------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
UK, Ireland submit Mox plant reports to UN tribunal
Ireland and Norway discuss Sellafield "monster"
Nuclear waste-heat to warm Finnish vineyard
Report: N.Korean weapons found
Missile Defense Delusion
Russian Nuclear Waste Referendum Bid Wins Overseas Support
Treaties, not missile defense, are our best protection
Low - Yield Nuclear Device Considered
Nuclear Reactor to Be Shut Down
House OKs Implementing Terror Treaties
Bush Calls Putin on Arms Reduction

MILITARY
Tora Bora: Deep Ravines Hide Many Enemies
More Tapes Found in Al Qaeda Lairs
12 Die as War Prisoners Revolt At the Afghan-Pakistan Border
Tamil Rebels Declare Cease-Fire
U.S. nuclear lab slows plans for biowarfare center
Anthrax Investigation Focusing on Labs
U.S. Will Offer Anthrax Shots for Thousands
Federal Regulators Decide on Exelon
DEA will double prevention agents
India places troops on high alert
India says all options open
India Raises the Pitch in Criticism of Pakistan
New York Daily News, on Saddam Hussein
Regimes seek way to support attack on Iraq
Israeli warplanes buzz south Lebanon
Defense chief says attacks aided cause
Palestinians Arrest Security Men, Hamas Mulls Truce
Rumsfeld Presses NATO To Focus on Terrorism
Court Rejects Complaint Against NATO
Hundreds of Qaeda Fighters Slip Into Pakistan
Senior German Official Says U.S. to Target Somalia in War on Terror
Russia reports spying by Iraq, North Korea
Official: US Still Spies on Russia
Czechs want U.S. radio moved
Taliban, Pakistan linked, general says
French agents to identify fighters
War on terrorism, Afghan post straining U.N.'s annual budget
UN Report Sets Criteria for Military Intervention
Afghan War Shows Air Power's Ability
Air Power Glance

POLICE / PRISONERS
NATION IN BRIEF
Next: An ID Chip Planted in Your Body?
Riots break out again
15 Security Force Members Arrested
Abu-Jamal Death Sentence Thrown Out
FBI Team to Question Detainees
Yemen Attacks Tribes Linked to Al Qaeda
Broad Effort Launched After '98 Attacks

ENERGY AND OTHER
Pacific Northwest federal utility chooses wind power
Ecogen to challenge UK govt on wind farm ban
N.J. Leukemia Cases, Chemical Factory Linked
CORPS ASKS FOR INPUT ON WETLANDS MITIGATION
This Year Was the 2nd Hottest, Confirming a Trend, U.N. Says
Mexicans want full road access

ACTIVISTS
Urgent Action Needed to Defend the ABM Treaty



-------- NUCLEAR

-------- europe

UK, Ireland submit Mox plant reports to UN tribunal

GERMANY: December 19, 2001
Reuters
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13767/story.htm

HAMBURG - A U.N. tribunal said this week Britain and Ireland had met its deadline to submit reports outlining consultations they had had on a controversial new UK nuclear fuel plant in northwest England which Dublin opposes.

A spokesman for the Hamburg-based International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea said both countries had filed their reports about 30 minutes ahead of the deadline.

On December 3 the court refused a request from Ireland for an injunction to prevent the start of operations of the mixed oxide (MOX) plant at Sellafield, in Cumbria on the Irish Sea, on safety and pollution grounds but ordered the UK government to consult Dublin about its concerns.

The court wanted Ireland to have a right of consultation before the the state-owned British Nuclear Fuels' (BNFL) MOX plant starts operations around December 20 and told both sides to confirm in written reports by December 17 that they had been in consultation. The court has not yet made a decision about whether the submissions will be made public, the court spokesman said.

In Dublin the Irish government confirmed it had submitted its report to the court.

"Ireland remains concerned about the degree of co-operation it is likely to receive from the United Kingdom," said Irish nuclear safety minister Joe Jacob.

Now Britain and Ireland have submitted their reports there will be informal discussions between the court, Ireland and Britain, but no more hearings by the Hamburg tribunal.

The 472 million pound ($687.6 million) MOX plant will produce mixed plutonium and uranium oxide fuel.

----

Ireland and Norway discuss Sellafield "monster"

REPUBLIC OF IRELAND:
December 19, 2001
Story by Alex Richardson
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13756/story.htm

DUBLIN - Irish nuclear safety minister Joe Jacob this week held talks with Norwegian environment minister Borge Brende to discuss their countries' opposition to Britain's Sellafield nuclear power plant.

In a statement Jacob said the meeting, in Dublin, had focused on Ireland's legal moves against the plant, which it considers a major health threat. Brende said Norway was considering its own legal options against the plant.

"As marine nations we share a common sense of responsibility towards our seas. Consumers are increasingly and justifiably demanding uncontaminated food from uncontaminated sources," said Jacob.

"Radioactive pollution in the seas caused by complexes such as the monster that is Sellafield - which in our view have no economic justification whatsoever - is the last thing fishing nations such as Ireland and Norway can tolerate."

Brende was leaving the Irish capital for talks in London with British ministers Margaret Beckett and Micheal Meacher later this week, and was due to visit the Sellafield plant yesterday.

"The Nordic countries have always been most supportive of Ireland's stance and opposition to Sellafield," said Jacob.

"I am particularly gratified that at this early stage in the Norwegian government's time in office that they are in the process of examining their own legal options in relation to Sellafield."

Two weeks ago a United Nations court refused Ireland's request for an injunction to block the start up of a 472 million pound ($688.8 million) nuclear fuel manufacturing plant on the Sellafield site, scheduled to begin operations on Thursday.

The Hamburg-based International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea ordered the British and Irish governments to co-operate and submit written reports to the tribunal by Monday.

Ireland is considering a complaint to the OSPAR tribunal which rules on the OSPAR convention on maritime issues in the northeastern Atlantic, and a possible challenge in the European Court of Justice.

Ireland has long complained of nuclear pollution from Sellafield, just across the Irish Sea in Cumbria, on England's northwest coast. Since September 11 Ireland has also raised fears the plant could be the target of an attack.

