------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Nuclear Power & Terrorism
Europe Tightens Security at Nuclear and Other Sensitive Sites
Security review ordered at German nuclear plants after safety lapse
Attack on German rail used for nuke waste transport
German nuke waste transport may face delays
Pakistani Nuke Scientists Questioned
Hulk of doomed Kursk submarine emerges from water
Russia: Terror Groups Scoped Nuke Site
Nuclear Plants' Vulnerability Raised Attack Concerns
Group Demands Reactor Upgrades
SMUD plans Calif power plant near abandoned nuke
Plane Near Florida Nuke Plant Carried Drugs
US Dept. of Energy Suspends Atomic Waste Train
New Tapes of JFK on Cuban Missile Crisis Released

MILITARY
Errant Cluster Bomb Leaves Danger Behind, U.N. Says
Alliance rebels become key U.S. ally
Pentagon Says Taliban Is Ready for Long Fight
Taliban Prepare Troops for Invasion
Religious leaders keep 'Faith in Face of Terror'
Decision to End U.S. Biological Warfare Programs
Government considers buying smallpox vaccine
Nunn: USSR Weapon-Makers May Help
NATURAL ANTIDOTES TO BIOLOGICAL TOXINS
Thompson vows U.S. will respond to any threat
Afghan casualty: anti-drug effort
Pakistani guerrillas return with eight killed by U.S.
Pro-bin Laden group loses 22 fighters in attack
Russia supplies tanks
Biden questions continuing strikes
Long Before War, Green Berets Built Military Ties to Uzbekistan
US commandos armed like 'Inspector Gadgets'

OTHER
Wind to benefit if Australia power target raised
Greens launch $9m environment policy
Swedish green technology has huge potential
Afghan Neighbors to Help Aid Flow
U.S. losing propaganda battle to "a guy in a cave"
The Real War - and The Propaganda War
Senate passes anti-terrorism bill
Five Israelis Held In New York
Spy data analysis criticized as slow
U.S. to Defer Spy Station Closure
FBI head says U.S. cities may see attacks
As Investigation Churns, More Attacks Are Expected
ANTHRAX PROBE SHIFTS TO HOMEGROWN HATE GROUPS

ACTIVISTS
Global Peace Day Nov 11, 11;11am
Which products make life more sustainable?
Large protests erupt in NATO countries



-------- NUCLEAR


Nuclear Power & Terrorism

by MATT BIVENS,
The Nation,
October 25, 2001
http://www.thenation.com/docPrint.mhtml?i=special&s=bivens20011024

Go to the website of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (www.nrc.gov), and you'll find an apology for how thin the information is there. On October 11 the website was closed; now bits and pieces are slowly re-emerging. Susan Gagner, an NRC press spokeswoman, says the site is being "scrubbed" of information that might be useful to terrorists. She said the NRC had been asked to take that action by "another government agency," but would not say which one. Another NRC spokesman told Reuters they were removing, for example, latitude and longitude coordinates of nuclear reactors, plant schematics and so on. Note that a full monthafter September 11, the NRC had to be toldto do this by someone else!

Well, better late than never. As The Nation has reported, the terrorists who in 1993 bombed the World Trade Center trained beforehand at a remote site not thirty miles from Three Mile Island -- and afterward threatened to send 150 suicide bombers into America's nuclear plants. [See "Nuclear Safety," September 16]. Given that Al Qaeda terrorists active in America have been thinking about nuclear terrorism for eight years now, it seems likely that much of the NRC's now-secret information--assuming it was of interest and is not still obtainable on any AAA road map--was downloaded long ago.

In any case, one needs minimal inspiration from the NRC website to brainstorm half-a-dozen ways a handful of motivated individuals could turn a nuclear power plant into an American Chernobyl. (Or forty-four Chernobyls. That's the sort of deadly radiation cloud New Scientist magazine predicts England and Ireland would see if a commercial jetliner plowed into the spent fuel pool of Britain's Sellafield plant. British Nuclear Fuels Ltd., Sellafield's parent company, called the report "irresponsible.")

The 1986 fire at Chernobyl threw radiation across Ukraine, Belarus and much of Europe. The death-and-injury toll is a matter of debate; of 300 volunteer firefighters who immediately showed up to battle the six-day blaze, thirty-one were dead within the week. As the fire burned on, thousands more volunteers arrived, but estimates vary as to how many died how rapidly. The Ukrainian government this year estimated that more than 4,000 of those volunteer firefighters have since died a young death, and that more than 70,000 Ukrainians have been "disabled" by radiation sicknesses. The radiation has also created national sacrifice areas in Ukraine and Belarus, where hundreds of thousands deserted their homes in minutes, many of them never to return. Kiev has declared an area the size of the Netherlands unsuitable for agriculture; in neighboring Belarus, nearly a quarter of all farmland is contaminated, and the Health Ministry recorded a 161 percent increase in birth defects in babies born between 1986 and 1993. The World Health Organization says thousands of children have contracted or will contract thyroid cancer over the next decades, an ailment treatable with medication if caught early enough.

US government action is being taken to defend some of America's 104 nuclear power plants from such a fate. National Guardsmen have been called out to patrol some reactors, and others along the Great Lakes are being watched by the Coast Guard. But the NRC remains tight-lipped and looks like a spectator--in public never moving from its initial September 11 "recommendation" that commercial nuclear plants adopt high-level security--while state governors, national security officials and Congressional critics drive the action.

The NRC could demand or order instead of just recommending. But it has not done so--even when its recommendation looks to have been ignored. For example, it took well over a month after the World Trade Center fell--and weeks of complaints by citizens, media and politicians--before the Maine Yankee nuclear power plant could be bothered to post a guard and a gate at the road leading into its complex. Maine Yankee is being "decommissioned," but it's still home to an enormous pool of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel. A spokesman for Maine Yankee, Eric House, said that despite the complaints that the place looked like a ghost town, security has been there all along--just "focused" on the metal warehouse over the spent fuel pool. Some locals say they've heard there are armed men inside that building, but House would not comment on that. So there's no way for the public to know whether those armed men have increased in number since September 11; or whether they could handle five or ten or twenty armed kamikaze terrorists; or what they could do to prevent, say, a truck bomb from trundling through the open gate, parking next to the pool house and then making most of Maine uninhabitable after it blows up.

NRC officials counter that there has been no "specific or credible" threat to Maine Yankee, or to any other American nuclear plant. Apparently they were waiting for delivery of an Osama-gram with a big hissing fuse attached. And apparently they finally received something like that on Wednesday, when the NRC announced that a "credible" threat had been made "very specifically" against Three Mile Island. (So just as someone called them to tell them to clean up their website, someone--the CIA? the terrorists?--called them to suggest they look to Three Mile Island.) No details were offered, but some Pennsylvania airports were closed for several hours. By Thursday, the threat was "no longer credible."

There is nothing new in this lackadaisical approach to nuclear plant security. Daniel Hirsch of the Committee to Bridge the Gap--the gap in question being that between the public and the jargon-filled world of nuclear power--has recounted how he and others spent a dismaying fifteen years trying to get the NRC to insist on forcing the power plants it licenses simply to set up barriers to potential truck bombs. In 1982, after a suicide bomber killed 241 US Marines stationed in Lebanon, the NRC began to hear Hirsch's pleas, and to re-examine its 1970s-era security regulations for nuclear facilities. Those rules required that reactors be prepared for the following worst-case scenario: three lightly armed attackers moving together on foot, assisted by a fourth attacker inside the plant's work force. No cars, no planes, no grenades, no truck bombs, no gases, no multiple teams.

According to a paper Hirsch wrote in the mid-1980s, NRC safeguards staff saw post-Lebanon truck bombs as a serious danger, and in 1984 publicized their intent to put out new rules. The NRC contracted with the Sandia National Laboratories to study the truck-bomb threat--and Sandia concluded that it was worse than all had feared. A reasonable-sized charge set back beyond even the protected area for most plants could cause "unacceptable damage." (In other words, it could rip things apart sufficiently to cause reactor safety systems to fail, radiological releases, etc.--the sort of thing that a 1982 US Congressional Committee study had just concluded might bring thousands of fatalities, millions of poisonings and billions of dollars in damages.)

Oddly, Hirsch writes, two weeks after they got that terrifying Sandia research back, the NRC postponed all action on a new truck-bomb-defense ruling--"pending the results of research." If it's more dangerous than ever, why postpone? Hirsch writes that the NRC was taken aback at the cost to the industry of real security and plunged into a paralyzing internal debate. "As long as the proposed NRC truck-bomb rule involved only a few extra concrete barricades on-site, the cost to the licensees [nuclear power plants] would have been minimal and the political cost to the NRC acceptable," he wrote. "When research revealed that the problem was considerably more serious than previously thought and the solution therefore more expensive, the regulatory agency apparently felt it could not afford to require action proportionate to the problem." Other government agencies were all putting in truck-bomb-defense policies (at taxpayer expense); the NRC contented itself with studying truck-bomb-defense policies rather than requiring them.

In 1993, nine years later, after talk of new rules had begun, a deranged man drove his station wagon through the gates of Three Mile Island, crashing it into the turbine building and disappearing for four hours. Weeks later, terrorists tied to Al Qaeda bombed the World Trade Center, and afterward wrote to the New York Times that they would send 150 suicide bombers against US nuclear targets.

Suddenly Hirsch and others who had written about security weaknesses at nuclear plants--among them Paul Leventhal of the Nuclear Control Institute and Bennett Ramberg, author of Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy: An Unrecognized Military Peril--found their truck-bomb fears shared by Congress. Under pressure, the NRC and the industry built new truck-bomb defenses.

But other concerns of Leventhal, Ramberg and Hirsch--for example, the danger of terrorists infiltrating a nuclear plant's work force -- were less satisfactorily handled. All three participated in a post-September 11 press conference in Washington to advocate, among other things, US military troops and antiaircraft weaponry posted at every nuclear facility. They also called for plant operators to aggressively recheck employee backgrounds, and for a government moratorium on plans to ship spent nuclear fuel to a central depository tentatively planned for Yucca Mountain, Nevada--a plan critics deride as "mobile Chernobyl."

Is that really what it takes to protect nuclear plants? If so, then some see in this a logical conclusion, and new currency for an old argument: that nuclear power is incompatible with democratic freedoms. If one has to scrub the websites, polygraph the employees, call out the guard and shoot down civilian aircraft that stray too close--does that sound like the USA, or the USSR?

And if it sounds too Soviet, then isn't it more sensible to just shut the nuclear plants down?

The Belgian government thinks so, and promises a bill by December 2002 to phase out its seven nuclear power reactors. Germany has already inked such a deal, and plans to replace the lost energy capacity with offshore windmill parks. It's easier than one might think. In America, despite all of the billions invested in it, nuclear power provides a mere fifth of the nation's electricity--far less than what five leading national laboratories say could be saved almost immediately with a national energy efficiency program, one that could unfold with most citizens never even noticing.

Given this logic, it's not hard to see why the industry would be in a state of denial about security: The very discussion is a lethal Pandora's box. Perhaps this is why a full month after September 11 the gates to Maine Yankee lay open, the NRC website was still packed with design schemata, and it was up to governors, not slow-moving NRC officials, to call out the guard. A clear-eyed discussion of how to defend these plants just might conclude that they are indefensible.

-------- europe

Europe Tightens Security at Nuclear and Other Sensitive Sites

New York Times
October 25, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/25/international/europe/25FRAN.html?searchpv=nytToday

PARIS, Oct. 24 (AP) - France is positioning surface-to-air missiles at two sensitive military and nuclear- processing sites as a precaution against airborne suicide attacks, military officials said today.

Antiaircraft missile-defense systems were being placed to protect Île Longue, a nuclear submarine base off Brittany, and La Hague, the site of Europe's largest plant to reprocess nuclear waste, a spokesman for the air force, Frédéric Solano, said today.

Mr. Solano said the radar and missile systems "enable us to identify aircraft and, if necessary, to shoot them down."

There have been no threats so far, and the missile systems - expected to be fully installed by Thursday - are purely a precaution, the Defense Ministry said.

Radar systems that can scout airplanes flying at low altitudes were moved near the two sites on Friday. Twelve fighter planes stationed throughout France are capable of taking off in five minutes in case of an attack.

Jolted into action by the attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, governments throughout Europe have tightened security outside nuclear power and radioactive-waste plants.

Hungary has also placed surface- to-air rockets near its only nuclear power plant, 60 miles south of Budapest.

France has been bolstering its defenses in the northwest since Sept. 11. Many of its air bases are in the south, which left the sensitive northwest area vulnerable.

Officials have declined to say what France is doing, however, to protect its 20 nuclear power plants from terrorist attacks. France gets more than three-fourths of its power from nuclear energy.

"The less we say, the more effective our system will be," Mr. Solano said.

In some countries, officials have continued to discuss the best way to protect nuclear sites.

Environment Minister Jürgen Trittin of Germany said last week that he would discuss with power companies how nuclear plants could be quickly switched off in case of a threat or an attack. But Mr. Trittin has dismissed calls from some opposition politicians for missiles to defend them. Germany has instead emphasized the need for tighter air security to prevent hijackings.

In Britain, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority said nuclear plants had been on a heightened state of alert since Sept. 11. The authority would not provide details.

An official at the British Defense Ministry said fighter pilots were on alert and would be able to move to plants quickly when necessary. No surface-to-air missiles have been placed at nuclear plants, the official said.

In Sweden, the Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate said security checks of visitors to that nation's four nuclear plants were more rigorous since the attacks in the United States. The deputy director general, Christer Viktorsson, declined to comment on other measures, saying only that staff members were in a "great state of readiness" and that "drills will focus more on different types of sabotage."

In Slovakia, officials altered the corridor for civilian flights to reduce the danger of attacks against on strategic targets like oil refineries, dams and its two nuclear plants.

-------- germany

Security review ordered at German nuclear plants after safety lapse

Thursday, October 25, 2001
By Stephen Graham,
Associated Press
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2001/10/10252001/ap_45371.asp

BERLIN - Germany's environment minister on Wednesday urged a review of security at the country's 19 nuclear power stations after it emerged that safety rules at one plant were broken for years.

Lawmakers seized on the revelations to demand the delay of a contested shipment of radioactive waste next month. The convoy's route to a north German dump was hit by an overnight arson attack.

The debate comes amid concern in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington that nuclear installations could become terror targets. German officials acknowledge power stations here wouldn't withstand the impact of a hijacked plane laden with fuel.

Confidence in atomic safety was shaken further Tuesday when Energie Baden-Wuerttemberg admitted that fluid in an emergency cooling system at its Philippsburg plant was knowingly kept below regulation levels for years.

Ordering Germany's 16 states to review safety at the plants, Environment Minister Juergen Trittin said electricity firms must move fast to restore trust. The operator of the Philippsburg plant "has demonstrated irresponsible deficiencies in its security culture," he said. The reactor, taken offline Oct. 8, must stay out of operation until "full transparency" is established on the cause of the lapse and steps are taken to prevent a repeat, he said.

Trittin, a member of Greens party, negotiated an agreement this year with the electricity companies to phase out nuclear power completely within about 20 years. But antinuclear activists want a quicker shutdown. Following the Sept. 11 attacks, Trittin has urged power companies to shut older, less robust, plants sooner and suggested the plants can be switched off quickly if authorities think they are threatened.

But the government has rejected the idea of deploying missiles to bring down hijacked planes, saying the power stations are too close to major airports for the danger to be recognized in time. Officials also stress that they have no current grounds to fear an attack.

The French military has stationed surface-to-air missiles at the La Hague plant, where Germany sends much of its nuclear waste for reprocessing.

Environmentalists warn that the waste shipments, long the target of protests by Germany's militant antinuclear lobby, also are vulnerable.

German police said Wednesday that they suspected an overnight arson attack on a railroad bridge was linked to an upcoming waste transport from La Hague to Germany's main storage dump. Tires and straw were rolled under the bridge on a trailer and set ablaze. The bridge, just a few kilometers from the Gorleben storage site, remained closed to train traffic Wednesday as authorities assessed the damage.

Lawmakers from Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's party stepped up calls for the shipment to be delayed to relieve police already working overtime to guard against terrorism. The deputy leader of the Social Democrats' parliamentary group, Michael Mueller, said putting off the shipment would also help restore the image of the power industry after the security lapses at Phillipsburg and two other plants in recent months.

The exact date of the transport hasn't been released for security reasons, but antinuclear activists have announced protests for the first week of November.

In April, demonstrators blocked rails and roads to delay the last shipment to Gorleben, despite the efforts of thousands of police officers. Police reported several attempts to sabotage rails and overhead power cables ahead of that shipment.

----

Attack on German rail used for nuke waste transport

Reuters
25/10/2001
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/12984/story.htm

HITZACKER, Germany - Engineers were examining a German railway bridge yesterday to decide whether planned nuclear waste shipments could proceed after suspected anti-nuclear activists damaged the track.

German police said they suspected militant anti-nuclear protesters were behind a fire started late on Tuesday in trailers under an iron bridge near the northern town of Hitzacker through which the nuclear waste transports pass.

A spokesman for the regional government said there was no alternative route the reprocessed waste could take to the nearby storage site at Gorleben. Rail traffic over the bridge was stopped after the fire, officials said.

A shipment of containers carrying German nuclear waste reprocessed in France was due to return in the coming weeks.

The stretch of railway has frequently been the target of attacks by anti-nuclear activists, who earlier this year managed to briefly hold up the resumption of shipments of waste from reprocessing in France by chaining themselves to the tracks.

The shipments were stopped for several years due to safety concerns but were resumed after a deal was reached to gradually phase out nuclear power in Germany over the next two decades.

----

German nuke waste transport may face delays

Reuters
25/10/2001
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/12982/story.htm

HITZACKER, Germany - German authorities said yesterday a nuclear waste shipment to a storage site in the northern town of Gorleben planned for late November might have to be postponed because of an attack on railway tracks on its planned route.

Deutsche Bahn AG said engineers who had examined a bridge near the town of Hitzacker had determined that parts of the rails were so badly damaged they would have to be replaced.

German police said they suspected militant anti-nuclear protesters were behind a fire started late on Tuesday in trailers under an iron bridge near Hitzacker.

The bridge is on the route of nuclear waste transports. A spokesman for the regional government said there was no alternative way the reprocessed waste could take to the nearby storage site at Gorleben.

Rail traffic over the bridge was stopped after the fire, officials said.

A shipment of containers carrying German nuclear waste reprocessed in France was due to return in late November.

The stretch of railway has frequently been the target of attacks by anti-nuclear activists. Earlier this year they managed briefly to hold up resumed shipments of waste from reprocessing in France by chaining themselves to the tracks.

The shipments were stopped for several years due to safety concerns but were resumed after a deal was reached gradually to phase out nuclear power in Germany over the next two decades.

-------- india / pakistan

Pakistani Nuke Scientists Questioned

October 25, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-Nuclear-Scientists.html?searchpv=aponline

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistani authorities interrogated two leading nuclear scientists Thursday about possible contacts with the leader of Afghanistan's Taliban militia, government officials said.

Sultan Bashiru-Din Mehmood, one of the founders of Pakistan's nuclear program, was detained Tuesday by intelligence agents in the eastern city of Lahore. Abdul Majid, a scientist who worked for years with Mehmood at the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, also was also being held, officials in the Interior Ministry said on condition of anonymity.

Government officials were not available to confirm the detentions on the record.

The sources said the men were being questioned about any possible links to Afghan officials, including Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. Neither has been charged with any crime.

Mehmood and a group of friends who are mostly scientists and engineers have been working on rehabilitation projects in war-ravaged Afghanistan.

