------- Index of Articles

List of countries that America has bombed since second world war

NUCLEAR
Concern of a nuclear fallout from Bush's war against terrorism
Irradiation Explored As Answer to Anthrax
Sellafield attack 'could be worse than Chernobyl'
Air Force Awards TRW $215 Million Contract for ICBM Motors
China paid Laden for access to Cruise missiles
Russian Investigators Search Kursk
Counting Chernobyl's Cancer Cost
Chernobyl still chalking up cancer cases
Conn. Governor: State Needs Protection
NUCLEAR WASTE polluting Snake River drinking water
National Guard posted around Pilgrim
Nuke Plant War Games Alarmed Locals
Numatec Hanford continues on cleanup project
Global Command Considered

MILITARY
Bombing raids help Northern Alliance
Afghan death toll mounts as US hit civilian targets
Bombings that hit wrong targets in Afghanistan
Russia in multi-million arms deal with Northern Alliance
U.S. to Help Uzbekistan Clean Up Anthrax Site
Experts Plan for the Unthinkable: Biowarfare
GERM BANK SECURITY
CDC Criticized for Anthrax Outbreak
Even down on the farm, security tightens
Germ-warfare tests gone awry in spotlight
Police arrested an estimated 734,498 persons for marijuana in 2000
Drug Trade Resurgent in Afghanistan
UK Official: Ease Marijuana Laws
India Rejects Pakistani Bid for Talks, Citing Attack in Kashmir
Iraq Denies Link to Deadly U.S. Anthrax Cases
U.S. Calls for Israeli Withdrawal
Refugees grasp at bin Laden's words
Mideast Militants Urge Escalation of Conflict
Sharon Disregards U.S. Request to Withdraw Troops
Italy Offers U.S. Variety of Help
U.S. Warned Not to Strike During Ramadan
Two U.S. helicopters fired on over Pakistan
Militants Urge Supporters to Raid U.S. Air Base
U.S. spent more than the next seven leading military powers
Global command considered

OTHER
BP to build Singapore stations for hydrogen cars
Cree sign treaty with Quebec for hydro development
Mining world seeks natural remedy for toxic waste
Terrorism, the energy trap, and the way out
Drug firms reel in new medicines from the sea
As the Refugees Crowd the Borders
Former Air Force Analyst Indicted
'Brutality smeared in peanut butter'

ACTIVISTS
R.E.C.A. Rally in Gallup, NM - Oct 27, 2001
"March Against the Warmakers - March to the Drumbeat for Peace"
Thousands March for Peace in Israel
Anti-war MPs in Labour resent gag order
Pacifists are filing for CO status in growing numbers


-------

List of countries that America has bombed since second world war

http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,579196,00.html

... Here is a list of the countries that America has been at war with - and bombed - since the second world war:
China (1945-46, 1950-53),
Korea (1950-53),
Guatemala (1954, 1967-69),
Indonesia (1958),
Cuba (1959-60),
the Belgian Congo (1964),
Peru (1965),
Laos (1964-73),
Vietnam (1961-73),
Cambodia (1969-70),
Grenada (1983),
Libya (1986),
El Salvador (1980s),
Nicaragua (1980s),
Panama (1989),
Iraq (1991-99),
Bosnia (1995),
Sudan (1998),
Yugoslavia (1999).
And now Afghanistan....


-------- NUCLEAR

Concern of a nuclear fallout from Bush's war against terrorism
Pressuring Pakistan into us coalition may be perilous

Widespread anti-US sentiment in Islamic world's only nuclear power raises concerns about whose finger is on the nuclear trigger

Lebanese news
Ed Blanche Special to The Daily Star
Tuesday October 23, 2001
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/23_10_01/art21.htm

The last time the Americans got rough with Osama bin Laden, when Bill Clinton fired a no-warning broadside of 70 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the Saudi renegade's training camps in Afghanistan in August 1998, Washington had the foresight to send General Joseph Ralston, then deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to Islamabad so that when the missiles streaked in over Pakistan he was able to assure Pakistan's leaders that it wasn't a sneak pre-emptive attack by India.

That's how jumpy things are in that part of the world, even without the global convulsions triggered by the suicide attacks against the United States. The political fallout in the Middle East ­ which in geostrategic terms now embraces South and Central Asia ­ from a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would be immense and dangerous. If Ralston hadn't, in the words of one US official, been in Islamabad "hand-holding" the Pakistani leadership to keep them calm, the Tomahawks fired from US warships in the Arabian Sea could conceivably have triggered a nuclear exchange between the two long-time enemies on the subcontinent.

In that respect, not a lot has changed in the intervening three years ­ indeed, the conflict over divided Kashmir has intensified. This time around, in the aftermath of the apocalyptic terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the Americans have pressured Pakistan's military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, into joining the coalition against bin Laden and global terrorism, an enterprise fraught with peril for the Middle East.

Given the widespread anti-US sentiment in Islamic Pakistan, that could spell trouble for Musharraf, the worst-case scenario being an uprising against him which could leave the country's nuclear arsenal in the hands of Islamic militants. Already, hard-line Muslim clerics in Pakistan are calling for a jihad against the US in support of bin Laden.

Pakistan is the Islamic world's only nuclear power. Experts estimate that it has enough material for 20-30 warheads, although they doubt whether these have been tested enough for use in combat. India could have 40-50. The experts believe that Pakistan could be closer to weaponization ­ marrying a nuclear device to a delivery system, such as aircraft or missiles ­ because of its close ties to China.

The tit-for-tat nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in May 1998, and the fears of a nuclear arms race in South Asia it engendered, rekindled a deep sense of frustration among the Arabs and Iran over their impotence in the face of Israel's nuclear arsenal. Those tests left Israel as the only state universally believed to have such an arsenal but which has never acknowledged that it does.

Israel is believed to have 100-200 nuclear weapons ­ aerial bombs, missile warheads and mines. It has persistently refused to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which has been signed by most of the world. It rejects inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency and other safeguards. In the eyes of many arms control experts, it has by example encouraged the spread of nuclear weapons.

The Indian and Pakistani tests illuminated a chilling fact of life in the post-Cold War era: the greatest danger of atomic conflict is from the growing list of nuclear powers, and those aspiring to that status, in the Middle East and Asia. That includes Saddam Hussein's clandestine program which has not been subject to any scrutiny since UN weapons inspection teams were withdrawn nearly three years ago in December 1998.

Russia, which has become Iran's main source of arms, is building Iran's first nuclear reactor outside the northern Gulf port of Bushehr and a second is reported to be planned. On Oct. 17, Russia's deputy nuclear energy minister, Yevgeny Reshetnikov, said Moscow has provided Tehran with a feasibility study for yet another reactor and noted that Iran has been talking of three more without specifying any locations.

The Americans have long sought to pressure Moscow into abandoning construction of the $800 million Bushehr reactor, claiming Tehran will use the technology to develop nuclear weapons. But both Russia and Iran say the plant will be used to generate power and will be under regular international inspection. Nonetheless, the Israelis and the Americans believe that it is now just a matter of time before Iran does have nuclear weapons along with the ballistic missiles to carry them.

The guiding theory of non-proliferation efforts has been that the more states which acquire nuclear weapons, the more likely someone is to use them. But the lesson from the Indian and Pakistani tests in 1998, which took intelligence services the world over by surprise, is that any country with the basic scientific and technological infrastructure required to produce a nuclear weapon decides to do so, no one can stop it.

There have been persistent reports that Israel, fostered to a considerable degree over the years by the Central Intelligence Agency, has clandestinely aided India in its nuclear arms quest since the mid-1970s. There have been several exchanges of nuclear and missile scientists over the past two decades. Dr. A. J. P. Abdul Karam, head of India's Defense Research and Development Organization who is closely involved with New Delhi's nuclear and missile programs, visited Israel at least twice in 1996-97.

The defense and intelligence links between the two countries have been accelerating since Israel signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians in 1993 and opened diplomatic relations with New Delhi. India's prime minister, A. B. Vajpayee, is said to be enthusiastic about forging strong military links with Israel, much as Turkey has. After the 1998 tests, there were fears that Muslim Pakistan would help Muslim Iran in its alleged drive to acquire or develop nuclear weapons that would challenge Israel's monopoly. But as far as is known, that has not happened, in part because of Pakistan's support for, and Iran's opposition to, the Taleban. Pakistan no longer backs the Taleban but, at least while Musharraf remains in power and becomes dependent on the Americans, it is unlikely to change its policy regarding Iran.

But Pakistan also has strong links with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council states. It is unlikely that Islamabad would risk alienating its new benefactors in Washington by sharing nuclear technology with other Muslim states. But, again, that is contingent on Musharraf staying in power as Asia and the Middle East both face profound uncertainties in the months ahead.

--------

Irradiation Explored As Answer to Anthrax
Process Used on Food Could Be Adapted To Rid Mail of Pathogens, Industry Says

By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 23, 2001; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36218-2001Oct22.html

It's already done with chicken, spice, ground beef and baby bottle nipples.

The U.S. mail may be next.

And soon.

In the midst of the growing anthrax scare, the government is exploring the possibility that irradiation or other state-of-the-art sterilizing technology might be used to cleanse the mail of pathogens.

In the weeks since mailed anthrax bacteria have infected people in Florida, New York and Washington, experts have been scrambling to figure out how to kill the microbe before it reaches mail handlers or recipients.

Irradiation appears to be one of the most viable solutions, experts said.

A fairly extensive industry exists that uses irradiation to sanitize food and medical, hygiene and packaging supplies, often in bulk or in assembly line settings. And industry officials believe irradiation might safely sanitize the mail, too.

"That is being explored," U.S. Postal Service spokeswoman Sue Brennan said yesterday, adding that the agency did not want to divulge its strategy. "We are using the latest technology in targeted areas to ensure that the mail is safe."

Irradiation, for one, has been used in sterilization for decades.

"Irradiation is used for food to reduce pathogens and extend shelf life, and there is thinking now that irradiation does such a nice job . . . that maybe it can be applicable to mail also," said Jeffrey T. Barach, vice president for special projects at the National Food Processors Association.

"There is some evidence, and some strong evidence, that irradiating bacterial spores, whether they be food pathogens or anthrax spores, does a really nice job of destroying the spores so that they lose their pathogenicity," he said.

Although some scientists contend that the effects of radiation on food are not all known, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it is "a safe and effective technology that can prevent many food-borne diseases."

Disease-causing germs are reduced or eliminated, the CDC says, and the food does not become radioactive.

"In the case of mail," Barach said in an interview yesterday, "if there was some powdered bacterial spores in there, it would have the effect of basically killing them or sanitizing them.

"With food, you have the concern about taste and quality after the radiation effects," he said. "So, generally, fairly low doses of radiation are used on food products. With mail, of course, nobody tastes mail. You could give it fairly healthy dosages. It doesn't do anything to the mail. It certainly doesn't make the product radioactive or leave any residue. So the mail opener or handler would have no problems in handling the mail after that."

There are three main methods of irradiation, according to the CDC:

• Radiation given off by a radioactive substance such as Cobalt 60, which can penetrate food up to several feet deep and has been used for decades to sterilize medical and dental products.

• Electron beams, a nonradioactive but highly accelerated stream of electrons sprayed from an electron "gun." They do not penetrate as deeply and are also used to sanitize medical and hygienic products such as baby bottle nipples and sanitary napkins.

• X-ray radiation, a more potent version of the device used in hospitals and dental offices.

The latter two technologies are the kind that might be installed in a postal facility, "where mail could be passed along a conveyor belt and the treatment given in that regard," Barach said. The first one, using a radioactive substance, requires larger, static, concrete-reinforced facilities to which mail might be brought in bulk for treatment, he said.

Food Technology Service Inc., of Mulberry, Fla., outside Tampa, has been treating food products for several years, and its gamma ray "cell" can handle pallets of several thousand pounds, plant manager Jonathan Locke said yesterday.

He said the plant sanitizes poultry, ground beef and spices in a process that now takes about seven hours but can be reduced to three hours.

Barach said there are only a few food irradiation centers in the United States so far, "because it hasn't really caught on that much," but there are scores of facilities that use electron beams to sanitize medical equipment.

Several are operated by San Diego's Titan Corp. and its subsidiary, SureBeam Corp.

The companies' equipment produces "the total elimination of all pathogens" on medical products it sanitizes and partial sterilization on food products, where certain bacteria need to be retained, such as in milk, said spokesman Wil Williams.

The electron beam apparatus, which can be installed on an existing assembly line, can kill pathogens "in a matter of seconds," he said.

Asked whether the beam could kill anthrax, he replied, "Yes, anthrax bacteria and spores."

He declined to reveal whether the Postal Service was interested, saying only that in recent days, "we've talked to many government entities about this."

-------- britain

Sellafield attack 'could be worse than Chernobyl'

Paul Brown, environment correspondent
Tuesday October 23, 2001
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/nuclear/article/0,2763,578991,00.html

An EU report says an accident at Britain's Sellafield nuclear plant could cause greater damage than the Chernobyl explosion in Ukraine in 1986.

The report, leaked on the same day that MEPs in Strasbourg discussed safety at nuclear sites following the September 11 attacks, paints a harrowing picture of the disaster which could follow an accident in the high level waste tanks at the Cumbrian reprocessing plant.

Fears that the waste problem was worsening have led to the nuclear installations inspectorate temporarily closing the reprocessing works last month.

The inspectorate has frequently warned British Nuclear Fuels, which operates the plants, it could not allow the situation to continue with 1,550 cubic metres of high level liquid waste remaining untreated.

The report, compiled for the EU by environmental group Wise Paris before September 11, said events that could trigger an atmospheric release of high level radioactive waste at the plant included explosions and air crashes.

"The long term consequences of a release from the Sellafield high level waste tanks could be much greater than the consequences of the Chernobyl accident due to the large amounts of caesium-137 and other radioisotopes in the tanks," it said.

The Chernobyl nuclear accident exposed 5m Europeans to increased levels of radiation. Hundreds of children in Russia and the Ukraine have cancer as a result.

The report said some emissions from Sellafield had contained radiation in excess of levels recommended both by the EU and under the Ospar convention for the protection of the marine environment in the northeast Atlantic.

Britain's decision this month to expand Sellafield with the commissioning of a mixed oxide (MOX) plant provoked protest in Ireland, which has long campaigned for the closure of facilities there.

The Irish government has launched legal proceedings under EU law, and is considering a claim under the United Nations convention on law of the sea. Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have also launched a case against the government but in the UK high court.

A spokeswoman for the Irish government department with responsibility for nuclear matters said it had not yet obtained a copy of the report.

"However, if media reports prove to have substance then it further justifies the Irish government's legal action against the British authorities," she said.

The report, Possible toxic effects from the nuclear reprocessing plants at Sell afield (UK) and Cap de la Hague (France), compiled for the EU's scientific and technological assessment committee, has not been published.

The committee is expected to meet in Strasbourg today to hear independent views before making a decision on whether to release it.

Irish Green party MEP Nuala Ahern said the closed nature of the meeting was highly irregular. "I'm going to stand up in the [European] parliament and say I have a copy, I believe it should be released to members and anyone who wants it I'm prepared to give it to them," she said.

In the parliament in Strasbourg yesterday, Green MEP Caroline Lucas called for anti-aircraft measures, no-fly and offshore exclusion zones to be established at nuclear power stations and reprocessing facilities in the EU, particularly at Sellafield and La Hague.

Dr Lucas said: "After September 11, all nuclear facilities must be shut down as rapidly as possible. Operations like reprocessing at Sellafield were never constructed with a terrorist attack in mind...

"If a plane crashed into ... Sellafield, it has been calculated that it would release 44 times as much radioactivity as the Chernobyl disaster, and could cause more than 2m cancers," she said.

-------- business

Air Force Awards TRW $215 Million Contract for ICBM Motors

Clearfield
Oct 23, 2001
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/icbm-01l.html

The U.S. Air Force this month awarded TRW Inc. (NYSE: TRW) a $215 million contract to begin the full-rate production phase of the ICBM propulsion replacement program (PRP).

This is the first of six full-rate production options to be exercised by the Air Force ICBM Systems Project Office at Hill Air Force Base, Utah. Total value of the PRP production program is $1.56 billion over eight years.

This award follows a September Milestone III decision by the Air Force Acquisition Executive to proceed with PRP based on a successful low-rate initial production (LRIP) contract, managed by TRW, that demonstrated the readiness of the program to move forward.

"The successful performance of our booster modernization program over the past several years has assured the Air Force it can move forward with full- rate production," said Dr. Donald C. Winter, president and chief executive officer, TRW Systems.

"TRW and its propulsion contractor teammates will continue to deliver 607 PRP solid rocket motor sets to the Air Force by 2008 to replace the aging propulsion systems in the nation's fleet of Minuteman III missiles."

The PRP program is designed to replace aging solid-rocket motors in the Minuteman III force with remanufactured motors to maintain alert readiness status through 2020. Under the completed PRP Technology Insertion contract, which preceded the LRIP phase, two flight tests were conducted by the Air Force with remanufactured Minuteman III boosters.

In October 1999, TRW entered a low-rate initial production contract with the Air Force to deliver 42 remanufactured motor sets -- or stages 1, 2, and 3 -- the first of which was deployed to Malmstrom Air Force Base in April 2001.

Under contract to TRW, Alliant Technology (ATK) Thiokol Propulsion Co., and Pratt & Whitney's Chemical Systems Division (CSD) formed a joint-venture propulsion team to produce the motors. Thiokol and CSD are remanufacturing the motors, replacing the propellant and obsolete or environmentally unsafe materials and components.

Under its ICBM prime contract, TRW is also responsible for managing the Guidance Replacement Program (GRP), together with its teammate The Boeing Company. GRP, which went into full-rate production in December 1999, extends the life of the Minuteman III guidance system.

TRW's other ICBM responsibilities include the Propulsion System Rocket Engine Life Extension Program, an effort that will refurbish the liquid propulsion stage (4th stage) of the Minuteman III missile to extend its life beyond 2020; and the Minuteman Minimum Essential Emergency Communication Network program to upgrade launch control communication.

Since 1954, TRW has served as systems engineering and technical advisor to the Air Force in managing the ICBM fleet. In December 1997, TRW's role changed as it won the prime integration contract, which reflected major changes in the management of the fleet.

Previously, the ICBM Systems Project Office at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, directed a number of associate contractors that provided various elements of the ICBM system; TRW provided technical support to the SPO. Under the new contract -- now underway for nearly 4 years -- TRW is the prime contractor managing the total ICBM system and the integrated team of contractors.

TRW provides advanced technology products and services for the aerospace, information systems and automotive markets. The company, which is celebrating its 100th year of operation during 2001, had year-end 2000 sales of $17.2 billion.

-------- china

China paid Laden for access to Cruise missiles

Times of India,
October 23, 2001
http://www.timesofindia.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=1464089578

LONDON: China paid suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden several million dollars for access to unexploded US cruise missiles following an attack on his bases three years ago, according to a newspaper report here on Saturday.

The newspaper reported that an alleged senior agent of bin Laden's al-Qaeda network in Europe told an associate, in a secretly taped conversation, that Chinese businessmen had paid $10 million to study the missiles.

Bin Laden is the prime suspect of the September 11 terrorist assault on New York and Washington which claimed the lives of some 5,500 people. Following the 1998 attack, carried out in reprisal for the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, reports suggesting China had acquired two unexploded Tomahawk missiles were attacked as "groundless" by Beijing, the broadsheet said.

The report came the day after US President George W. Bush, in a joint press conference with Chinese President Jiang Zemin, welcomed the Asian nation's "firm commitment" to the war on terrorism, although Beijing has yet to explicitly endorse the US-led campaign.

The report said that on March 9, a 32-year-old Libyan terrorist suspect met the head of al-Qaeda's Italian cell, Sami Ben Khemais, in a Milan flat and told him of China's involvement in the missiles.

The suspect, who was arrested in Munich on Wednesday at the request of the Italian authorities in connection with al-Qaeda, told ben Khemais: "With these weapons, he (bin Laden) has boosted his financial resources. From every part of the world businessmen who hate Americans have come to study American missile strategy.

"In particular, businessmen have come from China. He works a great deal with China. He's got good relations with them," added the suspect, named ben Heni by the paper.

The newspaper said that unknown to the two men, the flat had been bugged by Italian anti-terrorist officers. ( AFP

-------- russia

Russian Investigators Search Kursk

October 23, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Nuclear-Submarine.html?searchpv=aponline

MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia's top prosecutor led investigators Tuesday onto the deck of the nuclear submarine Kursk, hoping to find new clues to what caused the vessel to explode and sink more than a year ago.

Crew members on the barge that lifted the submarine from the Barents Sea floor and towed it to a floating dock in Roslyakovo, near the Arctic port Murmansk, lowered wreaths into the water to honor the Kursk's 118 dead.

The Giant-4 barge then headed away as the Kursk was raised to the point where its conning tower, with its shattered glass windows and red Russian eagle seal, could be seen above water.

With the Kursk fully out of the water, Prosecutor-General Vladimir Ustinov, top Navy officials and a team of about 40 investigators observed a moment of silence before stepping onto the submarine's deck. The first on board was Lt. Gleb Lyachin, the son of Kursk's late captain Gennady Lyachin.

``What we did is called examining the site,'' Ustinov said later.

Investigators who enter the vessel will have to wear gas masks, since toxic gases have built up in the submarine during its 14 months at the bottom of the sea following its sinking during naval maneuvers in August 2000, ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, who is responsible for the Kursk salvage operation, said that it would take up to three days to dry out the submarine for an internal inspection, the Interfax news agency reported.

Navy officials have said they expect to find only 30 to 40 bodies when they enter the submarine, with the rest likely pulverized by the explosion. Twelve bodies were recovered by divers when the Kursk was still on the sea floor.

Klebanov dampened expectations of what the investigation could reveal, saying ``nothing new will be found in the raised submarine'' that could help ``in understanding the causes of the Kursk catastrophe,'' Interfax reported.

Many Russian and foreign experts have said the initial explosion was sparked by an internal malfunction, but government officials say the Kursk may have collided with another vessel or World War II mine.

The submarine was raised and towed to shore in a risky, complicated operation that cost the Russian government some $65 million. The submarine's shattered first compartment, where the torpedoes were located and which may contain vital clues to the cause of the disaster, was cut off and left at the bottom of the sea for collection next year, if possible.

Klebanov said that the plan to lift the first compartment would be ready by the end of November, Interfax reported. Russian officials have said the Navy would handle the operation on its own, but Klebanov said foreign companies might be asked to take part as they did in the lifting of the submarine.

-------- ukraine

Counting Chernobyl's Cancer Cost

October 23, 2001
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/oct2001/2001L-10-23-02.html

LISBON, Portugal, Chernobyl has made medical history, accounting for the largest group of human cancers associated with a known cause on a known date, ECCO 11, the European Cancer Conference heard in Lisbon today.

Nearly 2,000 cases of thyroid cancer have been linked to the world's worst nuclear accident which occurred in Ukraine on April 26, 1986, and the number is still rising, according to some of the world's most prestigious cancer researchers.

Professor Dillwyn Williams, of The Strangeways Research Laboratory, Cambridge University, told the meeting, "Four years after the accident, an excess of thyroid cancers was noted among children who had been exposed to fall-out from the disaster. That increase has continued and new cases are still being seen in those who were children at the time of the accident."

One of the thousands of rescue workers who helped in the immediate aftermath of the accident. (Photos courtesy Chernobyl Charity Online)

Dr. Elaine Ron, of the U.S. National Cancer Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland, explained, "Following external radiation exposure, the elevated risk of thyroid cancer appears to continue throughout life, but there is some indication that the risk may be highest 15 to 19 years after exposure."

External radiation is the only well established cause of cancer of the thyroid gland. People under 20 are at a increased risk of thyroid cancer after exposure to isotopes of iodine.

Professor Williams said, "Exposure to isotopes of iodine gives the thyroid over a 1,000 times the average dose to the rest of the body. The particular sensitivity of children to thyoid cancer after radiation exposure can be linked to a combination of a higher thyroid dose and the biology of thyroid growth which falls to a very low level in adult life. Few of the patients with thyroid cancer have died, but help is still needed."

The United Nations marked the 15th anniversary of the disaster with an appeal for aid for the victims of radiation. According to one report, five million people in the former Soviet Union were exposed to radiation or other health hazards by the Chernobyl catastrophe.

On April 25, 1986, the reactor crew at Chernobyl-4 disabled automatic shutdown mechanisms before an attempted test of the unit the next day. The test was intended to determine how long turbines would spin and supply power following a loss of main electrical power supply.

Chernobyl's 4th reactor after the explosion and fire.

During the test, as flow of coolant water to the reactor was reduced, power output increased. When the operator moved to shut down the reactor from an unstable condition arising from previous errors, a power surge took place.

The nuclear fuel elements ruptured, and the resulting explosive force of steam lifted off the cover plate of the reactor, releasing radioactivity into the atmosphere. A second explosion threw out fragments of burning fuel and graphite from the reactpr core and allowed air to rush in, causing the graphite moderator to burst into flames.

The graphite burned for nine days, causing the main release of radioactivity into the environment.

Although only 31 people died in the immediate aftermath of the accident, hundreds of thousands were reported to have abandoned entire cities and settlements within the 30 kilometre (20 mile) zone of extreme contamination.

Dr. Williams said, "The effects of Chernobyl differed very greatly from those after the atomic bomb explosions. In Japan, the exposure was very largely to whole body radiation from gamma rays and neutrons. After Chernobyl the exposure was to isotopes in fall-out, and apart from the inert gas xenon, the largest components were radioactive isotopes of iodine."

Post Chernobyl cancer risks are not restricted to the thyroid gland, the meeting was told. Victor Chizhikov, of the Cancer Research Center, Kashirskoye, Moscow, reported that a study of former 43 Chernobyl clean-up workers had shown them to be at a significantly increased risk of lung cancer. All of the 36 smokers and seven non-smokers in the study group had evidence of inhaled radioactive dust in their lungs. They were compared to a control group of 21 smokers and 23 non-smokers who had never been exposed to radiation.

ECCO, the European Cancer Conference, is one of the world's major multidisciplinary cancer conferences, providing a platform for interaction and exchange between experimental and clinical oncologists and cancer nurses.

The conference is organized every two years by the Federation of European Cancer Societies for and on behalf of its six member societies.

--------

Chernobyl still chalking up cancer cases

10/23/2001
UPI
by Kelly Hearn in Washington
http://www.upi.com/print.cfm?StoryID=23102001-043154-4331r

LISBON, Portugal, Oct. 23 -- Some 2,000 cases of thyroid cancer trace a causal line to the Chernobyl nuclear incident in the former Soviet Union, and that number is still rising, medical experts said today.

Professor Dillwyn Williams, of The Strangeways Research Laboratory in Cambridge University, England, told medical professionals gathered at the European Cancer Conference in Lisbon, 15 years after Soviet citizens fled massive radioactive fallout from the Ukrainian plant, health effects are still taking a toll.