----

Nuclear waste-heat to warm Finnish vineyard

FINLAND: December 19, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13763/story.htm

HELSINKI - Grapes will soon ripen for wine production in frosty Finland thanks to warm water from a nuclear reactor cooling system, an official has said.

Reijo Sundell, environmental protection chief at power group Teollisuuden Voima (TVO), said the group had buried plastic cooling-water pipes beneath a field near the nuclear plant to keep the soil thawed year-round.

Above ground, 140 vines were planted earlier this year, with the first real harvest expected in 2003 and a targeted yield of close to 3,000 kilograms (6,600 pounds) of grapes, Sundell said.

"I suppose about half of that will become juice," he said, but added that the energy group had not yet decided who would turn the blue Latvian Zilga grapes into wine.

He said this summer's harvest would probably be too small to amount to much. "We'll probably just be able to get tasters."

The grapes planted near the Olkiluoto power station on the country's west coast are a resilient species that can withstand temperatures of minus 40 degrees Celsius (minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit).

The vineyard is part of research into uses of warm water created as a by-product of energy production and follows a project where TVO tripled the growth of crayfish by incubating them in the warm water.

The nuclear-warmed water will also be used to help grow watermelons, ginseng root, garlic and other vegetables that do not naturally survive outdoors in Finland, Sundell said.

-------- korea

Report: N.Korean weapons found

By Jong-Heon Lee
UPI Correspondent
December 19, 2001
http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/19122001-031252-3240r.htm

SEOUL, South Korea, Dec. 19 (UPI) -- The United States seized a number of North Korean-made weapons including machine guns, rifles and pistols in Afghanistan after the Taliban militia was driven out, South Korean news reports said Wednesday.

Quoting an unidentified diplomatic source here, the Kyunghyang Shinmun newspaper said the United States also found evidence of telephone conversations between the Taliban and Pyongyang.

The daily quoted a South Korean official as saying his government had military intelligence showing that North Korea in recent years had exported some 20 containers of conventional weapons to Pakistan, many of which were likely handed over to the Taliban.

"But there was no confirmed intelligence linking North Korea and the Taliban or Osama bin Laden," the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the United States, the source was quoted as saying.

The news reports came as North Korea blasted the United States for planning to make the communist regime the second target for its war against terrorism after Afghanistan.

"The United States is provoking the Democratic People's Republic of (North) Korea under an unreasonable pretext in pursuance of expansion of the 'anti-terror war,'" Pyongyang's ruling Workers' Party said, warning it was ready to counter it.

North Korea is on the U.S. list of countries that sponsor terrorism since it was found to have been involved in the 1987 bombing of a South Korean airliner in which 115 passengers and crew were killed.

South Korea's Foreign Ministry denied the local media report as "groundless."

"We cannot rule out the possibility of North Korean and other countries' weapons being seized in Afghanistan as conventional weapons are traded in international arms markets. However, there is no credible intelligence so far to that effect," the ministry said in a statement.

Seoul's Defense Ministry said Tuesday it estimated that North Korea has stockpiled enough plutonium to build at least one atomic bomb and was operating nine facilities to produce biological weapons.

The communist North has rejected Washington's demand to permit foreign inspections to verify it is not producing weapons of mass destruction. North Korea has reportedly concluded a secret accord to sell medium-range missiles and related technology to Egypt to earn badly-needed foreign currency.

-------- missile defense

Missile Defense Delusion

By Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Washington Post
Wednesday, December 19, 2001; Page A39
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62922-2001Dec18?language=printer

Washington being what it is, the idea that politics and ideology should be set aside for a higher purpose may seem a quaint, naive sentiment. But few would argue with the statement that the ultimate test in deciding to scrap a treaty that has helped keep the peace for 30 years is whether it makes the United States more or less secure. In that light, President Bush's decision to unilaterally walk away from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is a serious mistake.

No one doubts we live in a dangerous world and that our enemies are ruthless. But a "Star Wars" defense, assuming it could be made to work, would address only what the Joint Chiefs of Staff argue is the least likely threat to our national security.

One of the lessons we should have learned from the devastating attack of Sept. 11 is that terrorists determined to do this nation harm can employ a wide variety of means, and that weapons of mass destruction -- chemical, biological or even nuclear -- need not arrive on the tip of an intercontinental ballistic missile with a return address. That's why the Joint Chiefs of Staff argue that an ICBM launch ranks last on the "Threat Spectrum," while terrorist attacks constitute the greatest potential threat to our national security.

The administration's obsession with missile defense -- with a price tag in excess of a quarter-trillion dollars for the layered program on the president's wish list -- is doubly troubling because of the attention and resources being diverted from critical efforts to address genuine threats. While the president says nonproliferation is a high priority, his actions speak louder. Notwithstanding promises of new efforts, the fiscal year 2002 budget that he requested would have cut more than $100 million out of programs designed to corral Russia's "loose nukes," provide help that Russia has requested to destroy its chemical weapons stockpile and prevent unemployed Russian scientists from selling their services to terrorist organizations.

Only when it comes to missile defense is the administration pushing hard. But nothing could be more damaging to global nonproliferation efforts than to go forward with Star Wars. Russia has enough offensive weapons to overwhelm any system we could devise, so the real issue is what happens in China and throughout Asia.

China currently possesses no more than two dozen ICBMs. Our own intelligence services estimate that moving forward with national missile defense could trigger a tenfold increase in China's expansion of its nuclear capability. And that doesn't take into account likely Chinese behavior if an arms race ensues, something many experts argue is inevitable when both India and Pakistan respond as expected by ratcheting up their nuclear programs.

Thus, the cost of unilaterally walking away from the ABM Treaty and forging ahead with national missile defense includes not only dangerous neglect of the real threats we face but the likelihood that we will unleash a new arms race that will create a nuclearized Asia.

Finally, Sept. 11 clarified the fact that the world is in transition from old Cold War alignments to new patterns of conflict and cooperation. Managing such a transition wisely will determine whether we take advantage of new opportunities or whether we allow ideological zealotry to control strategic doctrine.

Al Qaeda's eager search for weapons of mass destruction highlights the importance of broad nonproliferation efforts and our need to work in concert with like-minded partners. The president skillfully worked to build a coalition to fight international terrorism. That success has created an environment for a changed world with the potential for old enemies to come together. Out of the Sept. 11 tragedy we have opportunities to pivot toward promising new relationships, following up on the cooperation of the moment with a realignment of forces for decades to come.