But a senior government official said on condition of anonymity that Mehmood is not suspected of being linked to terrorism suspect Osama bin Laden or his al-Qaida network.

Foreign nations worry about political unrest in Pakistan because the country, like its neighbor and rival, India, is a nuclear power. Some say uncertainty in the government could threaten the security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has drawn the wrath of Islamic militants for his decision to support the United States in its fight against terrorism and its airstrikes on Afghanistan. Some have advocated the overthrow of Musharraf.

But the president insists that the nation is behind him, and that Pakistan's nuclear weapons are in secure hands.

-------- russia

Hulk of doomed Kursk submarine emerges from water

by Clara Ferreira-Marques,
Reuters
25/10/2001
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/12981/story.htm

MOSCOW - Russia's navy said yesterday it had raised most of the Kursk nuclear submarine out of the water for the first time since it sunk 14 months ago.

Russian television showed footage of the submarine, which carries 22 nuclear-capable missiles and two nuclear reactors, still partially submerged in a floating dock at the Arctic port of Roslyakovo.

Russia's national coat of arms was visible on the tower below the vessel's windows, shattered by unexplained explosions that sank one of Russia's most modern submarines in August 2000. There were no survivors among its 118 crew.

"The operation is a complicated one. Nobody is in a hurry," a navy spokesman said in a statement.

The investigating team are expected to step inside the vessel towards the end of the week after draining off the water and checking there are no radiation leaks. They will then face the task of recovering the remains of submariners who died aboard the Kursk when it sank.

Investigators have inspected the roof to plan salvage work inside the submarine and to assess damage to the cruise missiles and nuclear reactors, the spokesman said.

Navy artillery specialists were preparing to unload the submarine's 22 nuclear-capable missiles, designed to destroy an aircraft carrier and its support fleet in one strike.

The Kursk, once the pride of Russia's navy, plunged to the bottom of the Barents Sea after two mysterious explosions ripped open its bow. It was hoisted from the seabed on October 8 and brought into Roslyakovo's floating dock last Sunday.

OPERATION FULFILLS PUTIN'S PLEDGE

The unprecedented salvage operation fulfils President Vladimir Putin's pledge to the victim's families to recover the servicemen's bodies and give them a proper burial.

Prosecutor-General Vladimir Ustinov, leading the investigation, said in an interview the process may take longer than expected.

"The bodies will be found, examined on site and identified ...Many of the bodies will be unrecognisable. So we need at least a month," he told Argumenty i Fakty newspaper.

"We will unravel this mystery. We will not conceal it from society."

He did not say how long the inspection was expected to take, or when preliminary findings could be expected.

Ustinov told a news conference on Tuesday that a full understanding of the accident would not be possible before the submarine's bow, still lying at the bottom of the Barents Sea, is recovered sometime next year.

Ustinov was among the first investigators to step onto the Kursk's roof on Tuesday as a detailed inspection of the wreck began.

--------

Russia: Terror Groups Scoped Nuke Site

October 25, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Nuclear-Security.html?searchpv=aponline

MOSCOW (AP) -- Terrorist groups tried twice this year to conduct reconnaissance at Russian nuclear arms storage sites but were thwarted from taking any action, a senior general said Thursday.

Col. Gen. Igor Volynkin, head of the department that oversees nuclear security in the Russian military, said the first attempt to stake out at a military storage site was eight months ago and the second was about six months ago.

Volynkin, in remarks shown on Russian ORT television, did not say where the incidents took place or name the terrorist groups.

He said both times the efforts were ``nipped in the bud'' and insisted that no one entered the territory of the military facilities. He did not say whether anyone had been arrested or charged.

He said that after the reconnaissance attempts, Russia increased security at its munitions sites, then after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States still more personnel and weaponry were brought to the facilities.

He insisted the storage facilities could withstand an air attack such as the ones that hit New York and Washington, but warned that a ground attack on the nuclear sites was possible.

Russia has seen several terror attacks in recent years, including apartment house bombings in 1999 that killed 300 people and were blamed on terrorists in breakaway Chechnya.

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

Nuclear Plants' Vulnerability Raised Attack Concerns
1982 Report on Danger of Jet Crashes Into Reactors Was Open to Public, Despite Terrorism Fears

By Peter Behr
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 25, 2001; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48190-2001Oct24.html

A government study indicating that a direct, high-speed hit by a commercial jetliner could penetrate a nuclear reactor's protective dome was available to the public for nearly 20 years until it was removed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, regulators confirmed yesterday.

The document remained public even though there have been warnings going back to 1995 that terrorists had included nuclear power plants among their potential targets, based on testimony in the investigation of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

A spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the agency would not discuss the contents of the report or its potential value to terrorists.

The study, by the Energy Department's Argonne National Laboratory, was prepared to assess the risks of an accidental airliner crash at a power plant.

It calculated the impact of objects as large as a commercial aircraft, traveling at various speeds, on the reinforced concrete containment dome protecting the reactor core of a common power-plant design. The study concluded that the dome would be penetrated at the highest flight speeds, according to the D.C.-based National Whistleblower Center, which provides legal representation for nuclear plant workers in whistle-blower lawsuits.

The ignition of a small percentage of an aircraft's jet fuel inside the containment dome would have the force of a 1,000 pounds of explosives and "could lead to a rather violent explosion environment and impose upon the primary containment relatively severe loads," according to the report.

"Based on the review of past [NRC] licensing experience, it appears that fire and explosion hazards have been treated with much less care than the direct aircraft impact and the resulting structural response," the study said.

"Therefore, the claim that these fire/explosion effects do not represent a threat to nuclear power plant facilities has not been clearly demonstrated."

The Whistleblower Center included excerpts of the report in a letter yesterday to Tom Ridge, head of the Office of Homeland Security.

The center also filed a petition with the NRC yesterday calling for further security measures to protect against an attack on nuclear power plants and a widespread release of radiation that could result if the reactor containment dome and core were destroyed.

At least one nuclear plant -- the Three Mile Island facility south of Harrisburg, Pa. -- was designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707, industry officials note.

But none of the nation's 103 nuclear power plants was built to withstand the direct, full-speed impact by today's commercial jetliners, NRC officials say.

Another advocacy organization, the Nuclear Control Institute, said its analysis shows that a reactor containment vessel could be penetrated by a jetliner's direct hit.

Nuclear industry officials have emphasized the strength of the reactor containment domes and the difficulty in steering a high-speed jetliner into a dome in the most damaging way. "I think there's a high likelihood that that aircraft would not penetrate the containment," Ralph Beedle, senior vice president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, said in an Oct. 14 television interview.

The 1982 study was mentioned in a Sept. 24 report by the publication Platts Inside NRC.

The Whistleblower Center said it found the document in the NRC's Bethesda public reading room on Oct. 2. "We asked a volunteer to look around the public reading room and see what was there on airplane crashes. And there it was," said Michael Kohn, the organization's general counsel.

NRC spokesman Victor Dricks said the NRC staff also found the study during a review of its public records following the Sept. 11 attacks and removed it on Oct. 11. He said he did not know whether it had ever been available over the NRC's public Internet documents service, but it is not on the agency's Web site now.

The risk of a terrorist attack in a hijacked aircraft has not been part of the NRC's safety regulation, officials confirm. "We never considered that a credible threat prior to September 11," Dricks said.

--------

Group Demands Reactor Upgrades

October 25, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Nuclear.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A group that has successfully sued on behalf of whistle-blowers to highlight nuclear safety problems is making an urgent appeal to Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge to fortify American reactors against terrorist attacks.

The National Whistleblower Center filed a petition with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission demanding several security upgrades to ``protect the public and environment from the catastrophic impact of a terrorist attack.''

``As the potential threat from international terrorism steadily increased over the years, the NRC took no action to address this growing threat,'' the center alleged in its action filed Wednesday.

The group complained the government has known since the mid-1990s that terrorists wanted to strike a nuclear plant yet left in its public reading room a 1982 scientific report that detailed American reactors' vulnerabilities to a jetliner crash.

The Associated Press disclosed the existence of the report Wednesday. It has been pulled from the reading room.

``The simple truth is that the NRC has long since known that the design and construction of all of the nuclear power plants located within the United States does not come close to being able to withstand the impact of a large commercial jet,'' the suit said.

In a separate letter to Ridge, the center's executive director Kris Kolesnik said the document was essentially a ``terrorist's handbook for duplicating the Sept. 11 attacks on a nuclear power plant or a spent fuel pool.''

``It's unfathomable that this information could be so readily available to the public,'' Kolesnik said.

NRC spokesman Victor Dricks dismissed the criticism, saying no one in government anticipated the suicide hijackings that occurred Sept. 11 and that the agency has ordered numerous improvements at America's 103 nuclear plants since then to guard against terrorism.

``We have people working around the clock for the last six weeks to do everything possible to ensure these plants are as safe as possible. All reasonable steps have been taken to supplement the security of all 103 operating plants,'' he said.

The center has successfully represented whistle-blowers who have won awards for retaliation after highlighting potential security shortfalls at nuclear power plants.

One of the whistle-blowers, Randy Robarge, who was fired from a nuclear plant job and has tried to highlight possible security weaknesses surrounding spent fuel storage areas, joined in the petition. The filing seeks no money but demands changes in nuclear plant security nationwide.

Among the security improvements demanded by the center:

--Establishment of no-fly zones around every nuclear plant and every spent fuel storage facility.

--Fortification of containment walls that protect nuclear reactors to ensure they could withstand consecutive crashes of two large jetliners.

--A requirement that security guards who protect the spent fuel storage areas be armed with weapons, as guards who protect reactors are.

--Enhancements to the screening process for temporary and permanent security clearances for workers with access to nuclear plants.

The center said foreign nationals can get temporary security clearances with a single photo ID, a credit check, one developed character reference, a request for an FBI background check and a one-year check of employment references.

``The background screening of any foreign national must extend beyond an FBI criminal review and must also include a review of the criminal record which might have been created in any country in which the person was born or resided,'' the center's petition said.

-------- california

SMUD plans Calif power plant near abandoned nuke

Reuters,
25/10/2001
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/12974/story.htm

LOS ANGELES - The Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) said yesterday it plans to sharply reduce the amount of power it has to buy by building a gas-fired plant near the site of a long shut nuclear reactor.

Colin Taylor, SMUD's director of power generation, said in an interview that the utility is "generation light" with peak demand of about 2,600 to 2,800 megawatts and only about 1,500 MW of generation.

One megawatt is enough power for about 1,000 homes.

The $350 million phase one of the Cosumnes power plant, which will provide about 500 MW of electricity, is planned to come on line by around the end of 2004.

"We have some (long-term) contracts that are running out around 2005 and want this plant on line so it will replace this (power)," Taylor said.

SMUD filed an application with the California Energy Commission last month to build a 1,000-MW plant on the site but a decision of whether to press ahead with the 500-MW phase two will not be made until 2003, Taylor said.

Taylor noted the utility wanted more time to assess the impact of such factors as a slowing economy on load growth before determining whether to build the second phase.

"I would say (phase two) is a fairly big question mark right now. I think we want to give it a couple of years to see what is going on," he said.

Phase two is expected to cost around $300 million and would come on line either in 2007 or 2008.

GROWTH STALLS

Taylor said the project was partly prompted by strong load growth, which for several years ran at five to six percent. This year, he noted the utility "hasn't seen growth."

California's total consumption of electricity has fallen this year, with the decline triggered by higher retail prices, a slowing economy, and appeals for voluntary conservation as the state struggled to avert rolling blackouts.

SMUD itself announced its first rate increase in more than 10 years in May.

In 1989, residents of Sacramento county voted in a local referendum to shut the 913-MW Rancho Seco nuclear power plant. SMUD was "fairly self-reliant" prior to the plant's closure but has relied heavily on other suppliers since then.

The utility's existing generation portfolio also includes about 800-MW on hydro power. The heavy reliance can cause problems in dry years such as the current one, Taylor noted.

"When we are short of water we end up on the spot market buying power," he said.

Taylor noted that the utility had to pay as much as $1.00 per kilowatt hour (KWh) during the recent California power crisis and was only charging around eight cents per KWh.

"It is prudent for us to generate more ourselves," he said.

The Cosumnes plant would be built less than a mile from the decommissioned nuclear unit.

Taylor said SMUD owned about 2,600 acres of land in the area and has contractual water rights. The site is also "right in the middle of a major transmission path," he noted.

SMUD will, however, need to build a 26-mile extension to an existing gas pipeline to feed the project.

-------- florida

Plane Near Florida Nuke Plant Carried Drugs

October 25, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-attack-drugs-plane.html?searchpv=reuters

CRYSTAL RIVER, Fla. (Reuters) - A small plane forced down by U.S. Air Force jets near a Florida nuclear plant was carrying drugs, police said on Thursday.

The single-engine Piper Arrow took off on Tuesday afternoon from Melbourne, on the east coast of Florida, for a flight to Louisiana, Citrus County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Ronda Evan said.

After the plane went off course, the Federal Aviation Administration, on high alert following the Sept. 11 attacks, notified the Air Force, which sent two F-16 jets to intercept it and force it to land in Crystal River, about 70 miles north of Tampa.

Crystal River is the site of a nuclear power plant operated by Florida Power Corp., a unit of Progress Energy . Security at U.S. nuclear plants has been increased since the Sept. 11 hijacking assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The Air Force notified the Citrus County Sheriff's Office and deputies met the plane when it landed, Evan said.

``They found 65 pounds of marijuana,'' Evan said, worth an estimated $65,000. The pilot and a passenger, both from Melbourne, were arrested.

-------- us nuc waste

US Dept. of Energy Suspends Atomic Waste Train Due to Terrorist Threat

From: "michael mariotte" <nirsnet@nirs.org>
Thursday, October 25, 2001
For Immediate Release

Contact: Kevin Kamps or Diane D'Arrigo,
Nuclear Information & Resource Service, ph. 202.328.0002

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has agreed with the objections of numerous environmental and public interest groups, suspending a planned transcontinental train shipment of high-level atomic waste due to concern about possible terrorist attacks. The atomic waste train scheduled to carry 125 highly radioactive nuclear fuel assemblies from West Valley, New York through ten states to Idaho has now been postponed until at least April 1, 2002. It would have been one of the largest single shipments of commercial irradiated nuclear fuel in U.S. history, according to DOE spokesman John Chamberlain.

"Actions speak louder than words, so although DOE will not admit it publicly, it's clear the West Valley shipment was suspended due to terrorism and security concerns," said Kevin Kamps of Nuclear Information & Resource Service (NIRS). "We're relieved DOE has recognized the extreme danger this proposed shipment would have created and chose instead to suspend the shipment. But the threat such shipments pose is not going to go away in a few months. Proposals for shipping tens of thousands of high-level radioactive waste containers by train and truck through 43 States past the homes of 50 million Americans to national dumpsites in Utah and Nevada must be re-examined in light of the potential for terrorist attacks."

Last summer, NIRS hauled a full-size replica atomic waste transport container along the actual West Valley shipment route through NY, PA, OH, IN, IL, MO, KS, NE, WY, and ID, educating the public about the dangers of nuclear waste transportation.

According to sources closely following the shipment's status, the twin 20 foot-long, dumbbell-shaped metallic atomic waste containers were scheduled to leave DOE's West Valley Demonstration Project near Buffalo as early as mid-September, but that was before Sept. 11. Due to concerns about additional potential terrorist attacks, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham suspended DOE nuclear waste and materials shipments the day after 9/11. But DOE began lifting that suspension just a couple weeks later, raising the possibility that the West Valley shipment might still roll by the end of October. Because metal gaskets on the two containers have not been certified for cold weather conditions, DOE had agreed to deliver the shipment to its Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory no later than Oct. 31 in order to avoid encountering extreme low temperatures.

DOE reinstituted its suspension of nuclear waste shipments on Oct. 7, due to concerns of potential reprisal attacks in response to the beginning of U.S. military action in Afghanistan that day. Despite this, DOE's West Valley site director Alice Williams told the Buffalo News on Oct. 16 that the nuclear train might still roll by the end of the month despite on-going national terrorist threats. However, the very next day, orders were sent to Williams from DOE headquarters in Washington explicitly suspending the shipment until next spring, according to an Oct. 19 Buffalo News article. The two containers will now be off-loaded from the on-site railcars, where they sat outdoors since May, and will spend the winter inside the West Valley facility.

"Energy Secretary Abraham's decision to halt this high-level nuclear waste shipment, not once, not twice, but three times clearly shows that the Energy Department itself acknowledges atomic waste trains like this one are potential terrorist targets," said Tim Rinne, State Coordinator of Nebraskans for Peace.

"Attorney General John Ashcroft and the FBI have warned about additional terrorist attacks. Trucking firms and railroads have been put on highest alert against attacks upon hazardous and radiological shipments. Recently, airports around the Three Mile Island nuclear plant were shut down due to a terrorist threat. The DOE shipment ban should be extended indefinitely, and expanded to cover commercial high-level nuclear waste shipments as well," said Kay Drey of the Missouri Coalition for the Environment.

Despite the current shipment ban, Energy Secretary Abraham appears ready to give his thumbs up to the national high-level atomic waste dumpsite targeted at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. DOE closed its public comment period on the Yucca proposal Oct. 19, and has announced Abraham will make his recommendation to President Bush by the end of the year or early next year. In recent days, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) publicly announced its "concurrence" with DOE's Yucca Mountain siting guidelines, and in recent weeks finalized its own Yucca licensing regulations. At the same time, the NRC is reviewing a nuclear power industry license application to "temporarily store" all currently-existing irradiated fuel at the Skull Valley Goshute Indian reservation in Utah, which would launch 200 high-level atomic waste trains per year throughout the country as early as 2004.

"It is hypocritical for DOE to put the brakes on the West Valley shipment while rushing ahead to give its thumbs up to Yucca Mountain," said Dave Ritter, policy analyst at Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program. "Approval of the Yucca Mountain repository proposal would launch tens of thousands of high-level atomic waste trucks and trains onto our roads and rails. Inadequately addressing potential terrorist threats to such shipments is rash, irresponsible, and reckless."

DOE studies show that 50 million Americans in 45 States live within a half mile of projected highway and train routes to Yucca Mountain.

Critics also point to an Aug. 27, 1998 letter written by Abraham, who was then a U.S. Senator from Michigan, to then-Energy Secretary Richardson regarding plutonium shipments. In the letter, Abraham wrote "I am sure you will agree that the ramifications of an accident are too serious to consider anything less than the very best emergency response preparedness." A copy of the letter is available from NIRS.

"Just as police and firefighters were on the front line of the 9/11 attacks, so would emergency responders be called upon to protect our communities in the event of an atomic waste transport accident or terrorist attack upon a shipment," said Chris Williams, executive director of Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana. "They need to be thoroughly trained and well equipped to deal with radiation emergencies, and not caught off-guard as our government agencies have been by the bio-terrorism attacks."

Critics have also called upon NRC to address terrorist threats to atomic waste transport containers. Commercial high-level atomic waste shipments, such as those to Carolina Power and Light's Shearon Harris reactor storage pools in North Carolina, have not been suspended despite the DOE ban.

In a Sept. 21 response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the NRC - responsible for regulating commercial and DOE high-level atomic waste transport containers and shipment safeguards -- admitted that "the capacity of shipping casks to withstand such a [large aircraft] crash has not been analyzed."

In June 1999 the State of Nevada filed a "Petition for Rulemaking" to the NRC, charging that safeguards against terrorist attacks on high-level radioactive waste shipments were woefully inadequate or non-existent. Nine state governments and the Western Governors Association endorsed the petition. Despite officially agreeing to act on the petition in Sept. 1999, the NRC has yet to do so. A copy of the petition is available from NIRS.