"This incident represents the largest group of human cancer of one type being associated with a known cause on a known date," Williams told United Press International in a telephone interview.

Williams said four years after the accident doctors noted a marked increase in thyroid cancer in exposed children. Today, many cases still arise in individuals who were children at the time of the accident.

Williams said Japanese citizens exposed to atomic attacks during World War II showed cancer in many organs but exposure to isotopes of iodine -- as was the case in Chernobyl -- effects mostly the thyroid, giving it "over a 1000 times the average dose" than the rest of the body receives.

External radiation is the only established source of thyroid cancer.

Radioactive iodine is harmful to people who are very young, typically less than 1 year old, and sensitivity to it falls dramatically with increasing age at time of exposure, Williams said.

"By the time people get to be adults it is debatable whether there is any risk at all," said Williams, who pointed out that for older patients, radioactive iodine is actually used as a therapy for certain thyroid conditions.

Iodine concentrates in the thyroid gland, which produces thyroxin, an iodine-containing hormone.

"There are two reasons why children are affected more," said Bruce Napier, chairman of the National Cancer Institute's bi-national advisory board on Chernobyl studies. "First is that radio nucleotides tend to have the biggest effect on cells that are dividing, so children's cells are obviously more sensitive because they are dividing. Second, children tend to drink more milk, which is a pathway for iodine. The (radio nucleotides) fall to the ground and cows consume it."

Williams said the Chernobyl reactor 15 years ago spewed into the air its deadly cargo of xenon, iodine and cesium. But heavy isotopes, such as uranium and plutonium, remain in the reactor, which today has cracks in it that are "so large sparrows can fly through them."

He stressed his study of thyroid cases "should not be regarded as an experimental study. These are real people who have real problems and economies that need help."

Only 31 people died in the immediate aftermath of the accident but one United Nations study said 5 million people in the former Soviet Union ultimately suffered exposures or other health ramifications.

"The international community still needs to monitor all other possible health effects of Chernobyl because we mustn't assume thyroid is going to be the only effect," said Williams.

One effort to do so is a four-facility international tumor bank "so tissue that is otherwise thrown away is kept so researchers across the world can study it," said Williams. Those banks are supported by the National Cancer Institute in the United States, the European Union, the World Health Organization and a Tokyo, Japan-based funding entity known as Sasakawa. Researchers from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine also contribute to the program, which is administered from Cambridge.

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

-------- connecticut

Conn. Governor: State Needs Protection

October 23, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Briefs.html?searchpv=aponline

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) -- Gov. John G. Rowland says southeastern Connecticut is so packed with military, industrial and nuclear sites that it needs federal protection against potential terrorist attacks.

Rowland said Monday he that would ask federal Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, who is in charge of the Federal Aviation Administration and the Coast Guard, to create a ``special security zone'' in the region.

The governor specifically is requesting surveillance of air traffic near the Millstone Power Station, home to two working nuclear reactors and one that has been shut down, and increased marine patrols by the Coast Guard.

The security zone also would provide protection to such potential targets as the U.S. submarine base, the Electric Boat shipyard, Pfizer pharmaceutical, the Coast Guard Academy and Plum Island, where scientists study some of the world's most infectious animal viruses.

The governor repeated that he won't be sending National Guard troops to guard Millstone, even though governors in New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts and Vermont have ordered the Guard to patrol plants in those states. ``If Millstone or a pharmaceutical company lacked presence outside, then hire security guards or hire state police,'' Rowland said.

-------- idaho

NUCLEAR WASTE
polluting Snake River drinking water for 200,000 people

The Progressive Review <news@prorev.com>
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001
http://prorev.com/bb.htm

NUCLEAR WASTE DUMPED at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory is polluting the Snake River Plain aquifer, the primary source of drinking water for 200,000 people, according to a new report by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, which warns that this important water resource faces further contamination from the migration of long-lived radionuclides and hazardous chemicals from nuclear weapons production wastes buried at the site. The Snake River Plain aquifer is the largest unified aquifer in the western United States and the most important underground water resource in the northwestern U.S. "For fifty years, nuclear weapons production has resulted in large quantities of radioactive and hazardous chemical waste being injected directly into the aquifer, discharged into surface ponds, or dumped into shallow pits and trenches," said Dr. Arjun Makhijani, principal author of the report and president of IEER. "These contaminants pose a serious threat to the lifeblood of the region, the Snake River Plain aquifer." According to the report, official US government data indicate that more than one metric ton of plutonium, packaged in nothing more than cardboard boxes, wooden boxes, or 55 gallon drums, was dumped into shallow trenches on the site in the 1950s and 1960s. Rain, snow, and occasional flooding of the trenches have already caused migration of some radioactive and hazardous materials towards, and in some cases into, the aquifer. Evidence has existed for more than 25 years that these long-lived radionuclides are migrating through the vadose zone to the aquifer much faster than anticipated.

REPORT http://www.ieer.org/reports/poison/toc.html

-------- massachusetts

NUCLEAR SECURITY
National Guard posted around Pilgrim

By David Arnold, Globe Staff,
10/23/2001
Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/296/metro/National_Guard_posted_around_Pilgrim+.shtml

Twenty members of the Massachusetts National Guard reported for duty yesterday afternoon at the Pilgrim nuclear power plant in Plymouth to beef up security at the 1,600-acre facility.

''We had had a problem with public perception. Panic had set in that the plant was vulnerable,'' said state Senator Therese Murray of Plymouth. ''I'm talking about reasonable people getting very nervous.''

Murray said that when the FBI issued a statement Oct. 12 warning that more terrorist attacks might be imminent, her telephones at work and home ''lit up'' with frightened callers.

So early last week, she and Plymouth town officials wrote to the governor's office requesting that National Guardsmen be posted at the 29-year-old Pilgrim plant, the state's only nuclear generator. On Friday, Acting Governor Jane M. Swift agreed to the request, according to Eleanor Beth, Plymouth town manager.

''We are pleased there is some extra attention being paid to Pilgrim,'' Beth said.

The soldiers, assigned to the 42d Infantry Division Artillery from Rehoboth, will patrol around- the-clock in five shifts of four members each. They are not permitted inside the perimeter fence without an escort, according to David Tarantino, a spokesman for Entergy Corp., which purchased the plant in 1998.

How long the assignment will last remains unclear. The cost is included in a $1.4 million appropriation for National Guard personnel serving throughout the state, which Swift signed yesterday as part of a $26.5 million supplemental budget.

Ratepayers will not be charged, according to Tarantino, because Pilgrim is a deregulated utility that makes flat-rate, long-term contracts with power retailers.

''I will say this: While the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] charges us with maintaining our own security, there's no NRC mandate making us responsible for defending against acts of war,'' Tarantino said. While welcoming the National Guard, he said he has confidence in the private security company already hired to protect the plant.

''My frustration is always that I cannot detail just how good the security is, because I would be giving away secrets,'' Tarantino said.

Last March, the plant successfully fended off a mock surprise attack by former Navy SEALS assigned to find weaknesses in the defenses of nuclear power stations.

The Pilgrim plant sits in close proximity to highly sophisticated radar facilities on Cape Cod that can spot submarine missile launches. Boaters are not allowed within a 500-yard buffer zone off the coast.

''We are trying to institute a no-fly zone overhead,'' Murray said. ''Pilgrim already has a fairly good security system in place.''

State lawmakers today will address another concern about Pilgrim safety when they consider a bill that would require state health officials to make hundreds of thousands of potassium iodide pills available to Bay State residents living and working within 10 miles of nuclear plants. The bill would apply to an estimated 112,000 people around Pilgrim, 85,000 near the Seabrook, N.H., plant and another 28,000 near Vermont Yankee in Vernon, Vt.

Potassium iodide is touted by some as a way to protect people from radiation in the event of an accident or attack at a nuclear plant.

Material from the Associated Press was included in this report.

-------- south carolina

Nuke Plant War Games Alarmed Locals

October 23, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Mock-Attack.html?searchpv=aponline

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- A special operations mock attack on a nuclear power plant just days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks alarmed officials in two states because the military didn't notify them.

The unannounced exercise included soldiers rappelling from helicopters and small arms fire around the Duke Energy Co.'s Catawba Nuclear Power Plant at York, S.C.

A Duke Energy spokesman said Monday the company still doesn't know what was going on.

``We were not part of an exercise and there was no contact made with the station,'' said Joseph Maher.

Fighter jets from Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina were scrambled to check out reports of an assault on the North Carolina-South Carolina state line, The News & Observer in Raleigh reported Tuesday.

Later that night, the North Carolina Division of Emergency Management's command center in Raleigh received unconfirmed information that it had been a U.S. military special forces operation, according to a report made available Monday.

The Department of Defense apparently forgot to advise regional authorities of the exercise, North Carolina emergency management reported.

``This could have been a catastrophic event,'' the emergency management report said.

Word of the exercise began about 8 p.m. Sept. 15, when people called Rock Hill police to say four or five helicopters were flying low near Interstate 77, following the Catawba River north toward the nuclear power plant. City police officers saw the aircraft in the distance but couldn't identify them, police Capt. Charles Cabaness said.

The county's emergency operations center couldn't reach the helicopters on any radio channel, and learned that air traffic controllers at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport couldn't reach them, either.

By midnight, eight state and federal agencies, including the FBI, had been notified and were looking into the scare.

Carolina Power & Light security personnel also monitored the situation, concerned that there might be security breaches at other nuclear plants. Duke and CP&L have nuclear plants in both states.

By 5 a.m., FBI agents told local officials they had determined the power plant was not under attack, according to the report.

Maj. Gary Kolb, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, said the helicopters were not from that base or involved in any exercise there. He said Army special forces normally notify regional civilian authorities ahead of any urban training.

Some law enforcement and emergency management officials are concerned about not being notified, especially on the heels of the attacks in New York and Washington.

``It wasn't a good time for the military to do whatever they were doing,'' said Cotton Howell, York County's emergency management director. ``Their timing was real bad.''

------ washington

Numatec Hanford continues on cleanup project

Hanford News
Tue, Oct 23, 2001
By Wendy Culverwell
Herald staff writer
http://www.hanfordnews.com/2001/1023.html

Numatec Hanford Corp. will continue to support CH2M Hill Hanford Group's work at the Hanford tank farm under a five-year contract extension approved a week ago.

The new contract is worth about $50 million.

Numatec Hanford has worked with CH2M Hill, the lead contractor, on the tank farm cleanup project for two years. In that time, the companies have worked on safety issues, including pumping wastes from single-shell tanks to double-shelled ones and began work on a system to feed the waste to the future vitrification plant for treatment.

In extending the contract, CH2M Hill officials gave Numatec Hanford its highest rating for its performance during the last year. Numatec exceeded expectations in safety, quality, innovation, keeping to a schedule and cost-effectiveness.

Dale Allen, senior vice president of operations for CH2M Hill, said Numatec brings welcome technical expertise as well as knowledge of the commercial nuclear industry.

Allen credited the company with reducing costs and developing new technologies to ease work in the complex tank farms.

For example, Numatec Hanford was one of the agencies that worked on a backhoelike robot that operates in the 600 radioactive pits that serve to connect the underground tanks at the 200 Area.

The robot device, or "pit viper," was created to minimize the need for human workers to operate at the pit's edges -- an arduous process since the pits are so contaminated and workers must be cycled through quickly to keep their exposure at less than 500 millirem per year.

Though costly to build, officials believe the pit robots could save money.

The contract extension will keep Numatec on the job through the end of September 2006. The company is a subsidiary of Cogema, a French nuclear company, and was formed as part of the Project Hanford Management Contract in 1996. It supports Fluor Hanford and CH2M Hill.

CH2M Hill is the contractor charged by the Department of Energy's Office of River Protection with managing about 53 million gallons of highly radioactive and hazardous waste stored in 177 underground tanks at the Hanford site's 200 area.

The wastes eventually will be vitrified -- or transformed into glass under extreme heat. While tank farm managers work to ready wastes for shipment to the plant, another contractor is gearing up to build the $4 billion project. Bechtel National Inc. started working on the plant project in March.

-------- us nuc politics

Global Command Considered

by Rowan Scarborough
The Washington Times
October 23, 2001
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20011023-30744658.htm

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is considering creation of a global command to fight a lengthy war on terrorism, a sure sign that the Pentagon is contemplating covert combat in countries other than Afghanistan.

Administration officials say Mr. Rumsfeld has met several times with Gen. Charles R. Holland, who heads U.S. Special Operations Command, about forming a command or centering the anti-terrorism effort at the general's headquarters at McDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla.

Giving Gen. Holland, or another four-star officer, command of the anti-terror war would avoid shifting responsibility from commander to commander as anti-terror operations move from region to region. The principal war-fighting commanders, known as commanders in chief, or cincs, are assigned their own turf, such as Pacific or European command.

The Bush administration is in the early stages of discussing covert intelligence operations or actions by U.S. commandos, or their foreign surrogates, around the world. These actions likely would not come until President Bush meets his first objective: ousting the ruling Taliban in Afghanistan and eliminating Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network.

The locations include:

• South America - The administration is collecting evidence of al Qaeda operatives involved in cocaine trafficking in Paraguay and Colombia. Islamic fundamentalist cells are operating in a tri-border area of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. Evidence has been found of al Qaeda members in this no man's land, a senior administration official says.

• Philippines - Anti-government Abu Sayyaf terrorists are linked to bin Laden. Options discussed include an all-out conventional attack, the use of special operations troops or asking a surrogate to do the job. One candidate is Australia's Special Air Service, which has seen, or will see, action in Afghanistan.

The United States believes the Philippines serves as home to scores of al Qaeda foot soldiers. Philippines President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo vigorously supports America's war on terrorism, but is cool to the idea of allowing U.S. commandos to fight Abu Sayyaf. The Philippines government does want American training and advanced equipment.

U.S. military advisers have visited the Philippines to assess the capabilities of forces fighting the rebels.

• Iraq - Some Pentagon officials, notably Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, are advocating going after dictator Saddam Hussein. Saddam has not been directly linked to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, but the State Department lists Baghdad, which plotted to kill former President George Bush in 1993, as a state sponsor of terrorism.

Administration officials said several Rumsfeld aides believe the armed forces need an anti-terrorist commander for a war that may last for decades.

"This is a global war on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction," Gen. Richard B. Myers, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, told ABC this week. "So Afghanistan is only one small piece. So of course we're thinking very broadly. I would say since World War II we haven't thought this broadly about a campaign."

The Air Force general added, "I think this is going to be a long, hard-fought conflict. And it will be global in scale. And it won't be, as I mentioned earlier, it won't be just military. It's going to be all the instruments of our national power, with our friends and allies. And the fact that it could last several years or many years, or maybe our lifetimes, would not surprise me." Some Pentagon officials are leery of a global anti-terrorism commander in chief. They fear the position would stir up turf battles among the regional cincs, who do not want to see a commander invade their turf and oversee a military operation.

A senior congressional defense staffer said if Mr. Rumsfeld wants a new war-fighting commander in chief, he will need to change the law. "I don't think Congress says no," the aide said.

"He's trying to figure out how to bridge across the cincs, but the cincdoms may not allow that," the source said. "They're protective of their turf."

Gen. Holland already is playing a large role in planning the commando war against the Taliban and al Qaeda. Afghanistan falls in a geographic area belonging to U.S. Central Command and its head, Army Gen. Tommy Franks, who is directing the overall campaign.

Gen. Holland's command oversees just a fraction of the force - 46,000 special operations troops in the Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps. But, since Mr. Bush's war on terrorism often will call on commandos, the general's influence has grown since Sept. 11.

He is a career Air Force special operations aviator. In Vietnam, he flew the AC-130 gunship now being used extensively over Afghanistan to hit Taliban and al Qaeda troops.

Victoria Clarke, spokeswoman for Mr. Rumsfeld, said discussion of an anti-terrorism command is one option discussed as the defense secretary studies ways to reorganize the entire commander in chief system for 21st-century threats, such as terrorism.

The fact that many secret military operations lie ahead is one reason Mr. Rumsfeld has preached operational security to his personnel at the Pentagon and in the field.

Mr. Wolfowitz on Thursday sent a memo to senior officials throughout the department urging personnel to watch what they say.

Titled "Operations Security Throughout the Department of Defense," the Oct. 18 memo states, in part, "It is vital that Defense Department employees, as well as persons in other organizations that support DoD, exercise great caution in discussing information related to DoD work, regardless of their duties. Do not conduct any work-related conversations in common areas, public places, while commuting, or over unsecured electronic circuits. Much of the information we use to conduct DoD's operations must be withheld from public release because of its sensitivity. If in doubt, do not release or discuss official information except with other DoD personnel."


-------- MILITARY

-------- afghanistan

Bombing raids help Northern Alliance

October 23, 2001
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011023-285148.htm

U.S. warplanes are stepping up attacks against frontline Taliban forces near troops of the opposition Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, defense officials said yesterday.

Bombing raids near Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul are part of a strategy to oust the ruling Taliban regime, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters, as warplanes struck Afghanistan for a 16th day.

Mr. Rumsfeld said bombing in support of Northern Alliance forces will help "destroy Taliban and al Qaeda forces."

"It happens that they are arrayed against, for the most part, Northern Alliance forces north of Kabul and in the northwest portion of the country. And our efforts from the air, clearly, are to assist those forces on the ground in being able to occupy more ground," he said.

The defense secretary appeared to give a green light to opposition forces to advance on the Taliban, which has about 40,000 troops.

Asked if U.S. forces had been holding back Northern Alliance troop advances, Mr. Rumsfeld said: "We have been ready, and we certainly are ready to have the alliance forces move both north and south.

"The pieces are being worked on, but I think it would be premature to say they're falling into place," Mr. Rumsfeld said of the overall efforts to defeat al Qaeda terrorists and the ruling Taliban militia.

"There are a lot of people who are working on them," he said. "The reality is that we believe very strongly that the threat to the world has not disappeared and that the sooner the al Qaeda and Taliban forces are dealt with, the sooner the threat will begin to moderate. And, therefore, we're not holding back at all."

Mr. Rumsfeld said the Northern Alliance is a loose group of separate elements with "somewhat consistent interests."

"The United States and the coalition forces have, for a period of days, been seeking out concentrations of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "We have had uneven success. To the extent we have excellent ground-to-air coordination, the success improves. To the extent that some of the forces move forward against Taliban and al Qaeda forces, our success improves because it flushes them."

Mr. Rumsfeld denied reports from Afghanistan that two U.S. helicopters were shot down by Taliban forces, and he said there is no evidence to support Taliban claims that U.S. forces bombed a hospital, killing about 100 people.

The defense secretary declined to say whether the United States would scale back military operations during the monthlong Muslim religious holiday of Ramadan, which begins in mid-November.

"We have great respect for the views and concerns of the many countries that are cooperating in this effort," he said. "And as I've said on a number of occasions, the sensitivities and the perspectives vary from country to country."

Still, terrorist threats are continuing and "the sooner we deal with this problem, the less likely it is that you're going to have additional terrorist attacks," Mr. Rumsfeld said.

The defense secretary said "history is replete with instances where Muslim nations have fought among themselves or with other countries during various important holy days for their religion and it has not inhibited them historically."

Mr. Rumsfeld appeared to play down statements made Sunday by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who said it would be in the U.S. interest to finish off the Taliban before winter makes military operations more difficult.

"Clearly, there's been a lot of talk of the weather," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "It makes things somewhat more difficult in the northern part of the country. But there's no timetables on this. The task is clear: We're going to root out al Qaeda and the Taliban leadership and the Taliban government, and that's just a part of the effort that will be conducted worldwide."

Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the U.S. bombing strikes are helping the Northern Alliance.

"We think they're outnumbered, for one reason, so that impacts how fast they can move," Gen. Myers said, speaking of the 15,000 troops of the Northern Alliance. "And I would say that's probably the biggest factor. I think that that's starting to come to a head, and we may see some progress in that area here in the not-too-distant future."

Gen. Myers said U.S. strikes also have damaged helicopters and transport aircraft, making it difficult for Taliban forces to reinforce troops and evacuate the wounded.

The attacks on the Taliban are "having some effect," but the exact effect is not known yet. "We're going to have to wait," he said.

The four-star general said the action in Afghanistan includes both visible military operations and "other things going on besides what you see here on these videotapes."

Gen. Myers showed videotape images of U.S. guided-bomb strikes on Taliban tanks from the past weekend.

Gen. Myers said U.S. forces bombed six targets on Saturday, including airfields and air defenses, along with facilities used for "command and control" and terrorist forces and camps.

About 90 aircraft took part in the bombing raids, including five long-range bombers, he said.

Eight targets were bombed on Sunday, including the Taliban forces in northern Afghanistan. A total of 85 jets took part in those raids, including 10 long-range bombers, Gen. Myers said.

Mr. Rumsfeld criticized U.S. government officials for what he said was illegally disclosing information about the first U.S. commando ground operation near Kandahar on Friday.

"I couldn't care less where the source of the leak is," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "The responsibility is the same. It puts people's lives at risk, and it's just terrible. It is terrible, and I just can't imagine people being that irresponsible that they're willing to do that."

Mr. Rumsfeld also expressed irritation at reporters for asking more than one question at a time during press conferences, and said he would not answer questions in the future about details of covert military action.

"Our goal is not to demystify things for the other side," he said. "This is a very complicated set of problems. The goal is to confuse. It is to make more difficult. It is to add cost. It is to frighten. And it is to defeat the Taliban and the al Qaeda."

Gen. Myers said Sunday that U.S. and allied forces have "taken down" Taliban air defenses "so we pretty much have free reign of the country."

"That is not to say they still don't have manned portable surface-to-air missiles," Gen. Myers said. "But we basically can range freely over Afghanistan. We've hit a lot of their military facilities, their tanks, their artillery, their vehicle support facilities and some troop concentrations. And al Qaeda, we've hit a lot of their training camps, so they won't be doing any training in the near future in Afghanistan. So we're trying to posture ourselves to continue to squeeze out al Qaeda and to diminish the Taliban's influence."

-------

Afghan death toll mounts as US warplanes hit civilian targets

World Socialist Web Site
By Patrick Martin
23 October 2001
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/oct2001/bomb-o23.shtml

As many as a hundred people were killed when US and British warplanes bombed and destroyed a hospital in the western Afghan city of Herat, the ruling Taliban government in Kabul claimed Monday. The Pentagon did not initially deny the report, which came after some of the heaviest air raids of the 16-day war, on the night of October 21-22. Doctors, nurses and patients were said to be among the dead.

Citing Taliban sources, the French news service Agence France Presse reported that the hospital in Herat was full of staff and patients when it was struck by a US bomb during an overnight raid on the city. The casualties were "very high," AFP said.

Earlier the Afghan news agency Bakhtar reported that US planes bombed the Nawabad section of Herat, destroying five houses and killing eight to ten people.

Another attack Sunday left 18 dead and 35 wounded in Tarin Kot, capital of Uruzgan province north of Kandahar. Five separate attacks took place, and two health clinics were hit in the town.

The civilian death toll now stands at more than 1,000, according to reports issued by the Taliban government and verified at least in part by journalists working inside the country. Anecdotal accounts derived from interviews with Afghan refugees fleeing the war zone into Pakistan also confirm the claims of heavy damage to civilian targets and large loss of life.

The Washington Post, in two dispatches from its correspondent in Quetta, Pakistan, reported a huge surge of refugees from southern Afghanistan after the stepped up air strikes around Kandahar, with more than 3,500 crossing the border October 18. The refugees described widespread civilian casualties in Kandahar. The Post account concluded:

"As reports of civilian casualties and other mistakes mount in America's war in the skies over Afghanistan, a growing number of Afghans from different backgrounds and political persuasions are questioning whether the United States is conducting a war against terrorism and Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia or against the Afghan people."

Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef, told a press conference in Islamabad Monday, "It is now clear that American planes are targeting the Afghan people." He pointed to the remarkable series of "mistakes" by the US military, which has hit a UN de-mining office, a Red Cross warehouse, a World Food Program building and other clearly marked health care and relief facilities, culminating in the destruction of the second largest hospital in Herat, a large city near the border with Iran.

On October 17, six agencies called for a "pause" in the US bombing, warning that about 400,000 Afghans would run out of food within a month if aid deliveries are unable to proceed.

Unreported by either side in the war are the casualties among Taliban soldiers, who are increasingly the focus of the US and British attacks. There were intense air strikes against Taliban positions defending the key northwest city of Mazar-e-Sharif, and the first significant bombing of the major Taliban troop concentrations north of Kabul.

A Taliban government spokesman said that there were indications that US forces were using chemical and biological agents, with many wounded people suffering apparent poisoning. Abdul Hanan Himat of the Information Ministry told the British news service Reuters, "Today in my contact with doctors in Herat and Kandahar, they told me that they have found signs that Americans are using biological and chemical weapons in their attacks." The same official told AFP, "There are signs of intoxication and doctors suspect that it may be because of chemical or biological weapons."

The Bush administration and the Pentagon, as they have since the air war began, dismissed all Taliban claims of civilian casualties as lies. There has been no official US estimate of civilian casualties, other than a ludicrous claim by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that there have been only four confirmed deaths-those of four security guards killed when an American cruise missile slammed into the office of UN mine-clearing group in Kabul.

Top military officers in command of the air war made little attempt to disguise the savagery of the bombing campaign. Rear Admiral Mark Fitzgerald, commander of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, declared, "Our strategy has shifted from attacking operational targets such as airfields, air defenses, communication nodes, to tactical targets such as tanks and troops in the field that support the war-fighting capability. We are striking targets. We are killing people on the ground. That's what war is all about."

There was incontrovertible evidence of errant US bombing Monday, when four photographers for Western news services witnessed US fighter jets drop two bombs on positions of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. Two F-16s struck Northern Alliance observation posts, and the opposition soldiers asked the journalists to "call the Americans and tell them they were making a mistake," said one photographer. The four witnesses included three Americans, one working for the New York Times, and a Spanish photographer working for the New York-based Newsday.

The Pentagon flatly denied Taliban claims that two US helicopters had been shot down in the course of the weekend raid by Special Forces troops on targets in Kandahar, but admitted that one helicopter had crashed in Pakistan, killing two soldiers and wounding three. US officials called the crash accidental rather than due to enemy fire.

As for the second helicopter, the Arab television station Al-Jazeera showed film of wreckage found in the southern province of Helmand, near the border with Pakistan. The debris included tires and a chunk of metal stamped with the words "Boeing" and "Philadelphia, Pennsylvania," the site of a major helicopter factory. One chunk of metal was described by experts as the nosewheel of a Ch-47 Chinook helicopter.

The Special Forces raid involved more than 100 US Army Rangers and smaller numbers of Delta Force commandos who were dispatched to the residence of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar with instructions to assassinate him. The Washington Post reported that President Bush has signed a National Security Directive authorizing the CIA to assassinate both Omar and Osama bin Laden, and authorizing the agency to spend an additional $1 billion to carry out this task.

