national character that Orwell identified in his less famous book: the acceptance of social hierarchy combined with the gentleness that leads people to wait in orderly lines at taxi stands; a deference to authority combined with an appealing tolerance of hypocrisy. These English qualities have their charms, but they are not American qualities.

The promise of America is a promise that we can escape from the Old World, a world where people know their place. When we say we are fighting for an open society, we don't mean a transparent society -- one where neighbors can peer into each other's windows using the joysticks on their laptops. We mean a society open to the possibility that people can redefine and reinvent themselves every day; a society in which people can travel from place to place without showing their papers and being encumbered by their past; a society that respects privacy and constantly reshuffles social hierarchy.

The ideal of America has from the beginning been an insistence that your opportunities shouldn't be limited by your background or your database; that no doors should be permanently closed to anyone who has the wrong smart card. If the 21st century proves to be a time when this ideal is abandoned -- a time of surveillance cameras and creepy biometric face scanning in Times Square -- then Osama bin Laden will have inflicted an even more terrible blow than we now imagine.

Jeffrey Rosen is an associate professor at George Washington University Law School and the legal affairs editor of The New Republic. He writes frequently on law for The Times Magazine.

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Egypt's Brutal Response to Militants
Tactics Used to Counter Opponents at Home Contrast With Appeals for U.S. Restraint

By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, October 7, 2001; Page A25
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14715-2001Oct6.html

MINYA, Egypt -- As soon as the shots were fired, the roads around this town in Upper Egypt were blocked with armored cars and barricades. Not a bicycle or donkey cart moved. Traffic backed up in a honking snarl, and the village stood still while the police organized a manhunt. The shots came from a single gunman in what may have been a common crime. But Egypt is taking no chances after a 20-year battle against an Islamic rebellion that has frequently resorted to terrorist attacks that once threatened to rend the Arab world's most populous country.

Although the uprising has been largely quelled, the Egyptian government's response to any whiff of instability among its 70 million people is still massive, quick and brutal. An estimated 600 people suspected of anti-government activity were killed between 1992 and 1997 in gun battles and executions, according to security analysts.

"There's a problem in the town with shooting," explained one of the guards outside Minya that day. "Maybe terrorists. But I think not. They have all been destroyed."

As U.S. leaders plan their response to the attacks on New York and Washington, Egypt and other Muslim and Arab countries have, with varying degrees of intensity, cautioned that military action against a Muslim nation like Afghanistan risks being construed as an attack on Islam itself. That nod to Muslim solidarity overlooks the fact that, with few exceptions, Arab and Muslim states have for 30 years or more been battling internally against the same ideology -- and in some cases the same people -- blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks. And they have not been gentle in their approach.

In contrast to the current calls for the United States to exercise patience and diplomacy, the battles here have often been pointed, climactic and waged with little attention to courtroom-level proof or judicial guarantees. They provide messy examples for the United States and other Western governments resolved to root out terrorism. But Arab officials say mass arrests, torture and swift military justice were necessary steps to bring subversion under control.

Egypt is a prime example. But there are others:

• Threatened by Muslim Brotherhood attacks in Syria, President Hafez Assad in 1982 flattened a brotherhood stronghold in the city of Hama with an artillery barrage that killed at least 10,000 people.

• Islamic fundamentalists who were poised to win control of the Algerian parliament in 1992 saw elections suspended, leading to a civil war in which 100,000 people died.

• When Islamic radicals suspected of links to Osama bin Laden began organizing attacks in northern Lebanon last year, the army tracked them down, hideout by hideout, in mountain caves, and killed them.

Persian Gulf states -- Saudi Arabia in particular -- have tried to manage fundamentalism by accommodating it, giving the clerical establishment a free hand to influence the schools, enforce a tight moral code and raise money for charities that, wittingly or not, sometimes aided militant groups abroad. The Saudi monarchy has traditionally drawn the line only at political agitation, which is quickly suppressed. Punishing the United States

However, in no case has the underlying tension between secular power and religion yielded neatly to compromise, with a national government that is legitimized through popular support while also remaining open to dissent and the legal transfer of power. The terrorists who have targeted the United States are trying, among other things, to punish it for choosing sides in that standoff, backing governments here and elsewhere that have proved impossible to dislodge through local violence and resistant to reform through political action.

Attacks on the United States are part of "a guerrilla warfare against Israeli and American interests not only in Arab and Muslim countries but everywhere in the world," the leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Ahmad Ibrahim al-Naggar, told prosecutors during a 1999 trial that ultimately led to his execution. "Bin Laden believed that the Jewish lobby pulled the ropes of politics in the United States and was behind the weakening of Muslim people and governments, and that this hegemony should be broken."

The complaint can be heard from conservatives and moderates alike in the Middle East, from the Westernized elite to Muslim traditionalists. Governments of Muslim countries that the United States dislikes, such as Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya, are criticized for human rights abuses, embargoed, chastised for being undemocratic and branded as supporters of terrorism. Those whose leaders agree more often with Washington, such as Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf states, are courted as leaders of the Arab world, lavished with billions of dollars in aid and investment, supplied with arms from the world's lone superpower and left comparatively alone as they repress and torture their citizens.

It may seem a simple case of the United States expressing its national interests, helping allies and punishing foes. But the seemingly selective application of values that the United States enshrines as universal has become a chief source of anger in the region.

"The U.S., in its internal affairs, has a good system, very well implemented," said Mohammed Morsy El-Aiat, a member of the Egyptian parliament and a supporter of the banned but tolerated Muslim Brotherhood. "But outside, people here feel that the U.S. is blocking them. . . . The U.S. gives support to this government and we don't hear any voices raised against its practices. We have had martial law here for 20 years."

Egypt, a backbone of U.S. policy because of its size and early willingness to end hostilities with Israel, offers a particularly instructive example of how quickly and how far militant Islam has spread, and how difficult it has been to counteract both as a source of violence and a political movement.

This is a conservative country, but broadly tolerant as well. Still, the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood here in the 1920s as a political movement planted a notion of religious-based activism that flowered decades later into the more militant philosophy of organizations such as the Islamic Group, which promises that "Islam is the Solution." In the interim, Egyptian leaders went through several cycles of cooperation and violence with radical Islamic politicians.

Gamal Abdel Nasser courted the Muslim Brotherhood when he helped topple the Egyptian monarchy in 1952, then banned all political parties after an assassination attempt attributed to them. His successor, Anwar Sadat, also sought the Brotherhood's support, only to be killed in 1981 by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Trying for a Change in Tone

The country's current president, Hosni Mubarak, oversaw an extensive crackdown after Sadat's assassination but followed it with a liberalization that allowed as many as 40 Brotherhood members to be elected to parliament. Trying to set a tolerant tone after the quick-arrest styles of Nasser and Sadat, Mubarak also allowed a massive intelligence breakdown, analysts here say.

During the 1980s, the Islamic Group organized into small cells that proselytized in neighborhoods, raised money for mosques and social services and, as its numbers grew, started organizing for an assault on the government. Although renowned for its large bureaucracy and security establishment, the Egyptian government did not respond to the increasingly radical messages being delivered in several hundred mosques that the Islamic Group built and staffed with sympathetic prayer leaders.