"Large scale movement of radioactive waste on the roads and rails would create tens of thousands of potential targets, in virtually any scenario a terrorist might choose, whether major metropolitan areas, suburbs, or the agricultural heartland, near schools, hospitals, or water supplies," said Corey Conn of Illinois-based Nuclear Energy Information Service.

-------- us nuc politics

New Tapes of JFK on Cuban Missile Crisis Released

October 25, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-arms-missilecrisis.html?searchpv=reuters

BOSTON (Reuters) - The Kennedy Library on Wednesday released newly declassified tapes of President John F. Kennedy conferring with aides about the 1962 crisis over Soviet missiles in Cuba that pushed the nation close to nuclear war.

The release from the presidential library comes on the 39th anniversary of Kennedy ordering U.S. Navy ships to ring Cuba in response to the Soviet Union's sending nuclear missiles and other offensive weapons to the communist country 90 miles from U.S. shores.

One 114-minute recording made in Kennedy's White House office contains meetings that took place on Nov. 19, and Nov. 20, 1962, less than a month after the nuclear showdown began but shortly after Kennedy reached an agreement with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to pull back from the edge of war.

The tapes include a discussion that occurred hours before Kennedy was to hold a news conference announcing the lifting of the naval blockade. The debate centered around whether the president should include a U.S. assurance that it would not invade Cuba, an assurance that the Soviet Union had requested.

On the recording, the president debates with his brother, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and other members of the executive committee of the National Security Council who argue that such an assurance is unnecessary.

``We do not owe anything as far as Khrushchev is concerned,'' the attorney general tells Kennedy.

``Now, how do we prevent this from looking like we're welshing on this?'' the president asked. Eventually, Kennedy decided against including the formal non-invasion assurance in that evening's public address.

Earlier on Nov. 20, Kennedy learned from the President's Science Advisory Committee how ineffective U.S. bomb shelters would be in a Soviet nuclear strike.

``What do you think you would save given the sort of attack you have on the urban areas and so on?'' Kennedy asked the committee.

``In the attack models we have, my recollection is, this would offer, within a target area a 40 percent savings (of lives), roughly speaking. All of these assume...the utilization of a proper warning,'' one of the scientists tells Kennedy.

At the time, Kennedy is told there were enough bomb shelter spaces for roughly 50 million people. The U.S. population was about 200 million in 1962.


-------- MILITARY

THE RAIDS
Errant Cluster Bomb Leaves Danger Behind, U.N. Says

New York Times
October 25, 2001
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/25/international/asia/25STAN.html

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Oct. 24 - A United Nations official said today that a cluster bomb used in an American bombing raid early Tuesday on Herat, in western Afghanistan, had left a village near a Taliban military camp strewn with deadly unexploded "bomblets" that were yellow in color and the size of soft drink cans.

The official said eight people from the village had been killed in the American attack.

The United Nations report of the cluster bomb - a weapon used by American forces in every war since Vietnam that has frequently caused civilian deaths - was the latest of a growing number of accounts of American bombs going astray and causing civilian casualties.

At the same time, there have been increasing accounts of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban moving troops and tanks into residential neighborhoods, either to deter bombing or to lure American pilots into hitting civilian targets.

At the United Nations briefing where the incident involving the cluster bomb was disclosed, spokesmen said the Taliban had moved six tanks into another village outside Herat after an American bombing raid during the weekend. Afghans reaching Quetta, Pakistan, said two villagers had died when five of the six tanks were struck in a subsequent American attack.

The manager of the United Nations mine action program for Afghanistan, Dan Kelly, said Afghan employees of the program in Herat had gone to Shaker Qala, the village where the cluster bomb hit, to place sandbags around the bomblets and to clear paths that would allow villagers to leave their homes.

Mr. Kelly, a retired Canadian army engineer, said the description of the bomblets given over the radio from Herat suggested that the bomb appeared to have been of a type designed to scatter bomblets over an area of 20 football fields.

He said that the bomblets, carried to the ground on small parachutes, contained a "shaped charge" capable of penetrating armored steel up to five inches thick. These bomblets, he said, are usually used for attacks on armored vehicles, troop concentrations, bunkers and other dispersed targets.

But they are deadly even if they fall to the ground unexploded, because their small size and bright color make them intriguing to passers-by, especially children. In more than 20 years of war, thousands of Afghan children have been killed or maimed by bomblets left over from Soviet bombing of guerrilla groups in the 1980's.

Mr. Kelly appealed to the Pentagon to provide the United Nations with details of the payload, height and speed of the aircraft that dropped the cluster bomb. That would enable the mine-removal team to determine the "footprint" of the bomb and the area to search for the bomblets.

With nearly 300 square miles of Afghanistan already taken up by uncleared minefields from the 22 years of Soviet military occupation and civil war, he said, "the last thing Afghanistan needs right now is more unexploded mines and bombs."

Since the American raids began 18 days ago, bombing mistakes have been reported almost daily. In one early case, a targeting error caused a bomb to strike a United Nations mine-removal office in Kabul, killing four Afghan employees. Tonight, a report on Iranian state television said American and British planes carrying out another bombing raid on Herat, at about the time of the day's early evening prayers, had killed at least 20 civilians near a mosque in the Ishaq Suleiman district, on the city's northwestern outskirts.

No confirmation of the two Herat strikes, the one involving the cluster bomb and the one near the mosque, was immediately available from the Pentagon, which has acknowledged several accidental strikes on civilian targets.

Still, the Pentagon has said errors were unavoidable in a bombing campaign of the intensity of that being conducted in Afghanistan. Pentagon spokesmen have also warned against uncorroborated reports by the Taliban of civilian deaths - including one that more that more than 1,000 Afghan civilians have died - saying that some accounts have been "outright lies."

But even if the Taliban have exaggerated or fabricated American bombing errors, the mistakes that have been confirmed make it clear that the United States, less than three weeks into the war, is engaged in a two-front battle: a military campaign to crush the Taliban and its ally, Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist network, and a propaganda struggle to show that America's technological superiority, embodied in "smart" bombs and cruise missiles and other stand-off weapons dropped from 15,000 feet and higher, is not being used recklessly to kill civilians.

The Taliban have also been called on to answer tough questions about their tactics. In the same United Nations briefings that have addressed accounts of errant American bombs, officials have given details of instances in which Taliban commanders have moved troops and tanks into civilian residential districts in Kabul, Kandahar and Herat.

Stephanie Bunker, the official spokeswoman for the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Afghanistan, based in Islamabad, accompanied the account of the errant cluster bomb outside Herat with the report of the Taliban's moving tanks into another village nearby.

On Tuesday Ms. Bunker, who is an American, said "residential areas and some villages" around Kabul, the capital, "are becoming more dangerous because Taliban troops have moved into those areas." Similar reports have reached Pakistan from Jalalabad and Kandahar.

-------- afghanistan

Alliance rebels become key U.S. ally

October 25, 2001
By Ben Barber
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20011025-863204.htm

The Afghan Northern Alliance may lack unity, leadership, money and weapons, but it has become - thanks to U.S. bombings - the spearhead of the U.S. war on terrorism.

Despite fears that alliance troops are prone to human rights violations and are too weak and divided to oust the Taliban, the rebel troops are poised to receive a green light to move on Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif.

President Bush said before his China trip last week U.S. air strikes would set the stage for "friendly troops on the ground" to oust the Taliban and help round up accused terrorist Osama bin Laden and his supporters.

Despite the U.S. sorties against Taliban frontline positions this week, the poorly armed, ethnically divided and leaderless Alliance troops still face a powerfully motivated enemy loyal to the Taliban leadership and stiffened by Arab and Pakistani religious zealots.

The alliance lost its most effective military strategist when its defense minister, Shah Ahmed Masood, was killed by a suicide bomber - possibly sent by Osama bin Laden - a few days before the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

"Who is in charge of the Northern Alliance now? No one," said Larry Goodson, an expert on Afghanistan who is advising the U.S. government on Afghan policy.

The alliance, which still holds the Afghan seat at the United Nations and controls about 10 percent of the Afghan countryside, remains a "credible fighting force with problems," said Mr. Goodson, a professor at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass.

With Mr. Masood gone, Mr. Goodson said, the alliance is even more fractious than before and it lacks a cohesive military strategy. It also suffers from outmoded military gear.

The Northern Alliance, also calling itself the United Front, consists of four major ethnic groups loyal to President Burhanuddin Rabbani.

Mr. Rabbani, head of the Jamaat-i-Islami party, served as president in Kabul from 1992 to 1996 when the Taliban, backed by Pakistan, drove him out of the capital.

His defense minister, Mr. Masood, commanded an ethnic Tajik militia that is now headed by his former aide, Mohammed Fahim.

The four main groups of the Alliance are, according to a Washington spokesman:

• The Tajiks of the Jamaat-i-islami, headed by Mr. Rabani and Gen. Fahim, with 15,000 regular and 15,000 reserve troops.

• The Uzbeki militia of Gen. Abdurrashid Dostum, who has shifted sides in past wars, His 8,000 troops are poised to advance on the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif and have been advised by U.S. forces.

• The 6,000 ethnic Hazara forces of the Hizb-e-Wahadat party, based west of the central Afghan town of Bamian, where the Taliban recently destroyed two giant stone Buddhas. The mainly Shi'ite Hazaras have been badly persecuted by the Sunni Taliban.

• The 5,000 troops in the Herat militia of Ismael Khan, a popular former governor of Heart who established schools for girls after the end of Soviet occupation in 1990.

Another militia is the Turkomen fighters of Gen. Malik Pahlawan, previously in an alliance with Gen. Dostum's Uzbeks. They betrayed Gen. Dostum to the Taliban but then slaughtered about 2,000 Taliban forces when they failed to give Gen. Pahlawan a major role in governing Mazar-e-Sharif.

None of the Northern Alliance factions is from the biggest and politically dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan - the Pashtun - who form the Taliban and are based in the south and east along the Pakistani border.

The only Pashtun militia to remain loyal to the Rabbani government is that of Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, which was once a conduit for Saudi funds and conservative Wahabbi Saudi volunteers for the anti-Soviet war of 1980-1990.

The Bush administration has sent CIA agents to the Pakistani border cities of Peshawar and Quetta to try to recruit Pashtuns to join with the Northern Alliance in a broad-based government under the aegis of the former king, Mohammed Zahir Shah. But so far there has been little evidence of success.

Before the U.S.-initiated air strikes on Afghanistan this month, the Northern Alliance had an estimated 15,000 troops, compared with 40,000 for the Taliban, said Mr. Goodson, far less than the alliance spokesman's estimates.

"Since then, they have begun to change sides. In Afghanistan, cash is flowing and tea drunk and sides are switching," he said.

However the Taliban forces have been stiffened by perhaps 1,000 to 5,000 deeply committed Arab and Pakistani volunteers.

--------

Pentagon Says Taliban Is Ready for Long Fight

By Vernon Loeb and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, October 25, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47797-2001Oct24.html

The Pentagon acknowledged for the first time yesterday that Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia is proving to be a tenacious opponent and is hunkering down for a long fight that could drag on for months through the harsh Afghan winter.

Briefing reporters at the Pentagon, Rear Adm. John D. Stufflebeem, deputy director of operations on the Joint Staff, said the Taliban has stopped advances by opposition Northern Alliance forces on Kabul, the capital, and an airfield near the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif and has begun dispersing its forces in ways that will be difficult to strike from the air alone.

"They are proven to be tough warriors," Stufflebeem said. "We're in an environment they obviously are experts in, and it is extremely harsh. The entire world needs to recognize that terrorism and terrorists are a much different kind of threat than we have ever faced before."

Stufflebeem's sober assessment of the Taliban's fighting capabilities echoed comments made yesterday by President Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. They stood in stark contrast to more upbeat assertions from the Pentagon early on in the air campaign, including a claim nine days ago that the Taliban's combat capabilities had been "eviscerated" by U.S. airstrikes.

In northern Afghanistan yesterday, U.S. warplanes for a fourth straight day bombed Taliban front lines north of Kabul, where some of the Islamic militia's best fighters and strongest fortifications are said to be located. With the air campaign in its 18th day, officials of the Northern Alliance, an Afghan rebel coalition fighting the Taliban, said they were helping to direct the attacks by providing targeting information to a U.S. military team in the area.

U.S. military officials say their help is increasingly important now that the Taliban has begun hiding its troops among the civilian population of Kabul and stashing its military equipment in mosques.

One senior Pentagon official said the lack of success on the ground north of Kabul is not surprising since -- to date at least -- most of the U.S. strikes have focused on Taliban positions in the southern city of Kandahar, the stronghold of the ruling militia.

"Taliban forces hunkered down on the front lines north of Kabul are not a threat to us," the official said. "We'll get them in due course. Seizing Kabul is not our objective. The center of gravity for the U.S. is Kandahar."

The official said Taliban commanders had prepared "remarkably poorly" before the onset of airstrikes on Oct. 7 by failing to disperse their assets. But, the official said, the Taliban has adjusted in recent days. "They've figured that out now -- and now they are trying to husband resources and hang on for the long haul," the official said.

Asked to assess the Taliban's strengths and vulnerabilities, Stufflebeem said he was "surprised at how doggedly they're hanging on to power -- I think that's the way to put it." Referring to Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader, he added: "For Mullah Omar to not see the inevitability of what will happen surprises me."

Underscoring the Taliban's determination, Stufflebeem said the United States has obtained credible intelligence that the Taliban may try to poison humanitarian food aid being distributed to starving Afghan civilians and blame the act on the United States.

"We are confident in what we have obtained as information," he said. "We are choosing to release that information now before it might become a fact. If it becomes a fact, it's not because the United Sates is doing something untoward. It's because somebody else is."

Abigail Spring, a spokeswoman for the United Nations' World Food Program in New York, said her organization was concerned by Stufflebeem's statement because the Taliban had taken over the WFP's two largest food warehouses, in Kabul and Kandahar, on Oct. 16. The Kabul warehouse was returned to the WFP the next day, but the Kandahar depot is still in Taliban hands.

"There's no question that [the] new allegations are very serious," she said. "We will need to verify them and take proper measures to ensure the safety of our foodstocks -- including making sure the foodstocks in Kabul have not been tampered."

During his briefing, Stufflebeem said that two Marine CH-53 helicopters yesterday recovered the wreckage of a Blackhawk helicopter that crashed while supporting last weekend's commando raids into southern Afghanistan. Those helicopters were operating from the USS Peleliu, a Wasp-class helicopter carrier that is part of an amphibious assault group in the Arabian Sea carrying the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, a senior defense official said.

The original rescue mission was aborted when Marine helicopters came under small arms fire in Pakistan during a refueling stop and flew out of the area after returning fire, leaving the wreckage behind.

In a speech at the Dixie Printing Co. in Glen Burnie yesterday, President Bush said the Pentagon "is slowly but surely encircling the terrorists so that we'll bring them to justice. We're patient. We're firm. We have got a strategy that is going to work."

Powell, appearing at the State Department with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, said that military operations in Afghanistan could continue through the beginning of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan in mid-November.

Despite the administration's appeals for patience, the first crack appeared this week in what has been strong bipartisan support for the Pentagon's military strategy. Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Monday that the unrelenting airstrikes were making the United States look like "a high-tech bully" -- even if that is not the case.

Noting the difficulties the administration is encountering in maintaining an unwieldy alliance of Muslim countries, Biden added: "The longer the bombing goes on, the more susceptible we are to criticism, justified and unjustified, in the Islamic world."

However tough the Taliban is proving to be in the field, current and former defense officials noted that the Pentagon has stopped short of carpet-bombing the Taliban's dug-in troops around Kabul and Mazar-e Sharif -- strikes that could easily be carried out using B-52 and B-1 bombers based on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.

"I sure hope the intensity picks up real soon," said Michael Vickers, a defense analyst and former Special Forces officer with experience in Afghanistan. "The bombing is pretty meager, even by Balkans standards. We certainly could be throwing a lot more at the Taliban-fielded forces."

A senior Pentagon official noted, however, that air power alone probably won't be able to dislodge a determined adversary such as the Taliban. "We bombed Serbia for 78 days with more assets," the official said. "We bombed the North Vietnamese for 15 years and didn't bring them to their knees."

Retired Air Force Gen. Charles Horner, who ran the air war against Iraq in 1991, said that in the complex military and political effort the United States is executing in Afghanistan, "slowly weakening" the Taliban is probably the best course.

"They have to be very careful about how they bring along the internal Afghan situation," Horner added. He said that hitting the Taliban front lines too hard right now might destabilize the country by leading to the collapse of the ruling regime before an acceptable alternative government is ready to take its place.

Retired Army Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub, a veteran of Special Operations combat in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, said he was "pleased to hear the Pentagon is saying we have to be patient. That's what I've been telling my friends."

Singlaub said that the Afghan war is about winning hearts and minds, not about destroying fielded forces. "There's a pressure to create some visible results," he said, "but the nature of this is that the majority of results aren't visible."

Staff writer Marc Kaufman contributed to this report.

--------

Taliban Prepare Troops for Invasion

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, October 25, 2001; 12:42 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51066-2001Oct25.html

TASHKENT, Uzbekistan, Oct. 25 - Taliban leaders have told their soldiers in Afghanistan to prepare for an invasion by U.S. troops and to expect help from thousands of reinforcements from Pakistan, according to a Taliban member in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad.

"They are drafting all the men from the villages around and giving them Kalashnikovs," the man, a senior civilian officer in Jalalabad who spoke by telephone on condition his name not be used. "They said to get ready to resist the American infantry."

"The Taliban has also told us to prepare for 65,000 reinforcements - Arabs, people from all countries, who will come from Pakistan," he said.

His information could not be independently confirmed. But the account reveals the message being given to Taliban forces as the United States presses its air offensive in Afghanistan and indicates the Taliban are preparing for an extended fight.

The man said nearly three-fourths of the populations of Jalalabad, the southern Taliban stronghold of Kandahar and Kabul, the capital, have fled to the countryside, leaving the cities to the fighters.

"We know this will be a fight for Islam," he said. "Our morale is up, because we have heard more people are coming to help us." Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan have been recruiting sympathetic Muslims to fight with the Taliban.

Some reinforcements already have arrived, he said, and they have been placed in houses around Jalalabad, east of Kabul near the Pakistan border.

"The idea is to have armed people all around to prevent the American soldiers from coming in the city," he said.

At the same time, he said, Taliban officials gathered in Kabul today to discuss their strategy and decide on a message to broadcast to their followers during the Friday Muslim prayers, he said. On the agenda was a discussion of whether to surrender Osama Bin Laden, the alleged terrorist being harbored by the Taliban, he said.

Across the battle lines, officers of the Northern Alliance, the rebel group fighting the Taliban for control of the country, were meeting in the Panjshir Valley and conferring by satellite phones on their strategy.

According to one commander, the Pentagon has asked Northern Alliance forces to move to capture Kabul and Mazar-e Sharif, a key city in northern Afghanistan. U.S. warplanes hit targets around Kabul today, but reportedly did not conduct air raids near Mazar-e Sharif.

High in the calculations of military planners on both sides in Afghanistan and in the United States was the quickening approach of winter. Already some mountain passes are under snow. In past years, most fighting has lulled in northern Afghanistan during the winter.

"I don't think we will be finished with this fight before winter," said the top Northern Alliance representative in Tashkent, Mohammed Hasham Saad. "We won't be finished before Ramadan," he said, referring to the Muslim holy month, which begins in mid-November.

"There was not very fierce battles today. Just the usual," said an officer of the Northern Alliance troops south of Mazar-e Sharif, who asked not to be identified.

He indicated the Taliban was adopting strategies to make the U.S. bombing more difficult.

"The Taliban have moved close to our lines - they are only 500 meters apart," said the commander. "And they have deployed their military equipment in the villages around here."