Indeed, there is some cause for hope. The United States and Russia are making real progress to reduce strategic offensive forces. Secretary of State Colin Powell has indicated we are relatively close to a formal agreement in this regard -- presumably one that binds our countries and provides for verification and transparency.

So far, the administration's conduct of the war on terrorism has shown discipline, perseverance and an ability to forge international consensus. But the war is only three months old, and the new patterns of cooperation and support are young and fragile. We must nourish them and build on them, rather than taking unilateral foreign policy moves that will make us less secure.

Today the doors to international cooperation and American leadership are wide open. But if we slam them shut too often, we will lose the best chance in a generation to work with allies to build a more secure future.

The writer is a Democratic senator from Delaware and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

-------- russia

Russian Nuclear Waste Referendum Bid Wins Overseas Support

December 19, 2001
ENS
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/dec2001/2001L-12-19-01.html

MOSCOW, Russia, Environmental groups from seven countries today urged the governor and members of the local parliament in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia to support polling the voters in a local referendum on nuclear waste. Public groups in the region are now attempting to collect enough signatures for a referendum on the import of foreign nuclear waste for storage and reprocessing in Krasnoyarsk.

Environmental activists Australia, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States urged the Krasnoyarsk authorities to support a regional referendum on the issue.

City of Krasnoyarsk

Russia's largest spent nuclear fuel reprocessing center is planned for the Krasnoyarsk Mining and Chemical Combine at Zheleznogorsk on the Yenisei River in central Siberia. Deep underground, Krasnoyarsk-26, once a secret Soviet nuclear city, was established in 1950 to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. Construction of a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant began in 1983, to include a spent fuel wet storage facility, waste disposal facilities and a plant to produce mixed uranium-plutonium oxide (MOX) fuel.

The reprocessing plant was due for completion in 1998, but funding was cut drastically in 1985 and stopped completely in 1989. In January 1995, a presidential decree authorized Krasnoyarsk to seek foreign investors. An expert commission in October 1996 decided that nothing more could be done until a full environmental impact study was completed. The plant is 30 percent complete and is being prepared for further construction.

"Unfortunately, no country has found a solution to the spent nuclear fuel problem that would be safe for the environment and technically perfect," the environmental organizations said in their joint letter. "We believe the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel is unacceptable from both non-proliferation and environmental points of view."

Before the referendum can be approved, 35,000 signatures must be collected, and the deadline for submitting the signatures is January 7, 2002. According to the local center organizing the referendum, about 38,000 signatures had been collected as of December 18, 2001.

But even if all the required signatures are collected, Russian environmental activists are not sure the Krasnoyarsk referendum will be held. Earlier this year, Russian authorities did not allow public groups to organize a national referendum on the import of spent nuclear fuel even though millions of people signed the petition forms.

Over 2.5 million signatures for the referendum were collected nationally by environmental groups, but then half a million were disqualified by officials for unclear reasons. The remaining signatures did not come up to the necessary number.

Soon after, Russian legislators approved a new law allowing the nuclear industry to import nuclear waste.

Russia's Ministry for Atomic Energy (MINATOM) has stated that over the next decade it could import up to 20,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from countries including Japan, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Taiwan, South Korea and China in contracts worth up to $21 billion.

MINATOM maintains that by accepting the rest of the world's unwanted radioactive waste it will be able to upgrade its own nuclear waste storage, clean up heavily contaminated land, and expand its nuclear reprocessing operations at the Mayak nuclear complex in the Ural mountains.

In their appeal to the Krasnoyarsk governor and parliament the environmentalists said, "Building democracy is not an easy task. In this light, we were very glad to hear that in your region you are making another very important step to democracy by allowing the public to express its point of view on nuclear waste policy."

The appeal was signed by: the Nuclear Information and Resource Service of the United States, Citizens Nuclear Information Center and Green Action Kyoto of Japan, EU Enlargement Watch and CORE of the United Kingdom, the Korean Federation of Environmental Movements, Friends of the Earth Australia, Urgewald of Germany, Ecodefense! of Germany and Ecodefense! of Russia which launched the appeal internationally.

The environmental groups appealing to Krasnoyarsk authorities are from countries that have accumulated stockpiles of spent nuclear fuel that amount to over 95 percent of the world's stocks of spent nuclear fuel. These countries are viewed by the Russian nuclear industry as potential exporters of nuclear waste to Russia - customers for Russia's waste disposal services.

"We have a common position on the issue of moving radioactive waste, including spent nuclear fuel, across the national borders - it must never be allowed," the environmental groups said in their appeal.

"Each country that produces waste must take responsibility for it. With this letter we are informing you that the environmental groups represented here will work to prevent non-Russian nuclear industries from exporting waste to Russia." the groups said.

About 200,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel has been produced by the world's nuclear reactors, a figure that increases by about 12,000 metric tons a year. Currently, almost half of this is reprocessed, 38 percent is disposed of and 15 percent is in long term storage.

-------- treaties

Treaties, not missile defense, are our best protection

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
December 19, 2001
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20011219-28622992.htm#5

On Dec. 13, President Bush announced that the United States would withdraw from the bilateral treaty with Russia so the United States can pursue anti-ballistic missile weapons banned under the ABM Treaty of 1972.

China has a relatively small number (about 50) of intercontinental ballistic missiles that it considers an adequate deterrent to the much larger arsenals possessed by the United States and Russia (each in excess of 1,000 missiles). Developing anti-ballistic missile weapons has the potential of neutralizing China's capability to deter attack by the United States. This will pressure China to build more nuclear weapons to overwhelm the system called National Missile Defense. If China builds more nuclear missiles, that would pressure India to build more weapons, which would, in turn, pressure Pakistan to do the same.

Thus, voiding the ABM Treaty without replacing it with a comparable multilateral agreement will probably spur another arms race. A world engaged in a nuclear arms race would make the United States less secure by increasing the number of nuclear weapons owned by unstable and marginally stable regimes. These regimes are the most likely way for terrorists to acquire nuclear weapons.

Overwhelming military capability did not prevent the September 11 attacks, and it won't prevent future asymmetrical warfare with the United States. Instead, the United States should work to create an international system that arbitrates conflicting interests through institutions such as a democratically elected world parliament and a judiciary empowered to make decisions binding upon nation-states.