With such a ready-made base for preaching and after-hours plotting, the organization established deep roots in some Cairo neighborhoods -- the slum area of Imbaba was virtually subject to Islamic law for a while -- as well as cities in Upper Egypt such as Minya, where poverty remains extreme and resentment against the local Coptic Christian community runs high.

Despite sporadic violence throughout the 1980s, the battle began in earnest in 1992 when preachers in Islamic Group mosques called on followers to rid the country of "Jews, Christians and Communists," language that prompted deadly attacks against local Copts, prominent secular intellectuals and police.

Over the next three years, assassination attempts became routine as the expertise of returning Afghan war veterans fueled the rebellion. Attackers with bombs and guns began targeting one of Egypt's economic mainstays -- tourists. The groups -- by this time funded partly by Osama bin Laden's network -- continued to rely as well on local donations and crime to pay the bills; Coptic-owned gold stores were a favorite target for armed robberies.

The government was initially caught off guard. Local judges worried aloud about assassination, and security officials were shot and killed by militants. The state responded with massive force. Hundreds of people at a time were rounded up and jailed. Judges used emergency detention laws to keep people imprisoned indefinitely if they were considered a security threat.

Police, meanwhile, were told to shoot to kill. Diaa Rashwan, an analyst with the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, cites one turning point in 1993, when authorities carried the battle into a mosque. The tear-gas and gun attack left as many as nine dead.

As gun battles and intelligence gathering intensified over the next four years -- an estimated 1,500 suspected militants, police and bystanders were killed -- authorities moved on other fronts. Economic growth and a flood of Western aid led to better social services in such areas as Imbaba, but the government stood by after a 1992 earthquake while the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic groups arrived in force to clear rubble and help victims.

Perhaps more important, the government ended its long-standing policy of allowing private construction and operation of mosques, requiring that all houses of worship be registered with the state and controlling the appointment of staff and prayer leaders. In conjunction with Al Azhar University in Cairo, which is government-controlled but still respected as the oldest center of Muslim scholarship in the world, the government created an acceptable orthodoxy meant to counter the fiery, anti-Western rhetoric of radical scholars such as Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who was jailed in New York for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Nearly 60,000 mosques are now regulated by the state; few are outside its observation.

Government ministries started organizing youth "caravans" in which Al Azhar graduates met with teens to discuss sex and marriage. Soap operas, particularly the heavily watched productions during Ramadan, began including radical characters either offensive in their hypocrisy -- preaching Islamic revolution while womanizing, for example -- or brought back to the moderate path through the influence of a caring Egyptian family. Thousands Remain in Jail

Judging from the results, Egypt can say with some justification that it has made its stand against terrorism. There has not been a documented attack here since the November 1997 massacre of 58 visitors in Luxor, most of them Swiss. The Islamic Group leaders are jailed, dead, dispirited or in exile.

Cease-fire is their official policy, although there is good reason to question their capability to attack even if they wanted to. The government is sure enough of its position that it has in recent years released hundreds of those jailed for militant activities, although an estimated several thousand people remain imprisoned.

The country remains something of a shadow play when it comes to security. It has a calm exterior, masking the fact that undercover officers are everywhere, uniformed officers are deployed in large numbers and decades-old emergency laws leave little room for niceties such as due process and search warrants.

Mubarak, local analysts say, receives a daily briefing from his intelligence chiefs, who rely on an extensive network of informants stretching into almost every teahouse and mosque. Terrorism may be on the wane here, but a Western visitor to Minya still sees armed guards, armed troop carriers on the road, a Zodiac patrol watching the Nile and rifle-bearing guards nestled in the cliffs around every Pharaonic ruin.

The arrests continue. More than two dozen suspected militants were seized this month, and several hundred others around the time of parliamentary elections last year, in a move meant to cut the anticipated support of several Muslim Brotherhood candidates.

Security remains tight. When Egyptian supporters of the Palestinians staged a march this month, riot police outnumbered protesters by four or five to one, while plainclothes officers shooed away the curious.

The organizer of the demonstration is now in jail.

-------- spying

In Hindsight, C.I.A. Sees Flaws That Hindered Efforts on Terror

New York Times
October 7, 2001
By JAMES RISEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/international/07INTE.html?pagewanted=all

WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 - George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, issued a directive shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks declaring an abrupt end to business as usual in America's intelligence community.

In the strongly worded memorandum, dated Sept. 16 and titled "We're at War," Mr. Tenet told senior officials at the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies that it was time to end past squabbles over turf and to begin immediately to coordinate their efforts and share information in the new war against terrorism.

Mr. Tenet's order called for an immediate end to peacetime bureaucratic constraints on the C.I.A. while demanding improved coordination and information sharing throughout the government's national security apparatus.

"The agency must give people the authority to do things they might not ordinarily be allowed to do," the memo declared, according to an official who described the document in detail. "If there is some bureaucratic hurdle, leap it."

Mr. Tenet's memorandum addressed what many government officials say were some significant flaws in the nation's defenses against terrorism that were exploited by the hijackers on Sept. 11.

Indeed, as investigators learn more about the terrorist plot and piece together strands of intelligence that were collected both before and after the attack, they are beginning to see the outlines of where the United States went wrong in what may have been the biggest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor.

A sense of wartime urgency over the need to prod the peacetime C.I.A. as well as the government's broader counterterrorism efforts suffuses the C.I.A. director's memo.

"We don't have time to have meetings about how to fix problems, just fix them," Mr. Tenet commanded, according to the official who described the document.

The unspoken message behind Mr. Tenet's memorandum was that the bureaucracy had grown too rigid in recent years, complicating the ability of intelligence agencies to confront a rapidly evolving threat like that posed by Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network. In effect, Mr. Tenet's memo echoed many of the sentiments voiced by the C.I.A.'s critics since Sept. 11.

Yet there is little appetite in Washington now for a postmortem on the government's failure to detect and defeat the plot. Instead, the C.I.A., F.B.I. and other agencies are running flat out to investigate the attacks, prevent further assaults and go on the offensive against the people they blame - Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

On Friday, the House of Representatives backed away from an immediate inquiry into what went wrong. Instead the House legislation calls for a commission that will be more forward-looking, identifying reforms needed to help prevent future attacks.

In hindsight, it is becoming clear that the C.I.A., F.B.I. and other agencies had significant fragments of information that, under ideal circumstances, could have provided some warning if they had all been pieced together and shared rapidly.

"It has been called to my attention that if you go back and sift through the intelligence reporting that was there before Sept. 11, that it is now clear that there are some things that should have rung bells a little bit louder," a senior intelligence official said. "There are a few fragmentary reports. But they are really only significant in hindsight. I wish we had paid more attention."

Bureaucratic and regulatory roadblocks dramatically slowed the government's ability to analyze some information it had already collected.

American officials now look back to intelligence received in June and July as the starting point in their efforts to try to reconstruct the events leading up to Sept. 11.

Officials familiar with the intelligence said that the C.I.A. got a series of intercepted communications and other indications that Al Qaeda might be planning a major operation. In some of their communications, the terrorists used code words and double talk to disguise their plans.

The communications clearly showed increased activity, including indications of the movement of Al Qaeda operatives. But the timing and location of any attack were unclear.

"There was a real heightened danger toward the end of June and July," said one intelligence official. "The problem we had at the time was that there were all kinds of indications of a serious intent to do harm, but we didn't know where."

American counterterrorism analysts eventually concluded that an attack might come around the Fourth of July holiday, most likely aimed at American interests overseas.