--------

Religious leaders keep 'Faith in Face of Terror'

By Michael Fainelli
Christian Science Monitor
October 25, 2001
http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1025/p12s2-lire.html

For the religiously inclined in particular, the suffering of recent weeks has given new urgency to some basic questions about mankind's place in the world. Is there a higher power guiding events? Why would God allow the evil to slaughter the innocent? What forgiveness or punishment do the wicked deserve?

On Monday, representatives of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity (with its major denominations) convened in Washington, D.C., in an attempt to place the terrorist attacks within a broader moral context and discuss how the faithful ought to respond.

Each of the presentations at the conference, "Faith in the Face of Terror," filmed at a television studio and broadcast live across the World Wide Web, wove personal narrative together with an explanation of how each speaker's theology informed his or her response to the attacks.

Dr. Arthur Caliandro, senior minister of Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, said that a period of mourning was needed before the events could be addressed in theological terms. "I cried and I cried and I cried," he said in the riveting cadence of a seasoned preacher. "I also had to get in touch with my anger, because the devastation of the terrorism was anger gone wild."

The speakers agreed on the distinction between anger and hatred, calling the latter a trap that merely perpetuates the cycle of violence.

"God has set limits for us, has set limits [on steps] that we can take even to oppose clear oppression," said Dr. Ingrid Mattson, vice president of the Islamic Society of North America. The God of Islam sides with the suffering, she said, citing the story of Cain and Abel. It's a principle she said she hoped would not be lost on Arabs made resentful by years of colonial rule or on Americans who would lash out at an entire religion to avenge the acts of a few.

All three religious traditions put their faith in an all-powerful, benevolent God, yet acknowledged that sometimes the wicked seem to have their run of the world.

"Why the disaster?" Dr. Caliandro asked. "Because God gives us freedom... [the terrorists] took advantage of the freedom they had and moved towards the dark sides of themselves."

Why didn't God stop them at the last minute? Sister Kathleen Feeley, a literature professor at the College of Notre Dame in Baltimore, suggested that evil can bring about good, by deepening awareness of the spiritual world.

The webcast "Faith in the Face of Terror" can be viewed at www.faithandvalues.com.

-------- biological weapons

Biowar: The Nixon Administration's Decision to End U.S. Biological Warfare Programs

Update, October 25, 2001
The National Security Archive <NSARCHIVE@hermes.gwu.edu>
The September 11th Source Books, Volume III, http://www.nsarchive.org/NSAEBB/NSAEBB58/

Washington, D.C., 25 October 2001 ­ The U.S. biological warfare program stockpiled more than 200 pounds of anthrax spores before President Richard M. Nixon ordered the end of the program and destruction of stockpiles in 1969, according to declassified documents posted today on the Web by George Washington University's National Security Archive, a non-governmental research institute and documentation center. The documents, titled "Biowar: The Nixon Administration's Decision to End U.S. Biological Warfare Programs," are available at http://www.nsarchive.org/NSAEBB/NSAEBB58

The threat of biological warfare is not a new one, and international efforts to eliminate this scourge date back to the 1925 Geneva Protocol which set out to ban both biological and chemical weapons from national military stockpiles. This effort recently encountered a serious setback when the current Bush administration announced in July that it would not sign the enforcement convention to the 1972 biological weapons convention. Yet, it was the United States that led the way to international agreement on the 1925 Geneva Protocol when the recently-elected administration of Richard Nixon announced in November 1969 that it would halt all work on the development of offensive biological weapons (later including toxins), and ordered destruction of all the existing stockpiles of such weapons.

Archive senior fellow Dr. Robert A. Wampler collected the documents from declassified White House and State Department files at the National Archives, which detail the internal debates, policy options, and decisions made by the Nixon administration in 1969 and 1970, when the government was under severe international criticism for the use of herbicides and tear gas in South Vietnam.

Despite Nixon's order, the CIA continued to store as much as 100 grams of anthrax and other biological agents for several years after 1970, until exposed by the Church Committee investigation in 1975, according to the documents posted today, which include the full text of the Church hearings on the CIA bioweapon program.

The documents are available at the following URL:
http://www.nsarchive.org/NSAEBB/NSAEBB58/

-------

Government considers buying 30 million doses of smallpox vaccine

JOHN WARD
Canadian Press
Thursday, October 25, 2001
Montreal Gazette
http://www.canada.com/montreal/story.asp?id={62D754A8-2F37-496D-880A-7D4A8BA930A8}

OTTAWA (CP) - The federal government is pondering whether it should stockpile 30 million doses of smallpox vaccine, Health Minister Allan Rock said Thursday.

He said the government has talked with U.S. health authorities about a joint project to develop a new and improved vaccine. Rock told the Commons health committee that a bioterrorist attack using smallpox would be far more dangerous than one using anthrax because smallpox is contagious.

"I don't believe we should go out and vaccinate 30 million people today," he told MPs. "But we should have at least 30 million doses."

Canada has 380,000 doses of the vaccine, left over from the 1970s, before the virulent disease was eradicated by an international campaign led by the World Health Organization.

"It's old vaccine, but I'm told it's still clinically effective," he said.

He said his experts say the vaccine can be diluted and still be effective, even at a 10-to-1 dilution rate. That would provide 3.8 million doses.

"I don't think that's enough."

However, he added, there's no more to buy.

"Smallpox vaccine is in very short supply in the world. People who have smallpox vaccine don't have it for sale."

He said the United States is considering whether to develop a new vaccine using modern gene technology. Washington is said to be planning a stockpile of 300 million doses.

Canada may join that program, Rock said.

Smallpox was once a terrible scourge with epidemics that killed millions over the years.

It was the first disease tamed by a vaccine. Millions of older Canadians still carry the pock-shaped scars left by the vaccination process.

The disease was eventually wiped out and the only known stocks of the virus are thought to be stored in freezers in American and Russian labs.

The minister outlined the government's plans to deal with bioterrorism.

He said his department is:

- Setting up training programs for local health practitioners to help them recognize unusual symptoms.

- Arranging for laboratories, so every region of the country will have a facility for fast analysis of suspicious substances.

- Working to set up clear lines of communication so that, in the event of a problem, there will be no confusion among the various levels of government.

Rock said no one expected a terror attack using germs, viruses, chemicals or nuclear materials.

"Although we prepare for the worst, the risk of such scenarios continues to be low."

Opposition MPs attacked Rock over the drug fiasco that boiled up last week when the government contracted to buy an anti-anthrax drug from a generic producer rather than the patent holder.

Canadian Alliance MPs sought the names of officials who "violated the patent laws."

Rock repeated that officials had acted in good faith when they offered the drug contract to Apotex because they had been told that Bayer, the patent holder, couldn't deliver the antibiotic.

It later turned out Bayer could provide the drugs. The Apotex allotment was subsequently warehoused and the generic drug maker said it won't charge Ottawa the $1.5 million cost unless the tablets are used.

Rock stood by a chronology of events laid out in affidavits from Health Canada that officials released Wednesday.

"The affidavits speak for themselves," he said.

Retorted Alliance MP Diane Ablonczy: "If they spoke for themselves we wouldn't be asking these questions."

Rock was asked if he had informed the Prime Minister's Office that he had worked for Apotex while he was in private law practice 20 years ago.

The minister flared at that, saying he and his firm represented thousands of clients over the years.

Outside the committee he was still angry.

"The fact is that I made all the appropriate declarations to the conflict commissioner, there is no issue there," he said. "If anyone has an allegation to make, they should make it or they should stand down."

-------

Nunn: USSR Weapon-Makers May Help

Thu, Oct 25
By JEFFREY McMURRAY,
Associated Press Writer
http://news.excite.com/news/ap/011025/19/nunn-bioterrorism

WASHINGTON (AP) - Scientists who worked on the Soviet Union's biological and chemical weapons programs could be key allies for America and should be added to the U.S. payroll, former Sen. Sam Nunn said Thursday.

The Georgia Democrat, who once chaired the Armed Services Committee, said the Soviets got further than the United States in developing such weapons. Ex-Soviet scientists could provide key information as America seeks to build a defense against chemical and biological agents, he said.

"The Russians have all sorts of scientists that know how to make weapons of mass destruction, and particularly biological," Nunn told the Senate Subcommittee on Emerging Threats. "They don't know how to make a living and don't know how to feed their families. We could step up to the plate and do something for our own security by engaging that community."

Nunn also suggested creating a partnership with Russia to share even the most highly classified scientific data. A similar partnership was formed between the United States and Germany after World War II, Nunn said.

America and Russia already share some scientific information, but on a much smaller scale than what Nunn is proposing. The International Science and Technology Center, a cooperative effort among the United States, Russia, Japan and Europe, has nonproliferation as its focus, but also fosters sharing of information among former weapons scientists.

Dr. George Anderson, director of medical countermeasures for the Southern Research Institute in Frederick, Md., said Russian scientists could prove particularly valuable in developing vaccines for biological attacks. Unlike most American vaccines, which are largely chemical-based, Soviet vaccines often had live strains of the virus that would be used to protect against a larger outbreak, Anderson said.

American scientists have tried to steer away from live medical agents for fear many people would reject the doses, some fatally. But Anderson said the differing philosophies could make for a beneficial partnership.

"No classified information is being shared right now," Anderson said. "These collaborative projects are like projects two different universities would collaborate on in the United States."

Subcommittee Chairwoman Mary Landrieu, D-La., said the panel would take the proposal under "serious consideration."

On the Net:
Nuclear Threat Initiative: http://www.nti.org/

----

NATURAL ANTIDOTES TO BIOLOGICAL TOXINS

Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001
From: "Molly Johnson" <mollypj@yahoo.com>
http://www.sdm2000.com/toxinreport.doc

SUMMARY. The threat of biological warfare is real and concern over preparedness of the civilian population and medical professionals is growing. There is virtually no practical way that vaccines, antibiotics or other treatment can be delivered to a frightened populace in a timely manner during a crisis. The current strategy of having an unprotected citizenry travel to physicians' offices or hospitals to receive prophylactic care or treatment is unfeasible. The public must be armed with preventive or therapeutic agents in their vehicles, homes and the workplace. Natural antibiotics and antitoxins are well documented in the medical literature, but overlooked by health authorities. These antidotes are readily available for the public to acquire and place inane emergency biological response kit.

Knowledge of Health, Inc.
457 West Allen Avenue #117
San Dimas, California 91773

1. GARLIC

The Garlic Information Center in Britain indicates that deadly ANTHRAX is most susceptible to GARLIC. Garlic is a broad-spectrum antibiotic that even blocks toxin production by germs. [Journal Nutrition, March 2001] In one test garlic was found to be a more potent antibiotic than penicillin, ampicillin, doxycycline, streptomycin and cephalexin, some of the very same antibiotic drugs used in the treatment of anthrax. Garlic was found to be effective against nine strains of E. coli, Staph and other bugs. [Fitoterapia, Volume 5, 1984] Freshly cut cloves of garlic or garlic powder may be beneficial. The antibiotic activity of one milligram of allicin, the active ingredient in garlic, equals 15 units of penicillin. [Koch and Lawson Garlic: The Science and Therapeutic Application, 2nd edition, Williams & Wilkins, Baltimore 1996] Garlic capsules that certify their allicin content are preferred and may provide 5-10 milligrams of allicin, which is equivalent to 75-150 units of penicillin.

2. SULFUR-BEARING ANTIOXIDANTS

The anthrax bacterium's toxicity emanates from its ability to kill macrophage cells, which are part of the immune system. Studies have shown that SULFUR-BEARING ANTIOXIDANTS (alpha lipoic acid, N-acetyl cysteine, taurine) and VITAMIN C, which elevate levels of glutathione, a natural antioxidant within the body, counters the toxicity produced by anthrax. [Molecular Medicine, November 1994; Immunopharmacology, January 2000; Applied Environmental Microbiology, May 1979] The above sulfur compounds can be obtained from health food stores and taken in doses ranging from 100-500 mg.

3. VITAMIN C

Vitamin C should be the buffered alkaline form (mineral ascorbates) rather than the acidic form (ascorbic acid) and should be combined with bioflavonoids which prolong vitamin C's action in the blood circulation.

The powdered form of vitamin C is recommended to achieve optimal dosing. A tablespoon of vitamin C powder (about 10,000 mgs) can be added to juice. Good products are Twinlab's Super Ascorbate C powder and Alacer's powdered vitamin C.

4. MELATONIN

MELATONIN, a sleep-inducing hormone available at most health food stores, has been shown to help prevent lethal toxins from anthrax exposure. [Cell Biology Toxicology, Volume 16, 2000] It could be taken at bedtime in doses ranging from 5-20 mg. Melatonin boosts glutathione levels during sleep.

Of additional interest, one of the methods by which MUSTARD GAS works is its ability to bring about cell death by depleting cell levels of glutathione [Medicine Journal, April 9, 2001] So GLUTATHIONE is also an antidote for mustard gas poisoning.

5. IRON and METAL-BINDING CHELATORS.

Virtually all bacteria, viruses and fungi depend upon IRON as a growth factor. [Iron & Your Health, T.F. Emery, CRC Press, 1991] Iron-chelating (removing) drugs and antibiotics (Adriamycin, Vancomycin, others) are effective against pathogens. The plague (Yersinia pestis), botulism,

SMALLPOX AND ANTRAX could all be potentially treated with non-prescription METAL-BINDING CHELATORS. For example, iron removal retards the growth of the plague. [Medical Hypotheses, January 1980]

The biological activity of the botulinum toxin depends upon iron, and metal chelators may be beneficial. Infection Immunology, October 1989, Toxicon, July 1997].

Phytic acid (IP6), derived as an extract from RICE BRAN, is the most potent natural iron chelator and has strong antibiotic and antioxidant action. [Free Radical Biology Medicine, Volume 8, 1990; Journal Biological Chemistry, August 25, 1987]

IP6 has been found to have similar iron-chelating properties as desferrioxamine, a drug commonly used to kill germs, tumor cells or to remove undesirable minerals from the body. [Biochemistry Journal, September 15, 1993] IP6 rice bran extract (2000-4000 mg) should be taken in between meals with filtered or bottled water only (no juice).

6. OREGANO

The antibacterial, antiseptic action of plant oils has been described in recent medical literature and may be helpful in fighting biological toxins. [Journal Applied Microbiology, Volume 88, 2000] A potent natural antibiotic, more powerful than many prescription antibiotics, is oil of OREGANO.

One study showed that oregano completely inhibited the growth of 25 germs such as Staphylococcus aureas, Escherichia coli, Yersiniaenterocolitica, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. [Journal Food Protection, July 2001]

Oregano has been shown to be effective in eradicating intestinal parasites in humans. [Phytotherapy Research, May 2000]

WILD OREGANO, which is quite different than the variety on most kitchen spice racks, has over 50 antibacterial compounds. Just one part wild oregano oil in 4000 dilution sterilizes contaminated water. [London Times, May 8, 2001]

Oregano powder from whole leaf oregano is available as Oregamax TM capsules (North American Herb & Spice Co.). A spectacular development in natural antibiotic therapy is the manufacture of oregano powder from 100% pure oregano oil, producing one of the most potent antibiotics known. It has recently become available under the trade name OregacinTM (North American Herb & Spice Co.). It costs about $1 per pill, but this is a far cry from the $16 per pill for Vancomycin, known as most potent prescription antibiotic.

7. NERVE GAS ANTITOXINS

Nature also provides nerve gas antitoxins. Nerve gas interrupts the normal transmission of nerve impulses by altering levels of acetycholinesterase, the enzyme that degrades the nerve transmit teracetycholine. HUPERZINE A, a derivative of CHINESE CLUB MOSS, has been suggested as a pre-treatment against nerve gases. [Annals Pharmacology France, January 2000]

The Walter Reed Army Institute of Research conducted studies which revealed that huperzine A protects against nerve gas poisoning in a superior manner to physostigmine, a long-standing anti-nerve toxin drug. [Defense Technical Information Center Review, Volume 2, December 1996] Huperzine A is available as a food supplement at most health food stores. Suggested dosage is 150 mcg per day. Pretreatment is advised prior to nerve gas exposure.

Molly Johnson - SLO CO Grandmothers for Peace 6290 Hawk Ridge Place, San Miguel, CA 93451 805/467-2431

----

Thompson vows U.S. will respond to any threat

October 25, 2001
By Joyce Howard Price
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011025-8765590.htm

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson yesterday announced measures to improve the public health response to the recent anthrax attacks and to bioterrorism in the future, saying that actions will go forward regardless of scientific uncertainties.

"We are taking aggressive steps to ensure that our postal system is safe, that our government can function without a break, and that America has all the resources necessary to handle anything the terrorists want to throw at us," Mr. Thompson said in a speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, meeting in the District.

"We have good science, but it is also an evolving science," he said. "We're going to act quickly, and, if need be, let the science catch up to our action."

The secretary's comments were in response to criticism that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an agency within his department, has received this week for failing to recognize that postal workers were at risk for anthrax infection from letters sent through the mail.

"Remember, we have never had cases of anthrax attacks in this manner before. It's a new challenge that we are all facing as a country," said Mr. Thompson.

In multiple appearances on the TV networks' morning talk shows yesterday, U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher bluntly admitted that federal officials erred in not responding more aggressively to anthrax-tainted mail in the nation's capital.

"We were wrong. We were wrong. The assumption had been that people [involved in processing or handling unopened envelopes containing anthrax] could not be exposed," Dr. Satcher said on ABC's "Good Morning America."

On NBC's "Today" show, he said: "We were wrong. The fact is we haven't been there before, and we're learning."

After an anthrax-laced letter arrived in the office of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, South Dakota Democrat, on Oct. 15, and a white powdery substance inside spilled out, thousands of workers on Capitol Hill were screened for anthrax, and many were immediately put on antibiotics.

That was done on the recommendation of the CDC.

But the federal agency initially did not advise screening and treatment of postal workers, even those employed at the facility that processes mail sent to Congress, believing anthrax inside a sealed envelope would not cause them any problem.

"Based on what we knew, we would not have had a reason to expect that there was anthrax in that environment. We had never had a case before," Dr. Satcher said on ABC.

Investigators had begun tracing the Daschle letter backward but stopped when they found no evidence of the anthrax bacteria at a congressional mail-intake facility.

But their views changed drastically by Sunday, when a Brentwood postal worker was diagnosed as having inhalation anthrax, the most serious form of the disease, and on Monday, when it was disclosed two Brentwood employees had died of that disease.

In his address to the mayors, Mr. Thompson enumerated the efforts that are being made to track down the source of anthrax-laced letters that were sent to Mr. Daschle, the three major television networks, a Florida tabloid publishing firm, and the New York Post, and the changes that have been implemented or proposed to confront the anthrax public health threat.

"They have used the best science to follow the trail of these letters. And they have used the best science to assess the risk of anthrax exposure to employees, both at the workplaces where the letters were received and at the postal facilities through which the letters passed," said Mr. Thompson.

"These efforts were evident in the Florida and New York cases where the letters were identified; those who may have been exposed were tested and treated," he said.

Mr. Thompson did not mention the Washington cases.

Several government officials yesterday identified new efforts and changes in procedures that are under way or planned for government responses to bioterrorism threats.

• Mr. Thompson and Helge H. Wehmeier, president and CEO of the Bayer Corp., announced an agreement for the federal purchase of 100 million tablets of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin, or Cipro, at a price of 95 cents per tablet. That price for the anthrax treatment is down from the usual discounted price of $1.77 per tablet that the federal government pays.

• Postmaster General John F. "Jack" Potter announced that postal workers who process mail will be outfitted with gloves and breathing masks. Use will be optional.