CARL NYBERG
World Federalist Association Cheverly

-------- u.s. nuc weapons

Low - Yield Nuclear Device Considered

December 19, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Mini-Nukes.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64827-2001Dec19?language=printer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Defense officials are considering the possibility of developing a low-yield nuclear device that would be able to destroy deeply buried stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons.

Such a move would require Congress to lift a 1994 ban on designing new nuclear warheads.

In a report to Congress, the Defense Department argues that conventional weapons, while effective for many underground enemy targets, would be unable to destroy the most deeply protected facilities containing biological or chemical agents.

In recent years there has been a growing unease that terror groups or unfriendly, newly nuclear-capable states may be hiding weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological weapons, in deep underground facilities.

In the report sent to Congress in October, the Defense Department said a low-yield, less than five-kiloton, nuclear warhead coupled with new technology that allows bombs to penetrate deep underground before exploding could prove effective in destroying biological and chemical agents.

Although not formally engaged in developing a new warhead design, nuclear scientists ``have completed initial studies on how existing nuclear weapons can be modified'' for use to destroy deeply buried targets containing chemical or biological weapons, the report said. Studies include ``synergies of nuclear weapons yield, penetration, accuracy and tactics,'' it said.

Conventional weapons cannot destroy the most deeply buried chemical and biological holding facilities, the report concludes, but a low-yield nuclear device could do the job. It notes that the current nuclear arsenal was ``not designed with this mission in mind.''

The report was submitted in response to a congressional directive that the Pentagon report what it was doing to develop ways to attack stores of chemical and biological weapons and also contains updates on a number of programs involving conventional weapons.

The report shows the Bush administration views a nuclear strike as ``an intrinsic part'' of dealing with deeply entombed enemy targets and ``is essentially doing all the preparation'' for a future full-scale research and development program for a new mini-nuclear warhead, said Martin Butcher, director of security programs at the Physicians for Social Responsibility.

This kind of warhead is ``the dirtiest kind of all. It's highly radioactive,'' said Butcher, whose group has been a leading voice in the nuclear nonproliferation debate. Development of such a bomb would send the wrong signals and would add to the risk of nuclear proliferation, he said.

A low-yield nuclear weapon generally is considered to be no more than five kilotons. By comparison, the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II were about 15 kilotons each.

The report sent to key committees in Congress by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in October provides a general outline of U.S. capabilities for dealing with what defense officials believe is a growing gap in U.S. military response.

The House International Relations Committee is pressing for renewed U.N. inspections in Iraq on the belief that it has rebuilt its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs since President Saddam Hussein's government stopped allowing inspections in 1998.

Notes and diagrams found in houses vacated by al-Qaida fighters in Afghanistan also point to an effort to create weapons of mass destruction.

The report said enhancements expected to be completed by 2005 to an array of conventional weapons, including laser-guided bombs and cruise missiles, should be able to destroy most underground facilities. But it maintains such weapons cannot penetrate the deepest facilities.

The report acknowledges that any decision to proceed with a nuclear device for attacking underground targets would be considered within the administration's broader plans for the nuclear stockpile and overall nuclear weapons policy.

It said a joint nuclear-planning board already has been established to examine the use of nuclear weapons as bunker-busters.

The idea of using low-yield nuclear warheads to attack deeply buried enemy targets has been discussed for years. It was the subject of a classified study concluded in 1997 and has been frequently discussed by nuclear weapons scientists at the Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories.

The essence of the report sent to Congress was reported Tuesday by The Albuquerque Journal. A copy was distributed by Nuclear Watch of New Mexico, based in Santa Fe, on its Web site.

The report had been requested by Sens. John Warner, R-Va., and Wayne Allard, R-Colo., and was part of this year's defense authorization legislation.

On the Net: Nuclear Watch of New Mexico: www.nukewatch.org

-------- us nuc facilities

-------- washington

Nuclear Reactor to Be Shut Down

December 19, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-BRF-Hanford-Nuclear.html

YAKIMA, Wash. (AP) -- The Energy Department decided Wednesday that an experimental nuclear reactor at the Hanford reservation will be shut down permanently.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said restarting the Fast Flux Test Facility would be impractical. The plant has been idled since 1992.

Though more than 20 years old, the 400-megawatt plant is the Energy Department's newest reactor. It was designed to research advanced forms of nuclear fuel for breeder reactors, which produce as much or more plutonium fuel than they consume.

However, the government scrapped its breeder reactor program in the 1980s after deciding it had misjudged the nation's electricity needs.

The nuclear fuel was removed from the plant's core, though the cooling system had been maintained in case of a restart.

Former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson ordered the plant decommissioned. The order was rescinded by the Bush administration, which studied the possibility of letting private interests use the plant to research medical isotopes.

-------- us politics

House OKs Implementing Terror Treaties

By Jim Abrams
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, December 19, 2001; 2:17 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1284-2001Dec19?language=printer

WASHINGTON -- The House approved legislation to implement two international anti-terrorism treaties over the objections of some Democrats who warned that the creation of new death penalties could cause problems with American allies.

The measure, passed 381-36, adjusts U.S. law to comply with an international convention for the suppression of terrorist bombings and another convention for the suppression of the financing of terrorism. The Senate must still act on the legislation.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said the two treaties would "reinforce the international community's intolerance for and condemnation of terrorist acts and their financing."

The anti-bombing pact was initiated by the United States after the 1996 bombing attack on U.S. military personnel in Saudi Arabia. The treaty, which obligates nations to prosecute or extradite people involved in bombing attacks, was ratified by the Senate in 1999 and entered into force internationally in May this year.

The financing treaty obligates nations to prosecute or extradite those who willfully provide or collect funds for use in terrorist attacks. It has been ratified by the Senate but has yet to go into force internationally.

Several Democrats said that while they supported the treaties, they were concerned with language in the legislation that authorized the imposing of the death penalty for certain bombing crimes, saying it could make it harder to extradite terrorists from nations that don't have a death penalty.

"It's become a serious problem in terms of our legal relationships with our most steadfast allies," said Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass.