"We had a floating list of likely places where an attack might take place, some in Europe, some in the Middle East," said one American official. "But the United States was not high on the list then."

The intelligence suggested that Al Qaeda was hoping to exploit the latest crisis between Israel and the Palestinians in a way not done in the past, perhaps for recruiting and propaganda purposes. Mr. bin Laden, born in Saudi Arabia, has typically focused his anti-American statements on the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, declaring it a violation of Islamic holy places. Now, in keeping with the rest of the Arab world, he shifted focus to the Palestinian uprising that began in September 2000, American officials believe.

When no July attack occurred, some American officials began to believe that whatever had been in the works had somehow been disrupted or aborted.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in an interview last week that "nobody could ever get the fidelity" of the summer warnings. It was as if the C.I.A. could hear Mr. bin Laden broadcasting, but could not quite tune in to the right frequency to grasp his intentions.

Today, officials are still divided about the meaning of the summer intelligence. Some officials speculate that the communications traffic was purposefully devised to throw analysts off the trail of the real operation.

But in August, aware of the need for vigilance, the C.I.A. issued another report reminding senior policy makers at the White House, Pentagon and State Department that Al Qaeda was still committed to attacking American interests.

The August report also cautioned that Mr. bin Laden and his network - blamed for the bombings of two American embassies in East Africa in August 1998 and the bombing of the destroyer Cole in Yemen harbor last October - were interested in carrying out strikes in the United States. Officials said that warning was coincidence rather than a move based on any intelligence pointing toward the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

"It was more of a background piece, saying that bin Laden was interested in attacking us here," said one senior American intelligence official. "But no one read it as a report saying, watch out, here they come."

At about the same time that the C.I.A.'s August report was being prepared and delivered, the F.B.I. arrested a French citizen, Zacarias Moussaoui, on immigration charges. Officials at a flight school in Minnesota had called authorities after they became troubled that Mr. Moussaoui was trying to learn how to fly large jet aircraft, but had said he did not need to know how to take off or land.

After his arrest on Aug. 17, the F.B.I. asked the C.I.A. and French intelligence officials for information about Mr. Moussaoui. French intelligence reported back that he had extremist beliefs and some troubling connections. Indeed, a French antiterrorist task force had an open file on him, saying he had traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan several times. But American officials say the French did not provide any conclusive connections to a terrorist group like Al Qaeda.

The C.I.A. also ran traces on him, but apparently did not find an Al Qaeda connection before Sept. 11, officials added.

With strong suspicions but little evidence, F.B.I. headquarters decided not to allow its agents in Minneapolis to open a criminal investigation, or to seek a warrant for secret wiretaps and clandestine physical searches.

Only after Sept. 11 did the F.B.I. search his computer, which disclosed that he had collected information about crop-dusting aircraft.

The reluctance to seek a warrant coincided with a secret internal investigation prompted by Royce C. Lamberth, the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which issues the warrants, about past F.B.I. requests for them.

In March, Judge Lamberth complained to Attorney General John Ashcroft about the way the F.B.I. was making applications to the court, and specifically referred to a request for a wiretap related to a member of Hamas, a militant Middle Eastern group. In response, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department opened an internal review.

F.B.I. and Justice Department officials have insisted that the review did not limit the ability to seek wiretaps. But F.B.I. headquarters nonetheless demanded more evidence from its agents in the field before agreeing to pursue an application for surveillance on Mr. Moussaoui.

The failure to investigate Mr. Moussaoui now seems just the kind of missed opportunity and bureaucratic hurdle that Mr. Tenet deplored in his memo.

Another example came in late August, just as the F.B.I. was debating whether to investigate Mr. Moussaoui. The C.I.A. told the Immigration and Naturalization Service that it should place two men, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, on its watch list to bar entry into the United States. The C.I.A. had earlier determined that Mr. Almihdhar had attended a meeting in Malaysia in January 2000 with people later implicated in the bombing of the Cole. Mr. Alhazmi had later traveled with Mr. Almihdhar to the United States, and so the C.I.A. wanted him added to the watch list too.

After the immigration service responded that both men were already in the country, the F.B.I. was notified and began to search for them. Neither was found before Sept. 11, when they apparently boarded American Airlines flight 77, the plane that the hijackers flew into the Pentagon.

Finally, intelligence officials say, in the days leading up to the hijackings there was a report that a member of Mr. bin Laden's family had been told to move to safety before an impending deadline, before some kind of work was done. Officials declined to provide details of the report, which they now say indicated that an attack was imminent.

Intelligence officials said that Mr. Tenet's memo did not detail specific lapses, but was clearly aimed at making sure they did not continue.

The memo may also represent a recognition that the inevitable postmortems will eventually find that poor coordination in sharing intelligence was at the heart of the Sept. 11 failure.

"Did the intelligence community miss something, or did they just never have it?" asked Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama and vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and one of Mr. Tenet's most prominent critics. "Those are good questions and they are not answered yet. In either event, it wasn't their best day."

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What's Classified? Sorry. It's a Secret.

By TODD S. PURDUM,
New York Times
October 7, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/weekinreview/07PURD.html

WASHINGTON IT will be, Americans have already been warned, a war fought in the shadows, from guerrilla battlefields to international bank accounts, and its biggest victories may well be secret and uncelebrated, "in tragedies avoided and threats eliminated," as President Bush put it.

It may depend on shifting, clandestine diplomatic alliances, on winking and nodding at normally powerful concerns from civil rights at home to human rights abroad, and on the situational ethics, disinformation and deceptions that war always implies.

But in defining what CNN calls "America's New War" so broadly, and differently, than any in the past, the Bush administration has also paved the way for a long, twilight struggle with the overriding reality of the age: information itself.

Precisely because the conflict will not be quick or easy, information will be vital to informed public debate and, ultimately, to sustained public support. How much will the war cost, and will it be worth it? Who will our allies be and what did we promise them? How many Americans are dying, and what are they doing, and where? All those questions will be asked, but some may go unanswered for a long time.

For even as this war is fought in shadows, the public will expect it to be covered in real time by satellite and cellphone, laptop and Web site. Night in Afghanistan will be noon in Washington, where the inevitable temptation will be to declare all manner of information - not just combat operations - off limits, if not classified. And the government's power to do so will be sweeping.

"The classification regulations are very broadly written, and quite capable of what a lawyer might call differences of interpretation by reasonable people," said David Rudenstine, a professor of law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University in New York and the author of "The Day the Presses Stopped," a history of the Pentagon Papers case. "And it wouldn't surprise me if somebody came forward and said, with respect to financial information, for example, `Well, this is related to national security and properly classified, because if we identify the accounts that are frozen we may endanger the lives of people who are cooperating with us.' "

The Nixon administration made just such arguments in trying to block publication of the secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam war in The New York Times and The Washington Post in 1971, contending that the study contained information that would embarrass allies, endanger peace talks and risk the lives of American troops, who were then still engaged in a hot land war in Southeast Asia.

And while the Supreme Court ultimately declined by a vote of 6-to-3 to block publication, Professor Rudenstine noted that it did not reject such arguments out of hand. Indeed, Justice Byron White wrote that further publication would "do substantial damage to public interests." It was simply that a majority of the court did not believe that the government had demonstrated that the potential risk to national security was great enough to justify the extreme step of imposing prior restraint on a free press.