• Mr. Potter also said the Postal Service intends to buy new bacteria-killing radiation devices. The agency is preparing to ask Congress for $625 million to buy more safety equipment, according to news reports yesterday.

• Deborah Willhite, a senior vice president of the Postal Service, said the agency also is urging people to wash their hands after handling mail every day.

In an interview with the Associated Press, she said, "We have no reason to believe that there would be anything on them, but what's the problem with clean hands?"

• Mr. Thompson said the CDC "will immediately move in at any and all postal facilities that might have handled a piece of mail, once anthrax is determined to be present," and "we will make medicine available immediately to those employees who may have been at risk of exposure."

• Mr. Thompson said he is adding four 50-ton "push packs" to the eight that are currently strategically located at secret sites throughout the nation. Push packs contain vaccines, antibiotics, intravenous drips, oxygen masks, and dozens of other medical supplies and are shipped to crisis areas within 12 hours of a disaster. The one that went to New York on Sept. 11 arrived in seven hours.

• The HHS secretary announced the "immediate release" of $3 million through the CDC to supplement public health grants to the District and other areas that have been hit by anthrax. He said the money will be used to "accelerate active surveillance, detection and confirmation of anthrax cases."

He provided a breakdown of how additional funding sought by the president to address the anthrax scare at the state and local levels will be used. He said "substantial funding" will be provided for the CDC's rapid response and advanced technology labs and their epidemiologists.

• Mr. Thompson said he also wants to provide each state health department lab with a graduate of the CDC Epidemiology Intelligence Service and to hire 410 new FDA inspectors to ensure that the food supply is not contaminated with biochemicals or other agents.

-------- drug war

Afghan casualty: anti-drug effort
A drop in Europe's narcotics prices fuels concern of Afghans selling drug stocks to buy arms.

Christian Science Monitor
October 25, 2001
By Scott Baldauf baldaufs@csps.com
http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1025/p6s1-wosc.html

RAWALPINDI, PAKISTAN - Just a few months ago, US officials had begrudging praise for the Taliban for banning the opium-producing poppy from the farmlands of Afghanistan.

Now, that praise is forgotten. Not only are the Taliban protectors of terrorists, in Washington's eyes, they have once again emerged as a major world supplier of drugs, particularly opium and heroin.

Recent reports in Europe of falling narcotics prices set off alarm bells that Afghan drug smugglers may be selling off stockpiles to pay for weapons.

There's no proof as yet, say officials, that Afghan opium has begun to flood the market - drug seizures in Pakistan actually fell 50 percent this year, perhaps because of tighter security on the Afghan-Pakistan border. But Pakistani and international drug-control officials are bracing for a worst-case scenario, as the West launches what may be a prolonged war against a nation that in the past decade became the largest source of opium in the world.

"Opium has always been a part of the Afghan economy. It has played a role as currency and a source of savings for farmers, and in times of crisis, they sold their stocks to get cash," says Bernard Frahi, director of the Afghan program of the United Nations Drug Control Program in Islamabad, Pakistan.

What makes the present situation dangerous, Mr. Frahi adds, is that Afghanistan's present rulers, as well as the opposition Northern Alliance, could use opium stockpiles to help fund their war efforts. In the past, the Taliban reportedly earned tens of millions from taxes on opium production.

While drug smugglers may be avoiding Pakistan's tighter borders, they could easily go to neighboring states such as Iran, China, or the Central Asian republics of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, or Turkmenistan.

"In these past days of financial crisis for these terrorist groups, one might think that the Taliban and the Al Qaeda [terrorist network] would use existing trafficking networks in order to get some immediate cash," says Frahi. "After all, the [smuggler's] staff is available, and the opium and the heroin labs are in the country."

Oddly enough, it is the very issue of drug control that the Taliban consider to be one of their greatest successes. Pointing to Islamic injunctions against drunkenness and addiction, Taliban's ruling leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar issued an edict last year to ban poppy cultivation outright. Faced with the threat of stiff financial and physical penalties, including death, only 6 percent of the farmers in Taliban areas grew poppies.

"In Pakistan, we took 15 years to eradicate the opium poppy, but Mullah Omar did it in one year," says one Pakistani drug-control official, in private. "That is really commendable. It's amazing."

The feat came about with minimal foreign aid, due to Western disapproval of the Taliban's human rights record, especially its harsh restrictions on women. Once it verified the Taliban's success, the US announced $43 million in humanitarian aid for Afghan farmers in May. (By contrast, the US last year earmarked some $893 million for drug-control efforts in Colombia, according to the State Department.)

On Wednesday, Mullah Omar said the ban remains in effect, the Afghan Islamic Press reported. The statement came after UN officials earlier this month said it appeared farmers were preparing fields for poppy crops.

The only part of Afghanistan that continued to produce opium was controlled by the opposition Northern Alliance, which the US has aided against the Taliban. This year's crop in alliance territory provided 10 percent of the total world supply, making Afghanistan the second-largest opium producer, after Burma (Myanmar).

While Afghanistan has been a source of opium for centuries, drugs only became a major funding source for weapons in the early 1990s, as Islamic holy warriors, or mujahideen, first fought retreating Soviet troops, then turned against one other. By 1997, Afghanistan produced 2,800 tons of opium annually, more than 80 percent of the total world supply.

Afghanistan produced so much, in fact, that it created a glut. This forced down prices and encouraged opium and heroin distributors in Turkey, Europe, and the US to stockpile drugs until prices rebounded. Some drug-control experts say falling heroin prices on the streets of Amsterdam and Berlin has more to do with a sell-off in Europe than in Afghanistan. After all, they say, it takes months for smugglers to move drugs from the opium banks of Afghanistan to the processing labs of Turkey to buyers in Paris.

In the gritty industrial city of Rawalpindi, next door to Islamabad, the best place to measure the flow of heroin is in the back alleys, where addicts smoke heroin off sheets of foil, withdrawing from life one puff at a time.

For raspy-voiced Asad Ali, who has used heroin for 15 years, wartime was always a good time. Opium farmers in Afghanistan would sell stockpiles for cash, flooding the market and bringing prices down.

But that hasn't happened this time, at least, not yet. In fact, the street price for heroin has gone up, from 15 rupees (24 cents) per gram last month to 20 rupees (32 cents) today. "It's more costly now than before," says Mr. Ali, emerging from the banks of a filthy catacomb where a river of garbage flows. Higher prices do not deter him. "I get the money from begging," he says. "I get heroin every day. And I get food."

At a private drug-rehabilitation clinic in Rawalpindi, former addict Muhammad Omar (no relation to the Taliban leader), says he expects prices to drop. "When the war in Afghanistan started, it seemed that it was going to get hard to get drugs, because it all comes from there," he says. "If the war continues, then the market will be flooded with heroin. It will be dirt cheap."

-------- pakistan

Pakistani guerrillas return with eight killed by U.S.

October 25, 2001
By Willis Witter
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20011025-95527052.htm

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Members of a militant Pakistani guerrilla group smuggled the bodies of eight colleagues from the Afghan front back into Pakistan, then confirmed yesterday that the eight had died in U.S. air strikes.

They were the first confirmed deaths of foreign forces joining the battered Taliban.

The guerrilla group succeeded in smuggling the bodies back after being refused entry at the main border crossing between Kabul and Peshawar.

A total of 22 Pakistani guerrillas were killed in the strikes earlier this week, according to members of the Harakat ul-Mujahideen, one of the most militant of more than a dozen Pakistani groups that send guerrillas to train in Afghan-istan and fight security forces in Indian-controlled Kashmir.

"They died at the front, fighting alongside the Taliban," said Gul Zamin, an activist in the banned group.

The deaths, while providing evidence that the U.S. strikes are reaching the Taliban and their allies on the ground, are likely to further inflame Pakistani militants, who already have been protesting the air strikes across the border in Afghanistan.

Colleagues first tried to bring the bodies through the border crossing at Torkham, on the road from Kabul to Peshawar, hoping to bury them in their homeland, according to reporters at the scene.

A Taliban official said the Pakistani border guards blocked the way, saying, "You wanted to fight with the Taliban, you can bury them in Afghanistan."

According to one account, the fighters died Monday night near Bagram, about 30 miles north of Kabul, where the Taliban faces off against the opposition Northern Alliance.

Another Harakat official told the Associated Press that they died while meeting in a house in Kabul, when a bomb came through the roof.

Harakat is designated by the United States as a terrorist group, and its assets were frozen following the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, in which more than 5,000 people died.

Pakistan not only served as a rear base during the 1979-89 war against the Soviet Union, but Pakistanis joined the Afghan struggle in large numbers.

Of the 22 Pakistanis reported dead yesterday, nine were buried at a site near Bagram. Eight were smuggled into Pakistan and the whereabouts of the other five were unknown.

In northern Afghanistan yesterday, Mohammad Atta, a Northern Alliance leader, said his opposition forces, based south of Mazar-e-Sharif, had mounted an offensive toward the district of Keshendeh during the night.

He said U.S. air attacks on enemy lines had enabled his men to win control of four villages in fighting, which left between 70 and 80 Taliban troops dead and 150 captured.

The alliance, which claims to have teams of U.S. special forces among its ranks, hopes to take Mazar-e-Sharif to open supply routes leading to Kabul and into western Afganistan.

Near Kabul, the Taliban has concentrated an estimated 6,000 troops in hills about 30 miles north of the city. At a front-line post at the Rabat district, alliance deputy brigade commander Haji Bari claimed the opposition had brought up thousands of troops and weapons to the strategic Panjshir Valley in anticipation of any march on Kabul.

"We're waiting for the order," he said against a background of crackling artillery and machine-gun fire.

For the moment, however, alliance fighters were pulling back their positions to put their troops at a safe distance from U.S. bombs hitting Taliban forces, he said.

In Islamabad, U.N. spokeswoman Stephanie Bunker said yesterday that more than 70 percent of the population of the main cities of Herat, Jalalabad and Kandahar had fled to escape the U.S. bombing.

The Taliban claims that more than 1,000 civilians have been killed in the bombardments, but Washington dismissed such claims as lies, acknowledging however that some bombs had gone astray.

The United Nations said yesterday that U.S. cluster bombs had hit a mosque in a military camp, a military hospital and a civilian village during attacks on the western Afghan city of Herat Monday night.

Meanwhile, the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan - their only foreign envoy - returned to Afghanistan yesterday for consultations.

Asked in an interview where he was going, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef would say only that he was not going to the Taliban power base of Kandahar.

"I want to hold talks with the authorities on some issues which cannot be discussed on the telephone," the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) quoted Mr. Zaeef as saying before he crossed the border at Torkham. It was suggested that he could not talk by telephone for fear of giving away the locations of Taliban leaders.

In a related development, Pakistani officials detained a pro-Taliban scientist who played a key role in helping Pakistan become a nuclear power. The government said Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood had been placed in protective custody.

Officials at the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission said Mr. Mahmood had been a project director for the nation's nuclear program.

Abdul Majid, who was also detained, worked with Mr. Mahmood for years at the Atomic Energy Commission. Mr. Mahmood's links with Islamic groups and his pro-Taliban sentiments had drawn scrutiny from Pakistani security agencies in recent months, sources at the energy commission said.

• This story is based in part on wire service reports.

--------

Pro-bin Laden group loses 22 fighters in attack

USA TODAY
10/25/2001
Associated Press
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/10/24/attacks.htm

KORAK DANA, Afghanistan (AP) - Taliban gunners fired missiles Wednesday at U.S. jets pounding the front line north of Kabul, the heaviest onslaught in four days of attacks there. Opposition commanders said they were bringing up fresh troops for a possible assault on the capital. An American airstrike in Kabul, meanwhile, reportedly killed 22 Pakistani militants linked to Osama bin Laden, prime suspect in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. It was the highest reported death toll suffered by bin Laden's allies since the air assault began Oct. 7.

In neighboring Pakistan, border guards reported five powerful explosions Wednesday near a region in Afghanistan's Paktia province where bin Laden is thought to run a tunnel complex. The concussions near the Gor Way Tangi area were so powerful that Pakistani officials said they believed 5,000-pound bombs were being used to collapse mountainsides and close tunnel entrances.

Pakistani authorities said Wednesday that six Muslims from Somalia and Sudan - countries where bin Laden recruits fighters - were arrested leaving Afghanistan last weekend. An inquiry was under way to determine whether they were members of bin Laden's al-Qa'eda terror network trying to flee American attacks.

Amid the roar of jets and the crackle of gunfire north of Kabul, opposition commander Haji Bari told The Associated Press that the northern alliance was bringing in thousands of new troops and weapons in anticipation of a green light from alliance leaders to march on the capital.

"We're waiting for the order," said Bari, deputy brigade commander in the Rabat district.

So far, U.S. strikes north of the capital have not brought an opposition advance. The northern alliance is also fighting to dislodge the Taliban from Mazar-e-Sharif, a key northern city.

The opposition claimed to have killed 35 Taliban fighters and captured 140 others - including Arabs and Chechens - in a battle Wednesday near the town of Kashendeh, about 60 miles south of Mazar-e-Sharif. The report could not be independently confirmed.

In other developments:

- Secretary of State Colin Powell said he hopes the anti-terrorism war in Afghanistan can be concluded quickly but the Bush administration is prepared to keep up the fight during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan if necessary. Powell said the ruling Taliban militia "must now go because they are part and parcel to al-Qa'eda."

- The House of Representatives gave overwhelming approval to an anti-terrorism bill giving police in the United States new power to secretly search the homes of terrorism suspects, tap all their phones and track their use of the Internet.

- German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder spoke out against a pause, for humanitarian reasons, in military action in Afghanistan, saying that a temporary halt would only prolong suffering.

- Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem of the Joint Chiefs of Staff expressed surprise at "how doggedly" the Taliban were clinging to power. He accused the group of even planning to poison humanitarian food supplies and blaming any deaths on the Americans.

President Bush ordered airstrikes against Afghanistan after the ruling Taliban repeatedly refused to hand over bin Laden and his followers.

Since the campaign was launched, hundreds of Pakistani militants sympathetic with the Taliban and bin Laden have entered Afghanistan vowing to fight the United States.

Among them were the 22 Pakistanis killed by a U.S. strike. The militants - members of the banned group Harakat ul-Mujahedeen - died when a U.S. bomb hit a house in Kabul where they were meeting Tuesday, said Muzamal Shah, a Harakat leader in Pakistan.

Shah said the men went to Afghanistan to help the Taliban "devise a plan for fighting against America."

Pakistani border guards at Torkham refused Wednesday to allow 11 of the bodies to be brought into Pakistan for burial. Sources close to the Harakat ul-Mujahedeen said the bodies later were smuggled in.

The Pakistani group, which is fighting Indian soldiers in Kashmir, has been declared a terrorist organization by the United States.

U.S. attacks this week have focused on al-Qa'eda and Taliban positions facing Kabul and on Mazar-e-Sharif, in hopes that the anti-Taliban northern alliance can advance on those cities.

For the fourth straight day, U.S. jets streaked across the skies near the village of Korak Dana about 30 miles north of Kabul, pounding Taliban positions with bombs and missiles.

Taliban fighters unleashed several surface-to-air missiles, which failed to bring down the planes. They also bombarded northern alliance positions with artillery and mortar fire.

Saeed Mir Shah, a 24-year-old fighter with the northern alliance, said he counted 10 bombs over a 2{ hour period at midafternoon. "All the houses were shaking," he said.

Pakistan, a key Muslim ally in the anti-terror campaign, has opposed allowing the northern alliance to seize Kabul. There are widespread doubts over the alliance's ability to govern. Its factions - made up largely of members of Tajik and Uzbek ethnic minorities - fought each other when they last controlled Kabul between 1992 and 1996 and in the process largely destroyed the city, costing some 50,000 lives.

In Peshawar, Pakistan, representatives of Afghan tribes began a two-day meeting to discuss formation of a broad-based government to replace the Taliban.

"This is the beginning, a turning point. I hope this will be the key to change in the government in Afghanistan," said Pir Sayed Ahmed Gailani, an Afghan spiritual leader and longtime supporter of the exiled Afghan King Mohammad Zaher Shah.

Gailani said the meeting would ask the Afghan people "to revolt against the Taliban dictatorship."

The sluggish pace of efforts to form an alternative government have prompted the United States to step up action on behalf of the northern alliance.

Opposition commanders say the Taliban have strengthened front-line positions north of Kabul in recent days in an effort to secure the capital. The commanders said Taliban soldiers are heavily dug in against airstrikes and called for more U.S. attacks to break the front line.

"These U.S. airstrikes are not enough," Bari, the alliance officer, said. "Our attacks are stronger than the Americans'."

Even as the commanders called for tougher action, an alliance spokesman said the United States should be careful not to kill civilians.

"We have to express our concern in that regard," the spokesman, Abdullah, who uses one name, said in the northern Afghan city of Khwaja Bahauddin. "There is no justification for civilian casualties."

Bari said the alliance expected to launch offensives soon against Mazar-e-Sharif and Taloqan, a former alliance headquarters. Control of those cities would give the opposition key supply lines for arms from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

-------- russia

Russia supplies tanks

October 25, 2001
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011025-6365347.htm

Russia was sending scores of tanks to opposition forces in Afghanistan as the Pentagon warned yesterday that Taliban forces planned to poison foreign food aid and blame it on Americans.

The arms shipments had begun moving to Northern Alliance forces occupying northern Afghanistan, said Bush administration officials, who added that the armor would provide a major boost in firepower to the 15,000 troops of the Northern Alliance.

The United States and coalition forces hoped the tanks, armored fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers would be used in a major offensive to oust the ruling Taliban regime in Kabul within the next several weeks, said officials who spoke to The Washington Times on the condition of anonymity.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, said yesterday that the Taliban was planning to poison foreign food aid sent to Afghanistan and blame any resulting deaths on the United States.

"The United States has obtained information that the Taliban might intend to poison humanitarian foodstuffs," said Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, deputy director of operations for the Joint Staff.

"We would never poison any foodstuffs," Adm. Stufflebeem said. "But, we have obtained information, so I will confirm for you that there are reports that the Taliban might poison the food and try to blame the United States."

Disclosure of the reported food-poisoning plan was a pre-emptive propaganda strike by the Pentagon. It came amid Taliban claims that U.S. and allied bombing had caused thousands of civilian casualties and hundreds of deaths, charges rejected as false by the Pentagon.

For example, at a press conference in Islamabad two weeks ago, Taliban Ambassador to Pakistan Abdul Salam Zaeef said that "more than 77 civilians have been martyred in different forms in our country, and the number is increasing with the passage of time."

"This is at a time when the Pentagon is lying to the world that it is not targeting civilians," he said.

Adm. Stufflebeem warned Afghans not to trust any food distributed by the Taliban.

"Those who have control of those foodstuffs that are not reputable for instance, the Taliban, who we know have control of some Red Cross warehouses of foodstuffs, or Taliban who may be collecting the humanitarian daily rations that are dropped - if it comes from that source, I would be very suspect," he said.

"I want to reaffirm that there is no truth that we would poison it," Adm. Stufflebeem told reporters at the Pentagon. "I want every person who can receive humanitarian assistance to do so from an agency that they can trust."

The Russian arms shipment to the Northern Alliance includes up to 40 T-55 tanks, some 80 BMP-1 and BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicles and several dozen BTR-60 armored personnel carriers, U.S. officials familiar with intelligence reports said of the transfers.

The armor delivery is expected to be completed by the end of this month.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said earlier this week that "we certainly are ready to have the alliance forces move both north and south."

Asked about the progress of the Afghan opposition, Adm. Stufflebeem said: "We're watching this battle move rather slowly on the ground. They're still exchanging artillery. We are still attacking [Taliban] forces. We know we're having an effect on their forces based on what we see from pilot reports that are coming back."