The House also moved on several other terrorism-related bills:

-It debated a bill authorizing $5.9 billion for Coast Guard programs and activities in the budget year starting last October, with new money added for security.

"Without substantial additional Coast Guard resources, we are not going to be able to significantly enhance maritime security as we should," said Rep. Frank LoBiondo, R-N.J., chairman of the House Transportation Committee's Coast Guard subcommittee.

The bill, which now goes to the Senate, requires all foreign and domestic ships to notify the Coast Guard 96 hours before they enter U.S. waters. Currently notification is 24 hours before entering a U.S. port.

-It took up a nonbinding resolution stating that Iraq's refusal to permit weapons inspections "presents a mounting threat to the United States, its allies and international peace and security."

House International Relations Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, R-Ill., said there's no doubt that Saddam Hussein has built up his biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs since weapons inspections were terminated in 1998. He said that while the resolution doesn't give the president the authority to use force, "we're confronting a very serious threat, something that's literally a matter of life and death, and this resolution expresses our very strong desire to see something done about it."

-On Tuesday, the House approved a measure authorizing $12 million a year for the Environmental Protection Agency to provide research grants on how to prevent, detect or respond to threats to the nation's water supply infrastructure.

The conventions implementation bill is H.R. 3275.
The Coast Guard Bill is H.R. 3507.
The Iraq resolution is H.J. Res. 75.
The water security bill is H.R. 3178.
On the Net: Congress: http://thomas.loc.gov.

----

Bush Calls Putin on Arms Reduction

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 19, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Russia.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush called Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday to discuss cooperation on reducing nuclear arms after U.S. withdrawal from an anti-missile treaty.

Bush called Putin to talk about developing a new arms framework, ``including lowered numbers of nuclear weapons and greater transparency of mutual cooperation on defenses, if possible,'' said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.

The two leaders also discussed strengthening U.S.-Russian economic ties, Fleischer said. Otherwise, he said, Bush wanted to ``extend holiday best wishes and to affirm the positive course of U.S.-Russian relations.''

Bush announced last week that the United States will pull out in six months from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty so it can test and build a missile defense system to protect against terrorists and rogue nations. U.S. and Russian officials will begin talks next month on making new cuts in their strategic nuclear arms, even though they continue to disagree over the U.S. pullout from the treaty.

Bush has proposed cutting U.S. nuclear warheads by about two-thirds, to between 1,700 and 2,200, from the current 6,000. Russia says it will bring its warheads down to between 1,500 and 2,200.


-------- MILITARY

-------- afghanistan

Tora Bora: Deep Ravines Hide Many Enemies

New York Times
December 19, 2001
By BARRY BEARAK and MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/19/international/asia/19BORA.html

TORA BORA, Afghanistan, Dec. 18 - The sun so pulsed off the great gorges here that the walls of rock seemed adorned with spangles. Below, at the floor of the canyon, a shallow river, barely inches deep, rushed across a bed of stones. The water was glassy clear.

Into beauty this pristine, the sight of an ugly blue-and-green truck coming around the curve today was startling. Armed soldiers sat atop the sides of the truck as it splashed over the riverbed. A cargo of bodies was at their feet. The dead were Al Qaeda fighters, hauled down from elevated caves and tunnels where they had put up their fatal resistance.

Two days ago, the commanders of an eastern anti-Taliban alliance declared that their men had totally defeated the final remnants of Osama bin Laden's troops in their midst. The grim conveyance of the rotting bodies might have seemed evidence of their boasts.

But a trek this afternoon through some of the vaulting peaks and fertile gullies of Tora Bora showed a more complicated denouement. While anti-Taliban soldiers control most of the terrain, they move about warily because a smattering of Al Qaeda troops still loom.

This is not the only danger. The anti-Taliban forces fight among themselves.

"It is a competition among rivals," said Faqir Muhammad, a gruff officer in a military faction controlled by Hajji Zahir, commander of one of three anti-Taliban armies in the region. "This is what Afghanistan is. We kill each other."

Mr. Muhammad had agreed to something forbidden by the commanders, guiding two reporters and a photographer into the remote landscape of Tora Bora. These past weeks, the press has been confined to a distant perch convenient only for gazing at plumes of smoke.

The officer stressed caution at every turn. Nervous soldiers with machine guns led the groups of fighters. Pausing on the open trail was considered a peril.

"We don't control up there," said Mr. Muhammad, aiming an index finger at a distant ridgeline. "That may still be Al Qaeda. This is Tora Bora. It is very dangerous."

Tora Bora, the tongue-friendly name for a mountainous immensity, has become a world-famous battleground, the last redoubt in Afghanistan of Mr. bin Laden's terrorist network. At its lower heights, it is a tree- dotted landscape that climbs through winding towers of stratified rock. The vistas are magnificent. Farther up, the staircases of stone are steeper and the sharp-edged summits are snow-topped. The weather is cruel.

For two weeks, American bombers blasted away at cavernous hideaways as Afghan troops, sometimes accompanied by American Special Operations units, pressed ahead on the ground. About 200 Al Qaeda members were killed. Perhaps 500 to 1,500 more, possibly including Mr. bin Laden, have fled into the forested reaches on the Pakistan border.

Though the Afghan commanders were swift to announce victory, the Pentagon described a less certain situation, with Gen. Tommy R. Franks, commander of the American military operation, saying it is "going to be a while" before Tora Bora is under control.

This seems to be the case. Nawaz Khan, a mid-level anti-Taliban commander, said heavy battles continued even on Monday, including one that yielded an Arab prisoner who claimed to have seen Mr. bin Laden in Tora Bora on Thursday.

"The man's name is Abu Abdur Rahman, and he told us Osama was with them until the 28th day of Ramadan," said Mr. Khan. "Osama had told them to pray, then suddenly disappeared."

Combat against Al Qaeda has been fierce, according to several of those who fought the battles. They insist that while American bombing was a help, only ground troops could finally root out the enemy. American Special Operations troops played no formidable role, they said.

"There were no American soldiers, and we didn't need them anyway," said Hamid Khan, overseer of Commander Zahir's forces in a large swath of Tora Bora.

Mr. Khan, a bearded man with intense eyes, has memorized the details of the battles of the past 20 days.