More and bigger raids are expected. More than 2,000 US troops are on the ground in Pakistan, according to press reports, deployed in three airbases near the Afghanistan border. They are using the airports of Jacobabad and Pasni as logistical bases and the airport of Dalbandin, nearest to the border, as a forward operational base.

--------

Bombings that hit wrong targets in Afghanistan

Reuters
10-23-01

ISLAMABAD - Following is a list of non-military installations allegedly bombed, apparently in error, by U.S. forces since they launched attacks on Afghanistan on Oct. 7.

Some incidents have been confirmed, while no independent confirmation was available for others. The U.S.-led forces say they are targeting Taliban military installations and camps and facilities of Saudi born militant Osama bin Laden.

OCTOBER 22

HERAT - The Taliban said United States bombed a 100-bed hospital in the western city of Herat, killing more than 100. The United Nations said Tuesday it had learned that a military hospital in a military compound had been destroyed in Herat on Monday but it had no information on casualties. A U.S. defense official said in Washington that U.S. forces might have accidentally hit a home for the elderly in Herat Monday.

OCTOBER 17

KANDAHAR - Taliban Information Ministry official Abdul Hanan Himat said a U.S. bomb hit a truck packed with Afghans trying to flee air raids on the town of Chunai near the southern Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. He said all those in the truck had been killed but gave no casualty figure. No independent verification was possible.

OCTOBER 16

KABUL - U.S. bombs hit warehouses operated by the International Committee of the Red Cross in Kabul, destroying tents, tarpaulins, blankets and other aid supplies intended for internally displaced Afghans.

ICRC said it was clearly a civilian facility, marked with a large red cross on the roof. An ICRC Afghan employee was injured.

The Pentagon said a U.S. Navy F/A-18 Hornet jet dropped 1,000-pound bombs that inadvertently hit one or more ICRC warehouses. U.S. forces had targeted a series of warehouses believed to be used by the Taliban to store military equipment, the Pentagon statement said.

"Military vehicles had been seen in the vicinity of these warehouses. U.S. forces did not know that the ICRC was using one or more of the warehouses," the statement said.

OCTOBER 13

KABUL - A U.S. Navy F/A-18 attack aircraft missed a Taliban military target at Kabul airport and its 2,000-pound "smart" bomb blasted civilian houses a mile from the Afghan capital, the Pentagon said.

A U.S. defense official said the satellite-guided bomb had missed because of human error, in that incorrect coordinates had been entered into a targeting system.

The Pentagon cited reports of as many as four dead and eight injured. A Reuters reporter said at least one man was killed and four injured.

OCTOBER 11

JALALABAD - The Taliban say U.S. bombs flattened Khorum village, near the eastern city of Jalalabad. Villagers said at least 160 people were killed in the pre-dawn bombing.

International journalists invited to visit the village saw evidence of widespread devastation and more than a dozen fresh graves but it was impossible to confirm the death toll or what had caused the damage.

Rumsfeld did not deny the area had been targeted, but described the alleged death toll as "ridiculous" and said the remote mountainous area was riddled with tunnels containing munitions.

OCTOBER 9

KABUL - A U.S. bomb struck a U.N.-funded demining office in Kabul, killing four people and slightly wounding one. The attack destroyed the four-story building.

"People need to distinguish between combatants and those innocent civilians who do not bear arms," U.N. Afghanistan coordinator for humanitarian aid Mike Sackett said after the incident.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld expressed regret for the deaths of the four Afghans, but said he did not know if they had been killed by U.S. weapons and added that some civilian casualties were inevitable.

-------- arms sales

Russia in multi-million arms deal with Northern Alliance
Moscow gives major backing to opposition forces

Kevin O'Flynn
Tuesday October 23, 2001
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,579008,00.html

Old Soviet tanks, helicopters and kalashnikovs are being supplied in a multi-million dollar arms deal between Russia and the Northern Alliance.

Russia has long been a secret ally of the Northern Alliance, supplying guns and supplies to the ousted Afghan government since 1996, but the terror attacks in the US has pushed Russia's support out into the open.

Russia's defence minister, Sergei Ivanov, has spelled out exactly what the Northern Alliance wants - familiar, old Soviet hardware that the Northern Alliance forces have used for years, first in the 1980s against the Soviet forces they had captured the arms from and then in the 1990s in the series of civil wars.

The arms deal is estimated to be worth between $40-$70m.

"Russia was supplying all the time," said a defence analyst, Pavel Felgenhauer. "But this is a major extra investment for the Northern Alliance to make a major offensive and sweep the Taliban out of northern Afghanistan." Old Soviet T-55 tanks, military helicopters, kalashnikovs, Igla and Shilka mobile anti-aircraft missile and armoured fighting missiles are reported to have been among the first deliveries to Afghanistan.

Forty tanks and twelve military helicopters are still to be delivered, according to the Associated Press.

"Afghans who have been fighting for the 20 years, including Northern Alliance fighters, know the old military equipment better than many servicemen in the Russian armed forces," said Mr Ivanov earlier this month.

"The Northern Alliance needs simple and very reliable, tested equipment: T-55 tanks, ammunition and submachine guns", he added.

"If they get other submachine guns, they [Northern Alliance fighters] throw them away with indignation and demand only kalashnikovs," the minister said.

The Northern Alliance, Ivanov said, needs "ordinary artillery guns with shells and ordinary battle infantry vehicles and armoured personnel carriers".

"These are quite ordinary, simple but reliable weapons, withstanding fluctuations of temperature and humidity," he added.

As well as military equipment and supplies some Russian defence experts have claimed that Russia has supplied technical specialists.

Mr Felgenhauer, citing military sources, said that a number of Russian technical specialists are already in northern Afghanistan helping the rebels. Other experts, and Mr Ivanov, have said the equipment is simple enough to be operated without technical assistance.

Russia is not keen on footing the bill for the expensive airlift operation. Mr Ivanov has asked the US for help and Andrei Belyaninov, the chief of Russia's chief defence exporter, Rosoboronexport, is said to have discussed the matter with the British defence minister, Geoff Hoon, when he was in Moscow earlier this month.

Supplies began to flow into Afghanistan at the end of September.

Ammunition and military hardware is being delivered to the Northern Alliance via pontoon bridges built by Russia's 201st division over the Pyandj river that divides Tajikistan and Afghanistan, Nezavismaya Gazeta reported.

-------- biological weapons

U.S. to Help Uzbekistan Clean Up Anthrax Site

By Alan Sipress
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 23, 2001; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37109-2001Oct23.html

The United States reached agreement with Uzbekistan yesterday to begin providing technical assistance for cleaning up a former Soviet biological weapons test range on an island in the Aral Sea that is heavily contaminated with anthrax spores, a State Department official said.

U.S. Ambassador to Uzbekistan John Herbst initialed the "implementing arrangement," under which the United States would help pay to remove thousands of tons of deadly anthrax spores dumped on Vozrozhdeniya Island and to decontaminate the site. American researchers found live spores on the island about 10 years ago.

The official said the United States has grown increasingly concerned about the lethal material left on the island, which belongs jointly to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, because the surrounding sea is drying up. The site, dubbed the world's largest anthrax burial ground, may soon be accessible by a newly formed land bridge, presenting both environmental and security challenges.

This agreement is one of several technical arrangements that the United States has reached with former Soviet republics, including Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, to help eliminate the threat of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons under the terms of the Nunn-Lugar legislation adopted by Congress. Although administration officials could not detail the terms of this latest agreement, they typically involve the provision of U.S. expert teams and technical measures to help stem the spread of hazardous materials, the official said.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, it reportedly contained eight biological weapons sites scattered among several republics. Earlier this month, an American team headed by Pentagon officials was dispatched under the U.S. Cooperative Threat Reduction Program to Kazakhstan to help decommission a former germ warfare factory where anthrax spores were found in a pipe.

This latest agreement, initialed in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, represents the latest example of cooperation between the United States and Uzbekistan, which has rapidly emerged as one of the key U.S. allies in the battle against Osama bin Laden's radical network. Uzbekistan borders Afghanistan and has offered various types of help to the U.S.-led campaign, including bases.

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SCIENCE TIMES
On Many Fronts, Experts Plan for the Unthinkable: Biowarfare

October 23, 2001
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
ANDREW C. REVKIN and JAMES GLANZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/23/health/anatomy/23PREP.html?pagewanted=all

Protection against biological and chemical attack was never very high on lists of national priorities - until the days after Sept. 11, when it collectively occurred to Americans how vulnerable they were.

An envelope that might (or might not) be filled with ominous powder, the possibility that someone might slip across a border with a jar of viruses, the impossibility of guarding every subway entrance and roof ventilator against a terrorist with a spray can: "In these times," said Dr. Frank Bia, an expert on infectious diseases and microbiology at Yale, "the unthinkable has become thinkable."

Here are assessments of the nation's ability to defend itself against germ warfare from a variety of perspectives, covering what has been done, what is being done, where gaps remain, what might be done to fill them - and how quickly.

DETECTION Knowing the Enemy

The current warning system for a bio warfare attack consists of Americans themselves - people who might show up at the doctor's office with a skin lesion or flulike sniffles and fever.

By then, it may be too late in two ways. The deadly infection or toxin may have already spread through the body. And, it is too late to protect others; the exposure would have happened hours to days earlier.

The ideal would be something like a smoke detector, continually sampling air and sounding an alarm when something dangerous is found.

But biological agents are far more difficult to identify than chemical ones like nerve gas. "There are only a few kinds of chemicals," said Calvin Chue, a scientist at the Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies at Johns Hopkins. "With the biologicals, it's a different and complex story."

Even seemingly clean air contains billions of germs, and deadly bacteria often have harmless relatives. A detector would test thousands, if not millions, of samples. Not only would it need to avoid false alarms but also report the cases where a pathogen was indeed floating in the air.

"Some organizations we've talked to said, `We'd rather not have your system here even if it had a 1 in 10,000 chance of a false alarm,' " said Dr. Richard Wheeler, an adviser to the Energy Department's Chemical and Biological National Security Program.

The military has spent hundreds of millions trying to develop such detectors, with some success. But they remain expensive, bulky and not 100 percent accurate.

Similar technology for civilian settings is even further off. A Washington subway station has been outfitted with a prototype detection system designed to sound an alarm, identify a pathogen and tell response teams where the pathogens are.

But the system can detect only chemical toxins, not biological weapons like anthrax and smallpox. The eventual goal is to add those capabilities. Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have begun testing a system that is about the size of a lectern and collects air samples and runs them through a chemical analysis that would hook antibodies onto the pathogens and cause them to glow. That work is still at least a year from fruition.

KENNETH CHANG and ANDREW POLLACK

RESPONSE Training and Talking

The response to confirmed anthrax cases in Florida, New Jersey, New York and Washington, is being viewed as a painful drill that has exposed gaping deficiencies in the country's ability to cope with bioterrorism. Experts on infectious diseases cited a number of areas that needed to be improved, including these:

• Training for doctors, nurses, police, firefighters and others in how to respond to bioterrorism emergencies.

• Expanding laboratory capacities to meet the surge in demand when thousands of specimens are sent for tests.

• Communicating crucial information to doctors better and faster so they can quickly treat infected patients and assure people who are worried but well.

• Finding ways for hospitals, which have cut costs by greatly reducing their number of beds, to open beds in an emergency.

"Our imaginations have not been broad enough," said Dr. Frank Bia, an expert in infectious diseases and microbiology at Yale. "When someone comes to the emergency room with something unusual, doctors must trust their instincts and sixth sense to make the pieces fit together."

Solving puzzling cases requires knowledge about exotic infections. But because anthrax and similar infections have occurred so rarely in this country, most doctors and nurses have, at best, only textbook knowledge about them.

Dr. Bia said the health system should tap the expertise of the many foreign doctors practicing in the United States who have treated anthrax in their native countries. "They are a resource right now," he said.

Health officials acknowledge that a major weakness in the response to anthrax has been the lack of effective communication.

Doctors often learn about new medical advances and refresh their memories about rare conditions in the conferences called grand rounds. But few hospitals have sponsored grand rounds on bioterrorism.

Dr. Stephen Baum, president of the Infectious Disease Society of New York, said he planned to hold such conferences at Beth Israel Hospital in New York City, where he is chief of medicine.

Last Thursday, an estimated 50,000 doctors, nurses and health workers viewed a teleconference on anthrax sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those who saw the program applauded its quality. But others did not have the required computer connections.

The capacity of laboratories needs to be expanded to deal with bioterrorism, said Dr. Baum, a member of the committee.

He said there must be "a unified way" for firefighters, police officers and emergency medical workers to respond to ill patients and potentially infectious material.

Then there is the nitty gritty. At least twice in the anthrax outbreak, generators have failed at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, delaying the laboratory work needed to determine who was infected.

LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN

PREVENTION Seeking a Better Vaccine

While drugs are useful in treating infections by some potential germ agents like anthrax, vaccines are prized by medical experts because they can prevent infections altogether or, in the case of anthrax, work with antibiotics to combat an infection.

The present anthrax vaccine is not ideal - it requires six separate injections with an annual booster - and is in any case reserved for military use.

Only one company, BioPort of Lansing, Mich., is licensed to make anthrax vaccine. But BioPort inherited an antiquated plant that has had trouble meeting Food and Drug Administration standards. Because of these problems, BioPort has been unable to make any vaccine since 1998.

A new anthrax vaccine is being developed by the DynPort Vaccine Company under contract to the Department of Defense.

Last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention applied for permission from the F.D.A. to use the stockpiled military vaccine for anyone allergic to antibiotics or who failed to respond to them in the event of anthrax exposure.

"Not only would some people be given just the vaccine but it might be something used in combination with antibiotics," said a spokesman for the C.D.C.

Military doctors who have considered the threat of deliberately spread anthrax concluded several years ago that people who may have been exposed to the spores should both take antibiotics and be vaccinated.

In a 1999 article, two military medical experts at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, Dr. Theodore J. Cieslak and Col. Edward M. Eitzen, recommended that everyone exposed to anthrax in a bioterrorism attack should be given the antibiotics ciprofloxacin or doxycycline and that in addition, "exposed persons should be immunized." At least three doses of vaccine should be given, they wrote, before stopping the antibiotics.

But the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a group of outside experts that advises the C.D.C. on vaccine use, concluded in December that a sustained course of antibiotics was the best protection for people who might have inhaled spores, and that vaccination was not necessary.

"You can do pretty darn well with antibiotics alone," said Dr. Charles M. Helms of the University of Iowa, a panel member. "Particularly if you have limited doses of vaccine to offer, there is no reason to get hung up on the issue of using both."

But Dr. Helms said there was always the risk that bioterrorists "would recognize the usual antibiotic and may create an antibiotic-resistant strain." He added, "I think we should clearly have more vaccine available."

Health experts also worry that large- scale use of antibiotics will hasten the rise of antibiotic-resistant diseases.

Another advantage of a vaccine is that it would allow people to quit the 60-day course of antibiotics much sooner than otherwise.

NICHOLAS WADE

TREATMENTS Antibiotics and Antitoxins

Even as government and industry are working to increase production of known treatments for potential biological weapons like smallpox and anthrax, scientists are trying to develop additional weapons.

For anthrax in particular, scientists say they have promising ideas. But, they say, the work is in its earliest stages and is far from producing a new drug that could be tested in humans.

One idea is to find an antitoxin, a molecule that neutralizes the toxins produced by anthrax bacteria. Since it is the toxins, not the bacteria themselves, that kill, antitoxins could block the germs' effects.

Dr. R. John Collier, a professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues started on this path several years ago, and now have two possible compounds that might work. They are nowhere near ready to give the compound to people and, as with all new drugs, there is a good possibility that they will either be too toxic or too ineffective for human use.

One antitoxin acts like a decoy, attaching itself to sites on cells where active anthrax toxin binds and then combining with normal active forms of the toxin and inactivating them. The investigators began by testing the decoy toxin in rats, which die in 90 minutes if they are injected with the lethal anthrax toxin. But when Dr. Collier and his colleagues inject the rats with a mixture of one part decoy toxin to four parts active toxin, the rats "survive with no symptoms," Dr. Collier said.

The group also has a compound that blocks the last step in the assembly of the anthrax toxin - a seven-sided structure that assembles on the surface of a cell and then delivers the toxins into the cell. This antitoxin sticks to the heptagonal anthrax toxin and prevents it from delving into the cell. The researchers tested it with the same sort of rat tests, with the same results, Dr. Collier said.

Another line of research involves a new type of antibiotic against anthrax bacteria. It was discovered by Dr. Lucy Shapiro, a Stanford microbiologist, and Dr. Stephen J. Benkovic, a chemist at Penn State, and their colleagues, who initially had no intention of going after anthrax. Instead, Dr. Shapiro said, they were designing a drug to inactivate a crucial enzyme used by so-called gram negative bacteria, a class that does not include anthrax. The made six new drugs, and all worked against gram negative bacteria in laboratory experiments, wiping out gram-negative bacteria that cause the diseases brucellosis and tularemia. Both bacteria are considered potential germ warfare weapons.

Then, Dr. Shapiro said, the group tried their antibiotic on gram positive bacteria, which do not have the enzyme the drugs were made to attack. They expected that the bacteria would be impervious. But, she said, "to our astonishment, it hit anthrax and multidrug resistant strep and staph." She said she had no idea why the drugs worked against these microbes.

Dr. Shapiro stressed that the work was just beginning. "If I were to give odds, I would say we have a 10 percent chance of getting all the way to an antibiotic," she said. "We are just now making enough to treat a rat. We are three years from availability if everything worked."

GINA KOLATA

LEADERSHIP Messages, and Missteps

It is an axiom of public health that sound science and good medical care are essential to controlling outbreaks of disease. But anthrax has demonstrated that other things are equally important: strong leadership, and a clear public relations strategy.

As Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a recent interview, the anthrax scare, in which relatively few Americans have actually become sick, has been "high on terror, but low on biomedical impact."

Curtailing that terror is essential. In any outbreak, public health officials need people to follow their directions on such issues as, for example, taking antibiotics, being vaccinated or remaining where they are rather than fleeing, possibly spreading deadly germs as they go. The way to obtain the public's cooperation, experts say, is simple: by delivering accurate information, even if it might be scary.

"Leaders may feel that they are under a lot of pressure to deliver the message, `Don't worry,' " said Dr. Monica Schoch- Spana, a medical anthropologist at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies. "Quite frankly, we would all love to have the message, don't worry, if we felt it really was grounded in honest to goodness truth. But because we can't have that ideal state, the next best thing is honesty."

In a bioterrorist attack, of course, government leaders must chart a delicate course.

"The main message in bioterrorism is that the government is putting the right programs in place," said Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, a former New York City health commissioner. "But that is not a message that is very satisfying."

With anthrax, there have been missteps. On the day the public learned that a Florida man had been diagnosed with inhalation anthrax, for instance, Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, suggested that the man may have contracted the disease by drinking water from a stream.

The facts later proved Mr. Thompson wrong, causing some public health experts to fear that the public would lose faith in him and the federal government.

Another problem has been a lack of centralized information; because local public health officials typically control their own outbreak investigations, information - and misinformation - has come from various corners of the country. Self-proclaimed experts have dominated the airwaves, confusing reporters and, hence, the public.

"One of the lessons drawn from Florida is that the first thing Americans need to hear is a voice that speaks from knowledge, not hyperbole," said Amy Smithson, a bioterrorism expert at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a nonprofit research organization in Washington.

"Because so many Americans have now heard conflicting things, they are confused and they are frightened. And that is understandable."

SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

BUILDINGS Air Pressure and Fine Filters

Buildings are usually regarded as places of refuge, but under many circumstances, a germ attack indoors is likely to be far more dangerous than one outdoors.

Fortunately, say experts on building design and bioterrorism, many measures are available to make buildings much less susceptible to such attacks. They largely involve ventilation and filtering systems, but also include recommendations on surveillance and emergency planning. Further protections are being intensively studied.

"A terrorist would need far less to have the same effect" in a building than outdoors, said Dr. Anthony Policastro, a mechanical engineer at Argonne National Laboratory with expertise in bioterror. But indoors, he emphasized, the degree of danger can be greatly reduced.

Experts distinguish between attacks that originate outside a building and migrate inside and those that start inside.

When the attack begins outside the building, the experts say, among the most important measures is "positive pressure." That means adjusting the ventilation system so that the interior pressure is slightly higher than in the surroundings.

"This requires only a modest-size blower at the normal air intake to the building that makes sure that any leakage of air in the building is out rather than in," said Dr. Richard Garwin, a physicist and bioterror expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

But the intake must be monitored so a terrorist does not introduce a biological or chemical agent into it directly. The intake should also be filtered with what are called high-efficiency air, or HEPA, filters, he said.

Related measures are available against an interior attack, although "a release inside the building is more difficult to respond to," said Jan Walker, a spokeswoman for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon.

The research agency, which is in the middle of a three-year project called the immune building program to make military buildings resistant to germ and chemical attacks, is working on technologies to sense and destroy those agents before people in the building are even aware they are present.

But experts also know how to prepare buildings and respond to attacks inside them to reduce their lethality. HEPA filters are available commercially.

If installing those filters is not possible, said James E. Woods, founding director of the HP-Woods Research Institute in Herndon, Va., then filters should at least meet the standards of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers. Mr. Woods said such filters remove even very small particles, like those that carry anthrax, with up to 90 percent efficiency.

JAMES GLANZ

MAIL Calling on Germ-Busters

One way to cut the risk of contamination from anthrax or other biological material arriving in a letter is to sterilize it.

This would never be practical for the entire annual flow of hundreds of billions of letters in the United States, postal officials said. But it could easily be done for a company or institution with some basis for concern - say, a television network or the White House.

Last week, government health officials began contacting companies that routinely sterilize everything from bandages to the tops on whipped-cream spray cans to see if the equipment could be used to kill bacteria or spores in mail flowing to vulnerable government offices.

One senior health official, speaking only on the condition of anonymity, said the inquiries began at the request of White House officials. The White House itself refused to comment. "We don't discuss any specific security measures," Ann Womack, a spokeswoman, said.

Experts said an iron or microwave oven would not have enough energy to kill the durable spores of anthrax, which can stay dormant for a century or more in the soil.

But various devices can easily do the job, almost all of which use high-energy electrons or cobalt, cesium and other sources of radiation to penetrate material and destroy the DNA of any organisms. Experts noted that electronics or floppy discs could be ruined by the high-energy beams.

Also, most of these systems have not been tested to ensure they can destroy the anthrax bacterium. They do routinely kill other bacteria and spores that are just as hardy, including those that cause botulism, said Dr. James S. Dickson, the chairman of the microbiology department at Iowa State University.

Some manufacturers incorporate the systems on assembly lines making sterile products. Johnson & Johnson, for example, keeps Band-Aids germ-free this way.

There are also dozens of free-standing sterilization centers, including several large ones a short drive from Manhattan in New Jersey, that can handle shipments of mail, company officials said.

Last week, officials at a variety of companies that provide sterilization services or machines said they were assessing whether there might be a new, if unwanted, market.

"I wish I lived in a world where this doesn't happen, but if it does, there is equipment to deal with it," said Yves Jongen, the founder and chief research officer of Ion Beam Applications, based in Belgium with American headquarters in Chicago.

ANDREW C. REVKIN

TRANSPORTATION Defending the Travelers

A central challenge facing emergency planners is reducing the risk of a biological attack exploiting the country's web of transportation links.

Airports and subway, train or bus stations - with crowds of travelers bound for many destinations - provide ready-made dispersal systems for biological agents, terrorism experts say.

Ways to prevent that from happening are keeping the air clean, devising detectors to pick up promptly any hints of a release and having the ability to shut down the system at the first sign of a problem.

On planes, at least, the air is far cleaner than it used to be. Since the early 1980's all commercial aircraft have used extremely fine filters to clean recirculating air - with filter pores small enough to capture almost everything 0.3 microns or larger. Individual anthrax spores measure one to three microns across.

Most illnesses caught on planes are caught from an adjacent passenger, not from floating pathogens circulating in the cabin, said Dr. Jolanda N. Janczewski, the president of Consolidated Safety Services, which advises airlines and other businesses on ways to prevent disease transmission.

Strategies for cutting terrorism risks in subways are being tested.

Cheryl Johnson, a spokeswoman for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, said officials planned to use some of the new technologies, including chemical sensors and computerized alert systems, in a simulated subway attack later this year.

The last line of defense is to make sure that a transportation system can be quickly shut down to prevent dispersal once a release has been identified. The Sept. 11 attacks showed that the Federal Aviation Administration could rapidly stop air travel, and most subway systems, including the New York City system, can be stopped almost immediately from a central control room.

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GERM BANK SECURITY
World's Largest Germ-Bank Union Acts to Keep Terrorists From Stealing Deadly Stocks

October 23, 2001
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/23/national/23GERM.html

After years of complaints by American officials that security measures were too lax, the world's largest organization of scientific germ banks said yesterday that it was taking steps to bar terrorists from obtaining deadly microbes.

The World Federation for Culture Collections, a union of 472 germ banks in 61 countries, said it was removing information about anthrax from its Internet sites and was pushing for tighter distribution rules among its members.

Dr. Jean Swings, a microbiologist at the University of Ghent in Belgium who is the group's president, denied that current security was lax. But he said, "We have to restrict the availability even more." It was not immediately clear if the union could force member organizations to comply.

Germ banks are scientific supply houses that provide cell cultures and microorganisms to researchers, either free, for sale or in exchange for other organisms. The union includes less than a third of the more than 1,500 germ banks worldwide. They maintain a million or so kinds of microorganisms, many deadly, and are regulated by a uneven patchwork of local and international rules.

The United States began tightening its export of microbes from germ banks to foreign states more than a decade ago. In 1997, legislation approved by Congress imposed tough rules on the sale or transfer of pathogens within the country. Many laboratories or other institutions have adopted even stricter procedures after the Sept. 11 attacks.

But American officials, both public and private, had little success getting hundreds of foreign germ repositories to adopt similar safeguards.

The federation plans to make an announcement today that will address some of the security issues, but not the details of its new precautions.

Some American establishments have even begun destroying their own stocks of microbes. Iowa State University killed off its deadly anthrax germs more than two weeks ago, deciding that they were not worth the trouble after Iowa's governor sent members of the National Guard to patrol the laboratory where they were stored.

"It was a little sad," said Dr. James A. Roth, a veterinary microbiologist who presided over the destruction. "We'd had these since 1928. But we have a new age now, and if we're going to keep anthrax here, we're going to have tight security."

Troubled by the new reality of biological terrorism, and uncertainty over where the attackers obtained their seed stocks of deadly anthrax germs, many universities, germ banks and professional groups around the world are re-examining and tightening security.

On Sept. 27, even before the disclosure of the first anthrax attack, the American Society of Microbiology, a professional group in Washington that has 43,000 members in the United States and abroad, issued an alert calling on its members to "exercise prudent attention to biosafety and vigilance concerning unusual occurrences," a discreet reference to possible terrorist activity. A spokeswoman said the group had never issued such a warning before.