BUT courts have not conferred on the press any fundamental right to information that the government chooses to keep secret, and the main legal recourse for many requests, the Freedom of Information Act, can take years to yield results, which are often redacted. Last year, President Clinton vetoed a bill that would have made it a crime to disclose any kind of classified information. But when its principal sponsor, Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, tried to revive it this year, the Bush administration let it be known, just a week before Sept. 11, that it would not support it. Some civil liberties groups predict that the issue will surface again, and other limits are already in the works.

"It's going to happen in a variety of ways," said Morton H. Halperin, who had a supervisory role in the task force that prepared the Pentagon Papers study and later became a longtime official of the American Civil Liberties Union. "One of the earliest manifestations of it was in the administration's anti-terrorism bill, making it a crime to publish the name of an agent of the C.I.A. I guess they had in mind somebody who infiltrates a terrorist group but it could apply to somebody who tortured people in Guatemala. They've now taken it out of the Senate version but not in the House."

Throughout American history, from the Alien and Sedition Acts of the 1790's through Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus in the Civil War, through restrictions in World War I and military censorship in World War II, to the stringent restrictions on press coverage of the Persian Gulf war imposed by the first Bush administration, the nation has accepted unusual limits on civil rights and free expression in wartime.

"It seems to me that the American public are just about willing to allow anything at this point," said Michael Deaver, who helped pioneer the modern arts of presidential image-making and information control in the Reagan administration. "Obviously, the public still has a right to know as much as is safe. The question becomes who determines what is safe, and at the moment, I think the public is willing to accept that it's the government who determines it."

Public officials and pop culture alike have been quick to recognize the unusual nature of what the British press is calling a "long, thin war," and what Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld called "a much more subtle, nuanced, difficult, shadowy set of problems."

Geoffrey Cowan, director of the Voice of America in the Clinton administration and now dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, predicted that much information will seep out, whatever the government's official stance.

"There'll be bureaucratic fights, with the Air Force wanting to get out information about the C.I.A. or whatever," Mr. Cowan said. "I think it's going to be hard to keep a lot of things secret. People will want to celebrate their successes. When a tragedy takes place and the government is accused of letting some terrorists get through, won't there be a need or desire to say, `But here are 10 we caught'?

"What deals did we make with other countries to become our allies, and are those secret deals?" Mr. Cowan asked. "Well, we're not the only parties to those deals, and doubtless the foreign governments will want to brag sometimes. This is all very new, and right now the country's all behind it. But the gulf war was only 100 days and this is going to go on for years."

EVEN Walter Cronkite, the dean of television journalists, who cut his teeth as a combat correspondent for United Press in World War II, expressed ambivalence about the challenges of chronicling this new kind of conflict.

"It's been my experience that after each crisis there's an immediate reaction that secrecy has to be total," he said in a telephone interview. "I think absolutely there's a serious danger, and we know not only our military but every organization would like to keep us in the dark about its doings. It's human nature."

At the same time, Mr. Cronkite dismissed as "perfectly ridiculous" any suggestion that live television cameras should be permitted on battlefields, and he added: "I am a little bit concerned when I read the detailed stories about the weaknesses of our security against chemical and germ warfare; it seems to me that we are giving potential enemies a blueprint of how to escape surveillance."

But Mr. Cronkite quickly added: "I believe that our newspapers and broadcasters are intelligent enough to make their own decisions in this regard of what can and cannot be published" without jeopardizing the nation.

And Professor Rudenstine noted: "In the end, trusting our free institutions to do the right thing has often been as much a part of our security as military force, and it would be a departure from our traditions to abandon that."

----

HIDE AND SEEK
To Fight in the Shadows, Get Better Eyes

New York Times
October 7, 2001
By TIM WEINER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/weekinreview/07WEIN.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, AS Sept. 11 dawned, thousands of people at America's intelligence agencies were already at their desks. Many had been assigned to think about the wrong things: what had happened the day before in Kosovo or the Kremlin, Indonesia or Iraq.

The day after, the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, told his people that the job was "to run to ground a vicious foe." But American intelligence was still set up to track cold-war targets - states and armies. It was not ready to kick down doors and kill people in Kabul. Nor could it warn of a surprise attack launched within the United States by 19 anonymous men, instead of troops and tanks and fighter jets from afar.

"This is the toughest of all intelligence targets," said Lee H. Hamilton, the longtime chairman of House committees on intelligence and international relations and a member of the United States Commission on National Security. "You have to have spies on the ground to get his location in real time, to know where he'll sleep that night. You have to penetrate their language, their culture."

What will the nation's intelligence services have to change to fight this war? The short answer is: almost everything. Despite all the talk of "a new kind of war," the Central Intelligence Agency may have to return to the old school of spying. "For it undoubtedly will prove to be a lot more like a cold war than a hot war," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said on Thursday in Cairo. "In the cold war it took 50 years, plus or minus. It did not involve major battles. It involved continuous pressure."

And the pressure is on American intelligence. On Friday, the House voted to consider "the establishment of a separate Clandestine Service" for mounting covert actions outside its home at the C.I.A. Old cold warriors and new counter- terrorists dream that it might look like the agency's progenitor: Wild Bill Donovan's Office of Strategic Services, the gang of bankers, safe- crackers, bluebloods and con men who fought the Nazis behind enemy lines.

But there are no lines now. The theater of war may be a cave near the Khyber Pass, a safe house in Hamburg, an airport in Kuala Lumpur - anywhere in the world. Since American intelligence cannot be everywhere, it will have to know its enemy, know his intentions, infiltrate his life, disrupt it and destroy it. Its targets are hard men hiding in shadows and speaking in codes, against whom spy satellites, surveillance systems and smart bombs count for little.

"You don't learn about their intentions from anywhere but human sources," said Norbert Garrett, a former senior C.I.A. official and president of Kroll Associates, a global security firm.

So it is human intelligence - first-hand information from American spies and foreign agents - that matters.

Whether in Afghanistan next week, or around the world for years to come, "it's not going to be a cruise missile or a bomber that is going to be the determining factor," Secretary Rumsfeld said. "It's going to be a scrap of information."

The United States has never had "a military campaign so dependent on human intelligence," said Mark Lowenthal, a former House intelligence staff director. But "our system is not set up to work against small, mobile, shadowy targets."

The C.I.A.'s spies are ill-equipped to fight a dirty war in the world's back alleys. They have been run ragged for years meeting the Pentagon's demands for short-term intelligence on every conceivable post-cold-war threat to the military.

Their overseers' priorities may be reflected by their spending: well over $10 billion a year on spy satellites and electronic surveillance; little more than $10 million a year for all C.I.A. covert operations in all of East Asia.

FOR now, American intelligence may have to rely on its liaisons with the world's toughest foreign services, men who can look and think and act like terrorists. If someone is going to interrogate a man in a basement in Cairo or Quetta, it will be an Egyptian or a Pakistani officer.

American intelligence will take the information without asking a lot of lawyerly questions: the House on Friday told the C.I.A. to abandon its own guidelines on working with people with blood on their hands.