Northern Alliance commanders are "feeling comfortable" with U.S. air strikes against frontline Taliban forces, he said.

However, there is no sign the alliance forces are advancing to Kabul or are closer to taking over the strategic airfield at the northern town of Mazar-e-Sharif, he said.

"That's not to say they haven't, but I just haven't seen that," the admiral said.

Adm. Stufflebeem said the 55th Brigade of Taliban forces, heavily populated with members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist group, is continuing to be attacked by U.S. air strikes.

"We have an interest in the 55th Brigade because that is one that had previously been identified as being populated with al Qaeda fighters," he said.

Adm. Stufflebeem said the conflict against al Qaeda terrorists and the Taliban will be long and difficult.

"They are proven to be tough warriors," he said. "We're in an environment they, obviously, are experts in, and it is extremely harsh. I am a bit surprised at how doggedly they're hanging on to power; I think that's the way to put it."

The admiral said in briefing reporters as warplanes struck targets in Afghanistan for an 18th day that he has been surprised that Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar has failed to see "the inevitability of what will happen" to his regime.

"But we are prepared to take however long is required to bring the Taliban down," he said. "I think that's the best way to put it.

"We definitely need to have patience," he said. "The entire world needs to recognize that terrorism and terrorists are a much different kind of threat than we have ever faced before."

A European diplomatic source confirmed that Russians are supplying arms to the Northern Alliance, but the source could not provide specific numbers or types.

The Russian arms deliveries followed a meeting in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, on Thursday between Gen. Anatoly Kvashnin, the Russian chief of the general staff, and Northern Alliance commanders.

Another Northern Alliance leader, Borhanoddin Rabbani, said in Dushanbe on Tuesday that his troops were fighting the Taliban on several fronts and expected to mount an offensive soon.

"The troops entrusted to me will soon begin a strong offensive," Mr. Rabbani told the official Russian news agency Itar-Tass. The offensive is expected to take place before the beginning of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which begins in mid-November.

A Russian government defense source also told the Interfax news agency that other weapons to be delivered to the Northern Alliance include Grad 122mm multiple rocket launchers and ZSU-23-4 Shilka self-propelled anti-aircraft guns.

The arms shipment was estimated to be worth about $45 million, Interfax reported.

In other military developments, U.S. air strikes on Tuesday hit five planned targets, including terrorist camps and forces, Taliban command-and-control centers and Taliban fighters in the field and garrison, Adm. Stufflebeem said.

A total of 90 strike aircraft took part, including 75 warplanes from aircraft carriers, 10 long-range bombers and five AC-130 gunships.

U.S. Air Force C-17 transports also dropped food rations, bringing the total number of packaged meals intended for Afghan refugees to more than 785,000.

The Pentagon also released video showing fighter bombers attacking a military facility near Kabul and a combat-vehicle facility.

Adm. Stufflebeem also said Pakistani military authorities had "secured" an airfield where U.S. salvage helicopters came under fire on Saturday.

The helicopters were sent to pick up a downed U.S. helicopter that had crashed last Friday during a U.S. commando raid. The wreckage was removed by the helicopters yesterday, he said.

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

Biden questions continuing strikes

October 25, 2001
By Audrey Hudson and Dave Boyer
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011025-541140.htm

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle yesterday distanced himself from comments by the top Democratic foreign policy lawmaker that America risks looking like a "high-tech bully" in the bombing of Afghanistan.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, departed from the post-Sept. 11 spirit of bipartisanship in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a nonpartisan group of foreign policy experts.

On Monday, Mr. Biden told the group in New York he did not know how much longer President Bush's "honeymoon" or "unquestioning period of unabashed support for the president's policy will continue."

Mr. Daschle would not address Mr. Biden's comments directly yesterday, but praised how the Bush administration is handling the military campaign.

"I don't know that I've come to any conclusions about how long the bombing should take place. I think the president is doing exactly the right thing," said Mr. Daschle, South Dakota Democrat.

"I support [Mr. Bush´s] effort. I think it is important for us to do as much as possible from the air to avoid casualties on the ground. I think he's doing that, for good reason," Mr. Daschle said. "I think we over a period of time will be able to determine and calculate the degree to which this has been effective. But it's far too early to come to any conclusions."

Asked by The Washington Times yesterday if his comments were misconstrued or taken out of context, Mr. Biden would only say "the speech speaks for itself."

Throughout most of the speech and questioning period Mr. Biden praised the administration's efforts, going so far as to predict Mr. Bush will "go down as a great president."

"I think he's done well. But now we're going to get into the tough calls," Mr. Biden told the CFR.

But he said a long U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan "plays into every stereotypical criticism of us [that] we're this high-tech bully that thinks from the air we can do whatever we want to do, and it builds the case for those who want to make the case against us that all we're doing is indiscriminately bombing innocents, which is not the truth."

The White House seemed unfazed by Mr. Biden's comments and vowed to continue the bombing campaign until the mission is completed.

"The president is committed to winning the war against terrorism and our military will conduct this campaign to make sure the terrorists are brought to justice," said White House Deputy Press Secretary Scott McClellan. "The American people are united."

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert called Mr. Biden's comments "completely irresponsible."

"The last thing our country needs right now is Senator Joe Biden calling our armed forces 'a high-tech bully,'" said Mr. Hastert, Illinois Republican.

"The American people expect their representatives and senators to support these operations and to support our men and women in uniform," Mr. Hastert said

"After losing close to 5,000 fellow citizens to terrorist attacks over the last month and a half, the American people want us to bring these terrorists to justice. They do not want comments that may bring comfort to our enemies," Mr. Hastert said.

Rep. Thomas M. Davis III of Virginia, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, called Mr. Biden's comments "outrageous and negligent."

Using high-tech bombs and specifically targeted ground assaults has spared the lives of thousands of innocent civilians in Afghanistan, Mr. Davis said.

"I believe we should take full advantage of every piece of the technology at our disposal in order to bring the al Qaeda network to justice, and it is irresponsible for the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to suggest to the world that our bipartisan resolve is waning," Mr. Davis said.

"The Taliban strategy has consistently been to hide out and outwait the U.S. and our allies, hoping that our resolve will dissipate and that partisan squabbling will lead America to fold up its tent," Mr. Davis said.

With Mr. Bush's public approval rating going as high as 90 percent since the attack, Republicans and Democrats have presented a mostly unified and nonpartisan front in support of the administration's military and domestic actions to fight terrorism.

But Mr. Biden also has been exerting his foreign policy expertise behind the scenes.

During a meeting last week Mr. Biden recommended to Mr. Bush that former President Bill Clinton be appointed as a special envoy to the Middle East.

The suggestion reportedly drew an incredulous response from others at the meeting.

--------

SPECIAL FORCES
Long Before War, Green Berets Built Military Ties to Uzbekistan

New York Times
October 25, 2001
By C. J. CHIVERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/25/international/asia/25UZBE.html

TASHKENT, Uzbekistan, Oct. 24 - In 1999, teams of Green Berets arrived at former Soviet garrisons outside the capital here. They were some of the Army's finest soldiers, they traveled in small groups and in the two years that followed they came and went every few months.

The mission was straightforward: to train the army of a former foe, in part to prepare its inexperienced conscripts for skirmishes with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a terrorist group accused of setting off bombs in Tashkent earlier that year.

The long-term goal was more ambitious.

The Green Berets were one element of an accelerating security arrangement in which the two nations were laying the groundwork for more extensive military cooperation.

In recent weeks this relationship has blossomed into the large-scale American deployment of Special Forces units and aircraft on what was once enemy soil.

Years before the United States' war against the Taliban, at a time when the State Department was worrying over the dreary human rights record of President Islam Karimov's authoritarian government, the effort at military cooperation was already expanding, according to officials and military personnel from both countries.

As Green Berets were familiarizing themselves with their new Central Asian partners, officials from the United States Central Command in Florida and the American Embassy in Tashkent were meeting with Uzbek defense officials, coordinating military programs. Soon, under a military education program that began here in 1995, more Uzbek officers were admitted to military schools in the United States, officials from both countries said. More American troops were attending training exercises in Uzbekistan's mountains and steppes.

The United States also helped the Uzbek military and border guards acquire nonlethal equipment, including helmets, flak jackets, Humvee transport vehicles, night-vision goggles and radiation detectors used to search for smuggled nuclear material.

Two weeks ago, the two countries announced an agreement that permitted American forces greater flexibility in operating from Uzbek bases, in return for assurances to protect Uzbekistan's security. And while the agreement stops short of being a mutual defense pact, it establishes "a qualitatively new relationship" that involves a long-term military commitment.

The Special Forces training sessions have typically lasted a month, people familiar with them said. After repeated visits, the Green Berets have spent enough time in Uzbekistan that strong personal relationships have developed. One official said a few United States soldiers had married Uzbek women; another said that when the American buildup began in earnest a few weeks ago there were reunion scenes - hearty bearhugs and backslaps - when soldiers from the two nations met at the Khanabad air base.

"These things are like modern dating," said one government official familiar with the programs. "Sometimes you get married, sometimes you get a temporary restraining order. In this case, it seems like we're engaged and things are going well."

Bahodir Umarov, a spokesman for Uzbekistan's Foreign Ministry, said the interchange "is proving a fruitful relationship," adding, "The future is promising because we have a good potential for cooperating in this field."

The rationale for these efforts was rooted in a complicated list of security concerns.

On one level, the United States sought to replace some of Uzbekistan's affinity for Russia with ties to the West, and create a reliable ally near the Caspian Sea, a region with reserves of untapped oil. More immediately, the United States hoped to help Uzbekistan resist the violent Islamic fundamentalism that had taken hold in neighboring nations, and to ensure its cooperation in programs to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction - two goals that have become more urgent of late.

In pursuit of those aims, as the State Department was pressing Mr. Karimov to liberalize his government, the military was working with people lower in the ranks, embarking on policies and exercises that promoted personal contact between armies.

"The United States has been interested in that area for quite a long time, and there have been quite a few exercises," said Charles Heyman, a retired British Army major who is now editor of Jane's World Armies, a publication that analyzes the abilities and operations of armies worldwide. "Some have been publicly disclosed and some have not. The real details are very, very hard to come by."

The military relationship, part of a policy the Pentagon calls engagement, has not been without risks. On one hand, the United States was nudging a undemocratic leader into accepting a more democratic model for governing. On the other, it was flirting with the patronage-riddled military and police forces that fall under his command, and whose future loyalties and ambitions have been uncertain.

But after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, regional experts and officials said, engagement programs in Uzbekistan emerged as a case in which cooperation, at least for the short term, appeared to have reaped a strategic benefit, allowing different political cultures to align their interests in a tense time.

"This is a region where personal contact is extremely important," said P. Terrence Hopmann, a Brown University political science professor who specializes in Central Asia. "If we had just shown up last month, wanting to use Uzbekistan's bases, it would not have been possible for things to go smoothly."

Some American troops were involved in exercises in Uzbekistan as long ago as August 1996, according to the Department of Defense, although Uzbek officials say those exercises did not involve Special Forces.

Rather, military officials said that under Gen. Anthony C. Zinni of the Marine Corps, the regional commander who supervised the military presence in the region until retiring last year, engagement efforts and Special Forces missions took much of their current shape in 1999. They have continued under the current commander, Gen. Tommy R. Franks of the Army. Several Green Beret teams have passed through the nation this year, for instance, and during the summer a Navy SEAL team also trained here.

As part of the visits, Green Beret teams of about 15 members each performed their classic mission: training potential allies in the fundamentals of martial life, United States military officials said. They instructed the Uzbek military in marksmanship, infantry patrolling, map reading and the like, hoping to make the conscripts, who serve only 18-month enlistments, more capable in operations against the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which intelligence officials say has fielded combat veterans from the Middle East, the Balkans and Afghanistan.

The Green Berets have not been used in direct action against the terrorists, according to two government officials and two members of Special Forces units who discussed the missions on condition of anonymity. The primary reason for secrecy surrounding each visit, they said, has been to protect soldiers from terrorist attack.

Government and military officials also said that enrolling Uzbek officers in American military schools had also proved a productive investment. For instance, they noted that an Uzbek lieutenant colonel who attended the English-language course at the Defense Language Institute in Texas and also the Air Force's Command and Staff College has helped coordinate the United States military's latest needs in Uzbekistan.

"Because of his background he knows the United States military and how it thinks, and he has been very useful," an official said.

Since this program began in Uzbekistan in 1995, 30 to 40 Uzbek officers have taken part in it, and the United States has allowed more access to schools in recent years, one Uzbek official said.

The engagement relationship has also helped the United States gather intelligence, analysts and officials said.

Tashkent was the former command post of the Soviet Union's Turkestan regional command, and a collection point for electronic eavesdropping on China and the Indian Ocean region. Many former Soviet surveillance stations on Uzbek soil are now used by Uzbekistan, according to Jane's World Armies.

Government officials said electronic information gathered about terrorism had recently been shared with the United States. Moreover, because Uzbekistan maintains an intense security apparatus over its citizens, it also has gathered intelligence on suspected Islamic terrorists or sympathizers from interrogations. That information is believed to be less valuable, however, and critics say it shows a troubling underside that can accompany allegiances with former Soviet nations, and the problems - moral and practical - that follow.

Human rights advocates say that because the Uzbek security police torture suspects, intelligence gleaned from their interrogations is uneven, with accurate information mixed with contrived confessions from innocent detainees. Uzbek interrogations, they said, sometimes begin with beatings and end with suspects signing blank statements, to which security officers insert a scripted text.

--------

US commandos armed like 'Inspector Gadgets'

By Brad Knickerbocker bradknick@aol.com
Christian Science Monitor
October 25, 2001
http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1025/p1s3-usmi.html

WASHINGTON - US Special Operations Forces like to play up their image as an elite band of "snake eaters" who can survive long periods in the desert or jungle with little more than a knife and their wits. But as the recent raids into Afghanistan show, they are equipped with gear that makes James Bond look low-tech.

In addition to a knife, their rucksack includes laser-guided weapons, thermal-imaging guns that see through fog, laptops as tough as Humvees, night-vision goggles, and little satellite-based Global Positioning Systems units that tell them (and their comrades and commanders) exactly where they are. Back in the lab, scientists are working on devices to shoot around corners.

Meanwhile, above this stealthy, high-tech battle scene, satellites and unmanned aircraft (some of them controlled by the Central Intelligence Agency) are providing instant intelligence, communication, and fire-control.

Much of this new gear has been developed since the Gulf War, and it could prove critical in a "war on terrorism" that - for political as well as geographic reasons - is unlikely to include large, armored, slow-moving land forces. A good part of the $40 billion recently appropriated for the war on terrorism is designated for such gear as production and upgrade schedules are accelerated.

For Special Forces troops, stealth and surprise are among their main assets, and this often means working in an unfamiliar environment at night. Parachuting in, as US Army Rangers did last weekend in Afghanistan, requires night-vision equipment and GPS systems to know precisely where the soldier (or his target) is located. Such equipment is more precise and reliable now than it was 10 years ago.

"Night-vision [gear] has improved substantially. It's 50 to 70 percent better," says former Army Special Forces Officer Michael Vickers. The same is true for the small GPS units that can pinpoint a location to within 30 feet - anywhere on the globe. "It was really just demonstration stuff in the Gulf War," says Mr. Vickers, now director of strategic studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.

Grainy, green videos of the recent night parachute drop and assault by US Special Ops troops in Afghanistan provided a test of a new tactical video system. As reported recently in Aviation Week & Space Technology, "It allows troops on the ground to relay in near-real time digital imagery and could allow almost instantaneous battle-damage assessment or video to be provided of an intended target before a strike is authorized."

Pre-mission planning also is enhanced. During the Gulf War, battlefield commanders had to wait for satellite images of strategic targets and enemy assets to be faxed over phone lines. Now, Special Forces units can acquire the imagery themselves and use it to create virtual-reality exercises to figure out how the mission could be accomplished.

Then, on the way to the battle zone, the aircraft carrying Special Forces "operators" (as they call themselves) have an intelligence capability that allows them to adjust or scrub the mission based on signals from satellites or pilotless drones flying over enemy territory.

The airplanes and helicopters assigned to Special Forces are more robust and sophisticated as well. "This means changes in the way we project power," says Vickers. "It's creating new missions as well."

What makes it all possible, says military analyst John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, is the information revolution - high-speed computers and advanced communication systems.

But all this gee-whiz gear does not guarantee success in a wartime environment that is as risky as it gets. Moreover, there is always the "fog of war" that inevitably presents unanticipated circumstances. In last weekend's raid in Afghanistan, a helicopter "extracting" troops from the attack site hit something that knocked off part of the landing gear.

"It is much easier to describe how this stuff is supposed to work than it is to predict how it will work," says Mr. Pike. "Does it mean we're going to win the war? I don't know."

In some ways, in fact, the war in Afghanistan could resemble the last major use of Special Forces by the United States - in Vietnam. "It's going to look a lot like hunting for Charlie, hunting for the Viet Cong," says Pike. "The problem is not just finding Osama bin laden, it's finding a dozen guys here and a dozen guys there."

The difference now is that US Special Forces are vastly better equipped than they were then - "Basically, the pointy end of a large and extraordinarily diverse information-collection system," as Pike puts it. And as a result of this vastly improved capability, he adds, "The Americans are going to be doing the ambushing rather than being ambushed."

But in the end, say experts, success or failure in such a scenario still comes back to the cunning and initiative of the individual commando. "Don't be doctrinaire," says Wayne Downing, a retired Army general who commanded Special Operations Forces. "Think like a bank robber."


-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

Wind to benefit if Australia power target raised

Reuters,
25/10/2001
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/12985/story.htm

MELBOURNE - The Australian EcoGeneration Association has forecast wind power would account for almost half the required electricity to meet a mandated target for renewable energy use by 2010 if the target was raised.

Under federal legislation passed earlier this year power retailers must source an extra 9,500 gigawatt hours of renewable electricity by 2010.

The Australian EcoGeneration Association is campaigning for the target to be lifted to 21,400 gigawatt hours and has completed an assessment on how the extra demand would be met.

AEA executive director Ric Brazzale said yesterday raising the target would likely cause the level of wind fired power to increase to 10,400 gigawatt hours, up from a forecast 2,950 GWh under the existing target. "Once you start cranking up the target, wind is probably going to be the biggest beneficiary because it is not capacity constrained," Brazzale told Reuters.

Other sources of energy expected to meet the current target include increased output from existing hydro electricity and the use of the sugar cane by-product bagasse in cogeneration plants.

Landfill gas and the sometimes controversial use of waste wood would be other major contributors to the 9,500 GWh target, but the AEA estimates they have less scope for expansion than wind if the target is lifted.

Green groups are campaigning for the renewables share of generation to be increased to help Australian limit its rising greenhouse gas emissions.

But an increase would face strong opposition from major energy users concerned about the potential for a rise in electricity prices.

The lowest cost baseload electricity in Australia is provided by brown and black coal fired plants which provide around 80 percent of Australia's electricity generation.

Brazzale said a major boost to wind power would see its existing unit costs decline leading to further greenhouse benefits beyond 2010 as the new industry was established.

He said more than 10 percent of the current target would be met by existing large-scale hydro schemes, which would not help the goal of expanding the renewable sector.

The initial 9,500 GWh when announced by the federal government was expected to represent a two percent increase in renewables.

The AEA said that due to new estimates of rising energy consumption it represented only a 0.5 percent rise, while its proposed target would represent a five percent increase.

The Australian Labor Party has said it would re-examine the target level if elected at the November 10 federal election.