But it did not recommend specific safety steps.

Over the decades, the free exchange of deadly microbes has helped the world's scientists crush infectious disease, doubling the human life span in one of history's quietest revolutions. Among the killers were plague, cholera, diphtheria, tuberculosis, smallpox, typhus, leprosy, polio and anthrax, a disease of grazing animals that can infect humans.

Dr. Ronald M. Atlas, president- elect of the American Society of Microbiology, estimated that 250 or so scientific centers in the United States had anthrax stocks, and 1,000 or so sites abroad. Such centers include not only germ banks but also universities, veterinary research centers, medical businesses and government laboratories.

Anthrax is "extraordinarily widely distributed, which unfortunately says a terrorist can probably get the pathogen," Dr. Atlas said.

While such collections must now reassess their vulnerability to theft and abuse, Dr. Atlas said, their germ work is quite legitimate and often crucial for fighting disease and confronting danger. For instance, he said, a new focus of research is whether X-ray machines that scan bags can be easily adapted to kill anthrax spores.

"Maybe I'd like to call the Iowa lab and ask them to try it," Dr. Atlas, who is also dean of the graduate school at the University of Louisville, said in an interview. "And they'll tell me, `We've just destroyed the culture and can't do that anymore.' That's the legitimate research side that suffers."

Joe Shannahan, a spokesman for Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa, said armed guards were still protecting anthrax supplies at a federal Department of Agriculture laboratory in Ames and at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Experts said few centers had destroyed their microbe stocks, but Dr. Roth of Iowa State said the new dangers of keeping anthrax outweighed any possible scientific use. Before the multiple strains were destroyed, he said, Iowa researchers checked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the F.B.I. to see if the anthrax germs were needed.

"They didn't want them," he said.

Dr. Roth said the anthrax germs had been under no special protections, other than a locked door, and that he himself had been only dimly aware of their existence. He said he had no indication that any unauthorized person had visited the lab seeking the germs, adding that he did not believe it was widely known that they were stored there.

The desire to tighten security has led some centers around the country to destroy pathogens routinely. Dr. Conrad Eugster, director of the Texas veterinary medical diagnostic laboratory at Texas A&M University, said that in the last year or so he and his colleagues had stopped storing anthrax germs from outbreaks they had diagnosed.

"We destroy them in a day," Dr. Eugster said, so that no strains can fall into the wrong hands.

For America, the tightening began after Washington in the late 1980's and early 1990's realized that germ banks used by American researchers had inadvertently shipped deadly microbes to the military forces of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi president, and to people who turned out to be domestic terrorists.

The turning point came in 1995 when Larry Wayne Harris, an Army veteran in Ohio with a history of affiliations with hate groups, managed to buy plague bacteria from an American germ bank by mail, paying $100 each for three vials.

After he was caught, Congress rewrote the nation's terrorism laws and tightened germ security, imposing tough rules on their acquisition and transfer. The rules took effect in 1997. American officials, however, had little success getting hundreds of foreign germ repositories to adopt similar safeguards.

The world's largest germ bank, the American Type Culture Collection, in Manassas, Va., lobbied the World Federation to back similar rules, going so far as to write a proposed resolution. "They ignored it," Dr. Raymond H. Cypess, president of the germ bank, said in a 1998 interview. "The international community has failed to address this issue in a meaningful way."

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CDC Criticized for Anthrax Outbreak

October 23, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-CDC.html

ATLANTA (AP) -- The nation's public health agency faced harsh criticism in Washington Tuesday from lawmakers who suggested ``people are dying'' because of a breakdown in its response to the anthrax attacks.

Senators said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whose doctors are the nation's front line against bioterrorism, was too slow to test workers at a Washington postal station that handled an anthrax-laced letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle.

``I am very concerned about what CDC is doing and how they are operating,'' said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, at a bioterrorism hearing. ``Maybe I'm wrong, but it just seems to me that something broke down here. People are getting sick and people are dying.''

CDC director Dr. Jeffrey Koplan defended the agency, saying its doctors were acting on the best information they had in an investigation that was unheard of just weeks ago.

``We are health officials,'' he told a Senate hearing. ``These are tragedies for us as well and not something we take lightly. But you've got to know about cases to take action.''

Two Washington postal workers died of inhalation anthrax, about one week after the anthrax-laced letter was opened in Daschle's office. Two other Washington postal workers are hospitalized with the disease and five others, including a postal worker from New Jersey and a union representative, are being treated for symptoms of inhalation anthrax.

All were in centers that handle mail sent to Congress, but none of those workers were immediately called in for anthrax testing or given preventive antibiotics.

``They closed the House building down while we were in there inhaling it,'' said Abraham Odom, a package sorter at the Brentwood Road center. ``That's not right. That's not fair. This stuff is supposed to be deadly.''

The CDC's Dr. Rima Khabbaz, an infectious disease specialist, said the agency was ``on a steep curve of learning'' and was re-evaluating its response.

Officials said that early testing at some sites led them to believe there was little risk to postal workers. And the anthrax cases in recent weeks had involved skin infections, less dangerous than the inhaled form.

Although Tuesday's hearing produced the sharpest criticism of the Atlanta-based agency, questions about the CDC's response to bioterrorism had been mounting since the first anthrax death in Florida on Oct. 5.

Public health experts outside the government said the agency was slow to alert doctors to the threat of other bioterror agents and didn't do enough to calm a jittery nation ill-informed on the particulars of anthrax. CDC was publicly silent as the investigation began in Florida, deferring questions to state and local health officials.

``The only people who can bring order to this is people like CDC,'' said Dr. Alfred Sommer, dean of public health at Johns Hopkins University. ``This is a national crisis. This should be their day.''

He questioned why in Florida CDC didn't hold daily briefings to help sort out conflicting information and inspire national confidence that the scare was in the hands of medical experts.

Presenting the image that health workers are directing the response -- not politicians or investigators -- is a key part of CDC's mission, said Dr. Gregg Wilkinson, epidemiology chairman at the University of North Texas' public health school.

``I think that there's a bit of an overreaction on the part of many members of the public. People are not using their heads,'' he said. ``That's where CDC and public health agencies need to calm people's fears.''

CDC spokesmen say they were initially restricted by the parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the FBI investigation and federal emergency laws.

Georgia's Sen. Max Cleland came to CDC's defense: ``The only time they've been throttled back is for national security. They're the best in the business, and thank God we have them.''

Established in 1946 to promote Americans' health by preventing disease and injury, the CDC is accustomed to doing its most dangerous work behind the scenes. It covers everything from tracking the flu to stopping gun violence. It rarely discusses the research it performs in high-security labs on the world's deadliest pathogens.

Soon after anthrax appeared in Florida, the CDC's disease detectives were dispatched to investigate. At its Atlanta headquarters, officials set up a crisis center, with dozens of scientists processing tests.

``We're working around the clock,'' said Dr. Julie Gerberding, acting deputy director of CDC's infectious disease branch. ``Our capacity to address the emerging threats is one that is evolving as the threat situation evolves.''

``No one doubts the urgency of this,'' said Dr. John Ward, editor of a weekly CDC bulletin. ``It's very reminiscent of CDC's response to the early days of the AIDS epidemic.''

But even as criticism of the agency was unleashed, congressional leaders were moving toward pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the agency, which still has some operations in World War II-era buildings.

To justify the spending, some lawmakers point to another failure early in the anthrax scare: Bad wiring caused a power outage at CDC that delayed by 15 hours the agency's ability to identify the anthrax case at NBC News.

``We have a crisis in America today, and CDC is at the point of the spear,'' said Rep. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., chair of the House terrorism subcommittee. ``These folks are doing a great job. But they need to have the resources to do a better job.''

--------

Even down on the farm, security tightens
America's farmers are taking preemptive steps against the threat of biological attack.

Christian Science Monitor
October 23, 2001
By Mark Sappenfield | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor sappenfieldm@csps.com
http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1023/p3s1-usmi.html

SACRAMENTO, CALIF. - Fastened to a featureless gray cinder-block wall, the small sign offers the only indication of how Case van Steyn's world has changed.

While milking and feeding proceed as they would on any average afternoon on his California dairy farm, the placard makes it sound as if the workers here in this scattered collection of metal sheds and low-slung cattle barns should be wearing moonsuits. "Biosecure Area," it reads, "Visitors by Appointment Only." Mr. van Steyn put it up last week, soon after he eliminated tours and began screening visitors more carefully.

Like most farmers from here to Florida, Mr. van Steyn realizes that agriculture is among America's most attractive and vulnerable targets for terrorism. But since there is no way to adequately patrol the immensity of the American range by foot or car, they're taking their own steps to prevent an attack - from making sure the barn doors are locked every night to taking a closer look at employees. As a result, a new and apparently permanent vigilance about security is taking hold on farms nationwide.

Even a minor biological attack on agriculture could have serious repercussions on exports - and thus the broader national economy. "Clearly [since Sept. 11], there's a hugely increased awareness that this is an issue," says Jerry Jaax, an expert on biological weapons at Kansas State University in Manhattan.

As part of a preemptive approach, some states have put together task forces or special committees to evaluate what can be done to help farmers and ranchers limit terrorists' opportunities. Most states have also made public appeals to farmers to reassess how they protect their land and property.

Ohio, for example, sent a letter to its farmers, asking them to look out for strangers and any missing chemicals that could be used to make bombs. "We're looking at it as if everything has changed down on the farm, and we need to be more security conscious from here on out," says Fred Dailey, director of the state Department of Agriculture. "This won't go away in a month."

What makes agricultural terrorism attractive is its relative ease. Many biological agents that destroy livestock or crops - such as foot-and-mouth disease - are harmless to humans and can therefore be administered safely. In addition, the possibility of being caught is much lower for agricultural terrorism, because farms and ranches are often isolated and open.

At the same time, such strikes - even if they only taint a limited number of animals or plants - could sow worldwide concern about the health of American agriculture. Not only might exports drop, but Americans, too, might lose confidence in the safety of their homegrown agricultural products.

The US system of detection and containment is good, observers say, but time would be of the essence. If an attack were to spread, the costs could become tremendous. In one recent analysis of Indiana agriculture, the money needed to detect, confine, and destroy infected animals ran into the billions if an outbreak merely spilled into a second county.

Biological warfare on crops and animals is not new. Since World War I, when Germany used anthrax to kill Allied horses, the Soviets developed extensive plans to attack American agriculture with biological agents, and Iraq reportedly developed a fungus that would damage rice and wheat.

Targeting America's food supply, however, is not necessarily an effective way to attack humans. While some agents are also dangerous to humans, extensive food-inspection programs would keep the human toll small, many experts say. Given the nature of the attacks so far - fueled by an apparent desire to kill humans - agricultural terrorism may not be a top priority for America's enemies.

But that hasn't eased concern. "Their strategy may be to attack the US in as many different ways as possible," says Mark Wheelis, a microbiologist at the University of California in Davis. "This might be a third- or fourth- or fifth-level priority."

For his part, van Steyn is taking every precaution he can. Not only is he keeping people out, but he's keeping other cows out, as well: He's eliminated bringing in animals from other farms. "I want to quarantine the world from me," says the dark-haired van Steyn, standing in front of a pungent cow paddock. "I know [my cows] are in good shape, so if I can keep whomever it is away from them, I know I'm OK."

Although the suburbs of Sacramento lick the surrounding farmland in tongues of red-tiled roofs, his property still seems as remote as Montana - beset more by flies than freeway traffic. But the skyscrapers of downtown, which can be seen from highway overpasses, are a reminder that people aren't far away.

Van Steyn knows he can't protect his cows 24 hours a day, but he also knows that, if he stays on guard, he's more likely to head off any problems before they happen. Others agree, noting that the current state of high alert - created by the outbreak of foot-and-mouth in Britain last year and intensified after Sept. 11 - will make detection easier.

"I would like to think that a majority of animal owners would be aware to any problem," says H. Leon Thacker a veterinary pathologist at Purdue University in Indiana. "And I would like to think that we would recognize this as something unusual and get on it quickly."

--------

Germ-warfare tests gone awry in spotlight
Researchers look at a time when the Army sprayed what it thought was harmless on San Francisco and other cities

By Jim Carlton
WALL STREET JOURNAL,
October 23, 2001
http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/attack/stories/wsjmicrobe_20011023.htm

SAN FRANCISCO -- Fifty-one years ago, Edward Nevin checked into a San Francisco hospital, complaining of chills, fever and general malaise. Three weeks later, the 75-year-old retired pipe fitter was dead, the victim of what doctors said was an infection of the bacterium Serratia marcescens.

Decades later, Mr. Nevin's family learned what they believe was the cause of the infection, linked at the time to the hospitalizations of 10 other patients.

In Senate subcommittee hearings in 1977, the Army revealed that weeks before Nevin sickened and died, the Army had staged a mock biological attack on San Francisco, secretly spraying the city with Serratia and other agents thought to be harmless.

The goal: to see what might happen in a real germ-warfare attack. The experiment, which involved blasting a bacterial fog over the 49-square-mile city from a Navy vessel offshore, was recorded with clinical nonchalance: "It was noted that a successful BW (biological warfare) attack on this area can be launched from the sea, and that effective dosages can be produced over relatively large areas," the Army wrote in its 1951 classified report on the experiment.

Now, with anthrax in the mail and fear mounting of further biological attacks, researchers are again looking back at the only other time this country faced the perils of germ warfare -- albeit self-inflicted.

In fact, much of what the Pentagon knows about the effects of bacterial attacks on cities came from those secret tests conducted on San Francisco and other American cities from the 1940s through the 1960s, experts say.

"We learned a lot about how vulnerable we are to biological attack from those tests," says Leonard Cole, adjunct professor of political science at Rutgers University in New Jersey and author of several books on bioterrorism.

"I'm sure that's one reason crop dusters were grounded after Sept. 11: The military knows how easy it is to disperse organisms that can affect people over huge areas."

In other tests in the 1950s, Army researchers dispersed Serratia on Panama City, Fla., and Key West, Fla., with no known illnesses resulting.

They also released fluorescent compounds over Minnesota and other Midwestern states to see how far they would spread in the atmosphere.

The particles of zinc-cadmium-sulfide -- now a known cancer-causing agent -- were detected more than 1,000 miles away in New York state, the Army told the Senate hearings, though no illnesses were ever attributed to them as a result.

Another bacterium, Bacillus globigii, never shown to be harmful to people, was released in San Francisco, while still others were tested on unwitting residents in New York, Washington, D.C., and along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, among other places, according to Army reports released during the 1977 hearings.

In New York, military researchers in 1966 spread Bacillus subtilis variant Niger, also believed to be harmless, in the subway system by dropping lightbulbs filled with the bacteria onto tracks in stations in midtown Manhattan.

The bacteria were carried for miles throughout the subway system, leading Army officials to conclude in a January 1968 report: "Similar covert attacks with a pathogenic (disease-causing) agent during peak traffic periods could be expected to expose large numbers of people to infection and subsequent illness or death."

Army officials also found widespread dispersal of bacteria in a May 1965 secret release of Bacillus globigii at Washington's National Airport and its Greyhound bus terminal, according to military reports released a few years after the Senate hearings.

More than 130 passengers who had been exposed to the bacteria traveled to 39 cities in seven states in the two weeks following the mock attack.

The Army kept the biological-warfare tests secret until word of them was leaked to the press in the 1970s. Between 1949 and 1969, when President Nixon ordered the Pentagon's biological weapons destroyed, open-air tests of biological agents were conducted 239 times, according to the Army's testimony in 1977 before the Senate's subcommittee on health.

In 80 of those experiments, the Army said it used live bacteria that its researchers at the time thought were harmless, such as the Serratia that was showered on San Francisco. In the others, it used inert chemicals to simulate bacteria.

Several medical experts have since claimed that an untold number of people may have gotten sick as a result of the germ tests.

These researchers say even benign agents can mutate into unpredictable pathogens once exposed to the elements.

"The possibility cannot be ruled out that peculiarities in wind conditions or ventilation systems in buildings might concentrate organisms, exposing people to high doses of bacteria," testified Stephen Weitzman of the State University of New York, in the 1977 Senate hearings.

For its part, the Army justified its experiments by noting concerns during World War II that United States cities might come under biological attack. To prepare a response, the Army said, it had to test microbes on populated areas to learn how bacteria disperse.

"Release in and near cities, in real-world circumstances, were considered essential to the program, because the effect of a built-up area on a biological agent cloud was unknown," Edward Miller, the Army's secretary for research and development at the time, told the subcommittee.

But in at least one case -- the bacterial fogging of San Francisco -- the research may have gone awry.

Between Sept. 20 and Sept. 27 of 1950, a Navy mine-laying vessel cruised the San Francisco coast, spraying an aerosol cocktail of Serratia and Bacillus microbes -- all believed to be safe -- over the famously foggy city from giant hoses on deck, according to declassified Army reports.

According to lawyers who have reviewed the reports, researchers added fluorescent particles of zinc-cadmium-sulfide to better measure the impact. Based on results from monitoring equipment at 43 locations around the city, the Army determined that San Francisco had received enough of a dose for nearly all of the city's 800,000 residents to inhale at least 5,000 of the particles.

Two weeks after the spraying, on Oct. 11, 1950, Nevin checked in to the Stanford Hospital in San Francisco with fever and other symptoms. Ten other men and women checked in to the same hospital -- which has since been relocated to Stanford University in Palo Alto -- with similar complaints.

Doctors noticed that all 11 had the same malady: a pneumonia caused by exposure to bacteria believed to be Serratia marcescens. Nevin died three weeks later. The others recovered. Doctors were so surprised by the outbreak that they reported it in a medical journal, oblivious at the time to the secret germ test.

After the Army disclosed the tests nearly three decades later, Nevin's surviving family members filed suit against the federal government, alleging negligence.

"My grandfather wouldn't have died except for that, and it left my grandmother to go broke trying to pay his medical bills," says Nevin's grandson, Edward J. Nevin III, a San Francisco attorney who filed the case in United States District Court here.

Army officials noted the pneumonia outbreak in their 1977 Senate testimony but said any link to their experiments was totally coincidental.

No other hospitals reported similar outbreaks, the Army pointed out, and all 11 victims had urinary-tract infections following medical procedures, suggesting that the source of their infections lay inside the hospital.

The Nevin family appealed the suit all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to overturn lower court judgments upholding the government's immunity from lawsuits.

Today, the U.S. military is again patrolling San Francisco's coastline, guarding against someone who might try to copy the Army tests of half a century ago. Local officials say such an attack is unlikely, given the logistical problems of blasting the city without Navy ships.

Partly as a result of Nevin's death, says Lucien Canton, director of San Francisco's emergency services, "One thing we now know is that it takes an awful lot of stuff to produce casualties, especially in a place like San Francisco that always has a stiff breeze."

-------- drug war

NORML: Police arrested an estimated 734,498 persons for marijuana in 2000

The Progressive Review <news@prorev.com>
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001 20:24:23 +0000
http://prorev.com/bb.htm

NORML: Police arrested an estimated 734,498 persons for marijuana violations in 2000, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation's annual Uniform Crime Report, released today. The total is the highest ever recorded by the FBI, and comprises just under half of all drug arrests in the United States . . . Of those charged with marijuana violations, almost 88 percent - some 646,042 Americans - were charged with possession only. The remaining 88,456 individuals were charged with "sale-manufacture," a category that includes all cultivation offenses - even those where the marijuana was being grown for personal or medical use. The total number of marijuana arrests far exceeds the total number of arrests for all violent crimes combined, including murder, manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault. Since 1990, nearly 5.9 million Americans have been arrested on marijuana charges, a greater number than the entire populations of Alaska, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming combined.

REPORT: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/00cius.htm.

----

Drug Trade Resurgent in Afghanistan
Opium and Heroin Flood Into Pakistan, Complicating Efforts Against Taliban

By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, October 23, 2001; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36532-2001Oct22.html

QUETTA, Pakistan, Oct. 22 -- As the United States wages war on terrorism in Afghanistan, concern is mounting about an unintended casualty: America's war on drugs.

Heroin and opium are believed to be flooding into Pakistan and soon could be coming to the West. Wholesale heroin prices are dropping. Afghan farmers, after a year's hiatus, are preparing their fields for a winter crop of opium poppies. And as the United States and Pakistan seek tribal leaders who would be willing to turn against Afghanistan's ruling Taliban movement, some candidates have been involved in the drug trade for decades.

"Things were looking good for a while," said Abdul Malik, the chief psychiatrist in Quetta's main hospital and director of heroin treatment for the Pakistani province of Baluchistan. "But with this war, it is going to get a lot worse for everybody -- us and the West. The only people who will profit are the traffickers."

And possibly terrorists.

Bernard Frahi, the U.N. Drug Control Program representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan, warned in an interview that a resurgent heroin trade could hamper the West's war on terrorism.

"Before this war, Osama had enough money," Frahi said, referring to suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden, who is being harbored in Afghanistan by the Taliban. "Now his bank accounts are frozen. What is he going to do? Turn rapidly to drug trafficking through networks that exist already."

In Washington, State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said the possible resurgence of the Afghan drug trade "is something that concerns us, and it is a way that the Taliban has found funding for their regime -- which, of course, supports [bin Laden's] al Qaeda network."

For years, Afghanistan produced more opium than any other country -- accounting for more than three-quarters of the world supply in 1999, according to the United Nations. Last year, a Taliban-imposed ban on opium poppy growing, along with a three-year drought, slashed the country's output -- though not its stockpiles -- and some analysts voiced optimism that the problem was beginning to abate.

But in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, a flood of opium and heroin moved out of Afghan warehouses into Pakistan, mostly through this border region, anti-narcotics officials and traders say.

Small dealers dumped their product on the market, both in Quetta and in Karachi, Abdul Malik said. Today, the wholesale price for a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of heroin in Karachi, one of the world centers of the heroin trade, is one-third of the $4,800 it cost before Sept. 11, a Pakistani narcotics officer said.

Pakistani government sources predicted that tons of heroin would begin to flow from Karachi's port to Western Europe and the United States once the war ends and security in the region loosens.

"Whatever they have, they would like to cash out -- or move out of -- Afghanistan," said Brig. Liaquat Ali Toor, the head of the army-run Anti-Narcotics Force in the areas bordering Afghanistan. "But right now, no one dares to move the goods around too much. There is heightened security everywhere. After the security relaxes, we will have a lot of work to do."

In addition, following the breakdown of law and order caused by U.S. attacks, Afghan farmers in several provinces are preparing their fields for a new poppy crop, analysts say.

Frahi said he had received reports from Nangarhar and Kandahar provinces that peasants were preparing their fields for poppies as opposed to wheat. The telltale signs, he said, involve a special kind of tilling. The earth is not plowed flat; rather, it is tilled so it rises and falls in small hills and valleys.

"Last year at this time, no one was cultivating poppies. Now it's a bad sign," Frahi said. "We can't ignore drugs because of terrorism. They are intertwined."

And as the United States and Pakistan search for Afghan allies against the Taliban, they are negotiating with exiles, local commanders and tribal leaders who for decades used heroin to keep their followers rich, buy weapons and ensure their hold on power. Last year, the only place where opium production increased, according to the United Nations, was an area held by the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, Badakhshan province.

"Dealing with these bandits is a mistake," said Gul Afgha, a former local leader in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. "Drugs again will flow from Afghanistan to the West."

Poppies and Afghanistan have a long association that dates back centuries. Farmers have been growing poppies since the time of the British Empire.

The first major wave of opium production occurred during the fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Drug money played an important role in funding the war and in enriching guerrilla factions.

The second wave started after 1996 when the Taliban seized power. It used taxes and tariffs levied on opium production as a major source of cash -- an estimated $40 million to $50 million a year, Western and Pakistani officials said.

Opium poppy cultivation increased dramatically when the Taliban came to power, rising from 52 percent of the world's total in 1996 to a high of 79 percent in 1999 -- 4,581 metric tons, according to the United Nations.

In a significant twist that meant greater profits, traffickers inside the country also began manufacturing heroin for the first time. Now roughly 95 percent of all heroin reaching Europe comes from Afghanistan. The U.S. government reports that only 5 percent of heroin entering the United States comes from Afghanistan; Colombia is the country's largest heroin supplier.

Pakistani officials said that last year drug traffickers in Taliban-controlled areas in Kandahar, Helmand and Nangarhar provinces were authorized to turn the 2000 opium poppy harvest into heroin and morphine base.

"Afghanistan produced about 500 metric tons of heroin last year -- sufficient for three years of global demand -- and cornered the world heroin market for the next several years," said a senior official in the intelligence wing of the Anti-Narcotics Force.

Under intense international pressure, in June 2000, Taliban leader Mohammad Omar banned poppy cultivation, declaring that it violated the teachings of the Koran. The next year, poppy cultivation in Afghanistan plummeted to 185 tons, according to a newly released U.N. report. The United States, saying it welcomed the ban, in May announced a $43 million grant to help Afghan farmers.

But the ban was not popular at home.

"Farmers cursed the government because they felt they had lost a means to livelihood," said Abdul Malik, the psychiatrist. "Wheat certainly wouldn't have provided that kind of money."

And abroad, Omar's ban has come under scrutiny in recent months with some law enforcement officials saying it appeared to be more of a marketing strategy than a law enforcement move.

Abdul Malik said that after the ban and well into this year, his sources reported opium and opium-related drugs continued to be sold in Kandahar's covered bazaar. "He banned cultivation and its use in Afghanistan," he said of Omar. "But he did not ban the trade."

Mohammed Atta is a 22-year-old who lives under a bridge by a fetid creek in Quetta. He has been doing heroin, or "chasing the dragon," as he put it in his excellent English, for six years.

Dressed in rags, he stumbled toward a foreigner one recent afternoon, begging for a handout so he could have another fix. Atta said he too expects prices to fall and supplies to rise.

"This is a good thing," he said, trembling slightly as he bent a blackened finger toward a visitor. "The new stuff will be cheaper and purer. It will be a better high."

Staff writer Peter Slevin in Washington and special correspondent Kamran Khan in Karachi contributed to this report.

--------

UK Official: Ease Marijuana Laws

October 23, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Britain-Marijuana.html

LONDON (AP) -- Britain's marijuana laws should be relaxed to give police more time to battle harder drugs, the nation's top law enforcement official said Tuesday.

Home Secretary David Blunkett said reclassifying marijuana, or cannabis, as a ``Class C drug'' -- putting it in the same category as anabolic steroids -- would not be the same as decriminalization or legalization. However, such a change means that those possessing marijuana would not be subject to arrest.

``Cannabis would remain a controlled drug and using it a criminal offense ... but it would make clearer the distinction between cannabis and Class A drugs like heroin and cocaine,'' Blunkett told a House of Commons committee meeting.

``It is time for an honest and common sense approach focusing effectively on drugs that cause most harm,'' he added.

Blunkett's statement comes amid an intensifying political debate about marijuana. Senior figures from all three major political parties have now urged a review of cannabis laws.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens called the proposal a reflection of changing police and public attitudes.