In the long run, though, American intelligence will need to rebuild its own ability to engage in old-fashioned espionage. But can it recruit a new generation, one that has never known real war, real fear, real danger? Will college seniors in New York and New Haven spurn J. P. Morgan Chase and Microsoft, taking it on faith that serving their country in anonymity is as important as making a bundle on war-scarred Wall Street? Will they pose as junior diplomats in Dushanbe for the same money they would make managing a Pizza Hut? Will that same trust take root in Detroit and Dearborn, Mich., when field recruiters show up in deep-rooted Lebanese, Palestinian and Yemeni communities, looking for citizens who can pose as terrorists overseas?

"The quality of the people, what their motivation is - that is what is at the base of all of our hopes," said Fred Hitz, recruited by the C.I.A. in 1961 after the dean of students at Princeton called him in and said: "You might want to talk with the chap down the hall."

As the agency's inspector general from 1990 to 1998, Mr. Hitz saw "the departure of a lot of experienced hands," he said. "They had done their work in the cold war, they had won, and they left."

Nearly half the spies departed, leaving little more than 1,000 in place at the end of the century. The agency has "slipped half a generation in human potential," he said, and it may need half a generation to recoup.

A lot of what happens next is in the hands of Representative Porter J. Goss, the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, a former C.I.A. case officer and, in the eyes of many in Congress, the next director of central intelligence.

Mr. Goss, his committee and the House are ordering American intelligence to think about rewiring some of its institutions and reconnecting them the rest of the government. They issued a scathing report on recent intelligence failures to warn against threats, to share information, to hire spies and train analysts, to place talented people overseas, and even to read its incoming mail.

"Thousands of pieces of data are never analyzed, or are analyzed after the fact" for lack of skilled people. They may "sit for months, and sometimes years," the report said.

In fact, the great anxiety in intelligence circles right now is that clues that could have provided warnings were in hand before Sept. 11 but went unseen.

"If, as in Pearl Harbor, there were documents out there that weren't translated in time," Mr. Hitz said, "that's going to be a devastating situation."

Six years after Pearl Harbor, the United States set up the C.I.A. and the rest of the 20th-century national-security system. And for many years after, the threat of the Soviet Union made secrecy and spying palatable - sometimes barely so - to the American people.

Now, as then, there is an urge for covert action to combat an invisible foe.

THE country has not yet had its once-a-generation debate over the role of a secret agency in an open democracy. But it probably will. If American spies are assassinated or kidnapped or kill the wrong people, the question will arise: should the nation free a 21st- century clandestine service from old rules and laws?

"Creating a more ruthless, back- alley, street-spying clandestine service won't happen overnight," said Mr. Garrett, a 27-year C.I.A. veteran, and a former chief of station in Cairo, Kuwait and elsewhere. "And it's dangerous to do it in reaction to a tragedy."

The late John Millis, a long-time covert-operations officer and Mr. Goss's intelligence committee staff director, gave a speech to C.I.A. veterans before his death last year. He said American intelligence was in disarray, drowning under a tidal wave of technology, harried by short- term military tasks, short on brain power and unable to fulfill its most important espionage mission: to warn of the next Pearl Harbor.

"People used to come to us and brag that the C.I.A. is the 911 of the government," Mr. Millis said. "Well, if you're dialing 911, intelligence has already lost."


-------- activists

Women's activist calls Afghans 'hostages' to Taliban terror

October 7, 2001
By Osamu Tsukimori
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20011007-27648100.htm

Fahima, a U.S.-based advocate of women's rights in Afghanistan, cringes at the thought of Osama bin Laden and the hold he maintains on the country she fled more than two decades ago.

"His language is terror," she said, and the people of Afghanistan would like nothing better than to get rid of him.

"They're grieving under the Taliban as much as the rest of the world," Fahima said. "These are innocent people. They're hostages.

"We should fight the terrorism together. The [Islamic] fundamentalism is like a cancer. Before we know it, it will come here and come back to haunt us. Let's end this cancer."

Fahima, 46, spoke last week about the plight of Afghan women at Montgomery College in Rockville, as the United States prepared for a long battle against bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 suicide attacks, and the Taliban rulers who protect him.

She asked that her last name not be used.

As Fahima grew up in Afghanistan during the 1960s, she recoiled at the way her own family discriminated against women and valued men. That, she said, is when her fight for women's rights started.

"For years and years, we were screaming, crying," Fahima said. "I always felt this is not right. We want somebody to listen to us."

The situation went from bad to intolerable, she said, after the Taliban came into power in 1996.

Women were no longer allowed to attend schools or work and told to stay in their houses, with windows shut and painted black.

Soon, listening to music and watching television were prohibited.

"If a man peeks in a house and sees a woman, that could be immoral," Fahima said. "They think women would be provoking a man. White socks are not allowed. Colored clothes are not allowed. High heels are not allowed. Even clapping, laughing or talking loud is not allowed."

"The women of Afghanistan have no rights," she said, " and that hurts."

Women cannot walk out the streets without a male relative accompanying them and hiding head to toe under black robes known as burqa.

If they walk alone, Fahima said, "They would be beaten on the streets, even stoned to death or executed."

Torture and public executions are rampant, and the suicide rate in Afghanistan is high, Fahima said, adding that three of her cousins had chosen to take their own lives.

She fled Afghanistan in 1979, after the Soviet Union invaded the country, came to the United States in 1983 and became a citizen in 1997.

She now runs a rug store and a restaurant in Annapolis and donates portions of her business earnings to a group that works underground to provide secret schools and medical care to women and girls.

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Scores protest in London against military strikes

Ananova
Sunday 7th October 2001
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_417580.html

More than 100 people are gathering outside Downing Street to protest against the military strikes in Afghanistan.

Protesters are chanting anti-war slogans through a megaphone in front of police.

The demonstrators have criticised the Allies for launching an attack and chanted: "Stop the war, feed the poor."

Scores of demonstrators turned out hours after the launch of military operations despite heavy rain and gusting wind.

One demonstrator, Jamie Ritchie, a 55-year-old lawyer from Willesden, north-west London, said: "I am opposed to a war because it is going to cause more problems than it will solve.

"We have had these wars in the past and they create more terrorism than they prevent.

"I would like to see a big change in the policies of what they call the international community."

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In NYC, Thousands Rally & March for Peace

October 7
by Bill Koehnlein

New York, (NY Transfer)--Thousands of anti-war demonstrators marched in New York City on Sunday in a protest made more timely and urgent by the US bombing of Afghanistan that started today.

The demonstration, which began barely two hours after the first bombs were dropped, was organized by a broad coalition of peace, labor, religious, political and social justice organizations that came together just days after the attack on the World Trade Center to discuss left and progressive responses to the impending threats of war, racist backlashes against Arab Americans, and the erosion of civil liberties.

The demonstrators, who reflected the diversity of New York City, assembled at Union Square Park in lower Manhattan, barely two miles from the site of the World Trade Center, for a march to Times Square. Within a couple of days of the September 11 attack, Union Square had become transformed into a memorial shrine to the Trade Center victims, and its south plaza grew into an altar where people left candles, flowers, photographs of missing friends or family members, and signs and posters expressing their feelings about what had happened. Since that time, the park has become the focal point for many of New York's ongoing peace activities.

Some of the demonstrators were seasoned activists, and a contingent from Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade--US volunteers who fought against fascism in Spain in the 1930s--received cheers as they made their way towards Times Square. For others, this was their first demonstration, and the feelings of many were summed up by a young woman who said, "I don't know all the issues involved, or who's right or wrong, but I know that war is no solution. It will only make things worse, and I'm afraid."