-------- environment

Greens launch $9m environment policy

Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Thu, 25 Oct 2001
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-25oct2001-6.htm

The Greens have launched their environment policy, pledging to spend more than $9 billion on conservation and energy efficiency measures.

Key elements of the policy include the promise to equip every house in Australia with a solar hot water service and energy efficient fridge and to close all uranium mines.

Greens Senator Bob Brown says the promises will be fully funded by a re-direction of the Natural Heritage Trust Fund and carbon tax on polluting industries.

"The Finns have done it, the Swiss have done it, all the Benelux countries have done it, so Australia can do it as well," he said.

The party says it will tackle salinity, implement national legislation to stop landclearing and create a World Environment Organisation based in Australia, along the lines of the WTO.

The Greens say their environment policies are fully funded and costed, unlike the promises of the other major parties.

Bright and bold

The Australian Conservation Foundation has described the environment policy from the Greens as bright and bold.

Every house in the country would be equipped with solar hot water and an energy efficient fridge by 2010.

The ACF has welcomed the package, and says independent polling shows the environment remains a key issue for voters in four marginal seats.

----

Swedish green technology has huge potential - study

REUTERS
25/10/2001
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/12977/story.htm

STOCKHOLM - Environmentally friendly technology could boost Sweden's exports by eight billion crowns ($749.9 million) in the next ten years, a Swedish Trade Council report showed yesterday.

"This could be the next big thing. By closer cooperation in the market and roughly 12 million crowns in state-subsidies this could expand greatly as the prospects for demand look fantastic," Rutger Engsall, in charge of the report, told Reuters.

The market for environmental technology such as water treatment, waste management and industrial pollution control is one of the most aggressively expanding sectors, said the report entitled "Environment technology - a world market of 6,000 billion in 2010 - could be Sweden's next export success".

Small companies, which account for 15 percent of Swedish exports, are expected to benefit the most and expect growth of 46 percent in 2001. Bigger businesses anticipate a rise in exports of environmentally friendly technology of two percent.

The Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development, which groups the world's richest countries, has rated the industry as one of the most important future markets with a growth potential of 5-20 percent in the next ten years.

The Swedish trade council report showed more than two thirds of the 413 companies working on green technologies which took part in the study planned to expand into new markets within the next two years.

Engsall said Sweden - a big exporter of mobile phone services and music - could make big gains on its cutting-edge environment-protection technology amid growing global concerns about pollution.

Central and eastern Europe, south east Asia and South America were the hottest markets which could help boost the Swedish industry with orders of 20 billion crowns, corresponding to one percent of exports.

Dubbing it as hot as the IT-sector the report said the industry's sales were bigger than those of the airline or the textile sectors.

-------- human rights

Afghan Neighbors to Help Aid Flow
Uzbekistan Opening Key Route; Turkmenistan Allowing Relief Operation at Border

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, October 25, 2001; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47834-2001Oct24.html

TASHKENT, Uzbekistan, Oct. 24 -- Two key countries on Afghanistan's northern border have promised a top U.N. delegation they will accelerate the movement of relief supplies to help avert a grim humanitarian crisis emerging from drought and war, according to U.N. officials.

The president of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, agreed to open the mined and sealed border with Afghanistan to permit relief supplies to be transported across a river that separates the countries, according to members of the delegation. Relief officials have urgently sought an opening of the corridor, which they say is the best route to get food shipments to hungry Afghans this winter.

In addition, the president of Turkmenistan, Saparmurad Niyazov, promised to allow U.N. workers to operate at the Afghan border, now designated as a closed military area. The United Nations said it hopes to open new transport centers to increase the amount of aid going through Turkmenistan.

These agreements, scheduled to be announced Thursday by two authoritarian governments long wary of the instability in Afghanistan and the activities of international agencies, were another indication of the political recalculations that have occurred since Sept. 11.

"There's been significant changes. There's clearly a desire on the part of the governments to cooperate with the U.N. activities," Kenzo Oshima, the U.N. humanitarian relief coordinator, said tonight in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. "Agencies knew this winter would be very, very hard unless we could deliver aid."

The agreements also reflect apprehension among Afghanistan's neighbors about the prospect of masses of starving Afghans on their doorsteps, a situation that already is occurring in Pakistan.

"Both governments realize there is a humanitarian crisis and a need to deliver as much as possible to those in need, the alternatives being mass starvation or a massive outflow of desperate people," said Ramiro Lopes daSilva, director of worldwide logistics for the World Food Program.

Aid officials were particularly pleased that Karimov decided to reopen the port at Termez to allow barges with relief supplies to cross the Amu Darya River and unload on Taliban-controlled land in Afghanistan.

Uzbekistan has been in a long struggle with Taliban-backed Muslim radicals. Karimov told Oshima that the bridge at that crossing, which is heavily guarded to prevent Taliban fighters from coming into Uzbekistan, will remain closed. The bridge was once the main route into Afghanistan for Soviet troops fighting there and has been closed since the Taliban seized control on the Afghan side in 1997. Karimov reiterated that he would consider opening the bridge only after the area on the other side is seized from Taliban control, Oshima said.

Uzbekistan also agreed to allow relief supplies to be flown in directly to a commercial airport in Termez, said Nigel Fisher, a regional director for UNICEF and a delegation member. That will eliminate the need to fly supplies into Tashkent first and then move them by truck on a nine-hour route to Termez. The U.N. delegation asked for -- and received -- permission to fly to Termez on Thursday, which Oshima said will be the first U.N. flight allowed there.

"We're quite pleased with the government's position," Fisher said. He said U.N. agencies already were moving supplies and equipment to Termez and that they hoped to begin loading the barges in two weeks.

"It's going to be a squeeze with winter coming," he said. Aid is coming to Afghanistan from Pakistan in the south, and through Tajikistan, Iran and Turkmenistan in the north. But the northern routes will begin to become impassable by mid-November, when snow starts to cover mountain passes, agency officials say.

U.N. officials have said 6 million of Afghanistan's 26 million people will face hunger as winter approaches. The region has been hit by what some people call the worst drought in 70 years, and its consequences are aggravated by the war and masses of fleeing Afghans.

The relief supplies would be taken to areas both inside and outside Taliban control. The relief effort is stumbling. Most international staffers have been pulled out of Afghanistan; radio and phone contact is restricted; U.S. bombs have hit a Red Cross facility; and Taliban forces have seized two World Food Program warehouses -- and returned one.

But the Afghan staff of those agencies have remained inside the country and work on both sides of the line. "It is very courageous, valiant work that these Afghans are doing in an extremely difficult situation," Oshima said.

Oshima, who visited the refugee camps in Afghanistan in February, led the special delegation to try to increase relief aid from Afghanistan's neighbors. After meeting the leaders of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the group was to fly Thursday to Tajikistan. "We needed to talk to the people involved, the presidents," Oshima said.

-------- media

U.S. losing propaganda battle to "a guy in a cave"

Canadian Press
Thursday, October 25, 2001
Montreal Gazette
http://www.canada.com/montreal/story.asp?id={5127D281-A2E9-484F-822B-67E4C112FFB5}

EAST LANSING, Mich. (AP) - The United States is doing a poor job winning the propaganda battle against Osama bin Laden, former U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke said Wednesday.

While bin Laden put out a "Hollywood quality video" this month praising the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States has failed to convince many Muslims it is not waging a war against them, Holbrooke said.

"How can the U.S. ... be losing the communications war to a guy in a cave?" Holbrooke told about 1,000 people at Michigan State University. "Our message isn't right, and our way of delivering it is terribly out of date."

Unless the United States is able to blunt bin Laden's appeal to Muslims worldwide and his call for a holy war against America, capturing or killing him will do little to stop terrorism, Holbrooke said.

"He will leave behind a generation of dedicated, fanatical terrorists to carry on his work," Holbrooke said.

--------

Subject: The Real War - and The Propaganda War
10-25 special issue

Special Issue #5 - "The Real War - and The Propaganda War"
25 Oct 2001
Special Issue of GlobalCircle NetNews now online at http://globalcircle.net/1gnn1025op.htm


The propaganda war claims they're going after Bin Laden or the Taliban - or somebody.

In the real war they're bombing mud huts, roads, water supplies, the Red Cross and UN workers, and blocking the only food shipments that might keep millions of civilians from starving after years of war and drought. And they're driving out hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the bombing.

In the propaganda war they say they're fighting terorism. Bush and Blair rant about Muslim militants out to destroy democracy and freedom in the Western world.

In the real war, the West is fomenting and provoking terrorism by decades of military interference in Muslim countries, documented by Stephen R. Shalom. The Arab press and TV tell their own story. They aren't taking over other countries; they aren't taking hostages; they aren't demanding ransom. Islamic militants and the masses supporting them in Arab countries --in their own words-- simply want the U.S. military out of their countries. Regardless of their internal quarrels, the U.S. military is uniting them against the West.

Many people have argued that any effort to stop military action must include a realistic alternative on how to deal with the terrorist threat. This is the answer: get out of their face, get out of their countries, and their own people will deprive them of financing, protection, and the support of the masses.

Most Americans, and probably most activists, have no idea how completely the U.S. military rules the world. Here are eye-popping charts and maps showing the U.S. military all over the world, the Unified Commands that circle the globe, and sources on the military presence and forces.

Professors Trask and Thobani say militarism is wedded to the destruction of indigenous peoples and patriarchy - "Why should we support the United States, whose hands in history are soaked in blood?

Chomsky illuminates "The New War Against Terror" and Vandana Shiva points out that Western policies on health and pharmaceuticals are also bioterror against third world nations.

Officials now claim they're going after the Taliban drug trade, but it's odd the Taliban wiped out the opium crop in the 90% of Afganistan they control. The poppy fields and heroin come from the Northern Alliance, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan, all U.S. allies in the war. Sounds familiar.

There's a wealth of credible Internet sources for further research and citation, articles and analysis from well known activists and scholars all linked in this issue. Each item has clickable links for full articles and more from the original source on the Internet.

Save for future reference.

-------- police / prisoners

Senate passes anti-terrorism bill

USA TODAY
10/25/2001
The Associated Press
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/10/25/senate-bill.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Senate sent President Bush legislation Thursday giving police new and expanded powers to track, punish and detain suspected terrorists. The bill, sought five days after the hijacked airliner attacks in New York and Washington, was passed by the Senate on a 98-1 vote. The House passed it with overwhelming support on Wednesday and Bush is expected to sign it before the end of the week. "I look forward to signing this strong bipartisan plan into law so that we can combat terrorism and prevent future attacks," Bush said Wednesday. The legislation, somewhat weakened from what Attorney General John Ashcroft proposed, expands the FBI's wiretapping and electronic surveillance authority and imposes stronger penalties for harboring or financing terrorists.

It also redefines what terrorist acts are and increases the punishment for them. "These laws will help ensure that Americans will never be violated in the way we were on Sept. 11," said Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Some senators are unhappy with the final product. "This bill does not strike the right balance between empowering law enforcement and protecting civil liberties," said Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis.

But the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said negotiators have placed safeguards on the legislation, like a four-year expiration date on the wiretapping and electronic surveillance portion, court permission before snooping into suspects' formerly private educational records and court oversight over the FBI's use of a powerful e-mail wiretap system.

"We were able to find what I think is the appropriate balance between protecting civil liberties, privacy and ensuring that law enforcement has the tools to do what it must," said Senate Majority Leader Thomas Daschle, D-S.D. said.

However, human rights and privacy advocates contend many problems remain in the final compromise.

"These new and unchecked powers could be used against American citizens who are not under criminal investigation, immigrants who are here within our borders legally, and also against those whose First Amendment activities are deemed to be a threat to national security by the attorney general," an American Civil Liberties Union letter says.

One of the most contentious portions of Bush's proposal would have allowed the attorney general to detain indefinitely until deportation any immigrant suspected of terrorism. House and Senate negotiators placed safeguards on that proposal by forcing to the attorney general to start deportation procedures immediately, charge the person with a crime or release the foreigner in seven days.

Some human rights advocates want it changed even more so that immigrants would not have to stay in jail while their cases go through the deportation process.

That "can result in a virtual life sentence, and the bill provides only the barest of judicial oversight of the attorney general's new power," said Elisa Massimino, director of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.

The only senator voting against the bill was Russell Feingold, D-Wis. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., did not vote.

-------

Five Israelis Held In New York

October 25, 2001
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=11837&PHPSESSID=19ad824ee8930c2d1f082035b47ec9c8

Five young Israelis are "on the verge of collapse," according to family members, as their incarceration in New York on charges relating to the Bin Laden attacks continues. They were arrested on Sept. 11, only hours after the World Trade Center attack, on charges of "plotting to blow up" a New York bridge.

Katie Shmuel of the Galilee town of Yokne'am, southeast of Haifa, says that her son Yaron is in "a very critical psychological situation," given that they are not allowed to have visitors and the difficult conditions in which they are being held. "Even the Israeli Consul-General in New York was allowed to visit only after asking several times and receiving a special permit," Katie told Arutz-7's Yosef Zalmanson today. "He was allowed to talk to them only in English, and only from behind a glass partition. The Consul told me that the boys are in a bad state and that they are being held under difficult conditions."

When asked why the five youths, aged 22-26, are being held, Katie replied with despair: "It's ludicrous. They were on the George Washington Bridge [between upper Manhattan and New Jersey] at the time of the bombing, and the FBI had warnings of a terrorist plot, of guys in a white van, to blow up the bridge. So when the FBI saw this van, with my son and his four friends - one of them had a large sum of money, there were two razor knives in the van, and one of the boys is named Omer, which the FBI guys thought was Omar - they put one and one together and got three, and immediately arrested them... For the first few days, the boys were held in an FBI dungeon, tied up, with no clothes and no food." She said that original reports that they had been arrested while boisterously watching the disaster from a rooftop "are totally fabricated. For one thing, they weren't even on a roof, they were in a van..."

When asked how she explains her son's continued incarceration and that of his friends, she said, "I truly have no explanation for this incredible story - except this: The Americans are using them as pawns to pressure the Israeli government. Am I being clear enough?" She said that President Moshe Katzav and others had attempted to intervene, but there have been no results so far. The youths are being held in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

A spokesperson for the Israeli Consulate in New York told Arutz-7 that in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, "the Americans now have different procedures for dealing with the detention of anyone arrested in connection with the attacks. Every single request of ours must go through the FBI and the State Department's legal team." She said, "We are doing as much as we possibly can on their behalf," including, she said, getting local Jewish leaders involved in the cause of the imprisoned young Israelis.

-------- spying

Spy data analysis criticized as slow

By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
October 25, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011025-75571455.htm

U.S. intelligence information from electronic communications probably will provide clues about plans for the Sept. 11 attacks but analyses of the data are too slow, a senior House member said yesterday.

Rep. Norm Dicks, Washington Democrat and former ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, also said the FBI failed to pursue leads to the hijackers suspected of carrying out the attacks.

"Part of our problem is that we collect all this sigint [signal intelligence], for example, but we don't process it all because we don't have the capability to do it," Mr. Dicks told defense reporters.

As for the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, "we didn't get there" in detecting plans for the attacks, said Mr. Dicks, currently a member of the defense appropriations subcommittee.

Mr. Dicks said he found that during every crisis in which he took part on the intelligence panel, "there was information that if we had properly analyzed it, would have led us to a conclusion, not with great specificity but with some specificity, that something significant was going to happen."

"And in this situation I'm sure we'll go back and find things in the sigint stuff that was never processed that will have given us indications that, had we processed it, would have maybe helped us," Mr. Dicks said.

He said the U.S. intelligence community is working on high-technology computer techniques that sift and "correlate" the large amounts of information collected by various spy agencies.

Mr. Dicks faulted the FBI for failing to stop the hijackers from the Middle East who received flight training. The FBI was informed of the activity and did not work "as hard as they should have worked it," he said.

"Frankly, here, I also believe that there were a number of significant tips that were handed off to the FBI and if there was a failure here, in my judgment, the failure was with the FBI," Mr. Dicks said. "They did not do the job that the country would have expected from them, I think. There are a lot of things here that should have been followed up on that were not done."

Mr. Dicks said major problems for U.S. intelligence are the secrecy and "stovepiping" of agencies that prevent close cooperation.

CIA Director George J. Tenet has taken steps to "bring down the walls" that separate the CIA, the National Security Agency and other intelligence components, Mr. Dicks said.

Asked about a report in The Washington Times that Russian merchant ships continued to spy on U.S. nuclear submarines in the Pacific Northwest, Mr. Dicks said he was worried about the security of nuclear submarines and their weapons, from both Russian spying and foreign terrorist attack.

A secret State Department, Pentagon and Coast Guard program to monitor Russian merchant ships near nuclear submarines based in Washington state's Puget Sound was undercut by a Transportation Department agreement with Moscow in June that loosened rules on Russian ship visits.

The agreement ended a policy requiring Russian ships to provide 72-hours notice before entering Puget Sound. Such notice is required for Russian merchant ships that enter other sensitive ports such as San Diego and Kings Bay, Ga., where nuclear submarines are based.

Mr. Dicks said Russian ships should be required to provide 72-hours notice of arrival in Puget Sound to prevent spying on submarines.

"What they are obviously doing is trying to watch and monitor the submarines as they come and go," said Mr. Dicks, who lives near the nuclear submarine base located along the Hood Canal near Bangor, Wash. "I think it's serious enough that we at least need to get 72-hour notification so that we're alerted."

Mr. Dicks said the Coast Guard has stepped up security for nuclear submarines and is escorting boats as they sail out of Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Security improvements also are needed at Bangor and Kings Bay, he said.

"I mean, talk about potential targets," Mr. Dicks said. "I mean, you've got nuclear submarines, nuclear weapons.

"To me, it just jumps out as two of the most significant bases in this country that whatever we have to do for security at those bases we ought to enhance," he said, "and we ought to be very careful about what happened with these Russian ships coming in and out of there and at least making sure that at least they do the 72-hour notification."

--------

U.S. to Defer Spy Station Closure

October 25, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Germany-Spy-Post.html

BERLIN (AP) -- The United States has put off closing a secretive Army spy base in southern Germany next year because of the war against terrorism, the U.S. military said Thursday.

The control post in the Bavarian spa town of Bad Aibling provides long-range communications for U.S. forces. Scheduled for closure as part of the U.S. troop drawdown in Europe, it will now stay open another two years until Sept. 30, 2004, said Lt. Col. Kenneth McClellan, a Defense Department spokesman in Washington.

The postponement came about because U.S. military transport planes based elsewhere in Germany have been pressed into service for airstrikes and food drops on Afghanistan, McClellan said. The aircraft would otherwise be used to remove the spy base's electronic equipment.

The communications and surveillance equipment at the base, about 35 miles southeast of Munich, also is likely to play a role in the U.S. war on terrorism.

``I'm sure the base's long-haul communications would be useful at this time,'' McClellan said by telephone.

About 1,500 Americans and 140 German civilians work at Bad Aibling. After its closure and the removal of the surveillance equipment, the base is to be handed back to Germany.

European critics have long suspected that the listening post set against the snow-peaked Bavarian Alps does more than just spy and track communications for the U.S. military.

In May, a European Parliament report cited Bad Aibling among some 20 stations worldwide believed to play a role in a top-secret global eavesdropping network.

The report, prepared after seven months of testimony by communications and security experts, concluded that the network -- dubbed Echelon -- exists despite U.S. denials.

In Germany, media reports and politicians have linked the station to alleged attempts by the U.S. National Security Agency to spy for economic advantage after the end of the Cold War. The NSA denies it undertakes industrial espionage.