"When we captured this place, Al Qaeda resisted for three days in this valley and two nights at the top of this mountain, which is named Tarsar," he said. "After this, they resisted for one day in Katsar. After that, in a place named Zarsar, they resisted for six days and we lost six of our own troops and had five wounded." He spoke of the enemy's fanaticism. "They planted bombs on themselves," he said as others nodded in agreement. "One soldier had a grenade in one hand and a Kalashnikov in the other. As we captured him, he pulled the plug and exploded himself and others with him."

Mr. Khan's headquarters was a small mud-brick room on a ridge. Its centerpiece was an ancient wood cookstove that heated the place while choking it with smoke. Barefoot men held their toes close to the fire. Other soldiers sat on the cushioned floor, some taking turns praying in a corner. Machine guns hung from hooks that might otherwise be used for coats.

One man held a walkie-talkie, listening to a gargling of static. He seemed to be troubled by what few words he could make out. Pacing, he finally began repeating fearful news, louder each time: a heavily-armed opposing force was in their midst.

To an outsider, this seemed an incursion by Al Qaeda stragglers.

But no, explained Mr. Muhammad, the guide. Some troops belonging to Cmdr. Muhammad Zaman, who purports to be Commander Zahir's ally, had passed into the area. This was considered a grievous violation of turf. The interlopers would have to be disarmed.

Hamid Khan and dozens of his men grabbed their weapons, rushed out the narrow door and began loping from rock to rock down a steep incline to a path below. A chase was on.

Commander Zaman's soldiers, their shawls rippling in the wind, darted along the narrow cliff sides, craning their necks to see if they were losing ground.

They were fortunate. Their head start was enough. They escaped.

No one had been killed, but there had been excitement enough. Mr. Muhammad thought it a good time to repeat his earlier instruction.

"This is Tora Bora," he said. "It is very dangerous."

--------

More Tapes Found in Al Qaeda Lairs

December 19, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/19/international/asia/19TAPE.html

WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 - President Bush told Congressional leaders today that more videotapes had been found in caves in Afghanistan abandoned by Al Qaeda forces, according to a Congressional aide.

The president made the disclosure during a morning meeting with the four top members of the House and Senate, but the aide said the president indicated that the White House had not yet reviewed the tapes.

A videotape discovered earlier and made public by the White House last week showed Osama bin Laden at an informal gathering talking extensively about his knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Mr. Bush called that tape "a devastating declaration of guilt for this evil person."

Pentagon and intelligence officials have said that anti-Taliban fighters assisted by United States Special Operations forces were scouring caves for any material, like documents and computer discs, that could provide intelligence on Al Qaeda.

Mr. Bush noted the existence of the new tapes and other materials in a meeting with Senator Tom Daschle and Representative Richard A. Gephardt, the Democratic leaders of the Senate and House, and Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and Senator Trent Lott, the top Republicans in the House and Senate. The Congressional leaders and the president were meeting to discuss the impasse over an economic recovery package as well as the progress of the war.

--------

12 Die as War Prisoners Revolt At the Afghan-Pakistan Border

New York Times
December 19, 2001
By DOUGLAS FRANTZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/19/international/19CND-STAN.html

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Dec. 19 - At least 12 people were killed today when captured Al Qaeda fighters grabbed weapons from their Pakistani guards and started shooting as they were being taken to prison, a Pakistani government spokesman said.

The revolt left six prisoners and five security force members dead, the spokesman, Maj. Gen. Rashid Qureshi, said. The driver of a bus also died.

Officials said the uprising broke out when 156 prisoners, most of them Arabs, were being taken in three buses from a detention center near the Afghan-Pakistani border to the city of Peshawar.

One of the buses overturned when the shooting started, Secretary of Information Sayed Anwar Mehmood said.

General Qureshi said many of the prisoners had tried to run away, that some had been rounded up and the rest surrounded.

Other officials said the prisoners had escaped from eastern Afghanistan and had not been handcuffed. Many were believed to be Yemenis who fled the caves and tunnels of the Tora Bora region after it was pounded by bombs from United States warplanes.

A similar uprising by Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners took place last month in a fort in Mazar-i-Sharif. Hundreds of the captives were killed.

Today's uprising came after Western and Pakistani officials said Tuesday that hundreds of Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters had slipped across the Afghan border and evaded the Pakistani Army to disappear into remote tribal areas.

The officials said many fighters had crossed into Pakistan through frozen mountain passes and trails south of the Tora Bora region, avoiding the heaviest deployments of Pakistani troops.

Since the resistance of Al Qaeda fighters in Tora Bora began to crumble in recent days, the United States has been pressing, with mixed results, to seal possible escape routes for Osama bin Laden and other leaders of his terrorist group.

At the same time, the Bush administration is pressing for new intelligence from captured fighters that might help in the hunt for Mr. bin Laden and the broader war against terrorism.

American marines took custody of 15 prisoners at a temporary prison camp at Kandahar International Airport on Tuesday. A team of eight F.B.I. agents went there to question the fighters on a number of subjects, most importantly whether any of them had knowledge of planned attacks against the United States or other countries, or the location of terrorist cells.

Al Qaeda fighters who have escaped appear to have blended in with Pashtuns whose tribal lands straddle the Afghan-Pakistani border and who have proved reluctant to alert the army, which is viewed with suspicion, Western and Pakistani officials said.

These officials have access to intelligence information and reports from Pakistani Army commanders in the tribal areas. They said the whereabouts of Mr. bin Laden and senior leaders of Al Qaeda remained a mystery.

The officials said no one could say for certain whether Mr. bin Laden had escaped through Pakistan or remained in Afghanistan.

Many Taliban leaders have also escaped, and large areas of Afghanistan remain lawless, subject to the control of local warlords. In an attempt to bring security to the country, Afghan and British officials agreed Tuesday on the size of the first contingent of an international force. They agreed that fewer than 100 British Royal Marines would be deployed before the new interim government takes office on Saturday.

The fact that the deployment is smaller than expected appears to be a victory for Northern Alliance hard-liners, who opposed a large foreign force. Ultimately, the force will grow to 2,000 to 4,000 soldiers.

American bombing paused Tuesday as the appropriate means to pursue Al Qaeda were assessed.