While the focus of the demonstration was on peace generally--one of the slogans of the day was "Our grief is not a cry for war"--many of the people who turned out blamed United States foreign policy for the crisis. "The American people have not been silenced," said Imam Abdul-Baqi of the Islamic Leadership Council of New York. "They are saying clearly to the president, 'We're against your policies. Stop the arrogance and respect people and their rights.' America is a great country, but it needs to change. Today it is Muslims who are victimized," he continued, "tomorrow it will be communists, and after that it will be everyone else."

The need to find solutions through international law, where bodies such as the United Nations or the International Court of Justice would play a prominent role, was a concern to many of the people on the march. Numerous banners demanded "Peace through social justice" or proclaimed that "War is not the answer." Person after person expressed the fear that unilateral military actions by the United States would only increase the threat of terrorism, and cause the death and suffering of many innocent people in the US and Afghanistan. "The Bush administration has made a horrendous mistake," said Charlene Mitchell, co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. "This action gives us a false sense of security. Think of the eventual death toll. This will only heighten terrorism. We have to negotiate. We have to use international law."

Local peace and social justice groups see today's demonstration as the beginning of a new movement for change. While many people expressed anger at both the attack on the World Trade Center and the response of US policy makers, and some expressed fear about what might happen in the future, others were confident that such a movement could affect lasting change.

As Esperanza Martell, a long-time Puerto Rican activist in New York, made her way through the crowd and gave out flowers, she paused for a moment to say, "On the anniversary of the death of Che Guevara we stand for peace with justice in our time. Siempre hasta la victoria!"

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Peace protesters hit street to denounce air strikes

EUGENE TONG,
Associated Press Writer
Sunday, October 7, 2001

Within hours of the bombing of Afghanistan, peace protesters hit the streets Sunday, waving signs at passing motorists reading "Don't turn tragedy into a war" and "Stop U.S. state terror."

More than 100 people gathered outside the Federal Building in Westwood for a peaceful demonstration watched by a handful of federal security officers and FBI agents.

"The horrible events that occurred at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon simply can't be corrected by killing more people and dropping more bombs," said Walter Lippmann, 57, of Los Angeles.

It was the latest of many demonstrations held throughout the state since President Bush first vowed to take military action against the Taliban regime following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

A small group of about six or seven people waved Israeli and American flags as they staged a counter-demonstration outside the Federal Building.

The group, which was separated from peace protesters by police tape, has been staging pro-Israel rallies every Sunday for more than a year, said organizer Suzanne Davidson.

"I believe in justice for America," Davidson said. "I don't want to see anybody die ... but if there's going to be a war, there's going to be a war."

About 200 pro-peace demonstrators rallied in downtown San Francisco on Sunday with some holding American flags that had white peace signs replacing the stars. They also carried signs that read "Peace Talks Now" and "Violence started it. Solidarity can end it." [Being personally among them, I can attest to the fact that there were in excess of 3000, but let's not quibble over crowd estimates when it comes to slanting the news!!!!!]

Last week, 15,000 protesters gathered in the city to oppose U.S. military action.

"I support justice instead of vengeance," said Margaret House of Oakland. "You can't get terrorists with bombing. They hide among the civilians. Any kind of bombing would create civilian casualties."

At a mosque in south Los Angeles, about 100 people gathered to pray for peace during an interfaith service that included leaders of the Islam, Jewish and Christian faiths.

"War takes the best in human life, the best in this nation," said Rev. George Regas, one of the organizers of the interfaith service. "I hate war for that."

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Socialist Party Statement on Bombing of Afghanistan

10/7/01

The Socialist Party U.S.A. stands in complete outrage at the actions of the US Government to bomb Kabul and other cities and towns in Afghanistan. This retribution is not and cannot be just. Instead this military aggression will only lead to more violence; endless cycles of retribution and war will again be in all our lives; innocent people will die; and we will be no better than the September 11 hijackers. Never in history has peace been obtained through war.

We are sorely disappointed, though hardly surprised, that the U.S. government's campaign of so-called "Infinite Justice" has not and probably will not be conducted in a court of international law. To do so would open the possibility of true justice, where all crimes against humanity - those conducted against the U.S.A. and those conducted by it - are prosecuted fairly.

We join socialists, anti-war and peace organizations, labor unions and all others worldwide in declaring our firm and passionate opposition to policies and actions that lead to war. The people of Afghanistan have never been, and will never be, our enemy.

National Action Committee Socialist Party USA
339 Lafayette Street, #303
New York, NY 10012
phone/fax: (212)982-4586
http://www.SocialistPartyUSA.org

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Rage against the war machine

BY EVELYN McDONNELL
emcdonnell@herald.com
Sunday, October 7, 2001
<http://www.miami.com/herald/content/features/digdocs/047005.htm>

When Ani DiFranco took the stage in Missoula, Mont., nine days ago, for her first show since Sept. 11, the outspoken artist found herself uncharacteristically searching for words.

"I didn't know what I was going to say," the 31-year-old singer, guitarist, and songwriter explained the next day. "I've been working on a long poem about the current state of affairs, but it's not done. It's not that my thoughts aren't formed; it's just that I'm very particular about my writing. I want to get it right.

"Then again, I relish the challenge of speaking off the cuff on stage. In true folk-singer tradition, once I got up there, I found I had plenty to say."

What DiFranco had to say would not make President Bush happy.

"I'm wary of the hypocritical reaction of, 'How could one human being do this to another?'that pie-eyed American innocence," DiFranco said, recounting her onstage remarks. "Where was that question before this happened? Americans have been perpetrating that kind of violence for years, especially in the Middle East.

"The battle cry for retribution is criminal, especially when we're standing here as a nation, looking retribution in the eye."

When the United States was at war in Vietnam, musicians helped lead the opposition at home with protest songs such as Blowing in the Wind, Give Peace a Chance and War. And now, with the nation gearing up for what will most likely be its biggest military operation since Vietnam, some current artists are starting to meet the noise of the war machine note for note.

Protests of the attack on America are morphing into protests of attacks from America. A remake of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On by 36 pop stars was originally recorded to raise awareness and money to combat AIDS in Africa.

But since Sept. 11, Gaye's words -- "There's too many of us dying . . . only love can conquer hate" have taken on new significance, and some funds raised from that effort are now being funneled to victims of the attacks in New York and Washington.

In the wake of so many deaths so close to home, many performers are finding they must find a way to express grief before they can articulate a response. Interviews with several musicians who have been politically active in the past revealed that most are finding messages of healing to be more resonant than cries of outrage.

And within those healing messages, artists are drawing direct connections between the violence perpetrated on America and violence elsewhere in the world, meeting complex political realities with their own educational missions.

"I think it is very important that we as Americans understand that people all over the world have suffered similar horror and humiliation," says Patti Smith in an e-mail interview. "This is not a time for indignant nationalism. This is a time to educate ourselves and to enter the world view."

Adds Tom Morello, guitarist for the band Rage Against the Machine: "The lesson we should take from this terrible loss of human life is it must never be allowed whether the victims are Americans or the victims are outside of our borders."

INITIAL REACTIONS

Like most people, musicians reacted to the events of Sept. 11 with disbelief, horror, fear and sadness.