-------- terrorism

FBI head says U.S. cities may see attacks

By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
October 25, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011025-10049005.htm

The director of the FBI yesterday warned U.S. mayors of a "distinct possibility" of new terrorist attacks against U.S. cities - six weeks after the Sept. 11 assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Robert S. Mueller III told the U.S. Conference of Mayors at a Washington meeting that the FBI is "pouring its heart and its soul into the investigation" of the suicide attacks and into finding those behind the spread of anthrax, but issued a dire warning of possible new strikes.

"We are assessing threats in real time and providing warnings to your cities and to the nation. And I must tell you that the threat level remains very high. More attempts and possible attacks are a distinct possibility," he said.

Mr. Mueller also said it is not yet clear if the sending of anthrax-laced letters to Florida, New York and Washington was the work of organized terrorists, but that the attacks were "clearly meant to terrorize a country already on the edge."

"Every resource that can be deployed is being deployed; every person who can be utilized is being utilized," he said, adding that 7,000 FBI agents and support personnel are "examining every scrap of evidence."

He gave no clue of what form any new attacks might take, but federal authorities have stepped up their vigil against possible car and truck bombers. Health officials have ordered renewed supplies of the vaccine against smallpox.

An extraordinary public warning issued Oct. 11 by the FBI of possible new terrorist attacks came in response to unspecified threats received from what authorities called a "credible source." Mr. Mueller said yesterday it was "conceivable, although there is no evidence necessarily to support it, that the advent of the anthrax attacks is what this source was talking about."

As Mr. Mueller spoke, more than 100 FBI agents continued to interview dozens of people in the Trenton, N.J., area, where three anthrax-laced letters sent to media outlets in New York and to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's office at the U.S. Capitol were postmarked.

No search warrants have yet been issued, but agents - along with U.S. Postal Service inspectors - have seized several mail-drop boxes.

Agents also are checking hospitals, clinics, medical labs and pharmacies. Handwriting experts have scoured over the letters, and agents have examined the postal bar codes for clues.

The letters passed through a large mail center in Hamilton Township, about 20 miles northeast of Ewing, N.J., where the mail is collected from 46 post offices. Investigators said 13 of 23 samples taken from the Hamilton facility showed evidence of anthrax.

Letter carrier Teresa Heller, who contracted the skin form of anthrax, delivers and collects mail at more than 500 houses, apartments and businesses in the Ewing area. Investigators have not been able to tie her to a potential source, noting that she did not work Sept. 18 - the day anthrax letters to NBC and the New York Post were postmarked. The letter to Mr. Daschle was postmarked Oct. 8.

Three persons have died so far from inhaled anthrax. Three others have been hospitalized after inhaling the bacteria. Seven have contracted the less lethal form of skin anthrax.

Mr. Mueller said agents have examined 3,700 separate pieces of evidence in "easily the largest and most comprehensive investigation in our history." He said, however, that beyond the investigation itself, his overriding priority is prevention - making sure terrorists "do not succeed in striking America and America's cities again."

In a related matter, a Pakistani man detained on immigration charges in the FBI's ongoing probe died in his jail cell in New Jersey of an apparent heart condition.

Muhammed But, 55, was found early Tuesday on his bed in his cell at the Hudson County jail in Kearny, N.J. Tests of the man using nasal swabs and blood and tissue samples proved negative for anthrax, jail officials said..

"There is no anthrax involved," said Emily Hornaday, spokeswoman for the New Jersey division of criminal justice. "He died of natural causes." Mr. But had been in custody since Sept. 19.

--------

THE INVESTIGATION
As Investigation Churns, More Attacks Are Expected

New York Times
October 25, 2001
By DAVID JOHNSTON with DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/25/national/25INQU.html

WASHINGTON, Oct. 24 - Law enforcement officials said today that they believed additional anthrax attacks were a virtual certainty, even as they acknowledged that their extensive investigation into the germ- laden letters had left them baffled.

Seeking leads, officials have brought in handwriting analysts to examine the letters, subpoenaed information from laboratories around the country and followed countless other avenues of inquiry. But today, federal officials said one focus that had guided their investigation was becoming less clear.

They said all their testing and canvassing in West Trenton, N.J., where investigators had suspected the tainted letters were mailed, had yet to yield valuable evidence. As a result, they are beginning to examine some of the other 45 post offices that feed into the mail processing center in Hamilton Township, where contamination was found.

In Washington, officials said anthrax-contaminated letters could now be moving through the country's postal system undetected. They added that whoever sent the highly concentrated form of the disease to Senator Tom Daschle must be regarded as a sophisticated assailant capable of making or buying more anthrax spores.

The expectation of other letters is based on several factors. Most important, investigators have concluded that the same person wrote the three known anthrax letters sent to The New York Post, NBC and Mr. Daschle, the South Dakota Democrat who is the majority leader.

Behavorial scientists and handwriting experts who have analyzed the letters for the government have reached some preliminary findings about the author, including one that the writer had probably learned English as a second language.

The letters to NBC and The New York Post appear to be identical, and one is almost certainly a photocopy of the other. That letter appears to have been written by a person, probably a man, who was depressed, angry and isolated, the officials said.

"This is next; take penacilin now," these letters said.

But these behaviorial experts discerned a significant change in the second letter to Mr. Daschle, which contained a much more virulent form of anthrax. This letter, the officials said, was written by someone who was angrier, more controlled, less depressed and who should be regarded as dangerous and potentially capable of committing other crimes.

In that letter, the writer said, "We have the anthrax; you die now."

Because of the extreme danger of contracting the disease, Army scientists at the Fort Detrick biomedical laboratory in Maryland have barred investigators from handling the Daschle letter to determine whether there are fingerprints or DNA on it.

Investigators in New Jersey had initially focused on a mail route in West Trenton, since Teresa Heller, the letter carrier infected with anthrax, worked there. But 20 tests taken at that West Trenton post office, as well as swab tests of mailboxes and mail collection bins at businesses and apartment buildings along her route, have found no evidence of anthrax.

Investigators now say it is possible that Ms. Heller might have been exposed some other way. She worked on Sept. 19, the day after the NBC letter was postmarked, and it is possible that the crate that held the letter was given to her the next day.

"We pretty much covered the area as far as the residential interviews are concerned," said Sandra Carroll, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I.'s Newark office. "But if we have to test every one of the 46 post offices in that area, that's what we'll do."

So far, two other offices that feed mail into the processing center in Hamilton Township - one in downtown Trenton and the other in Monmouth County - have been tested. Results are not yet available.

Facing an investigation with many facts, but many more unanswered questions, law enforcement officials are casting for leads beyond the letters themselves.

Last week, F.B.I. agents visited Princeton University. "Their interest was `What organisms do you work with at Princeton, and have you had anything stolen?' " said Thomas E. Shenk, chairman of the molecular biology department. He said there were no threatening organisms and nothing had been stolen.

Joe Morris, chief executive officer of the New Jersey Pharmacists Association, said the F.B.I. sent a letter to all pharmacies in the state seeking information on prescriptions filled for the antibiotic Cipro.

The investigation into the anthrax attacks has also focused attention on research laboratories around the country that work with the deadly bacteria. Several leading anthrax experts confirmed that subpoenas were sent to certain laboratories last week, requesting the names of people who have had access to anthrax cultures, as well as records about where such cultures had been shipped.

Dr. Martin E. Hugh-Jones, a professor at Louisiana State University who oversees one of the nation's largest research collections of anthrax strains, said the information sought was "basically, what cultures we had, who we sent them to, and who has been in our lab, as best we can remember."

Dr. C. J. Peters, director of the Center for Biodefense at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, said it would be possible for a laboratory employee to steal a microscopic culture of anthrax without notice. Dr. Peters said anthrax cultures are kept in containers in laboratory refrigerators, with each container holding different numbers of spores. If someone scraped off only one microscopic spore, that alone could serve as a starter culture, he said.

"I'd only need one spore to get all the anthrax I wanted," said Dr. Peters, noting that someone with the necessary equipment could ferment a single spore into billions within a few days. "It's not hard to grow." He added, "You could go from a smidgen to a hundred billion spores."

The focus on domestic laboratories concerns several scientists, who fear that the prevailing panic could spark efforts to limit access of researchers to anthrax cultures. Dr. Peters noted that all of the advances in developing anthrax vaccines have occurred because scientists have had access to the cultures.

"The inevitable suggestion is going to be, `If we just lock up all the anthrax, we won't have a problem,' " Dr. Peters said. "But if we lock up all the problems, we won't have any solutions."

---------

ANTHRAX PROBE SHIFTS TO HOMEGROWN HATE GROUPS

By MURRAY WEISS
NEW YORK POST
October 25, 2001 -- EXCLUSIVE
http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/32555.htm

Ultra-right-wing organizations - including a particular West Coast group - have become a key focus of the massive federal investigation into the murderous Anthrax attacks, The Post has learned.

Investigators have been zeroing in on members of several anti-government hate groups that they believe have obtained or attempted to get the deadly bacteria from several U.S.-based laboratories before it surfaced in Florida, Washington and New York this month.

Several sources told The Post taht, while they have not entirely discounted state-sponsored terrorism, Osama bin Laden sympathizers or sleeper cells, a number of developments in the far-flung probe have them eyeing domestic terrorists:

- The FBI is analyzing about a dozen other letters - including several that predate the World Trade Center attacks and the anthrax scare - that were sent to various media outlets. These letters did not contain anthrax, but had similar messages and handwriting as the germ-tainted notes.

- Probers also see similarities between the anthrax letters and some of the so-called hoax letters that contained talcum powder and were initially brushed aside as not being linked to the bioterror scare.

Some investigators believe the same person may have written both sets of letter.

"Our feeling is the anthrax does not point to an international terrorist group," a well-placed source said. "The only way it could be is if they are purposely writing letters that point away from them as a ruse and using anthrax that we believe was manufactured here."

"The anthrax letter writer did not fall off a turnip truck after the World Trade Center destruction," another source said. "He has been thinking these thoughts long before this, and may have had anthrax for a while."

"There are a number of strong leads and some people we've known of for some time who are being looked at," another highly placed source said.

From the start, FBI profilers cautioned about channeling investigative efforts toward Mideast terror groups because the anthrax-tainted letters to the New York Post, NBC-TV and Sen. Thomas Daschle contained the date "09-11-01," but were in envelopes postmarked Sept. 18.

Sources said international terrorists would unlikely feel the need to spell out an obvious link to their earlier horrific handiwork.

"That's real overkill," agreed Clint Van Zandt, a former top FBI profiler. "It is someone other than a bin Laden trying too hard to link up to Sept. 11. It is a gratuitous reference."

The tone of the letter to Daschle, the Senate majority leader, is far more threatening - "You Die Now" - than the missives to the media, which advised the recipients to "Take Penacilin [sic]."

"Daschle represents the government, and the government is what the right-wing groups hate," a source said. "By contrast, the media is something they use to get publicity and spread fear."

The sources declined to name the hate groups being eyed in the investigation or the laboratories where the anthrax may have been obtained or milled.


-------- activists

Global Peace Day Nov 11, 11;11am

Thu, 25 Oct 2001
From: Yumi Kikuchi <yumik@awa.or.jp>
http://www.peace2001.org/gpc/wwgpd/wwgpd_en.html

Dear All,(pls spread this to your friends!)

Hi, this is Yumi who is responsible for starting Global Peace Campaign. Hope you take time to read my funny English.

I am inviting you to organize Global Peace Day(Nov 11) together around the world. It is the day after the World War 1, all nations came together to sign the peace treaty and decided not to fight any more. In Japan it is called World Peace Memorial Day, in USA Veterans Day, In Australia Memorial Day. I don't know what it is called in other countries, but, why not, let's call it GLOBAL PEACE DAY from now on.

I would like each one of you to organize a peace event on the Global Peace Day; the event can be as small as lovers/family/ friends gathering, or even 1 person event(Mr Yamada of Global Peace Campaign's main fundraiser is going to climb up to the mountain in Kobe and pray by himself. Myself and Gen are going to hold a small home concert here with a few friends), or could be a big gathering, peace walk or concert. It is up to you. But all we will do commonly at 11:11am of each time zone (there is 28 time zones in the world) is to have 1 minute of prayer for peace, then sing a peace song (we chose to sing Imagine, but this can vary, too). We now have 40 entries for GPDay and I hope you will also do something on that day that time.

Once you decide what to do, please let us know by visiting: http://www.peace2001.org/gpc/wwgpd/events.html

You can click English button and can write your action in English. So far, there are entries from the USA and Taiwan. soon from Australia and England, I hope.

GPC is also going to put another peace ad in LA Times and one arabic newspaper and one or two papers in Europe simultaneously on Global Peace Day, continuing to raise money in Japan. If you can afford to help raising money for LA Times, you can donate directly to Veterans For Peace; http://www.veteransforpeace.org (if you have a credit card). If you would like to get involved with ad making, write me a direct e-mail. Right now, Norie Huddle, Paul Swann, Elizabeth and I, together with Veterans for Peace are working on this.

If you are thinking of peace ad in your country, I am happy to help, but you have to be able to raise the most of the money by yourself, but I certainly would like to do what I can.

Thank you for your participation in advance! We, ordinary peaple who wish peace, will impact the direction of the future by working together globally. I appreciate your involvment and your open heart. Thank you!

Let's hand the peaceful and beautiful earth to our children. A lot of work ahead, but I am happy working with you! If we become refugee of the earth, we have no place to go. All adults of the world have responsibility for what kind of earth we are leaving for the chidren, and peaple from the developed countries have more responsibility than the people from less developed countries.

Love and peace, Yumi Kikuchi,

----

Which products make life more sustainable?

Thursday, October 25, 2001
By Jerry Kay,
ENN
http://enn.com/news/enn-stories/2001/10/10252001/s_45350.asp

This weekend we attended the Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, Calif. One thing the conference planners underscored is a belief that the solutions to our problems exist now. I agree with this belief.

While fundamental changes in lifestyle, economics, and politics are worthy of discussion and pursuit, the energy issues in California demonstrate that major changes can take place without major inconveniences. Estimates suggest that people in California have decreased their energy consumption by about 10 percent. They have done so without any draconian measures.

Often, certain products help us live more sustainably in regards to energy, transportation, health, education, home making, and construction. We'd like to hear about any products that you have found that truly make a difference in your attempts to live more lightly upon the Earth and would like you to email them to us. As we are approaching the holidays, please expand your ideas to include things that might be fun, entertaining, and informative as well as strictly functional. Please be specific and include the name of the product, the manufacturer, and a paragraph or two summarizing what makes it unique or worthy of sharing with our ENN readers.

By sharing our knowledge within our community, we can greatly increase the impact of these greener choices. So check back on Friday to see what your fellow ENN audience has come up with.

--------

Large protests erupt in NATO countries
SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC GOV'TS FEEL ANTI-WAR HEAT:

Via Workers World News Service
Oct. 25, 2001
Workers World newspaper
By John Catalinotto

Hundreds of thousands of people from the Middle East to Africa to Europe took part in major demonstrations against the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan the weekend of Oct. 12-13. Two of the larger protests took place in the heart of major NATO powers--in London and Berlin.

These actions took place as the U.S. continued bombing Afghanistan, using cluster bombs and killing Afghani civilians. This put the onus of terror on the Pentagon in the eyes of much of the world.

Bush's war of "long duration" showed all signs of being an imperialist war to arrange the division of the world and its energy resources--especially in the Middle East and Central Asia. British and German participation in this war makes even clearer its predatory character.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has been traveling around the world trying to build up support for the "coalition" Washington is using to back its moves against Afghanistan. Blair is a more articulate defender of imperialist interests than Bush, but there is no way of separating Britain's role from its history of colonialism, especially in that area.

British imperialism is in the role it has occupied since 1945--juniorpartner of U.S. imperialism. While its political leaders put their experience running the British Empire at the service of Washington, they make sure the British ruling class gets its share of the plunder.

But while the New York Times happily reprints Blair's speeches, he has aroused growing opposition at home.

What distinguished the march in London, which organizers said was 50,000 strong, was the broad multinational participation. There was an especially large contingent from the Muslim community--mainly South Asian--living in England that is now about 4 million people.

Salma Yakoob of the Stop the War Coalition in Birmingham, speaking in Trafalgar Square, described it well: "If only the leftists had been here today, people would have said we were all lefties," she said. ''If only CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament] had been here, they would have said it was the middle-class elite. If it was only the Muslims, they would have called us extremists. If it was only Asians and Black people, they would have said it was the ethnic minorities.

"Tony Blair, we are here united against this war. You cannot dismiss us all.'' (The Independent, Oct. 13)

British anti-war activist Jean Hatton told Workers World, "The most popular placard carried by the demonstrators seemed to be 'Not in our name,' a slogan used widely by protesters against sanctions on Iraq. Others highlighted the double standards employed by Western nations, where the deaths of thousands in Iraq caused by these sanctions go largely unreported."

She added that even neighborhoods in smaller cities saw many expressions of solidarity between the historically British and the immigrant Muslim population, and a strong feeling that the people of Afghanistan should not suffer any additional hardships.

"There is great unease across Britain. Even people who supported the bombing of Yugoslavia and Iraq are asking what can possibly be achieved by bombing a country already devastated by war," Hatton said.

A NEW ROLE FOR GERMANY

Since 1945, Washington has led the vast majority of military assaults in the world, from Korea to Kosovo. London and sometimes Paris send their troops in behind the Pentagon; at times they act on their own. The German military, however, was supposed to stay put--unless it was fighting the USSR under NATO command.

Now for the first time Berlin has been openly invited to take part in the action, and the Social Democrat/Green government is jumping at the chance to send German youths to their death.

In a major speech on Oct. 11, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said, "The willingness to provide security through the military is an important declaration for Germany's allies." It "means a new self-conception of German foreign policy.... Avoiding every direct risk cannot and must not be the guideline of German foreign and security policy." (Washington Post, Oct. 12)

He added, "There are more reasons why Germany must show its active solidarity ... historical reasons, contemporary reasons, and reasons to do with the position of Germany in the future."

Schroeder's speech found an echo. "This is a defining moment for Germany and its role is being fixed," said Karl Kaiser, director of the German Council on Foreign Relations. "It didn't go unnoticed that when Bush spoke of the coalition around the U.S., he said it was Britain, France, Australia and Germany. And that has enormous meaning."

The Christian Democrats also back this aggressive policy. Only the Party of Democratic Socialism refused to vote for German participation in the war on Afghanistan.

This new eagerness to send their youth--working-class youth, that is--into danger should be recognized for what it is. This is a declaration that the German government wants to guarantee that German imperialism gets its share of the spoils. In the current crisis, that means its share of Middle East and Central Asian oil and gas.

PROTESTS IN BERLIN AND STUTTGART

As in the U.S. and Britain, an ever-larger part of the German population began to fear that the Pentagon's bombing of Afghanistan would kill and maim innocent people there and only increase the dangers at home.

In Berlin a reported 50,000 people came out against the U.S. war. Another 25,000 marched in Stuttgart.

Ruediger Goebel writing in the Berlin daily newspaper Junge Welt on Oct. 15 noted that these protests were significantly larger and more youthful than any during NATO's aggression against Yugoslavia two years ago, with large numbers of high-school students taking part.

This new youth activism is important, as it directly confronts the move by German ruling circles to participate in military adventures around the world. Some of these youths had participated in anti-globalization actions.

Sebastian Schluesselburg, representing secondary-school students, expressed the youths' dissent in a clear voice at the Berlin protest. "Retaliatory military strikes have no backing in the German student body, Mr. Chancellor," he said. Earlier in the week students in Berlin had defied threats of school punishment to take part in anti-war activity.

Germany still has a drafted army, although it is moving in the direction of a more streamlined, professional and motorized force. A vocal opponent of German militarization, Tobias Pflueger, has already called upon German youth to refuse service and on German soldiers to refuse to take part in any support of the U.S.'s open-ended war.



------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)

------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!