Asked if there had been a shift in the air strategy, Gen. Peter Pace, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, replied: "I would say it's a very natural transition from occupying territory that was previously held by the enemy to now having most of their territory under opposition control and now beginning to focus in on the pockets of enemy resistance and then determining what the best weapons system is. And sometimes the best weapons system is an individual with a rifle."

Although it was the first day since the first week of the war that American warplanes did not drop bombs, officials said scores of aircraft, including Navy F-14's and F-18's as well as Air Force B-52 and B-1 bombers, had been sent into the skies over Kandahar and Tora Bora, where they circled, awaiting calls from ground spotters of emergent targets. Those calls never came.

Italian Harriers from the carrier Garibaldi and French Super Étendard fighter jets from the carrier Charles de Gaulle flew missions with American aircraft in Afghanistan Tuesday for the first time. They did not drop bombs either, American officials said.

In northern Afghanistan, an American soldier assisting in clearing mines at Bagram Airport north of Kabul suffered serious but not life-threatening wounds to his leg and foot Tuesday when he stepped on a mine, Pentagon officials said. He was not identified.

Anti-Taliban commanders in the Tora Bora region said 500 to 1,000 Al Qaeda and Afghan Taliban soldiers had disappeared, while officials in Islamabad said Pakistan had detained fewer than 100 Al Qaeda members.

Part of the discrepancy may come from the possibility that Pakistanis are releasing Afghan and Pakistani fighters and holding only foreigners. But officials said they were having other troubles, too.

"The Pakistan Army is having problems arresting everyone," one Pakistani official said, "because once they get into the tribal area, it is difficult to identify them without someone pointing them out.

"Most Pashtuns are reluctant to snitch on them, and officials do not report individual cases as long as these are not detectable by the Americans or senior officials sent from Islamabad."

The flight of Al Qaeda members and other Taliban troops from the caves in the snow-capped mountains that mark the border puts Pakistan's military government in a tough spot.

On one hand, it has strongly backed the American-led coalition, providing access to its airspace and military bases and cutting off formal relations with the Taliban before its collapse. Last week, for the first time, Pakistan deployed a significant number of armed troops, estimated at 4,000, in the autonomous tribal regions to block potential exits for those fleeing the American bombing.

At the same time, the government recognizes that cracking down too hard on Taliban fighters, particularly Afghans, could stir trouble among Pakistanis who remain sympathetic to the Taliban or feel that the American bombing has gone far enough.

Complicating domestic concerns is the pro-Taliban attitude that persists within elements of Pakistan's military and its intelligence agency, something that the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has pledged to wipe out.

James F. Dobbins, the American special envoy to Afghanistan, said in Islamabad on Tuesday that it was impossible to prevent some members of Al Qaeda from escaping over the wild border into Pakistan. He did not estimate how many might have escaped.

Mr. Dobbins spoke after meeting with Pakistani officials here. He said they had assured him that reinforced patrols were trying to intercept anyone escaping from the Tora Bora region.

"Pakistani officials reaffirmed their commitments to us as regards the strict border controls," said Mr. Dobbins, who arrived in the Pakistani capital after reopening the United States Embassy building in Kabul on Monday.

"It's a mountain range, so I think the passes are sealed," Mr. Dobbins said. "I don't think it's possible to prevent individuals from crossing the border. I think it is possible, once they have done so, to apprehend them over time and to ensure they are dealt with appropriately."

Since the besieged Al Qaeda fighters were surrounded by hostile anti-Taliban Afghan forces and American and British troops, escaping the rugged mountains and heavy woods toward Pakistan was the only route left for them.

A senior Pakistani official said regular troops, paramilitary forces and some tribal militias were keeping a 24-hour vigil along the border with Afghanistan. He said they were using helicopters as well as donkeys and mules to try to plug exit points.

Soldiers are stationed near checkpoints along the main roads and have also set up remote camps to keep an eye on the paths used routinely by smugglers, according to reports from travelers.

The Pakistanis have concentrated on trying to seal the most likely exits opposite Tora Bora by concentrating troops and surveillance along a 25-mile stretch.

But the 1,500-mile border, rugged landscape and reluctance of some tribe members to cooperate have made it impossible to stop everyone, the Western and Pakistani officials said.

Officials said many fighters were believed to have made the arduous journey farther south to areas that were not as well monitored by helicopters and troops. If they can make it out of the most heavily patrolled region, there are many opportunities to slip unnoticed into Pakistan.

People who came across the border at Chaman in southwestern Pakistan in recent days said there were no checks of Afghans or Pakistanis entering the country and only cursory examinations of the papers of foreigners.

-------- asia

Tamil Rebels Declare Cease-Fire

DECEMBER 19, 07:31 ET
By SHIMALI SENANAYAKE
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/main.html?FRONTID=ASIA&STORYID=APIS7GG8H9O0

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) - Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels said on Wednesday they were declaring a monthlong, unilateral cease-fire starting Christmas Eve as a goodwill measure to advance the peace process. The government said it would probably reciprocate.

The rebel statement was issued hours after the opening of a new Parliament, dominated by the United National Front of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, who has promised to pursue peace talks to end an 18-year war that has killed more than 64,000 people.

Velupillai Prabhakaran, the seldom-seen leader of the rebels, ordered to all combat units to ``cease all hostile military actions against the Sri Lankan armed forces from midnight Christmas Eve,'' said a statement faxed to news agencies from northern Sri Lanka.

``We just heard about the cease-fire and we are considering the matter,'' Defense Minister Thilak Marapana said. ``We'll probably respond positively to it.''

The rebels were opposed to the previous Peoples' Alliance government of President Chandrika Kumaratunga, who had pursued an aggressive military campaign after losing sight in her right eye in a rebel suicide bombing.

The Tigers have been fighting since 1983 for a homeland for minority Tamils in the northern and eastern parts of the small island-nation off the southern coast of India.

The rebel statement said the election of the United National Front government was a ``mandate for peace and harmony,'' adding they were prepared to extend the cease-fire.

Kumaratunga, who remains in the powerful position of president although her party lost the parliamentary election, had rejected recent cease-fire offers, saying they were a ploy to allow the rebels to regroup.

Ever since it became clear that Kumaratunga's party might lose the Dec. 5 election, the rebels appeared to have been preparing to resume the peace process.