"There's 6,000 bodies 15 blocks from my house," says Kathleen Hanna of the New York punk band Le Tigre. "I can't stop thinking about that."

"I had the wind knocked out of me," says Michael Franti of the Bay Area group Spearhead. "The first couple days I was listening to radio and watching TV a lot. Instantly I heard everyone politicizing the events, so I stopped watching and listening.

"I felt to politicize things so early, we would lose our sense of humanity.

It's important to stop and mourn and go through pain and sadness, so we would be guided by that voice of humanity and compassion." So Franti meditated. Morello gave blood and money. Hanna and DiFranco turned to song.

"I'm trying to write my feelings about it," says Hanna, who in the '90s fronted the pioneering "riot grrrl" band Bikini Kill. "The way to honor people is to keep on living, to totally appreciate the gift of being alive. I also want to write things about taking care of yourself and not going crazy."

Feelings of powerlessness were widespread, which only furthered the aims of the terrorists to frighten people into inaction. Those feelings can become tangled up with survivor's guilt: How can I go on doing what I'm doing when so many others can't?

"As an artist, I admit that I have to motivate myself and hold on to the belief that art is significant in times of tragedy," Smith says. "But when I re-examine the role of art and music and literature throughout history, as a respite, as a rallying force, and as a source of inspiration and healing, I am forced to marshal my energies and get back to work."

Getting back to work is both balm and directive, and several musicians spoke of their renewed commitment to combining activism with artistry. "Crisis fuels my will to work," DiFranco admits. "I'm out here yelling my head off anyway. It feels very important to be out touring. I'm looking forward to tapping into what this country is feeling. I had been feeling very isolated."

POP PATRIOTS

The wave of emotion and humanitarianism that has swept the United States is encouraging to artist-activists such as DiFranco, who sees it as a sign that the country can get serious about the role it plays in world events.

"We are a slightly more educated populace than the people who reacted to Pearl Harbor," DiFranco says. "We are drawing wonderful lessons from this: We are one people. Races dissolve into faces."

Others, however, fear a slide from national concern to nationalism, from patriotism to jingoism.

"There are two things to take away from this," Morello says.

"There's a tremendous feeling of unity and empathy for the victims. Suffering has been made real; this isn't a flood in Pakistan buried on page 38. There's never been more goodness coming to the surface.

"On the other hand, there's this barbarian bloodlust: 'We must soak our flag in blood to avenge this.' It is crucially important for there to be open and honest discussion of things going on in the world. There's a cycle of violence that America should not be part of."

CENSORSHIP?

Still, getting their message heard may be the protest singers' most difficult task since most of these artists operate outside the parameters of the mainstream music industry.

DiFranco sells hundreds of thousands of records on her Righteous Babe label, but she's not getting played on radio. Rage Against the Machine has enjoyed stunning success for a band with overt politics, yet after Sept. 11, it was singled out in an internal memo by the Clear Channel radio chain as an act program directors were warned about playing.

"That's one of the dangers of times like this; this horrible tragedy is being used as a pretext to silence dissident voices," Morello says. Since its existence was made public, Clear Channel has backed away from the blacklist, in sometimes Orwellian fashion.

A spokeswoman at the company's radio headquarters in Tennessee at first said there was "an in-house suggestive" to "use your discretion," then said "there was no list." After describing the directive as "verbal," she then said "nothing was said. There was nothing there."

Still, there are some "redemption songs," as Bob Marley called them, making the airwaves. They're being sung not just by the usual activist figures, but by such pop stars as Britney Spears, Nelly and Fred Durst.

Proceeds from the remake of What's Going On, which was recorded Sept. 5 and 7, were originally intended to help fight AIDS in Africa but after the terrorist attack on America, project coordinators Leigh Blake and Bono of the group U2 decided to earmark half the funds to the United Way's relief efforts; the artists agreed.

Now, what Blake calls "one of the most antiwar songs ever written" has been getting regular airplay at the same time the United States and its allies are preparing to go to war. "I don't think any artistic person wants war," says Blake, who has also supervised musical fundraisers with the Red Hot organization. "Who of that generation [many of the artists on the record are of draft age] wants war?

They want life. I interpret this song as: What is going on? What kind of world are we living in today?"

Come Together, a star-studded tribute to John Lennon at Radio City Music Hall that aired on TBS last week, is another event planned long ago that, in light of recent events, has taken a new meaning. "It is obvious to me that Give Peace a Chance is more applicable than ever," Smith says.

CAPITALIST TOOLS?

More radical activists see these benefit shows and records as feeding the war machine. Boots Riley of the self-professed Communist rap group The Coup criticizes the very nature of fundraisers. (The original album art for The Coup's new CD was changed after Sept. 11: It showed the band members blowing up the World Trade Center using a guitar tuner as a detonator.) "Who should be paying for the relief of the victims? Insurance companies.

Working-class people are being told we have to pay for this," says Riley, the son of a Black Panther lawyer.

Riley also criticizes the singing of America the Beautiful and the fact that the MTV-made video for What's Going On features American flags. "The flag is being used to rally people for war. They're turning that [song] into a commercial for war," he says.

"That's probably an argument coming from a cynic who feels very powerless," answers Blake. "People need a kind of camaraderie in these times. Friendship, patriotism, kindness and compassion are extremely important."

The hyperbolic rhetoric of activists such as Riley, who barely tempers his wide-ranging diatribe against America with expressions of sympathy for Americans killed, are pushing some listeners away.

Tristin Laughter is a publicist for Lookout! Records in Berkeley, a punk-rock label based in the lap of the American left. She lost a close friend Sept. 11 and the unsympathetic words of left-leaning writers such as Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky have only added to her upset.

"I have never felt more clearly my alienation from political movements in this country than I do now," she wrote in an e-mail to colleagues last week. "To analyze the causation of the terrorists' actions is to accept their violence as a legitimate political expression. I do not."

"I am also not into wrapping a stars-and-stripes bandanna around my head Willie Nelson-style and honking in unison with 10,000 Durangos while the Lynyrd Skynyrd/W. remix plays from my radio. I am sad, and I am lost."

BUILDING COALITIONS

In the past three weeks, some artists have become more sensitive than ever to the delicacy of the task of coalition building.

"As a communicator, I feel I have to be very aware of people's thoughts and feelings and where their political knowledge is at," Franti says. "If the goal is to move people toward peace, we can't push them off by showing hatred toward people who might think differently. It's hard when our nerves are so frayed and close to the surface. We must be mindful and compassionate for everyone."

Activists hope to learn from the mistakes of the '60s, when the war-resistance movement was seen as elitist.

"I don't want to see a duality happen where college-educated people are casting anyone who's waving a flag as a backwoods redneck, which is a totally classist way of thinking," says Hanna. "People are allowed to have different opinions. We need to have dialogue. The people who go over there to fight are going to have different opinions of what to do strategically. don't see a lot of rich lefty liberals signing up for service." The need for voices that speak to people's pain and confusion, instead of at them, may be greater than ever. While the artists interviewed at times slipped into the conventional lefty tropes slamming the media, blaming capitalism, generally, they spoke eloquently to the fears and uncertainties gripping the world.

"Protest songs at their best give voice to alternative responses to complex and painful subjects," Smith says. "Often, they reflect the more ompassionate and humanistic viewpoints and provide people with the words to express the best within them instead of the most reactive within them." Adds Blake: "We should be able to look to politicians at times like this, but we don't seem able to. Instead we turn to celebrities, who seem to speak our own language."