``This is a clear signal that (marijuana possession) is not such a high priority as it was perceived to be,'' Stevens said. ``There are lots of other more high profile issues for police officers to tackle.''

A leading researcher in the potential use of marijuana for medical treatment praised the proposal.

Dr. John Zajicek, who is doing clinical trials with cannabis to treat multiple sclerosis, said a loosening of the law could aid MS sufferers.

``If we are to provide the evidence that the drug is useful in alleviating pain in MS then there has to be a way of getting the drug to those patients,'' he said.

Police say seven out of 10 drug arrests are for marijuana and that processing a marijuana-related arrest creates several hours of police paperwork and usually ends with a small fine.

Changing the marijuana laws would require approval by Parliament. The proposal will first be discussed with senior police officers and the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, a Home Office spokesman said. A final decision is expected in the spring.

Marijuana is currently a Class B drug, and possession carries a maximum penalty of five years in jail.

Simple possession of a Class C drug carries a maximum sentence of two years, and British law states that only offenses punishable with at least five years imprisonment are subject to arrest. In lesser offenses, a police officer can only issue a warning or a court summons.

Possession with intent to supply or supplying Class C drugs would still be an arrestable offense.

One south London borough is effectively implementing the home secretary's proposal. Since July, Lambeth police have been giving only a verbal warning to anyone caught with a small amount of marijuana.

-------- india

India Rejects Pakistani Bid for Talks, Citing Attack in Kashmir

New York Times
October 23, 2001
By CELIA W. DUGGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/23/international/asia/23KASH.html

NEW DELHI, Oct. 22 - India's prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, today bluntly rejected an invitation to hold talks with Pakistan's military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, saying such a meeting was out of the question as long as Pakistan was sponsoring what Mr. Vajpayee called terrorist acts against India.

The prime minister pointed to an attack today by militants on an air force base 20 miles south of Srinagar, the summer capital of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, as yet another example of Pakistan- supported terrorism.

A caller who said he represented the radical Islamic group Lashkar-e- Toiba, which is based in Pakistan, told newspapers in Srinagar that the group had carried out the attack. The police said four militants and a civilian had been killed, while the caller said eight soldiers and members of the air force had been gunned down.

"In this situation, there is no point in talking to Pakistan," Mr. Vajpayee said.

General Musharraf matched Mr. Vajpayee's shrillness today, warning that Pakistan was "not a small country" and would retaliate if India struck at militants' training camps on the Pakistani side of the line that separates the portions of Kashmir each country controls.

Today's oratorical volleys were the most definitive sign yet that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's visits to Islamabad and New Delhi last week had failed to calm flaring tempers in the two capitals. He asked India and Pakistan, nuclear-armed enemies, to try to resolve through negotiations their differences over Kashmir, a land both have claimed for more than half a century.

United States officials worry that an outbreak of hostilities between Pakistan, a crucial partner in America's fight against the Taliban, and India, also part of the global coalition, would greatly complicate the American-led military campaign in Afghanistan.

Tensions have been mounting between the two nations since Oct. 1, when a Pakistan-based group was implicated in a terrorist attack on the state legislature in the Indian part of Kashmir that killed 38 people, 23 of them civilians.

India was already irritated that the United States had teamed up with Pakistan, the country it considers the main sponsor of terrorism against India, to fight terrorism in Afghanistan.

But the Oct. 1 attack generated domestic political pressure, from the public as well as hawks within the governing coalition, to strike back at the country harboring the terrorists, which for Indians is Pakistan.

That pressure is compounded by an election looming in India's most populous and politically powerful state, Uttar Pradesh. If Mr. Vajpayee's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party loses the state elections there in coming months, it could undermine his party's leadership of the coalition government that now rules India, a nation of a billion people.

So it was significant that Mr. Vajpayee made his hard-line comments today during an appearance in Uttar Pradesh. He declared that India would not succumb to American pressure for talks. "Our foreign policy is not guided by the United States," he said. "We believe in taking our own decisions."

Mr. Vajpayee and General Musharraf met for the first time in July in Agra - also in Uttar Pradesh - for talks that collapsed. Here in India, the general was seen as having upstaged the prime minister by aggressively and publicly defining their differences over Kashmir, overshadowing India's protests about terrorism.

In the emotional aftermath of the attacks on the United States, the Oct. 1 terrorist attack in Srinagar gave India an opportunity to try to redefine the Kashmir dispute as being mainly about terrorism rather than the human rights violations committed by Indian security forces or the struggle against Indian rule there.

The debate about how India should respond militarily in Kashmir has continued to intensify in the press. The cover of India Today, a newsweekly, shows a missile aimed at a Pakistani flag and asks, "Should India Attack?"

-------- iraq

Iraq Denies Link to Deadly U.S. Anthrax Cases

October 23, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-attack-anthrax-iraq.html?searchpv=reuters

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi newspapers and officials denied on Tuesday any link to the release of killer anthrax bacteria in the United States but said U.N. inspectors would not be allowed back to investigate Baghdad's weapons programs.

They accused Washington of fabricating the anthrax attacks as a pretext to broaden its anti-terrorism campaign to include more countries.

``The aim is to create suspicion around countries listed by the United States (as sponsors of terrorism) in order to commit aggression against them,'' al-Thawra, newspaper of the ruling Baath party, said.

``Such plots and games by successive American administrations are not new to us as they have planned several scenarios in order to achieve their dream of controlling the whole world,'' it added.

Foreign Minister Naji Sabri last week denied any link to the U.S. anthrax cases, telling reporters: ``It's bullshit.''

Western officials say Iraq and the former Soviet Union both produced weapons-grade anthrax in the past, but the State Department said on Monday it knew of no clear link between Iraq and the release of killer anthrax bacteria in the United States.

According to western reports the United Stated also developed anthrax as a biological weapon but closed the program in 1970.

Officials in Washington said on Monday two postal workers who died had most likely inhaled anthrax spores, although definite diagnoses had not been made.

If anthrax were confirmed, it would bring to three the number of U.S. anthrax deaths to three this month.

A senior official of Iraq's ruling Baath party said in remarks published on Tuesday that Baghdad would not allow U.N. weapons inspectors to return to investigate the country's past biological, chemical, missile and nuclear weapon programs.

Washington has accused Baghdad of developing such weapons since U.N. inspectors left Iraq in December 1998.

``Iraq's position is clear that it will not accept the return of (U.N.) weapon inspection teams,'' Huda Saleh Mehdi Amash told the weekly al-Rafidain newspaper.

President Bush has said he is watching Iraq ``very carefully'' and President Saddam Hussein should allow international weapons inspectors to return.

Some senior U.S. officials and legislators have advocated attacking Iraq with or without proof that it was involved in the September 11 attacks on U.S. cities that killed nearly 5,400 people.

The United States has launched military strikes against Afghanistan after blaming militant Saudi exile Osama bin Laden's al-Quaeda network for the attacks and Afghanistan's Taliban rulers for harboring bin Laden and his associates.

-------- israel

U.S. Calls for Israeli Withdrawal
Statement Condemns West Bank Incursion

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 23, 2001; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36182-2001Oct22.html

The Bush administration yesterday condemned the Israeli military incursion into the West Bank over the weekend as "unacceptable," and it called for the immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces from Palestinian-controlled areas.

The unusually tough message to a close ally was read by State Department spokesman Philip T. Reeker, who said "we deeply regret and deplore" Israel's actions, which killed "numerous . . . innocent civilians" and contributed to "a significant escalation in tension and violence." He added that "Israel must act now in a manner that helps restore calm."

At the same time, President Bush sent what one U.S. official called "a very clear letter" to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat saying that Arafat had to make "absolutely certain" that Palestinian authorities arrested the people responsible for last week's assassination of Israel's tourism minister. Bush said that moves by Arafat to halt terrorist attacks were the only way back to the peace process.

The U.S. consul general in Jerusalem, Ronald Schlicher, joined European ambassadors in a meeting yesterday with Arafat, who was urged to match his verbal commitments with concrete actions to halt terrorism by Palestinian groups. "As we've said many times in the past, actions are required, not just words," Reeker said.

The administration's comments came just three days before a deadline set by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for Arafat to hand over suspects in last week's assassination of the tourism minister, Rehavam Zeevi. The Bush administration doubts Arafat will turn over the suspects and fears Sharon will order even more dire military action, inflaming anti-American passions throughout the Muslim world.

Bush's letter made no mention of turning Zeevi's killers over to Israeli authorities.

The Bush letter and State Department warning also coincided with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres's arrival in Washington for two days of consultations, beginning yesterday with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and Vice President Cheney. Peres will meet today with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Peres said in an interview yesterday that the Bush administration was asking Israel to "please lower the flames" of the conflict "because otherwise it will be very hard for [the United States] to construct the proper coalition" against Afghanistan and terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.

In a speech earlier at the National Press Club, Peres said "the problem is how" to reduce tensions. "The only way to do it," he added, "is to deliver a serious message to Arafat that he has to do what he promised to do."

Arafat "wants to be a member of the club that fights terror," but "this is not a membership you can win with words," Peres said.

He also said Israel's forces would withdraw soon from Palestinian-controlled towns on the West Bank. Otherwise, he warned, his Labor Party might quit Sharon's coalition government.

At the same time, Peres defended the use of military pressure on Arafat and Israel's policy of assassinating people it believes guilty of plotting terrorist attacks. "We don't have a choice. You don't have a choice," he said. "If you knew bombers were going to blow up the twin towers, wouldn't you kill them?"

Peres continued to insist that a peace agreement was possible, although he said interim steps would be needed after the past year of violence. He said Arafat should start by arresting the 10 to 15 "troublemakers who are causing most of the terrorism."

With the United States appealing for support from the Arab world, many Arab leaders have been calling on the Bush administration to exert greater pressure on Israel.

Amr Moussa, a former Egyptian foreign minister who is now secretary-general of the Arab League, told the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee and the Arab American Institute here yesterday that terror in the Middle East "stems mostly from injustice to the Palestinians, who see no light at the end" of "foreign military occupation."

While bin Laden does not speak for the Arabs, Moussa said, "frustration, despair and danger are sentiments which if unchecked can be channeled into destructive acts."

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Refugees grasp at bin Laden's words
Palestinian groups in Lebanon's Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp have little sympathy for US battle.

Christian Science Monitor
October 23, 2001
By Nicholas Blanford | Special to The Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1023/p7s1-wome.html

AIN AL-HILWEH, LEBANON - Ali Al-Ali, a former Palestinian fighter, resides deep inside the slums of Lebanon's largest Palestinian refugee camp.

Living in appalling squalor and surrounded by 70,000 Palestinian refugees, many of whom long ago lost hope of returning to their former homes in what is now Israel, Al-Ali has seen how his neighbors are desperately seeking to salvage some hope from Osama bin Laden's speeches of support for the Palestinians.

They may disapprove of his methods, and most condemn the Sept. 11 attacks, but for some in Ain al-Hilweh, Mr. bin Laden has become a symbol of defiance to the US, Israel's main ally.

Al-Ali has lived for nine years in the Ozo district of the refugee camp. Ain al-Hilweh is Arabic for "Sweet Spring," the waters of which once irrigated the orange groves surrounding the coastal city of Sidon, 20 miles south of Beirut. But today, the only running water is the raw sewage trickling down open drains. Barefoot children play in the filth outside Al-Ali's front door.

His wife and four children sleep on the floor of his cramped home. "I get the bed," he says, pointing at a rickety iron bedstead next to the glassless window. The tin roof lets in clouds of dust in the sweltering heat of summer, torrents of rain in the bitter winter.

The other room in the hovel is where the family cook. They have no bathroom. Plastic bags serve as toilets. There is only one cupboard. A bag of stale Arabic bread is suspended from a hook on the wall, out of reach of the rats that thrive in Ozo's alleys.

There is a palpable sense of despair in Ain al-Hilweh, the grimmest and most politically volatile of the 12 Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. The camp is surrounded by Lebanese Army troops, but lies outside the jurisdiction of the Lebanese state.

Palestinians are banned by the Lebanese authorities from all but the most menial of jobs. Al-Ali earns $3 a day from scavenging scrap metal and cardboard. He also receives a monthly pension - worth little more than $20 - from the Palestine Liberation Organization for his years as a fighter.

Al-Ali lifts his shirt to reveal several crude scars, a permanent legacy of his violent past.

But in Ain al-Hilweh, the residents talk of the possibility of future violence. One of the many Palestinian fac-

tions found inside Ain Al-Hilweh is Esbat al-Ansar, an extremist Islamic group reportedly with close links to bin Laden's Al Qaeda. President Bush listed Esbat al-Ansar last month as one of 27 groups and individuals accused of terrorism whose assets in the US were frozen.

Esbat al-Ansar's leaders emerged from the camp's shadows briefly to refute the charges.

"We in Islamic Esbat al-Ansar have no financial organizations nor accounts in the US or anywhere else.... We also have no organizational links with Sheikh Osama bin Laden, and our actions and decisions are independent," a spokesman, Abu Sharif, told reporters.

The group's sudden elevation to the ranks of major terrorist organizations provoked laughter in Ain al-Hilweh. Esbat al-Ansar, consisting of no more than 300 people, has a reputation for being poor.

"When they call me on their mobile phones, they let it ring once and then hang up and expect me to call them back. That's how poor they are," says Col. Mounir Moqdah, a veteran Palestinian guerrilla commander and the most powerful man in Ain al-Hilweh.

Yet, a source close to Esbat al-Ansar said that emissaries of bin Laden traveled to Ain al-Hilweh three years ago to hand over funds. The injection of cash allowed Esbat to purchase weapons and sparked a series of shootings and grenade attacks in the camp against officials of Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, traditionally the dominant party. The source said Esbat also used the money to secure allegiances in the camp, including Colonel Moqdah.

But Moqdah denies having anything to do with Esbat al-Ansar. "Esbat al-Ansar is so small, it's not worth considering," he says. "My relations are with the bigger groups involved with the liberation of Palestine."

There is a fear in the camp that the US may pressure Lebanon into sending troops into Ain al-Hilweh to wipe out Esbat al-Ansar. Such a move would spark a war, Moqdah says. There is little support for bin Laden in Ain al-Hilweh, he says, but also little sympathy for the US.

"For 53 years, our people have been suffering and America has been the main support for the Israeli occupiers," he says. "If they want to fight terrorism, they should start with themselves and Israel. The hands of America are stained with blood."

Ibrahim Hamid lived in New York from 1988 to 1993. The Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center made him feel "very sad," he said. "They were innocent people. I really felt like I wanted to cry, because I lived there."

Mr. Hamid, a mechanic, says he has not left the camp for nine years, ever since his return from New York. "The Lebanese authorities want me for something. I don't know what," he says with a grin and a shrug.

But later, one of Moqdah's bodyguard says it's not the Lebanese that want to arrest Hamid. "It's the Americans," he mutters. The reason is chilling. "He was one of the plotters in the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993," the bodyguard says. "He left America that same night."

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Mideast Militants Urge Escalation of Conflict

By Lee Hockstader and Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, October 23, 2001; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36210-2001Oct22.html

JERUSALEM, Oct. 22 -- Militants in both Israel and the Palestinian territories appealed to their leaders today to press ahead with fighting during what is already one the most intense and sustained bouts of combat in months.

In Jerusalem, thousands of right-wing Israelis thronged the center of the city tonight, likening Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden and urging Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to eliminate him.

Meanwhile, Palestinian Islamic and national political groups criticized Arafat for ordering the arrest of more than two dozen militants following the assassination of an Israeli cabinet member last week. The groups vowed to keep up attacks to drive Israeli troops out of Palestinian territories.

The pressure by hard-liners comes against a backdrop of heavy fighting across the West Bank, especially in the biblical town of Bethlehem. Israeli forces have either invaded or choked off virtually every major Palestinian population center. Passions are flaring on both sides, underlining the political difficulty Sharon and Arafat would face if they tried to back down and contain the violence.

"The daily reality is war," said Ronny Davidovits, a Jewish settler who attended the rally in Jerusalem. "Sharon must be up to it. He must chase Arafat away."

The rally in Jerusalem appeared to be attended mainly by Jewish settlers and turnout was lighter than at some past gatherings. A few demonstrators held up posters of Arafat and bin Laden, labeled "The Twins." Many called for Israel to turn back the clock: Be rid of Arafat and end seven years of Palestinian self-rule in major towns in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, if necessary by reoccupying them permanently.

"It was better before," said Chedva Amit, from the Gush Etzion bloc of Jewish settlements south of Jerusalem.

Several participants criticized Sharon for maintaining a broad coalition government and accommodating his dovish foreign minster, Shimon Peres. Peres has pressed for peace talks with the Palestinians and insisted that Arafat is the only possible partner for negotiations, blunting Sharon's contention that Arafat is Israel's bin Laden.

"We must get rid of Arafat and all the Palestinian institutions," said Naveh Ezer, an Israeli schoolteacher.

Some people at the rally expressed a longing for the days when the Palestinians possessed few arms; during the uprising of the late 1980s and early '90s, the main Palestinian weapons were stones and Israeli soldiers were able to suppress the resistance with less difficulty than today, when the Palestinians are better armed. "We have to go back to the situation before, we have to get the guns out of their hands," said Ezer.

The rally was held in an atmosphere of tense expectation. Earlier in the day, Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said the country was dealing with more warnings of possible Palestinian terrorist attacks than ever before. He insisted that Arafat arrest Palestinian militants, in particular those connected to the assassination last week of an extreme nationalist, Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi.

Sharon charged that a member of Arafat's security forces helped Zeevi's murderer escape from Jerusalem after the assassination and flee to Palestinian-controlled territory. Israeli television reported later that Sharon was referring to Tawfiq Tirawi, Arafat's intelligence chief in the West Bank. Palestinian officials denied the accusation.

Arafat's Palestinian Authority has said its security services arrested more than two dozen militants from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the hard-line group that asserted responsibility for Zeevi's murder. In addition, the Palestinian Authority outlawed the PFLP's military arm.

Israeli officials dismissed Arafat's moves as an empty ploy designed to fix a public relations problem rather than prevent further violence. They said that the arrests did not include those most directly involved in Zeevi's murder and that Arafat's outlawing of the PFLP military wing had no significance.

Arafat's regime "is like a jungle," said Meir Shetreet, Israel's justice minister. "There is no law over there, nothing is done according to the law."

In Damascus, PFLP militants said the group would keep fighting in "self-defense." Members of Arafat's Fatah movement also criticized the outlawing of the PFLP's military wing, and said it would have no effect on the fighting.

"It doesn't matter what the organization is," Ahmed Helles, head of Fatah in the Gaza Strip, told al-Jazeera TV, a satellite network based in Qatar. "Our struggle is legitimate and we can fight back as a people, a nation."

A leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, which has carried out suicide bombings and other attacks inside Israel, insisted that the the Palestinians must continue to fight.

"The Palestinian Authority's declaration is very dangerous," said Abdul Aziz Rantisi, a Hamas leader in Gaza. "The supreme Palestinian interest lies in an open road for resistance. . . . Otherwise we'll be slaughtered like sheep."

However, Palestinian officials, including Arafat's West Bank security chief, Jibril Rajoub, warned militants to heed the leadership's instructions.

This afternoon, Palestinian militants threatened to attack the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo, built on land captured in 1967 on the southern fringe of the city. Earlier, Palestinian officials had promised to prevent attacks on Gilo.

"If the Israelis don't remove their tanks from Bethlehem in the next few hours, we'll impose a curfew in Gilo by bullets and mortars," said a statement signed by the Bethlehem chapter of Fatah this afternoon. A few hours later, furious firefights erupted between the Palestinian gunmen in the Bethlehem area and Israeli soldiers in Gilo.

In Bethlehem, which Israeli forces entered early Friday, local journalists said many buildings near the center of town were badly damaged, including a maternity hospital, a home for the elderly, a well-known hotel, a guesthouse for Christian pilgrims and a U.N. medical clinic for Palestinian refugees.

This evening, two Palestinian militants were killed in what Palestinians described as Israeli assassinations. One victim, who died in a car bomb in the West Bank city of Nablus, belonged to Hamas. The other was killed in a refugee camp near the West Bank city of Tulkarm.

Separately, Israeli warplanes attacked suspected Hezbollah guerrilla positions in southern Lebanon after the guerrillas fired rockets and mortar shells at Israeli outposts in the disputed border area of Cheeba Farms. There were no reports of casualties.

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THE MIDEAST
Sharon Disregards U.S. Request to Withdraw Troops

October 23, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast.html

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel defied its closest ally the United States Tuesday by rebuffing Washington's demands to pull back from its broadest military offensive against the Palestinian Authority.

The White House said President Bush was expected later in the day to urge Israel to withdraw from Palestinian-controlled areas.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters that Bush was expected to deliver the message when he joined a meeting between Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Washington, which hopes an end to fighting would boost Arab support for its Afghanistan campaign, had adopted a low-key response to raids Israel launched in or around six West Bank cities after a far-right cabinet minister was assassinated last week.

But the United States has taken an increasingly critical stance as the Israeli troops dug in and the death toll mounted in the past few days.

KILLINGS

Israeli soldiers killed two Palestinians at a security post in the West Bank city of Tulkarm Tuesday, witnesses and hospital officials said. The incident occurred after Palestinian police opened fire at Israeli tanks.

At least 31 Palestinians and an Israeli have been killed since gunmen from the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine assassinated Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi last Wednesday.

Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer brushed aside the demand to end the offensive, which Israel said was aimed at pressuring Palestinian President Yasser Arafat to hand over Zeevi's assassins.

``The things that came out of there (the United States), with all due respect, are not valid,'' Ben-Eliezer told reporters.

``Because we have no intention of staying in these territories. We have no intention of staying in area A (Palestinian-ruled areas) and we have no intention of conquering territory.''

Peres told CNN from Washington that Israel would pull out once Arafat ``responded positively'' to a U.S. demand he arrest Zeevi's killers.

Arafat told reporters in Gaza that Israel was ``belittling'' the international community by turning a blind eye to demands it withdraw from areas taken since the assassination.

Palestinian officials have said Israel's real aim was to topple Arafat and his governing Palestinian Authority. Israel has denied the allegation.

GROWING CRISIS

Israeli newspapers spoke of a growing crisis in relations with the United States, which provides Israel with $3 billion in annual aid, at the same time as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon faces cracks in his coalition over the offensive.

``Israeli defense forces should be withdrawn immediately from all Palestinian-controlled areas and no further such incursions should be made,'' a State Department spokesman said Monday.

The State Department also called on the Palestinian Authority ``to do all in its power to halt violence and terror,'' adding that failure to do so ``is absolutely unacceptable.''

Fighting has been particularly bad in Bethlehem, the biblical birthplace of Jesus, where Israeli forces are a few hundred meters (yards) inside the city.

``It is true there are tanks in the streets of the cities. That does not help,'' Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief, said before talks with Sharon.

``But it is also very difficult for the Israelis to see how one of their ministers has been killed, assassinated, and the perpetrators are not found,'' Solana told reporters.

The surge of violence, a year into a Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation, has obstructed Middle East peace efforts which Washington views as vital to its anti-terror war following the September 11 attacks in the United States.

ARMY CHIEF SAYS RAIDS NOT LONG-TERM

Israeli army chief Shaul Mofaz told reporters that soldiers had killed ``around 20 terrorists'' and arrested 20 during the six-day-old operation which he said would not continue for ``an extended period.''

The PFLP said it killed Zeevi to avenge Israel's assassination of its leader, Abu Ali Mustafa, in August.

After Zeevi's death, the Palestinian Authority outlawed the PFLP's military wing. A senior Palestinian security official said Palestinian police had arrested 30 PFLP members.

But Arafat's ability to crack down on Islamist and radical groups was further weakened after the militant Hamas organization vowed to avenge Monday's killing of one of its top bombmakers. The movement said Israel killed one of its ''commanders,'' Ayman Halaweh, by booby-trapping his car.

Israel officials had no comment on Monday's Nablus blast, but Sharon's office said in a statement that Halaweh was involved in eight suicide bombings in which 48 people were killed including one at a Tel Aviv disco in June in which 21 died.

At least 656 Palestinians and 177 Israelis have been killed since the Palestinian revolt began in September 2000 after peace talks stalled.

-------- italy

Italy Offers U.S. Variety of Help

October 23, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-Italy-Military.html?searchpv=aponline

ROME (AP) -- Italy is offering the United States an armor regiment, attack helicopters, fighter jets and specialists in nuclear, chemical and bacteriological warfare for the coalition against terrorism, the defense minister said Tuesday.

The United States welcomed the offer ``with great satisfaction,'' Defense Minister Antonio Martino told parliamentary commissions on foreign affairs and defense Tuesday. However, he stressed that the United States ``hasn't formalized any request for help.''

While in Washington to meet U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld last week, Martino said Italy would give ``total support'' to the U.S. anti-terrorism campaign.

Italy is willing to offer a 390-man armored regiment, four A129 attack helicopters, explosives experts, a 116-member team of experts and special vehicles to deal with nuclear, bacteriological and chemical weapons, Tornado reconnaissance fighter jets, a C-130 transport plane and a refueling jet, he said.

Naval support is also being offered for the northern Arabian Sea, with the possibilities including a torpedo-hunting ship, a pair of frigates or an aircraft carrier.

In all, some 1,000 men could be deployed in 15 to 60 days, Martino said.

``Italy has done and will do its share'' against international terrorism, Martino said earlier in the day at a ceremony in Italy's defense studies center.

``But together with the all-out fight against the terrorists, all peoples who combat them must also add dialogue with reasonable, tolerant, open, civilized Islam,'' Martino said.

Last month, Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi sparked outrage at home and abroad when he declared that Western civilization was superior to Islamic civilization, and Martino's comments appeared to be aimed to smooth over any remaining hard feeling.

Martino said Monday it was too early to speculate on when and where Italian troops will be deployed.

Italian officials have already raised the possibility that more Italian troops could be sent into the Balkans for peacekeeping duties to free up some of the U.S. force deployed there.

Italy played a small role in the U.S.-led Gulf War a decade ago.

-------- pakistan

U.S. Warned Not to Strike During Ramadan
Pakistani Leader Says Dissent Will Intensify if Attacks Continue Into Holy Month

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, October 23, 2001; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36163-2001Oct22.html

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Oct. 22 -- The Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, warned tonight that popular misgivings about U.S. military action in Afghanistan will intensify if attacks continue during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month that begins in mid-November.

"So one would hope and wish that this campaign comes to an end before the month of Ramadan," Musharraf said on CNN's "Larry King Live." "And one would hope for restraint during the month of Ramadan, because this would certainly have some negative effects in the Muslim world."

Bush administration officials have acknowledged the complications presented by Ramadan, a period of fasting and renewed devotion akin to Lent in Christianity. But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld suggested today that U.S. military action would not conform to the religious calendar.

"History is replete with instances where Muslim nations have fought among themselves or with other countries during various important holy days for their religion and it has not inhibited them historically," Rumsfeld said.

Musharraf has more than once urged the United States to finish the campaign in Afghanistan as quickly as possible and with a minimum of civilian victims. Although he reversed years of Pakistani support for the Taliban and agreed immediately after Sept. 11 to help the United States, Musharraf also must respond to public sentiment among the 140 million Pakistanis.

Many Pakistanis resent the fact that their country is being used as a platform for some U.S. military and intelligence actions against a country that until a little more than a month ago was a friendly neighbor. A dozen Pakistanis have been killed in protests organized by extremist Islamic parties here since bombing began Oct. 7.

Daily images of U.S. warplanes pounding an achingly poor Muslim country -- one already fractured by two decades of warfare -- have produced anger among the populations of many Muslim countries and unease among their leaders, including those who have endorsed the U.S. anti-terrorism campaign.

Musharraf, who seized power in a 1999 military coup, has sidelined Pakistan's political parties. As a result, he has no support base outside the military to ease his dealings with the public, even the part of it that opposes Islamic extremism and sympathizes with U.S. anti-terrorism objectives.

At the same time, however, officials in his government have begun to worry about the length of the military action and the direction taken in U.S.-led efforts to arrange a post-Taliban leadership for Afghanistan.

Senior Pakistani officials said they are dismayed by the lack of success in recruiting anti-Taliban Pashtun tribal leaders in southern and eastern Afghanistan to mount military and political opposition to the Taliban movement. These efforts, by U.S. and Pakistani intelligence operatives, have been "very intense, but without any tangible results," a senior official said.

Similarly, some Taliban officials have indicated a willingness to join a post-Taliban reconstruction government, but have held back on any decision to break openly with the Taliban, these officials reported.

As a result, contacts underway to organize a grand assembly of anti-Taliban Afghan leaders, under the aegis of exiled king Mohammed Zahir Shah in Rome, have tipped too strongly toward the Northern Alliance for Pakistan's taste. For the Pakistani government, a new order in Afghanistan revolving around the Northern Alliance would be anathema, tantamount to installing a hostile group next door and inviting more instability by imposing a minority government on Afghanistan's 26 million people.

"The Northern Alliance has neither the political capacity nor the military capacity to govern Afghanistan," Musharraf said in an appearance on Pakistani television tonight.

"We have told the United States Pakistan would forcefully resist any attempt to impose any Northern Alliance-influenced political setup on Afghanistan," a senior official said. "The quest for a friendly government in Afghanistan is still the key plank of Pakistan's new Afghanistan policy."

The Northern Alliance rebel groups, fighting the Taliban north of Kabul, the Afghan capital, and around Mazar-e Sharif, control about 10 percent of the country and represent mainly its Tajik and Uzbek minorities. Over the years, they have been aided by Russia, Iran and India.

Pakistan, whose population is 15 percent ethnic Pashtun -- and whose army is up to 30 percent Pashtun -- has maintained its relations in recent years with the other side, the Taliban, which springs mainly from Afghanistan's 40 percent Pashtun plurality.

Pakistani officials have bridled at a tentative agreement between the exiled king and the Northern Alliance to form a 120-member interim council with 50 members nominated by the king, 50 by the Northern Alliance and 20 by common agreement.

"Pashtun have traditionally ruled Afghanistan, and they should be reflected in the future political dispensation," Musharraf said in the Pakistani television interview.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in his visit here last week, voiced openness to the idea of embracing some Taliban members in the new Afghan system, provided they are not part of the present Taliban leadership under Mohammad Omar and have clearly broken with his ideology. The problem, Pakistani officials acknowledge, is that nobody meeting that description -- "the good Taliban" -- has stepped forward.

Correspondent Pamela Constable in Islamabad and special correspondent Kamran Khan in Karachi contributed to this report.

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Two U.S. helicopters fired on over Pakistan

USA TODAY
10/23/2001
The Associated Press
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/10/23/helicopter.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - Two U.S. helicopters came under fire in Pakistan as their crews attempted to retrieve the wreckage of another helicopter that had crashed during a covert weekend commando raid, the Pentagon said Tuesday. And officials acknowledged that yet another aircraft lost its wheels during that undercover raid but returned safely to its base.

In Monday's shooting incident, the retrieval crews were transporting a Black Hawk helicopter that had crashed, killing two Rangers Friday, the same night that more than 100 special forces raided an airfield and a Taliban compound in southern Afghanistan. Officials have said the Black Hawk was at the ready to swoop into Afghanistan to rescue any special forces that might get into trouble.

The retrieval crew Monday returned fire and left the area, also leaving behind the Black Hawk wreckage it was trying to pick up, said Lt. Col. George Rhynedance, a Pentagon spokesman.

He said the small-arms fire was believed to have come from a small radical group that he did not further identify.

The incident comes amid continuing demonstrations by Islamic militants in Pakistan who want to expel Americans supporting the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan. The U.S. aim is to root out terrorist networks associated with Osama bin Laden, top suspect in the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the United States.

Near one Pakistani base being used by U.S. personnel, police Tuesday erected blockades and sandbag bunkers against mass demonstrations after militants vowed to storm the facility. More than 100 people had been arrested by midmorning after a protest at Jacobabad, site of Shahbaz Air Base.

Rhynedance declined to say where Monday's shooting incident occurred but said it was brief "and what we are considering harassing fire."

He said the United States was asking through diplomatic channels that Pakistan investigate.

"Pakistan has been giving us outstanding support within the limits of what it has agreed to do" in the anti-terrorism campaign Rhynedance said. Pakistan is helping with intelligence and allowing use of its airspace and some fields, but has said it will not allow attacks from its territory into Afghanistan.

Members of the retrieval crews were taking the wreckage in a sling under another helicopter and stopped for a scheduled refueling on their way back to their base, which Rhynedance also declined to identify. In order to land for the refueling, they had set the wreckage down and left it there for later pickup when the shooting started, Rhynedance said.

Meanwhile, Rhynedance said an American MH47 Chinook helicopter lost its front wheels and a piece of undercarriage when it hit something during the Friday raid.

The Taliban militia that control most of Afghanistan have said that two U.S. helicopters were shot down during the raid, a claim Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld denied.

Video footage from the Al-Jazeera television network showed people gathered around several large wheels that the Taliban said were a downed helicopter's landing gear.

The Chinook hit a wall or barrier as it was taking special forces into Afghanistan Friday, Rhynedance said Tuesday. He said there were no injuries to troops and no other damage to the helicopter.

The troops were able to finish their mission and return to their base, which he declined to identify. He also declined to say whether the accident occurred during the assault on the compound of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar compound or the simultaneous one at the airfield.

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Militants Urge Supporters to Raid U.S. Air Base

October 23, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-Pakistan.html

JACOBABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Police erected blockades and sandbag bunkers across a southern city Tuesday, girding for mass demonstrations after Islamic militants vowed to storm a Pakistani air base being used to support U.S. military personnel.

More than 100 people had been arrested by midmorning after a protest inside Jacobabad, site of Shahbaz Air Base, though the unrest was not widespread. Most shops were closed and many streets were deserted except for police, army and paramilitary troops.

Islamic militants summoned by Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan's largest and most influential religious party, vowed to seize the base Tuesday afternoon. The party had vowed to marshal thousands of supporters.

It wants to expel U.S. personnel supporting the U.S.-led military campaign designed to root out terrorist installations in Afghanistan belonging to Osama bin Laden, top suspect in the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the United States.

Most roads to the city have been blocked and patrolled for days to prevent mass entry, though some were reported open Tuesday. During the morning, about 200 militant Muslims appeared inside the city, chanting anti-government slogans. They made no immediate move toward the base three miles away.

Police rushed them with batons, ordering them to disperse. Nearly all were arrested, according to an Associated Press photographer on the scene who said at least five protesters appeared to have been injured by batons.

Two more small groups of demonstrators -- one of 25 people, the other of about 15 -- were arrested shortly afterward when they started to march toward the base. Authorities said they had been hiding in houses and were emerging sporadically.

Earlier, Jacobabad Police Chief Akhtar Shah said authorities had also arrested about 100 activists since Sunday to prevent air-base-related demonstrations. The militants claim to have thousands more ready.

``We will reach the air base at any cost,'' said Maulana Abdul Hafeez Bajarani, a Jamaat-e-Islami spokesman in Jacobabad.

On Monday, the head of Jamaat-e-Islami was barred by police from traveling -- an attempt to defuse the planned demonstrations. The leader, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, was visibly angry.

``The days of this government are numbered, and Musharraf will no longer be in power after a few days,'' he said at the airport in the eastern city of Lahore. He wouldn't elaborate.

Jamaat-e-Islami said police had arrested at least 1,100 supporters over the past two days; authorities say the number is far lower.

Other activists have gone into hiding, determined to avoid arrest until they make it to Jacobabad for the protest, Jamaat-e-Islami said.

On Oct. 14, Islamic militants fought running street battles with police in Jacobabad. One protester was killed as mobs fought to reach the air base.

Hundreds of activists were arrested before that rally as well, though most were freed afterward. Three leading Islamic clerics were placed under house arrest at the start of the campaign, another pre-emptive move to block opposition. One has since been released.

President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's government says Pakistan is lending only logistical support to the United States. He has promised that no attacks on Afghanistan will be staged from Pakistani soil.

Musharraf has insisted for weeks that most of Pakistan is behind him, and protests -- while loud and sometimes violent -- have been scattered and have included only a sliver of Pakistan's population.

``Yes, there are risks,'' Musharraf said Tuesday on CNN's ``Larry King Live.'' ``But I know that a vast majority of the country is supporting whatever decision I took.''

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

U.S. spent more than the next seven leading military powers, combined

The Progressive Review <news@prorev.com>
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001 20:24:23 +0000
http://prorev.com/bb.htm

HINDUSTAN TIMES: 1999: The U.S. spent more than the next seven leading military powers, combined: $283 billion versus $265 billion. Five of the next seven leading military powers are U.S. allies. The U.S. spent 2.6 times more on its military than the combined military expenditures of the next nine largest potential adversaries (Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Cuba): $283 billion versus $109 billion. The U.S., NATO, and other U.S. allies (Japan, South Korea, Australia, Saudi Arabia) spent five times more on their militaries than the combined expenditures of the next nine largest potential adversaries (Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Cuba): $551 billion versus $109 billion.

----

Global command considered

October 23, 2001
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011023-30744658.htm

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is considering creation of a global command to fight a lengthy war on terrorism, a sure sign that the Pentagon is contemplating covert combat in countries other than Afghanistan.

Administration officials say Mr. Rumsfeld has met several times with Gen. Charles R. Holland, who heads U.S. Special Operations Command, about forming a command or centering the anti-terrorism effort at the general's headquarters at McDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla.

Giving Gen. Holland, or another four-star officer, command of the anti-terror war would avoid shifting responsibility from commander to commander as anti-terror operations move from region to region. The principal war-fighting commanders, known as commanders in chief, or cincs, are assigned their own turf, such as Pacific or European command.

The Bush administration is in the early stages of discussing covert intelligence operations or actions by U.S. commandos, or their foreign surrogates, around the world. These actions likely would not come until President Bush meets his first objective: ousting the ruling Taliban in Afghanistan and eliminating Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network. The locations include:

• South America - The administration is collecting evidence of al Qaeda operatives involved in cocaine trafficking in Paraguay and Colombia. Islamic fundamentalist cells are operating in a tri-border area of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. Evidence has been found of al Qaeda members in this no man's land, a senior administration official says.

• Philippines - Anti-government Abu Sayyaf terrorists are linked to bin Laden. Options discussed include an all-out conventional attack, the use of special operations troops or asking a surrogate to do the job. One candidate is Australia's Special Air Service, which has seen, or will see, action in Afghanistan.

The United States believes the Philippines serves as home to scores of al Qaeda foot soldiers. Philippines President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo vigorously supports America's war on terrorism, but is cool to the idea of allowing U.S. commandos to fight Abu Sayyaf. The Philippines government does want American training and advanced equipment.

U.S. military advisers have visited the Philippines to assess the capabilities of forces fighting the rebels.

• Iraq - Some Pentagon officials, notably Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, are advocating going after dictator Saddam Hussein. Saddam has not been directly linked to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, but the State Department lists Baghdad, which plotted to kill former President George Bush in 1993, as a state sponsor of terrorism.

Administration officials said several Rumsfeld aides believe the armed forces need an anti-terrorist commander for a war that may last for decades.

"This is a global war on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction," Gen. Richard B. Myers, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, told ABC this week. "So Afghanistan is only one small piece. So of course we're thinking very broadly. I would say since World War II we haven't thought this broadly about a campaign."

The Air Force general added, "I think this is going to be a long, hard-fought conflict. And it will be global in scale. And it won't be, as I mentioned earlier, it won't be just military. It's going to be all the instruments of our national power, with our friends and allies. And the fact that it could last several years or many years, or maybe our lifetimes, would not surprise me."

Some Pentagon officials are leery of a global anti-terrorism commander in chief. They fear the position would stir up turf battles among the regional cincs, who do not want to see a commander invade their turf and oversee a military operation.

A senior congressional defense staffer said if Mr. Rumsfeld wants a new war-fighting commander in chief, he will need to change the law. "I don't think Congress says no," the aide said.

"He's trying to figure out how to bridge across the cincs, but the cincdoms may not allow that," the source said. "They're protective of their turf."

Gen. Holland already is playing a large role in planning the commando war against the Taliban and al Qaeda. Afghanistan falls in a geographic area belonging to U.S. Central Command and its head, Army Gen. Tommy Franks, who is directing the overall campaign.

Gen. Holland's command oversees just a fraction of the force - 46,000 special operations troops in the Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps. But, since Mr. Bush's war on terrorism often will call on commandos, the general's influence has grown since Sept. 11.

He is a career Air Force special operations aviator. In Vietnam, he flew the AC-130 gunship now being used extensively over Afghanistan to hit Taliban and al Qaeda troops.

Victoria Clarke, spokeswoman for Mr. Rumsfeld, said discussion of an anti-terrorism command is one option discussed as the defense secretary studies ways to reorganize the entire commander in chief system for 21st-century threats, such as terrorism.

The fact that many secret military operations lie ahead is one reason Mr. Rumsfeld has preached operational security to his personnel at the Pentagon and in the field.

Mr. Wolfowitz on Thursday sent a memo to senior officials throughout the department urging personnel to watch what they say.

Titled "Operations Security Throughout the Department of Defense," the Oct. 18 memo states, in part, "It is vital that Defense Department employees, as well as persons in other organizations that support DoD, exercise great caution in discussing information related to DoD work, regardless of their duties. Do not conduct any work-related conversations in common areas, public places, while commuting, or over unsecured electronic circuits. Much of the information we use to conduct DoD's operations must be withheld from public release because of its sensitivity. If in doubt, do not release or discuss official information except with other DoD personnel."


-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

BP to build Singapore stations for hydrogen cars

23/10/2001
Reuters
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/12930/newsDate/23-Oct-2001/story.htm

SINGAPORE - British energy group BP and the Economic Development Board (EDB) yesterday signed a letter of intent to build hydrogen refueling stations for future Singapore motorists driving hydrogen-powered vehicles.

In May, the EDB signed a similar letter of intent with DaimlerChrysler to develop hydrogen-power cars for the Singapore market.

"You'll probably see the installation of hydrogen systems in 2003, with the construction one year ahead of the introduction of the vehicles, which could be 2004," said Gary Oliver, hydrogen market development manager at BP.

Oliver said BP plans to install hydrogen refueling facilities, which cost between $500,000 to $1.5 million each, in one or two of its existing retail outlets in Singapore.

"For this pilot project we're targetting about two refueling stations to serve maybe 15 cars or so," he said.

Oliver said while the initial stations will be costly and serve only a few vehicles, the price of installing hydrogen refueling stations should decline as more are built.

The next step in the project will be to conduct a feasibility study on the Singapore market, BP executives said.

BP in March launched a similar project in the United Kingdom.

"We think that in 20 years the internal combustion engine could be obsolete," said Koh Kim Wah, president of BP Singapore.

He said while this project is focused on vehicular use of hydrogen, this fuel could also be used for power generation and other energy needs in the future.

Hydrogen is a colourless and odourless combustible gas that can be produced from natural gas or water. It is currently most widely used in industrial production of ammonia, petrochemicals, methanol and refinery operations.

--------

Cree sign treaty with Quebec for hydro development

Canadian Press
Tuesday, October 23, 2001
Montreal Gazette
http://www.canada.com/montreal/story.asp?id={5E69047E-2C64-4DDD-B782-54464A58D9FB}

The Quebec government and northern Cree leaders signed a multibillion-dollar agreement Tuesday aimed at easing longstanding feuds and opening the door to future hydroelectric projects.

Under the wide-ranging deal, the government has promised the Cree at least $3.5 billion over 50 years - including $139 million before 2004, Premier Bernard Landry said.

The Cree would also receive greater say in the development of forestry and hydro resources on their land in the northern half of Quebec.

In return, the Cree have promised to drop $3.6 billion in lawsuits against the government. They have also agreed to two new hydroelectric installations worth a total of $3.8 billion, both of which remain subject to environmental approval.

"We're all too aware that on this planet today we're not just sensing winds of peace and harmony," Landry said.

"Quebecers and Crees are taking steps toward peace, harmony, brotherhood and a bright future away from a sometimes-troubled past."

The agreement in principle was signed by Landry and Cree grand chief Ted Moses at the legislature.

Cree leaders will consult with their people in the coming weeks before signing a formal deal.

-------- environment

Mining world seeks natural remedy for toxic waste

Amanda Cooper,
23/10/2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/12929/story.htm

LONDON - Using materials such as bonemeal or seaweed, scientists hope natural waste will one day serve to combat dangerous mining waste that can cause serious illness in humans and kill plant and animal life.

Many of the metals found in the acidic waste from mining operations - or tailings - such as cadmium, arsenic or lead can be lethal if allowed to enter the environment in large amounts.

"There's no such thing as an impermeable landfill or a container that is insoluble enough not to release metal," said Dr Eva Valsami-Jones, who heads the environmental mineralogy programme at Britain's Natural History Museum in London.

Tailings are usually stored in large pits, but a spate of serious accidents involving toxic spills will force the mining world to review its waste management policy.

"The only safe tailings dam is one that doesn't exist. You can store a couple of weeks' worth of water but basically you cannot go on storing billions of litres of water, because sooner or later, whether by accident or carelessness or natural disaster, it's going to fail," said Professor David McConchie, of the Australian green-technology firm Virotec.

Rather than neutralising the tailings with acid, the new remedies use the chemical powers of natural waste to trap heavy metal atoms, and slowly release them into the environment in such tiny amounts that they no longer pose a threat.

"The key questions are - do these methods work, are they cost-effective, are they better than what already exists and can operations be carried out in a way that minimises environmental harm?" said Charles Secrett, head of the British-based environmental lobby Friends of the Earth.

In a reflection of the ancient Greek practice of homeopathy - treating like with like - researchers have come up with three methods utilising waste products that promise to be cheap and sustainable to remediate, or clean, contaminated soil and water.

Caustic red mud can make acidic mine water clean enough to drink, while bonemeal and seaweed could one day be used together to clean the most polluted old mine sites.

LOCK UP THOSE ATOMS!

The Natural History Museum's team is currently studying the effectiveness of bonemeal, used as a common garden fertiliser because of its high phosphate content, in treating soil contaminated by inorganic material like heavy metals.

The bonemeal dissolves in the soil and its alkaline phosphate binds with the metal to form a chemical micro-barrier.

"The metal phosphate is very insoluble. Once it forms, it is no longer available as a contaminant, it's as if it is locked up in a mineral cage," Valsalmi-Jones said.

"The first stage of our research actually demonstrated in the lab that there was a wide range of metals we could remediate, which included the standard nasties like lead, cadmium and also things like uranium, nickel and cobalt - all the metals one would want to remediate," she added.

Research is still at an early stage, but this method may one day provide a safe, sustainable solution to waste and could even be used in tandem with other ecological methods to treat areas polluted by both organic and inorganic substances, she said.

"Anything that is safe for environmental or human health and closes the loop in terms of residue is in principle a good thing. But all too often we class residues as 'waste' that actually have demonstrable uses," said FOE's Secrett.

CLOSING THE LOOP

McGill University in the Canadian city of Montreal is also moving closer to closing the environmental loop with the use of dead plant life to rid tailings water of metal. Professor Bohumil Volesky of McGill's department of chemical engineering found biomass such as dead seaweed removed heavy metals from water and like a sponge, was then easily rinsed out and reused and the metals could be recovered and resold.

"Heavy metals are toxic and the problem with them is that they are persistent. A metal is a metal is a metal. It doesn't change and the only way to remove the toxicity associated with it is to remove the metal from the environment," he said.

Water is poured through a column of biomass, which collects the heavy metals through a process called biosorption. Once the biomass is saturated, a mild acid is used to wash out the metals in a highly concentrated form, and can be used time and again.

"Eventually the material deteriorates and what you do is give it the last wash so it's totally metal free. Then you can use it as fertiliser or...as straw or hay," Volesky said.

With the metal-laden soil and water taken care of at the mining site, the earth must be packed with nutrients so that it can regenerate and encourage new plant growth.

PLANT REGENERATION WITH RED MUD

Virotec, a former Australian gold mining firm, made a breakthrough when it found that the red muddy residue from alumina refining could remove heavy metals and then be used for revegetation.

"We take one waste product from the alumina refineries, physically and chemically change it, and then apply it without leaving another environmental problem behind," said Virotec executive chairman Brian Sheeran.

The product bauxsol takes its name from the aluminium ore bauxite. Once treated seawater, bauxsol cleans the tailings water by capturing the metal, leaving behind a small amount of inert red sediment on which plants can thrive.

"Even when we plant plants on the used bauxsol, they don't get hit with an overload of metals," Professor McConchie, who developed the product, said. "They love it."

Bauxsol contains a cocktail of harmless minerals, some of which are even used in common indigestion tablets, he said.

"The minerals react with the metals and the acid extremely well and form these new minerals that have a low solubility and are very stable...when we leach the used bauxsol with very acid solutions, we still don't recover the metals," McConchie said.

Bauxsol was recently show-cased in Baia Mare in Romania, the site of one of the industry's worst toxic spills last year.

The downsides? "If you use it on your vegetable garden at home...just make sure you don't have a family dog and white carpets!" McConchie said.

-------- energy

Terrorism, the energy trap, and the way out

Christian Science Monitor
October 23, 2001
By Michael J. Mazarr
http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1023/p9s1-coop.html

WASHINGTON - WITH each passing day, the scope of the United States' and allied responses to the terrorism of Sept. 11 becomes clearer and clearer. But the attacks on America, and the wider trends from which they emerged, point to another pressing need - one that is so far going unnoticed. The events of Sept. 11 sealed the national security argument for a massive national investment in renewable energy.

Without new sources of energy, the US will be increasingly hostage to the few countries still producing large amounts of oil, and frighteningly vulnerable to energy-related aggression and terrorism. About a decade from now, we will import some 70 percent of our oil, and the Middle East will account for perhaps 70 percent of world oil exports. Energy rivalries, price volatility, and the strategic vulnerability of oil will intensify.

The threats emerging from this vortex of energy insecurity could take many forms. Two or three small nuclear warheads detonated in the right places in the Persian Gulf would bring the world economy to a standstill. A regional bully circa 2010 or 2015 will be able to hold at risk a far greater proportion of the world's daily energy diet than did Saddam Hussein in 1990.

If our vulnerability to this sort of mischief was substantial before Sept. 11, it is much greater today. Osama bin Laden and his followers are intent on sparking a war between extremist Islam and the West. To the extent that they succeed even in part of their agenda - threatening, for example, the stability of the regime in Saudi Arabia - US and world oil supplies will rest on even shakier foundations.

As recent events make clear, too, the problem isn't just global, it is also domestic. A fossil-fuel-dependent, long-range-energy-grid economy is susceptible to terrorist attacks from local or global troublemakers.

How, then, can we begin a transformation in our sources of energy? Advocates of such a shift usually offer punitive or restrictive approaches, from regulations to enforced conservation, to achieve their goal. Such regulations are politically charged, though, and they don't really solve the problem - they only delay the day of reckoning. Truly escaping the fossil-fuel trap demands different kinds of fuels.

It demands a visionary approach to energy security and environmental sustainability that ought to be very attractive to President Bush. He could, for example, announce his intention to reduce the threat posed by the slow exhaustion of fossil fuels, and commit the US to a dramatic increase in the proportion of the total energy it generates from decentralized, renewable sources within a specific time frame - say, by 2010.

Such a goal is achievable. Many renewable energy technologies - solar, wind, fuel cells, biomass - are now within shouting distance of the potential for widespread use in terms of reliability, practicality, and, most important, cost-competitiveness with fossil fuels. Some renewables just need scale; with bigger markets, per-user prices will drop. In other cases, rigorous research and development remain necessary.

Either way, a bold government policy that both guarantees larger markets for renewables and funds new research can make these technologies practical for widespread use - not in one year, perhaps not in five, but much sooner than it will happen otherwise.

Opponents of a big federal role on renewables have argued that developing them is the market's job, not the government's. But with our most vital national interests at stake, economic theory needs to take a backseat to national security. Fifteen years from now, when gas prices are leaping and terrorists are menacing Middle East oil, our philosophical devotion to market forces will seem absurd.

Politically, this approach could be a real winner. The broad appeal of such an initiative - "protect the environment, shore up our security, safeguard our economy" - is as obvious as its environmental and strategic value. Polls show that 90 percent of Americans favor a greater federal role in renewable energy.

As a side bonus, renewable energy could become the technological silver bullet in the global-warming and energy-policy debate - a debate President Bush was losing before the recent crisis. Instead of placing government agencies or global bureaucracies in charge of a painful, gradual reduction of greenhouse gases, he could jump-start the technologies that will someday eliminate them.

Whether or not we have an environmental problem in need of urgent action, we surely have a brewing security crisis that demands it. The time has come for America to become the master of its own energy security, and the president can lead the way.

Michael J. Mazarr is president and CEO of the Henry L. Stimson Center.

-------- health

Drug firms reel in new medicines from the sea

Story by Ben Hirschler,
European Pharmaceuticals Correspondent,
23/10/2001
Reuters
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/12934/newsDate/23-Oct-2001/story.htm

LONDON - Sea sponges aren't only handy in the bath, they could also provide doctors with a new generation of drugs to treat serious diseases, including cancer.

The idea of tapping natural chemicals in sponges and other marine creatures first grabbed the imagination of researchers in the 1970s, when Swiss group Roche Holding AG explored Australia's Great Barrier Reef - without success.

But bio-prospecting is a slow business and, a quarter of a century on, the underwater treasure hunt is starting to yield results, with several marine pharmaceutical compounds now nearing the market.

Ireland's Elan Corp plans to launch a new painkiller shortly that will be the first ever drug isolated from a marine organism, according to David Newman, a chemist in the natural products branch of the National Cancer Institute in Maryland.