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Peace Rally in DC

Liberal Slant
By: Heiderose Kober
10/07/01
http://www.liberalslant.com/text.htm

I attended the Saturday rally and was amused by the slant in the media. At least there was some mention. I have attended rallies of thousands that never made any news in the mainstream media (e.g. Voter March May 19) while a protest against McCain by seven disappointed Republicans some months ago were deemed worthy of a whole article.

I was young and idealistic in the 60's and 70's and was touched by the earnestness of the young people at the rally. They did remind me of myself at that age. Sure, many are naive but their hearts are in the right place. And they have learned well! Remember, this generation grew up being taught from pre-school time onward that violence is wrong, peaceful coexistence is desirable, diversity is good, and different viewpoints are to be honored. As a mother and grandmother, I am proud to say that I did my share of teaching and living these ideals for the next generations.

I am greatly heartened by the ease with which these young people accept racial, cultural, and lifestyle differences. Despite their inexperience and untested convictions, they give me great hope for our country. Innocence has great power in this cynical world even though it is not always obvious. The media knows this too; the pictures of the protesters shot through lines of police in riot gear were deliberate attempts to criminalize the protesters, as were reports of the pepper spray incidents and arrests.

I did not see any of the protesters fall into the trap that was so clearly set for them. One counter-protester ran unchallenged through the marching crowd several times with a sign reading "Nuke them All and there won't be War." The marchers just shook their heads and ignored him. I made deliberate 'soft' eye contact with the police every chance I got (a technique that establishes a human bond and decreases the possibility of violent confrontations) and was rewarded many times with a response. Faces would lose their mask-like rigidity and many would even read my sign "Hate cannot drive out Hate; only LOVE can do that" a quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. Some shook their heads at me sadly (probably at my naivety), but it was a meaningful and peaceful exchange. It is not 'Us' versus 'Them' as our political leaders would want us to believe. We are all in this together. That was the message I experienced during the rally.

What I found most interesting was many critics' skepticism (the Guardian of London, 10/1/01, called it a "Mixed and Messy Message") of the idea that a myriad of left-leaning groups with very different agendas can come together in solidarity for a shared goal without requiring any group to give up its identity in the process. In that respect, the rally was an actual demonstration how different interest groups can act together meaningfully without resorting to coercive, intimidating, or exclusive behaviors. The respect, tolerance, and goodwill manifested by the young people who tirelessly facilitated the march were impressive! Well done!

Our greatest 'weapon' against violence will always be an actual demonstration that peace works! We can live that message in our families, our schools, our places of employment, our communities every day. Rallies such as the one in Washington are necessary when the cry for war drowns out the call for peace but we should not underestimate the impact of our everyday lives on world peace. Peace is not the absence of conflict; it is the active pursuit of solutions.

Violence is not a solution; it is defeat.

Heiderose Kober is a contributing writer for Liberal Slant

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Two Who Voted Against War, 60 Years Apart
No: The lonely stand against giving President Bush the power to act against terrorism recalls Rep. Jeannette Rankin, who was the one in December 1941.

By Theo Lippman Jr.
October 7, 2001;
Baltimore Sun

ONE IS THE loneliest number, especially when it's a high visibility congressional vote against a measure practically the whole nation supports - as was the case Sept. 14, when the House of Representatives voted 420 to 1 to give the president power to retaliate against the terrorist attacks on America. California Democrat Barbara Lee defended her lonely stand by saying that authorizing military force to stop terrorism wouldn't work, and "I felt let's not do anything that could escalate this madness out of control."

Being that out of step with public opinion can ruin a political career, but it can also be immortalizing. Take the case of Jeannette Rankin. Rankin was the lonely one in the House's 1941 vote of 388 to 1 for a declaration of war against Japan the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

It was the most dramatic of her many acts in support of pacifism, feminism and social justice in four years in Congress and seven decades as a lobbyist, advocate, organizer and protest leader.

Politically speaking, the 1941 vote was a disaster for Rankin, as had been her vote against the declaration of war against Germany in 1917. But today two private organizations bearing her name work for peace and the well-being of women, and a statue of her is on very prominent display in her home state.

Jeannette Pickering Rankin was born to a well-to-do Republican family near Missoula, Mont., in 1880. After stints as teacher and social worker, she worked for the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She rose in its ranks, and when Montana gave women the vote, she won a seat as the first woman in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The day she joined the House, President Woodrow Wilson asked for a declaration of war against Germany. The measure was sure to pass the House. Friends and family tried to talk her out of opposing it. Her fellow suffragists feared such a vote by the only woman in Congress would hurt the effort for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution giving women the vote nationally.

After a 14-hour debate, in which she did not participate, she said at roll call, "I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war. I vote no." The measure passed 374-50. She did not return to Congress after the 1918 election.

After the war, she became a delegate to the Women's International Conference for Peace and Justice, of which she became an officer. She spent much of her time in Washington, lobbying for her causes - for the Women's Peace Union and National Council for the Prevention of War, but also for such things as child labor laws for the National Consumers League.

She decided she needed an East Coast base. Tired of Montana winters, she settled in Georgia, near the state university and Brenau, a woman's college that gave her an appointment to a "Chair of Peace." Opponents labeled her a communist. She sued a newspaper that ran a story to that effect, winning a public apology and $1,000.

As the 1930s rolled on toward that famous date which lives in infamy, Rankin became involved with other pacifist efforts, including the Emergency Peace Campaign, which counted the Quakers among its principal patrons. She testified frequently before congressional committees, opposing military preparedness legislation.

In 1940, she announced she would run for Congress again back in Montana, as a Republican. She campaigned in high schools, urging students to ask their parents to oppose the nation's involvement in a new world war. She won.

Eleanor Roosevelt tried to get her to support Franklin D. Roosevelt. She refused. In February, May, June, October and November of 1941, she pushed unsuccessfully for legislation that would, among other things, require congressional approval for moving troops out of the hemisphere.

On Dec. 8, the House rushed through a declaration of war in less than an hour. She tried to speak against the measure on the floor, but she was blocked until the roll call vote reached her. "As a woman, I can't go to war," she said, "and I refuse to send anyone else."

She was booed - in the House that day, later in press and pulpit. Only a few voices saluted her "courage." Rankin was not re-elected in 1942. (Barbara Lee is unlikely to suffer that fate. Her district includes Oakland and Berkeley. Even critics of her vote have called it "heroic" and "an act of conscience.")

Throughout World War II, Rankin spoke against Roosevelt and his policies. She accused him of provoking the attack on Pearl Harbor. She traveled and spoke in the post-war years, but there was no peace movement to animate.

Vietnam changed that.

In 1968, at age 87, she accepted a request to lead a Women's Strike for Peace march on Congress. The marchers called themselves the Jeannette Rankin Brigade.

She remained active in her causes until her death in 1973.

Her spirit abides at the Jeannette Rankin Foundation in Georgia, which gives education grants to "mature, unemployed women workers," and at the Jeannette Rankin Peace Center in Missoula, which works "to teach the fundamental skills of peacemaking."

And she is one of the two Montanans chosen by the state to be honored with a statue in the Capitol's Statuary Hall Collection.


Theo Lippman Jr. is a retired editorial writer for The Sun.


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