The compound, called Prialt, comes from a tropical cone snail that stabs its prey with a poison harpoon. It is designed to treat severe chronic pain in cancer and AIDS patients.

The novel analgesic won conditional approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2000 and an Elan spokesman said the company hoped for final clearance later this year.

Behind it, the Spanish biotechnology company PharmaMar, a unit of Zeltia SA set up specifically to comb the sea for drugs, expects to start selling its first anti-cancer compound, known by the codename ET-743, by the end of 2002 in Europe.

The drug, extracted from a grape-like sea squirt cultivated in the Mediterranean, is collected by divers, although a semi-synthetic version is also in development.

Zeltia has a further two cancer drugs in clinical trials, the most advanced of which - Aplidine - is showing promise.

NATURE'S MEDICINE CHEST

There is nothing particularly new about tapping nature's medicine chest - the Ancient Egyptians first recorded the use of medicinal plants almost 4,000 years ago.

Modern medicine, too, has embraced a variety of natural products including the heart drug digitalis, originally made from foxglove; blood pressure treatments derived from viper venom; and a cancer medicine, Taxol, extracted from yew trees.

But it is only relatively recently that researchers have looked systematically to the sea - despite some serendipitous discoveries that have helped in drug design. It was analysis of chemicals in Caribbean sponges in the 1950s, for example, that gave vital chemical clues needed to make the AIDS drug AZT.

Newman, a world expert on drugs from the sea, believes there are good reasons to think marine invertebrates, particularly those found in tropical seas and on coral reefs, will yield powerful new drugs, including tumour-killing agents.

Sponges and other creatures are engaged in a chemical "arms race" in their watery environment, and they need potent defences to counteract the natural dilution of the sea.

CHEMICAL WARFARE

"On a coral reef what you have is chemical warfare. Every invertebrate needs to have a toehold on the reef so it can feed and the way to defend that toehold is to develop a more powerful poison sack than the competition," said Newman.

"That is why materials from the marine environment are normally extremely potent."

Zeltia chairman Jose-Maria Fernandez Sousa-Faro says his company has collected 22,000 marine samples since 1986 and he is confident there are many more new drugs among them.

"Many of the medicines currently on the market originally came from natural sources - but terrestrial ones. Nobody has yet searched systematically in the oceans and there is a big opportunity there since they contain 75 percent of the world's living species," he said.

"There is no reason to think that the sea cannot provide us with as good medicine as the land has done before."

Modern techniques for analysing chemicals found in marine organisms are helping in the hunt and big pharmaceutical companies are starting to pay attention.

Zeltia in August signed Europe's second biggest biotech marketing deal ever for its cancer drug ET-743 with U.S. healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson, worth more than $100 million.

Other "big pharma" companies are also developing promising early-stage compounds.

Switzerland's Novartis AG is studying a product called discodermolide derived from a Caribbean sponge which may be 80 times more potent in killing cancer cells than Taxol, a chemotherapy for breast, ovarian and other cancers.

Eli Lilly and Co, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co and American Home Products Corp also have projects to examine marine anti-tumour products.

Outside the cancer field, scientists from the University of Mississippi announced earlier this year that several Pacific sponges produced alkaloids that could help fight malaria, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.

-------- human rights

As the Refugees Crowd the Borders, We'll Be Blaming Someone Else
'It is palpably evident that they are not fleeing the Taliban but our bombs and missiles'

Common Dreams
Tuesday, October 23, 2001
Independent/UK
by Robert Fisk
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1023-08.htm

Mullah Mohammed Omar's 10-year-old son is dead. He was, according to Afghan refugees fleeing Kandahar, taken to one of the city's broken hospitals by his father, the Taliban leader and "Emir of the Faithful", but the boy - apparently traveling in Omar's car when it was attacked by US aircraft - died of his wounds.

No regrets, of course. Back in 1985, when American aircraft bombed Libya, they also destroyed the life of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's six-year-old adopted daughter. No regrets, of course. In 1992, when an Israeli pilot flying an American-made Apache helicopter fired an American-made missile into the car of Said Abbas Moussawi, head of the Hizbollah guerrilla army in Lebanon, the Israeli pilot also killed Moussawi's 10-year-old. No regrets, of course.

Whether these children deserved their deaths, be sure that their fathers - in our eyes - were to blame. Live by the sword, die by the sword - and that goes for the kids too. Back in 1991, The Independent revealed that American Gulf War military targets included "secure" bunkers in which members of Saddam Hussein's family - or the families of his henchmen - were believed to be hiding. That's how the Americans managed to slaughter well over 300 people in an air raid shelter at Amariya in Baghdad. No Saddam kids, just civilians. Too bad. I wonder - now that President George Bush has given permission to the CIA to murder Osama bin Laden - if the same policy applies today?

And so the casualties begin to mount. From Kandahar come ever more frightful stories of civilians buried under ruins, of children torn to pieces by American bombs. The Taliban - and here the Americans must breathe a collective sigh of relief - refuse to allow Western journalists to enter the country to verify these reports. So when a few television crews were able to find 18 fresh graves in the devastated village of Khorum outside Jalalabad just over a week ago, the US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could ridicule the deaths as "ridiculous". But not, I suspect, for much longer.

For if each of our wars for infinite justice and eternal freedom have a familiar trade mark - the military claptrap about air superiority, suppression of "command and control centers", radar capabilities - each has an awkward, highly exclusive little twist to it. In 1999, NATO claimed it was waging war to put Kosovo Albanian refugees back in their homes - even though most of the refugees were still in their homes when the war began. Our bombing of Serbia led directly to their dispossession. We bear a heavy burden of responsibility for their suffering - since the Serbs had told us what they would do if NATO opened hostilities - although the ultimate blame for their "ethnic cleansing'' clearly belonged to Slobodan Milosevic.

But NATO's escape clause won't work this time round. For as the Afghan refugees turn up in their thousands at the border, it is palpably evident that they are fleeing not the Taliban but our bombs and missiles. The Taliban is not ethnically cleansing its own Pashtun population. The refugees speak vividly of their fear and terror as our bombs fall on their cities. These people are terrified of our "war on terror'', victims as innocent as those who were slaughtered in the World Trade Center on 11 September. So where do we stop?

It's an important question because, once the winter storms breeze down the mountain gorges of Afghanistan, a tragedy is likely to commence, one which no spin doctor or propaganda expert will be able to divert. We'll say that the thousands about to die or who are dying of starvation and cold are victims of the Taliban's intransigence or the Taliban's support for "terrorism" or the Taliban's propensity to steal humanitarian supplies.

I have to admit - having been weaned on Israel's promiscuous use of the word "terror" every time a Palestinian throws a stone at his occupiers - that I find the very word "terrorism" increasingly mendacious as well as racist. Of course - despite the slavish use of the phrase "war on terrorism" on the BBC and CNN - it is nothing of the kind. We are not planning to attack Tamil Tiger suicide bombers or ETA killers or Real IRA murderers or Kurdish KDP guerrillas. Indeed, the US has spent a lot of time supporting terrorists in Latin America - the Contras spring to mind - not to mention the rabble we are now bombing in Afghanistan. This is, as I've said before, a war on America's enemies. Increasingly, as the date of 11 September acquires iconic status, we are retaliating for the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington. But we're not setting up any tribunals to try those responsible.

The figure of 6,000 remains as awesome as it did in the days that followed. But what happens when the deaths for which we are responsible begin to approach the same figure? Refugees have been telling me on the Pakistan border that the death toll from our bombings in Afghanistan is in the dozens, perhaps the hundreds. Once the UN agencies give us details of the starving and the destitute who are dying in their flight from our bombs, it won't take long to reach 6,000. Will that be enough? Will 12,000 dead Afghans appease us, albeit that they have nothing to do with the Taliban or Osama bin Laden? Or 24,000? If we think we know what our aims are in this fraudulent "war against terror", have we any idea of proportion?

Sure, we'll blame the Taliban for future tragedies. Just as we've been blaming them for drug exports from Afghanistan. Tony Blair was at the forefront of the Taliban-drug linkage. And all we have to do to believe this is to forget the UN Drug Control Program's announcement last week that opium production in Afghanistan has fallen by 94 per cent, chiefly due to Mullah Omar's prohibition in Taliban-controlled areas. Most of Afghanistan's current opium production comes - you've guessed it - from our friends in the Northern Alliance.

This particular war is, as Mr Bush said, going to be "unlike any other" - but not in quite the way he thinks. It's not going to lead to justice. Or freedom. It's likely to culminate in deaths that will diminish in magnitude even the crime against humanity on 11 September. Do we have any plans for this? Can we turn the falsity of a "war against terror" into a war against famine and starvation and death, even at the cost of postponing our day of reckoning with Osama bin Laden?

-------- spying

Former Air Force Analyst Indicted

October 23, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Spy-Case.html

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) -- A federal grand jury on Tuesday charged former Air Force intelligence analyst Brian P. Regan with attempted espionage.

Regan, of Bowie, Md., was arrested on Aug. 23 at Dulles International Airport as he was preparing to leave the country.

Prosecutors say that Regan, a decorated former master sergeant who worked for a defense contractor and had access to top secret national security information, tried to give classified documents to a foreign country, which a source identified as Libya.

The U.S. Attorney's office said in a statement that Regan frequently accessed Intelink, the U.S. intelligence community's classified version of the Internet, to look at documents he outside his field of work, including pictures of ballistic missile launch facilities in two countries, one of which was Libya.

Regan was trained in solving secret codes and worked for the National Reconnaissance Office, a military intelligence agency in Chantilly, Va., that designs, builds and operates the U.S. network of spy satellites.

He retired from the Air Force in August 2000 and went back to work at NRO a few months later as an employee of TRW, a military contractor. He regained his security clearances for the job, allowing him to access Intelink again.

Regan, in his late 30s, married and a father of four, remains in jail. He will be arraigned on Nov. 5. His attorney did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment.

-------- terrorism

'Brutality smeared in peanut butter'
Why America must stop the war now.

By Arundhati Roy
Tuesday October 23, 2001
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,579196,00.html

As darkness deepened over Afghanistan on Sunday October 7 2001, the US government, backed by the International Coalition Against Terror (the new, amenable surrogate for the United Nations), launched air strikes against Afghanistan. TV channels lingered on computer-animated images of cruise missiles, stealth bombers, tomahawks, "bunker-busting" missiles and Mark 82 high drag bombs. All over the world, little boys watched goggle-eyed and stopped clamouring for new video games.

The UN, reduced now to an ineffective acronym, wasn't even asked to mandate the air strikes. (As Madeleine Albright once said, "We will behave multilaterally when we can, and unilaterally when we must.") The "evidence" against the terrorists was shared amongst friends in the "coalition".

After conferring, they announced that it didn¹t matter whether or not the "evidence" would stand up in a court of law. Thus, in an instant, were centuries of jurisprudence carelessly trashed.

Nothing can excuse or justify an act of terrorism, whether it is committed by religious fundamentalists, private militia, people's resistance movements - or whether it's dressed up as a war of retribution by a recognised government. The bombing of Afghanistan is not revenge for New York and Washington. It is yet another act of terror against the people of the world.

Each innocent person that is killed must be added to, not set off against, the grisly toll of civilians who died in New York and Washington.

People rarely win wars, governments rarely lose them. People get killed.

Governments moult and regroup, hydra-headed. They use flags first to shrink-wrap people's minds and smother thought, and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury their willing dead. On both sides, in Afghanistan as well as America, civilians are now hostage to the actions of their own governments.

Unknowingly, ordinary people in both countries share a common bond - they have to live with the phenomenon of blind, unpredictable terror. Each batch of bombs that is dropped on Afghanistan is matched by a corresponding escalation of mass hysteria in America about anthrax, more hijackings and other terrorist acts.

There is no easy way out of the spiralling morass of terror and brutality that confronts the world today. It is time now for the human race to hold still, to delve into its wells of collective wisdom, both ancient and modern. What happened on September 11 changed the world forever.

Freedom, progress, wealth, technology, war - these words have taken on new meaning.

Governments have to acknowledge this transformation, and approach their new tasks with a modicum of honesty and humility. Unfortunately, up to now, there has been no sign of any introspection from the leaders of the International Coalition. Or the Taliban.

When he announced the air strikes, President George Bush said: "We're a peaceful nation." America¹s favourite ambassador, Tony Blair, (who also holds the portfolio of prime minister of the UK), echoed him: "We're a peaceful people."

So now we know. Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is peace.

Speaking at the FBI headquarters a few days later, President Bush said: "This is our calling. This is the calling of the United States of America. The most free nation in the world. A nation built on fundamental values that reject hate, reject violence, rejects murderers and rejects evil. We will not tire."

Here is a list of the countries that America has been at war with - and bombed - since the second world war: China (1945-46, 1950-53), Korea (1950-53), Guatemala (1954, 1967-69), Indonesia (1958), Cuba (1959-60), the Belgian Congo (1964), Peru (1965), Laos (1964-73), Vietnam (1961-73), Cambodia (1969-70), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), El Salvador (1980s), Nicaragua (1980s), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-99), Bosnia (1995), Sudan (1998), Yugoslavia (1999). And now Afghanistan.

Certainly it does not tire - this, the most free nation in the world.

What freedoms does it uphold? Within its borders, the freedoms of speech, religion, thought; of artistic expression, food habits, sexual preferences (well, to some extent) and many other exemplary, wonderful things.

Outside its borders, the freedom to dominate, humiliate and subjugate ­ usually in the service of America¹s real religion, the "free market". So when the US government christens a war "Operation Infinite Justice", or "Operation Enduring Freedom", we in the third world feel more than a tremor of fear.

Because we know that Infinite Justice for some means Infinite Injustice for others. And Enduring Freedom for some means Enduring Subjugation for others.

The International Coalition Against Terror is a largely cabal of the richest countries in the world. Between them, they manufacture and sell almost all of the world's weapons, they possess the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction - chemical, biological and nuclear. They have fought the most wars, account for most of the genocide, subjection, ethnic cleansing and human rights violations in modern history, and have sponsored, armed and financed untold numbers of dictators and despots. Between them, they have worshipped, almost deified, the cult of violence and war. For all its appalling sins, the Taliban just isn't in the same league.

The Taliban was compounded in the crumbling crucible of rubble, heroin and landmines in the backwash of the cold war. Its oldest leaders are in their early 40s. Many of them are disfigured and handicapped, missing an eye, an arm or a leg. They grew up in a society scarred and devastated by war.

Between the Soviet Union and America, over 20 years, about $45bn (£30bn) worth of arms and ammunition was poured into Afghanistan. The latest weaponry was the only shard of modernity to intrude upon a thoroughly medieval society.

Young boys ­ many of them orphans - who grew up in those times, had guns for toys, never knew the security and comfort of family life, never experienced the company of women. Now, as adults and rulers, the Taliban beat, stone, rape and brutalise women, they don't seem to know what else to do with them.

Years of war has stripped them of gentleness, inured them to kindness and human compassion. Now they've turned their monstrosity on their own people.

They dance to the percussive rhythms of bombs raining down around them.

With all due respect to President Bush, the people of the world do not have to choose between the Taliban and the US government. All the beauty of human civilisation - our art, our music, our literature - lies beyond these two fundamentalist, ideological poles. There is as little chance that the people of the world can all become middle-class consumers as there is that they will all embrace any one particular religion. The issue is not about good v evil or Islam v Christianity as much as it is about space. About how to accommodate diversity, how to contain the impulse towards hegemony ­ every kind of hegemony, economic, military, linguistic, religious and cultural.

Any ecologist will tell you how dangerous and fragile a monoculture is. A hegemonic world is like having a government without a healthy opposition. It becomes a kind of dictatorship. It¹s like putting a plastic bag over the world, and preventing it from breathing. Eventually, it will be torn open.

One and a half million Afghan people lost their lives in the 20 years of conflict that preceded this new war. Afghanistan was reduced to rubble, and now, the rubble is being pounded into finer dust. By the second day of the air strikes, US pilots were returning to their bases without dropping their assigned payload of bombs. As one pilot put it, Afghanistan is "not a target-rich environment". At a press briefing at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, was asked if America had run out of targets.

"First we're going to re-hit targets," he said, "and second, we're not running out of targets, Afghanistan is ..." This was greeted with gales of laughter in the briefing room.

By the third day of the strikes, the US defence department boasted that it had "achieved air supremacy over Afghanistan" (Did they mean that they had destroyed both, or maybe all 16, of Afghanistan's planes?)

On the ground in Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance - the Taliban's old enemy, and therefore the international coalition's newest friend - is making headway in its push to capture Kabul. (For the archives, let it be said that the Northern Alliance's track record is not very different from the Taliban's. But for now, because it's inconvenient, that little detail is being glossed over.) The visible, moderate, "acceptable" leader of the alliance, Ahmed Shah Masud, was killed in a suicide-bomb attack early in September. The rest of the Northern Alliance is a brittle confederation of brutal warlords, ex-communists and unbending clerics. It is a disparate group divided along ethnic lines, some of whom have tasted power in Afghanistan in the past.

Until the US air strikes, the Northern Alliance controlled about 5% of the geographical area of Afghanistan. Now, with the coalition's help and "air cover", it is poised to topple the Taliban. Meanwhile, Taliban soldiers, sensing imminent defeat, have begun to defect to the alliance. So the fighting forces are busy switching sides and changing uniforms. But in an enterprise as cynical as this one, it seems to matter hardly at all.

Love is hate, north is south, peace is war.

Among the global powers, there is talk of "putting in a representative government". Or, on the other hand, of "restoring" the kingdom to Afghanistan's 89-year old former king Zahir Shah, who has lived in exile in Rome since 1973. That's the way the game goes - support Saddam Hussein, then "take him out"; finance the mojahedin, then bomb them to smithereens; put in Zahir Shah and see if he's going to be a good boy. (Is it possible to "put in" a representative government? Can you place an order for democracy - with extra cheese and jalapeno peppers?)

Reports have begun to trickle in about civilian casualties, about cities emptying out as Afghan civilians flock to the borders which have been closed. Main arterial roads have been blown up or sealed off. Those who have experience of working in Afghanistan say that by early November, food convoys will not be able to reach the millions of Afghans (7.5m, according to the UN) who run the very real risk of starving to death during the course of this winter. They say that in the days that are left before winter sets in, there can either be a war, or an attempt to reach food to the hungry. Not both.

As a gesture of humanitarian support, the US government air-dropped 37,000 packets of emergency rations into Afghanistan. It says it plans to drop a total of 500,000 packets. That will still only add up to a single meal for half a million people out of the several million in dire need of food.

Aid workers have condemned it as a cynical, dangerous, public-relations exercise. They say that air-dropping food packets is worse than futile.

First, because the food will never get to those who really need it. More dangerously, those who run out to retrieve the packets risk being blown up by landmines. A tragic alms race.

Nevertheless, the food packets had a photo-op all to themselves. Their contents were listed in major newspapers. They were vegetarian, we're told, as per Muslim dietary law (!) Each yellow packet, decorated with the American flag, contained: rice, peanut butter, bean salad, strawberry jam, crackers, raisins, flat bread, an apple fruit bar, seasoning, matches, a set of plastic cutlery, a serviette and illustrated user instructions.

After three years of unremitting drought, an air-dropped airline meal in Jalalabad! The level of cultural ineptitude, the failure to understand what months of relentless hunger and grinding poverty really mean, the US government¹s attempt to use even this abject misery to boost its self-image, beggars description.

Reverse the scenario for a moment. Imagine if the Taliban government was to bomb New York City, saying all the while that its real target was the US government and its policies. And suppose, during breaks between the bombing, the Taliban dropped a few thousand packets containing nan and kebabs impaled on an Afghan flag. Would the good people of New York ever find it in themselves to forgive the Afghan government? Even if they were hungry, even if they needed the food, even if they ate it, how would they ever forget the insult, the condescension? Rudi Guiliani, Mayor of New York City, returned a gift of $10m from a Saudi prince because it came with a few words of friendly advice about American policy in the Middle East. Is pride a luxury that only the rich are entitled to?

Far from stamping it out, igniting this kind of rage is what creates terrorism. Hate and retribution don't go back into the box once you've let them out. For every "terrorist" or his "supporter" that is killed, hundreds of innocent people are being killed too. And for every hundred innocent people killed, there is a good chance that several future terrorists will be created.

Where will it all lead?

Setting aside the rhetoric for a moment, consider the fact that the world has not yet found an acceptable definition of what "terrorism" is. One country's terrorist is too often another¹s freedom fighter. At the heart of the matter lies the world's deep-seated ambivalence towards violence.

Once violence is accepted as a legitimate political instrument, then the morality and political acceptability of terrorists (insurgents or freedom fighters) becomes contentious, bumpy terrain. The US government itself has funded, armed and sheltered plenty of rebels and insurgents around the world.

The CIA and Pakistan's ISI trained and armed the mojahedin who, in the 80s, were seen as terrorists by the government in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Today, Pakistan - America's ally in this new war - sponsors insurgents who cross the border into Kashmir in India. Pakistan lauds them as "freedom-fighters", India calls them "terrorists". India, for its part, denounces countries who sponsor and abet terrorism, but the Indian army has, in the past, trained separatist Tamil rebels asking for a homeland in Sri Lanka - the LTTE, responsible for countless acts of bloody terrorism.

(Just as the CIA abandoned the mujahideen after they had served its purpose, India abruptly turned its back on the LTTE for a host of political reasons. It was an enraged LTTE suicide bomber who assassinated former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1989.)

It is important for governments and politicians to understand that manipulating these huge, raging human feelings for their own narrow purposes may yield instant results, but eventually and inexorably, they have disastrous consequences. Igniting and exploiting religious sentiments for reasons of political expediency is the most dangerous legacy that governments or politicians can bequeath to any people - including their own.

People who live in societies ravaged by religious or communal bigotry know that every religious text - from the Bible to the Bhagwad Gita - can be mined and misinterpreted to justify anything, from nuclear war to genocide to corporate globalisation.

This is not to suggest that the terrorists who perpetrated the outrage on September 11 should not be hunted down and brought to book. They must be.

But is war the best way to track them down? Will burning the haystack find you the needle? Or will it escalate the anger and make the world a living hell for all of us?

At the end of the day, how many people can you spy on, how many bank accounts can you freeze, how many conversations can you eavesdrop on, how many emails can you intercept, how many letters can you open, how many phones can you tap? Even before September 11, the CIA had accumulated more information than is humanly possible to process. (Sometimes, too much data can actually hinder intelligence - small wonder the US spy satellites completely missed the preparation that preceded India's nuclear tests in 1998.)

The sheer scale of the surveillance will become a logistical, ethical and civil rights nightmare. It will drive everybody clean crazy. And freedom - that precious, precious thing - will be the first casualty. It's already hurt and haemorrhaging dangerously.

Governments across the world are cynically using the prevailing paranoia to promote their own interests. All kinds of unpredictable political forces are being unleashed. In India, for instance, members of the All India People's Resistance Forum, who were distributing anti-war and anti-US pamphlets in Delhi, have been jailed. Even the printer of the leaflets was arrested.

The rightwing government (while it shelters Hindu extremists groups such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal) has banned the Islamic Students Movement of India and is trying to revive an anti- terrorist Act which had been withdrawn after the Human Rights Commission reported that it had been more abused than used. Millions of Indian citizens are Muslim. Can anything be gained by alienating them?

Every day that the war goes on, raging emotions are being let loose into the world. The international press has little or no independent access to the war zone. In any case, mainstream media, particularly in the US, have more or less rolled over, allowing themselves to be tickled on the stomach with press handouts from military men and government officials. Afghan radio stations have been destroyed by the bombing. The Taliban has always been deeply suspicious of the press. In the propaganda war, there is no accurate estimate of how many people have been killed, or how much destruction has taken place. In the absence of reliable information, wild rumours spread.

Put your ear to the ground in this part of the world, and you can hear the thrumming, the deadly drumbeat of burgeoning anger. Please. Please, stop the war now. Enough people have died. The smart missiles are just not smart enough. They're blowing up whole warehouses of suppressed fury.

President George Bush recently boasted, "When I take action, I'm not going to fire a $2m missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It's going to be decisive." President Bush should know that there are no targets in Afghanistan that will give his missiles their money's worth.

Perhaps, if only to balance his books, he should develop some cheaper missiles to use on cheaper targets and cheaper lives in the poor countries of the world. But then, that may not make good business sense to the coalition¹s weapons manufacturers. It wouldn't make any sense at all, for example, to the Carlyle Group - described by the Industry Standard as "the world's largest private equity firm", with $13bn under management.

Carlyle invests in the defence sector and makes its money from military conflicts and weapons spending.

Carlyle is run by men with impeccable credentials. Former US defence secretary Frank Carlucci is Carlyle's chairman and managing director (he was a college roommate of Donald Rumsfeld's). Carlyle's other partners include former US secretary of state James A Baker III, George Soros and Fred Malek (George Bush Sr's campaign manager). An American paper ­ the Baltimore Chronicle and Sentinel - says that former president George Bush Sr is reported to be seeking investments for the Carlyle Group from Asian markets.

He is reportedly paid not inconsiderable sums of money to make "presentations" to potential government-clients.

Ho hum. As the tired saying goes, it's all in the family.

Then there's that other branch of traditional family business - oil. Remember, President George Bush (Jr) and Vice-President Dick Cheney both made their fortunes working in the US oil industry.

Turkmenistan, which borders the north-west of Afghanistan, holds the world's third largest gas reserves and an estimated six billion barrels of oil reserves. Enough, experts say, to meet American energy needs for the next 30 years (or a developing country's energy requirements for a couple of centuries.) America has always viewed oil as a security consideration, and protected it by any means it deems necessary. Few of us doubt that its military presence in the Gulf has little to do with its concern for human rights and almost entirely to do with its strategic interest in oil.

Oil and gas from the Caspian region currently moves northward to European markets. Geographically and politically, Iran and Russia are major impediments to American interests. In 1998, Dick Cheney - then CEO of Halliburton, a major player in the oil industry - said, "I can't think of a time when we've had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian. It's almost as if the opportunities have arisen overnight." True enough.

For some years now, an American oil giant called Unocal has been negotiating with the Taliban for permission to construct an oil pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan and out to the Arabian sea. From here, Unocal hopes to access the lucrative "emerging markets" in south and south-east Asia. In December 1997, a delegation of Taliban mullahs travelled to America and even met US state department officials and Unocal executives in Houston. At that time the Taliban's taste for public executions and its treatment of Afghan women were not made out to be the crimes against humanity that they are now.

Over the next six months, pressure from hundreds of outraged American feminist groups was brought to bear on the Clinton administration.

Fortunately, they managed to scuttle the deal. And now comes the US oil industry's big chance.

In America, the arms industry, the oil industry, the major media networks, and, indeed, US foreign policy, are all controlled by the same business combines. Therefore, it would be foolish to expect this talk of guns and oil and defence deals to get any real play in the media. In any case, to a distraught, confused people whose pride has just been wounded, whose loved ones have been tragically killed, whose anger is fresh and sharp, the inanities about the "clash of civilisations" and the "good v evil" discourse home in unerringly. They are cynically doled out by government spokesmen like a daily dose of vitamins or anti-depressants. Regular medication ensures that mainland America continues to remain the enigma it has always been - a curiously insular people, administered by a pathologically meddlesome, promiscuous government.

And what of the rest of us, the numb recipients of this onslaught of what we know to be preposterous propaganda? The daily consumers of the lies and brutality smeared in peanut butter and strawberry jam being air-dropped into our minds just like those yellow food packets. Shall we look away and eat because we're hungry, or shall we stare unblinking at the grim theatre unfolding in Afghanistan until we retch collectively and say, in one voice, that we have had enough?

As the first year of the new millennium rushes to a close, one wonders - have we forfeited our right to dream? Will we ever be able to re-imagine beauty?

Will it be possible ever again to watch the slow, amazed blink of a newborn gecko in the sun, or whisper back to the marmot who has just whispered in your ear - without thinking of the World Trade Centre and Afghanistan?


-------- activists

(R.E.C.A.) Rally in Gallup, NM - Oct 27, 2001

From: "Lori Goodman" <kiyaani@frontier.net>
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 08:07:53 -0600

WESTERN STATES RECA REFORM COALITION
RADIATION EXPOSURE COMPENSATION ACT 2000

A rally bringing the people of the Four Corners states is intended to send a united voice to the U.S. Congress. "Take care of old messes before creating new ones" is the message of the region-wide campaign, sponsored by the Western States RECA Reform Coalition at the Gallup UNM Branch gymnasium on Saturday, October 27, 2001, beginning at 10 am.

"Last year, Congress clearly mandated payments under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to former miners and other former uranium workers," said Melton Martinez, a member of the Coalition from Prewitt, NM. "But now, Dept of Justice (DOJ) will be proposing legislation to roll back RECA amendments gained, and by not issuing required regulations needed to compensate harmed uranium millers and ore transporters. This is unjust and only adds to the physical and emotional injury done to the uranium workers."

In moving ahead on things that need to be taken care of and to prevent a repeat of DOJ's fiasco of issuing IOUs instead of checks, invited speakers will inform the public of current status of RECA. Issues to be addressed:

1. Changing RECA trust fund from an "annual appropriation" (subject to continuous approval process) to a permanent appropriation - out of reach of horse trading in Washington.

2. By law, the RECA 2000 regulations were supposed to be out by January 2001. It is now ten months past and the regulations are still not out.

3. Tell the federal government to quit stalling and pay the outstanding IOUs to former uranium workers.

4. Technical Amendments - continued efforts to fill in the gaps in RECA reform, including compensation for uranium workers who were affected after 1971, more counties that were downwind of nuclear tests, and dependents of uranium workers.

5. NO NEW MINING while aforementioned concerns remain unaddressed and unimplemented. Right now the corporation Hydro Resources, Incorporated is seeking approval for leach mining of uranium in the Navajo communities of Church Rock and Crownpoint. More exposure while the victims of previous mining efforts remain afflicted with no redress.

"This cycle of delays and confusion tactics must stop," said Ben Shelly, Co-chair of Western States RECA Reform Coalition and McKinley County Commissioner from Thoreau, NM. "The manipulating of RECA in Washington without the knowledge of the grassroots communities only creates mistrust of our congressional people." Mr. Shelly concluded: "All we ask is for our elected leaders to obey their own laws - passed a year and a half ago - so that some of the victims can still receive the benefits due them before it's too late."

Invited speakers: Offices of Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM); Senator Pete Dominici (R-NM); Rep Heather Wilson (R-NM); Dr. Taylor McKenzie, Vice-President Navajo Nation; Dr. John Fogarty, PHS Crownpoint; Floyd Archuleta, Dept of Energy Espanola Resource Center; Pueblo of Acoma, Pueblo of Laguna, Post '71 Uranium Workers, Dependents of Uranium Workers, Western States RECA Reform Coalition.

Sponsoring coalitions and organizations: Western States RECA Reform Coalition, Office of Navajo Uranium Workers, Navajo RECA Reform Working Group, Uranium Radiation Advisory Group of Navajo Nation, Colorado Plateau Uranium Workers, Colorado Uranium Workers Council, New Mexico Uranium Workers Council, Utah Navajo Downwinders, Northern Arizona Downwinders, Eastern Navajo Uranium Workers, Lukachukai Uranium Workers, Church Rock Uranium Workers and Dine' CARE.

Contacts:
Lori Goodman (970) 259-0199
Melton Martinez (505) 287-3848
Edward Brickey (970) 523-7460

----

"March Against the Warmakers - March to the Drumbeat for Peace"

Saturday, Oct. 27th
Gather at Government Center Boston 12:00 noon
From: "ANSWERBoston" <ANSWERBoston@iacboston.org>
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001 16:43:17 -0400

March to the Drumbeat for Peace through downtown to the Military Recruiter & Park Plaza

Join with the whole United International Anti-War Movement to say: "Stop the Bombing of Afghanistan!" "Bring the Troops Home, Now!" "War & Racism Are Not The Answer!" "Stop the Layoffs - Stop the War Against the Poor!" "Defend Civil Liberties!"

Bring Drums & Percussion instruments!!! Join the new formation of the Boston Rhythm Workers Union. (Contact Richard Hugus rhugus@cape.com )

Program will include:

Anti-war songs from Dylan to Chapman to Rage, now banned on corporate radio & TV

Stand with, Defend & hear from Chuck Turner, Boston City Councilor, who cast the lone, heroic vote against Jimmy Kelly's pro-war council resolution!

With Flight Attendants & Hotel & Restaurant Workers' Union reps, Tell corporate america "No to Mass Wartime Layoffs!" "Fund Mass Worker Relief & Jobs Programs, not missle programs & bombing raids."

With Students from dozens of Mass. campuses, let George Bush know this war's "Not in Our Name!" "No Draft, No Way!" "We Won't Fight For Oil Profits!"

With Leslie Feinberg, author of "Stone Butch Blues" & "Transgender Warriors", Tell the FBI, "Hands Off Our Civil Liberties" "Free Palestine!" "Stop Media Lies"

With Amer Jubran, of Al-Awda-MA (Palestine Right to Return Coalition), Tell the US government "Stop Funding Israel's Wars in the Middle East"

With Diane Dujon, Dottie Stevens and the Mass. Welfare Rights Union, Demand the state and local gov'ts "Stop the Social Service Cuts Now!" "Welfare reform is political terror on women & children in Massachusetts."

With Moonanum James, Vietnam Vet, U.S. Postal Worker, and co-leader of United American Indians of New England, Tell the US Military brass, "Stop the Wars Against the World's Indigenous, Sovereign Nations!"

With Kazi Toure of the Boston Coalition for Mumia Abu-Jamal, let the powers know, "Prisons & Police Brutality Are Not the Answer!" "The Death Penalty Has Got To Go!" "Free Mumia Now!"

and More!

initiated by: International A.N.S.W.E.R.-Boston (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism!) http://www.iacboston.org 617-522-6626 email: ANSWERBoston@iacboston.org

To endorse send email message to: ANSWERBoston@iacboston.org or call 617 522-6626

Download a Boston Oct. 27th Flyer (PDF version) http://www.iacboston.org/pdf/O2701L.pdf

October 27: Tens of Thousands To Converge Worldwide to Say: Stop The Bombing! Stop Racial Profiling! Money For Human Needs, Not War! Don't Take Away Our Right To Free Speech!

International A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition A.ct N.ow to S.top W.ar and E.nd R.acism (212) 633-6646 website - http://www.internationalanswer.org / email - iacenter@iacenter.org

MEDIA ADVISORY Press Contact: Tony Murphy

Saturday, October 20, 2001

With anti-war demonstrations, teach-ins and street theater actions set for October 27 in a rapidly growing count of more than 50 cities worldwide, it's clear that the U.S. war doesn't have the widespread popularity claimed in the media.

"Polls say a majority support war," said Teresa Gutierrez, an A.N.S.W.E.R. organizer. "However, polls propose bombing as the only proactive solution to preventing terrorism and guaranteeing security."

"Our solution - to stop the U.S. government from extending its usual Middle East war policies, which have killed over a million people in Iraq alone - enjoys much broader support worldwide. If the polls being taken in the U.S. asked people if they preferred stopping war and racism to continuing war and racism, the results would look much different," Gutierrez said.

The anti-war and anti-racism call put out by A.N.S.W.E.R. - Act Now to Stop War and End Racism - has attracted more than 2,000 signers to date and serves as a sort of "people's poll," catalyzing a wide range of activities including student conferences, marches, vigils and a list of other anti-war events that gets longer every day.

That list includes nationwide student conferences and teach-ins, which A.N.S.W.E.R. youth organizer Mervyn Mercano says have grown into a fierce battle to protect free speech rights. "Meanwhile, the college military recruiting stations are empty," Mercano said. "The Bush administration's attempts to win support for its war certainly hasn't succeeded on campuses."

NEW YORK - In New York City, people will gather at Times Square - one of NY's main locations for anti-war activity since the beginning of this U.S. war - and march to a teach-in. Meanwhile, NY Students Against the War are engaged in a struggle to protect free speech rights against the city university administration, who is openly discussing censuring the professors' union for sponsoring teach-ins on the war. Upstate in Kingston, a walk through neighborhoods will begin with an anti-war rally/vigil in the town's Academy Green Park.

CALIFORNIA - Mission High School will be the site for San Francisco's teach-in, titled Stop the War and Racist Attacks, Defend Civil Rights And Liberties. Topics include The History of U.S. Intervention in the Middle East; History of U.S. Terrorist Tactics; as well as workshops from leaders in Southeast Asian, Arab and Muslim communities. In Los Angeles, the march and rally, called by the LA/Orange County Coalition to Stop the War and the Coalition for World Peace, will begin at Pershing Square Park at 1:00. In nearby Huntington Beach, the Orange County Alliance for Global Nuclear Disarmament will hold a Carnival for Peace, with street theater, drum corps and spontaneous stump speeches. Called by the San Diego A.N.S.W.E.R Coalition, the event will be held on the University Avenue Bridge over I-15, with the slogan Say No To War and Racism!

FLORIDA - The TD Waterhouse Center in Orlando will be the site of "Operation: Education - Security Through Peace," an educational/cultural event featuring a wide range of speakers including representatives from the A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition.

ENGLAND - The Lancaster Museum has been the site of weekly anti-war vigils and marches organized by The Lancaster & District Coalition Against The War. On Oct. 27, people plan to follow up their vigil by traveling to nearby Preston for a regional demonstration against the bombing.

HAWAII - The Hawaii Independence Allegiance in Waikiki is inviting people to rally for peace at King Kalakua Statue with flags, signs and puppets.

ARIZONA - Activists in Flagstaff holding an art-focused event at the Gallerie Luftmensch, calling their event day of recognition of Afghani citizens, complete with flags from both Afghanistan and UN flown all day and an educational forum on how art can affect the outcome of the continuing hostilities.

PHILIPPINES - Holding their event in Manila Oct. 28, the Justice Not War Coalition plan a colorful Peace Walk-Mardi Gras. "The Peace Walk is a reaffirmation of our solidarity with the growing worldwide protests against the unjust U.S.-led war. It will show our deep concern on the horrific effects of the war and the Philippine government's blind support for it," said the Coalition.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Targetting the media's complicity in supporting the government's war drive, International ANSWER Washington is planning a March for Truth, from the Washington Post to the White House, with a teach-in to follow.

NEW ZEALAND - Peace rallies and picnics are planned in the cities of Dunedin and Wellington, with the Wellington Response Team saying the event will feature "music, speakers, information tables, petition and poets."

NORTH CAROLINA - Three cities in N.C. are organizing for October 27: at Appalachian State University campus and downtown Boone, October 27 is part of a week-long rally for peace, including teach-ins, film series, rally, candlelight vigil, open mike evening for peace, and info tables. In Chapel Hill, the Coalition to End the Cycle of Violence will hold a state-wide rally with speakers and music. A march around parts of downtown Chapel Hill will follow. Charlotte International A.N.S.W.E.R. will start its rally at Marshall Park, marching to the federal building and back.

OHIO - At Antioch College in Yellow Springs, the Convergence for Conscientious Peace are holding a brunch followed by teach- ins, speakers, rally, march, and an intimate political musical performance, featuring Palestinian issues activist Nigel Parry.

PENNSYLVANIA - Philadelphia A.N.S.W.E.R. is organizing a demonstration beginning at Love Plaza under the slogans Say NO to war; Say NO to racism and anti-Arab & anti-Muslim violence; Say NO to the shredding of the Bill of Rights and freedom of speech; and work to build alternatives to war.

GEORGIA - Downtown Atlanta will be the site of a demonstration following weeks of anti-war activities at campuses and elsewhere that have been happening on almost a daily basis.

Dozens of other events are planned; the list is growing every day. http://www.internationalanswer.org/o27.html

A.N.S.W.E.R. Boston ANSWERBoston@iacboston.org 617-522-6626

c/o International Action Center - Boston www.iacboston.org 31 Germania St. Jamaica Plain, MA 02130 (enter 284 Amory St near Stonybrook on Orange Line) www.iacboston.org/directions Phone: 617 522-6626 Fax: 617 983-3836 email: iacboston@iacboston.org

International ANSWER coalition (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism) www.internationalanswer.org

IAC - New York City www.iacenter.org

For latest actions and updates to "Free Mumia Abu-Jamal", check out www.mumia2000.org

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Thousands March for Peace in Israel

October 23, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Mideast-Plea-for-Peace.html

BETHLEHEM, West Bank (AP) -- Israeli tanks moved aside and Palestinian gunmen laid down their weapons for a few hours Tuesday to allow a rare plea for peace to be heard in the traditional birthplace of Jesus.

``God of peace, give our land peace,'' thousands of Palestinians sang as they walked from an Israeli checkpoint to the Church of the Nativity on Manger Square, led by Pope John Paul II's envoy to the Holy Land and several Christian bishops.

The mostly Christian marchers, some waving Palestinian flags or the banner of the Vatican, passed through the battle-scarred streets of Bethlehem. Some chanted political slogans such as ``Sharon, Sharon, hear, hear, Bethlehem is an Arab city'' -- a reference to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

The pope's envoy, Archbishop Pietro Sambi, said the Christian-organized procession was meant to appeal to reason. ``It is a demonstration against violence and wars and in favor of peace, just peace, secure peace, which is best for the Palestinians and for the Israelis,'' he said.

The Bethlehem area has been hard-hit by fighting, with 11 Palestinians killed in six days. It is one of six West Bank towns Israeli tanks have entered in response to the assassination of an Israeli Cabinet minister by Palestinian militants.

Bethlehem's Holy Family Hospital, a maternity hospital and orphanage run by the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent, came under fire overnight. Nobody was injured.

Nuns said three Israeli tank shells hit the laundry room and an empty guest house. An Israeli army spokesman, Lt. Col. Olivier Rafovitch, denied that claim and said the damage could have been caused by a Palestinian rocket or rifle grenade.

A reporter visiting the compound saw large holes in a wall that could have been made by a tank shell or another large projectile. Several windows, including a stained-glass window in a chapel, were shattered by bullets.

Sister Munira Jabali said the firefight lasted for seven hours, and that 60 children in the orphanage were moved into the hallways for safety.

``Sister Sophie carried the children to the hallway,'' said 6-year-old orphan Assad Atly. ``All the children were crying, and I was too.''

The Palestinians have accused Israeli troops of firing indiscriminately, without regard for civilians. Twenty-eight Palestinians, most of them civilians, and an Israeli motorist have been killed in the fighting since Israel moved into the West Bank towns after Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi's killing Oct. 17.

Israel has said it is targeting suspected militants who it said often use civilians as human shields. Israel has also accused Palestinian gunmen of firing from near churches in hopes of drawing return fire that would damage church property and put Israel at odds with the Christian world.

Over the weekend, a 19-year-old Palestinian was shot and killed as he emerged from the Church of the Nativity, built over Jesus' traditional birth grotto. Palestinian witnesses said he was killed by Israeli fire, a claim Israel denied.

On Tuesday, the peace procession ended near the Church of the Nativity, at St. Catherine's Church, with thousands packing the shrine for prayers, among them many Muslims.

At the altar, the bishops representing major denominations -- Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenia, Anglican, Coptic -- were joined by a senior Muslim clergyman. All held hands in prayer.

``I feel very moved by this procession,'' said a Bethlehem car mechanic, Samir Qumsieh, 43, who attended with his 7-year-old daughter. ``It gives meaning to peace and living in freedom.''

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Anti-war MPs in Labour resent gag order

The Hindu
October 23, 2001
By Hasan Suroor
http://www.hinduonnet.com/stories/0323000g.htm

LONDON, OCT. 22. The row in the Labour Party over the continued bombing in Afghanistan has escalated with the anti-war MPs refusing to tone down their criticism despite a gag order which one MP called a ``McCarthyite witchhunt''. They have protested at being treated like ``circus dogs'' with the party whips trying to put them on leash in a bid to prevent them from publicly airing their views on the military action.

The row comes amid report that the British Government is on the verge of committing its ground troops in Afghanistan. One MP, Mr. Paul Marsden, has embarrassed the leadership by briefing a tabloid on his conversation with the party chief whip, Ms. Hilary Armstrong, during which she sharply told him to fall in line with the government policy. ``I want a guarantee that you will not speak to the media unless you speak to me first,'' she reportedly told him and when he insisted that he had a right to air his views, she retorted: ``It was people like you who appeased Hitler in 1938.''

The Sunday Telegraph quoted Ms. Armstrong as saying that Mr. Marsden had ``got problems'' but he would ``sort them out eventually''. He is among the most outspoken critics of the Blair Government's all-out support for the war in Afghanistan and is backed by two senior MPs, Mr. Tam Dalyell and Mr. George Galloway besides a host of younger backbenchers. Already known as ``rebels'' on the issue, they are reported to be busy mobilising support for a pressure group called ``Labour Against the Bombing'' and, according to The Guardian, they hope to attract upto 30 MPs in addition to the moral support of non-Labour critics of the war. They plan to step up their demand for a pause in the bombing so that sufficient food and other relief material can be reached to the people before the onset of winter.

Last week, they joined an American anti-war campaigner, Mr. David Pickering's petition to Downing Street opposing the ``instruments of war'' to deal with the crisis following the September 11 outrage. Mr. Pickering's website is said to have received messages of support from over 50,000 Britons. As reports point to a worsening humanitarian situation, pressure for a halt in hostilities is mounting and, according to a report in The Observer, the United Nations is ``set'' to issue an appeal for a ceasefire to facilitate relief work. It quoted a U.N. source as saying that unless the bombing stopped there would be a ``huge number of deaths'' due to starvation and malnutrition.

The reported U.N. move, dismissed in some circles as speculation, follows appeal by several international aid agencies in the region for a pause in air strikes. They have criticised Britain's Secretary for International Development, Ms. Clare Short, for claiming that the bombing was not coming in the way of providing relief - a line strongly articulated by the Prime Minister, Mr. Tony Blair, who told Parliament that it was the Taliban who were proving to be a hurdle.

The British aid agency, Christian Aid, has term Ms. Short's statement ``misleading'' alleging that the Government's ``spin doctors'' were showing ``callous disregard'' for people's suffering. Observers pointed out that while the Government was right in accusing the Taliban of creating problems it was also true that because of the relentless bombing it was not possible to get food to the people. A spokesman of the World Food Programme, Mr. Michael Huggins, has said that food distribution has been severely disrupted as truck drivers refuse to go into areas where bombs are falling.

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Pacifists are filing for CO status in growing numbers

By Jen Cooper
Scripps Howard Foundation Wire
Ocotber 23, 2001

At 17, Daniel Fahey signed up for the Navy ROTC program and attended the University of Notre Dame on a military scholarship. He did well and was commissioned into the Navy as an officer in 1990.

In January 1991, when Operation Storm began, the Navy sent Fahey to be trained to fire nuclear Tomahawk cruise missiles.

That was when Fahey's own war began.

For six weeks, the man who had joined the Navy for adventure and travel wrestled with his beliefs and came to the conclusion that because of his moral and ethical code, he could not fire a nuclear missile, or any missile, for that matter.

Fahey was granted conscientious objector status in February 1991, was discharged from the Navy and over the next five years paid back his college scholarships.

Fahey, who is now a graduate student at Tufts University in Massachusetts, said he confronted his beliefs when he was being trained to fire nuclear missiles. Had there been no war or had he been assigned noncombat duties upon entering the Navy, Fahey said he probably would have fulfilled the final three years of his enlistment.

Now, with air strikes against terrorist targets in Afghanistan underway, other members of the military are wrestling with their own convictions.

Several peace organizations said they have received a dramatic increase in phone calls and e-mails from military personnel who have questions about conscientious objection and other types of discharges. The inquiries tend to come from young enlisted personnel who joined the military within the last 10 years.

"A lot of people didn't give (their decision to join the military) much thought, or what the implications are, or what you might be asked to do," Fahey said. "Maybe the current march to war is really making them evaluate their beliefs."

Conscientious objectors - people opposed to any and all war - may be granted an honorable discharge if their beliefs are found to be sincere. Brian Cross, a staff member with the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors in Oakland, Calif., said many of the service personnel who call are people who were already uneasy about their duties in the military, and the renewed threat of war has caused them to think more seriously about filing for conscientious objector status. "Sometimes people are reluctant to take a stand until push comes to shove," he said.

Since Sept. 11, the committee has received hundreds of phone calls, and Cross said 12 times as many people have requested literature as they did in August.

Cross, who gained conscientious objector status during Vietnam, said America has recognized conscientious objection since the time of the colonies.

"It's not part of human nature to want to kill somebody, even for a political end and even for revenge," he said. "Patriotism is one thing and a willingness to kill is another."

The CCCO is also associated with the GI Rights Hotline. The hotline had anticipated 20,000 calls this year, but in light of the terrorist attacks, staff members are expecting that number to jump to 30,000, Cross said.

Most of the military personnel who have called have been between the ages of 18 and 28, he said.

The organization also has received calls from high school counselors and parents who are worried that America's war on terrorism will also mean a reinstatement of the draft.

"It's difficult to have a concrete sense of what it's like to go to war," said Harold Jordan, coordinator of the National Youth and Militarism Program in Philadelphia.

But the attacks that began Oct. 7 cemented the threat of military action, and that has caused some members of the military to confront their beliefs. The same scenario happened during the Gulf War, Jordan said.

Jordan's program is affiliated with the American Friends Service Committee, a social justice and humanitarian organization that estimates 2,500 people attempted to get out of the military during the 1991 Gulf War. A General Accounting Office report said 447 people applied for CO status in 1991, up from 200 the previous year. However, Jordan said that figure does not take into account the people who were in the process of applying or who went to jail for refusing to go to war. Representatives for the service branches said they haven't yet seen any increase in the number of people interested in or applying for conscientious objector status.

Marine Capt. Jeff Pool, who works with Marine Forces Reserves in New Orleans, said the response that he's seen is that Marines are anxious to know whether they'll be mobilized. "No one wants to be left behind, especially after an attack like that one," Pool said. "All the Marines I know are trying to get to go."

Air Force Col. Phillip Deavel, a senior judge advocate at Randolph Air Force Base in Texas, said the United States military has long recognized conscientious objector status as an important aspect of a democratic society.

"This is not a program the military resists," he said. "It's an important safety valve."

Deavel said conscientious objector status, however, is not to be used as a way to skirt a commitment to military duty.

People applying for CO status must show that they have a deep and sincere aversion to war, although that belief does not necessarily have to flow from a religious conviction.

In order to prove that sincere belief, a CO applicant must make a written statement, be evaluated by a chaplain and psychiatrist and have their application undergo several legal reviews.

"The vast majority of us are morally comfortable with the justness of the military," Deavel said. "Otherwise, we would not be in uniform in the first place."

Conscientious objectors in the military

Because it is possible for service personnel to change their beliefs after enlisting, the U.S. military offers conscientious objection as a viable way to leave the military based on one's convictions.

The Pentagon receives, on average, 200 applications for conscientious objector status each year. But one of the biggest arguments as to why conscientious objectors are in that military is that new recruits aren't given an accurate picture of what military life is all about.

Harold Jordan, a spokesman for the Youth and Militarism Program, agrees and said recruiters tend to focus on the benefits of military service like loan repayment programs and job training.

"Traditionally, you see in ads that you go into the military to get a leg up on life and get money for college and that war is not something that's going to affect you or happen very often," he said. "There's something inherently wrong and dishonest about how military service is presented."

Slogans like "Be all can you be," "Fuel your future," "Aim High" and "Accelerate Your Life," don't give people an accurate understanding of military life, Jordan said.

The Army's new slogan, "Army of One", distorts what joining the military is about, he said.

"It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen," he said. "The notion that you go into the military as an expression of individuality is not the reality."

The problem is worsened by schools and career centers that encourage and pressure students to join the military.

"Schools just turn people over to recruiters as if they were guidance counselors," he said.

Jordan said students should be allowed to hear balanced presentations from veterans, not just "government salespersons."

The people who are calling Jordan's organization now are people who he said were probably considering getting out before, but this new possibility of a global war triggered them to take action now.

Jordan said the phone calls and e-mails he receives are from all of the different service branches. However, during the Gulf War he said the people calling were overwhelmingly from the Army and Marine Corps.

Army Capt. Jennifer Wabales, who works with recruiters in the Denver area, acknowledged that people join the Army for different reasons, including education and college benefits. But she said the Army is not trying to disillusion people and trick them into joining the military.

"Commercials do focus on education and benefits but they also show soldiers in rubber rafts floating down the jungle," she said. "There's the implication that somewhere that training will be needed."

Wabales said a lot of her recruiters served in the Gulf War and show pictures and tell stories to people considering enlisting.

Master Sgt. Ron Turner, a public affairs officer with the Marine Corps Recruiting Command in Quantico Va., said from the time people first meet their recruiter they are being told that they are being trained for war.

Marine recruiters ask potential recruits whether they are a conscientious objector and the same question is asked to all new enlistees on the first day of boot camp.

If a person answers yes, they're sent home.

"The Marine Corps doesn't want anybody who doesn't want to be a Marine," he said.

Regardless of their individual training or specialty, all Marines understand that they are first and foremost riflemen, he said.

Lance Cpl. Brent Gregory recently graduated from boot camp in San Diego, Calif., and said it was made very clear that they were being trained to go to war.

His platoon practiced sticking bayonets into mannequins, shot at rifl targets that were in the shape of a person and responded to certain drills with "kill."

Gregory said they also sang cadences that talked about going into a danger zone, getting killed and coming home in a body bag.

"People are ignorant to think they won't have to go to war," he said.

And being a conscientious objector in the military goes against everything the service trains for, he said.

"That's like saying I want to be a firefighter but I don't want to go into a burning building," he said.



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