Prabhakaran, in his 47th birthday speech on Nov. 27, said he might consider something less than full independence.

``The Tamil national question, which has assumed the character of a civil war, is essentially a political issue,'' Prabhakaran had said in the speech broadcast by the clandestine Voice of Tigers radio.

Prabhakaran is wanted in Sri Lanka and India for political assassinations. He founded the LTTE in 1976 and runs the organization with absolute authority. The Tamil Tigers are banned as terrorists in the United States, Britain, Canada, India and Sri Lanka.

The Sri Lankan government says the Tigers' arsenal includes Stinger missiles purchased from Afghan rebel groups. But its most menacing weapons are human bombs known as Black Tigers who have assassinated former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and former Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa, among other leaders.

-------- biological weapons

U.S. nuclear lab slows plans for biowarfare center

Wednesday, December 19, 2001
By Zelie Pollon,
Reuters
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2001/12/12192001/reu_45920.asp

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. - Los Alamos National Laboratory has slowed plans to build a new lab for testing live anthrax bacteria and other biowarfare agents to allow more time for public comment, lab officials said Tuesday.

Because of a storm of concerned comment since a public meeting last month at which the lab presented its plan to its neighbors, the nation's leading nuclear weapons research facility said it was extending the period for feedback by about a month to Jan. 15.

Local critics say the government-owned and university-run lab, which sprawls across a mountain plateau next to the small town of Los Alamos, is exposing neighbors to potential harm and could violate an international treaty banning biological arms.

But lab officials say they need a so-called Biosafety Level 3 facility to handle live agents like anthrax as part of the nation's growing concern with defense against biological attack. "We're just upgrading our facility and going to the next level. It's an extension of the research Los Alamos has already been doing,'' said Tracy Loughead, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Energy in Albuquerque, N.M. The department owns Los Alamos, which is operated by the University of California, and will decide about building the new facility based on public comment and a possible environmental impact statement.

MAINTAINS NUCLEAR STOCKPILE

The national laboratory's main mission is maintaining and preserving the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile. But it has branched out into related research fields, including some work on detecting biological weapons like the anthrax spores mailed in the United States after the Sept. 11 hijack attacks.

There are already hundreds of Biosafety Level 3 laboratories around the country, mostly at universities and private corporations, but this would be the first housed at a nuclear weapons research lab. Los Alamos' proposed Level 3 lab would be a step up from an already existing Level 2 facility, which can handle noninfectious strands of DNA from biowarfare agents but not the live agents themselves. At Level 3, federally mandated precautions, including air locks and protective suits, are meant to keep bacteria and viruses from escaping.

Local critics of the project argue that putting a biowarfare research lab next to a nuclear weapons program is likely to lead to work on creating biological weapons rather than on ways to defend against them.

"There are also safety considerations because this lab does not operate itself safely and has endemic management problems,'' said Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group, a citizen watchdog organization that has monitored the national laboratory since 1992.

QUESTION ABOUT ARMS CONVENTION

Mello said that without stringent oversight, the national laboratory could be in defiance of the International Biological Weapons Convention, which forbids the development of biological weapons. The convention was signed into law by former President George Bush in 1989.

Lab officials deny there would be any treaty violation. "We do not make biological weapons,'' said the Department of Energy's Loughead, adding that the aim of the new lab would be to research the properties of bioweapons rather than to create any.

Officials are also planning to locate the biolab outside the secure nuclear areas that are closed to the public, allowing public access and monitoring of the lab's work.

John-Olav Johnsen, a senior technical adviser for the bioscience division of the Energy Department, said there were three potential sites for the 3,000-square-foot structure. "There's not classified work going on. People will be welcome to come and get a tour,'' Johnsen said.

The building itself - projected to cost less than $5 million - could be completed by 2003 and in full operation by the following year, he said.

----

Anthrax Investigation Focusing on Labs

By LAURA MECKLER
DECEMBER 19, 03:56 ET
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=NATIONAL&STORYID=APIS7GG9FJG0

WASHINGTON (AP) - The anthrax investigation is focused on fewer than a dozen laboratories that have worked with the deadly bacteria, federal officials said, and investigators are working to identify the genetic fingerprints of anthrax held at each of them.

Investigators are increasingly convinced the anthrax that has killed five people since October came from inside the United States, and they are hoping to find the laboratory that produced it.

There have been no new cases of anthrax infection for weeks, but officials are still dealing with fallout from those exposed to the tainted letters during the fall.

Federal health officials said Tuesday they would offer the experimental anthrax vaccine and an extra 40 days of antibiotic treatment to thousands of Capitol Hill, media and postal workers in case any anthrax still lurks in their lungs.

The risk of getting anthrax after the standard two months of antibiotics is ``very mild, minor,'' stressed Dr. D.A. Henderson, the government's top bioterrorism adviser. ``It is not zero, however.''

In the investigation, the FBI believes there are at least five and as many as a dozen labs that have worked with anthrax from the Ames strain found in letters sent to Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, said a law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity. Specifically, they've focused on labs that received samples from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease at Fort Detrick, Md.

It is taking time to investigate each one, the official said Tuesday. That includes complicated genetic fingerprinting of the anthrax each lab holds, as well as interviewing people who work there.

So far, the anthrax at each tested lab has been a perfect genetic match to the anthrax found in the letters, said another federal official, also speaking anonymously. But anthrax has not yet been tested from every lab, he said.

In recent days, attention has focused on the possibility that a U.S. military installation was involved.

That's partly because many of the labs that received anthrax of the Ames strain got it from Fort Detrick. Also, military officials said last week that Dugway Proving Ground, an Army installation in the Utah desert, has been working with a powdered form of anthrax since 1992 in its biowarfare research program.

Asked about the military's involvement, Homeland Security Chief Tom Ridge acknowledged on Tuesday the possibility but said it was not the only one.

``There are multiple agencies within government that have for many years, for many reasons had access to this strain of anthrax,'' he said. ``That connection (to the military) could very well exist. The fact is we have multiple leads.''

At least one leading expert is urging the FBI to focus on government laboratories and contractors. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a molecular biologist at the State University of New York at Purchase, has told the FBI the perpetrator probably has connections with the government.

``Many contractors work in government labs and would have access to material,'' said Rosenberg, who chairs a biological weapons panel at the Federation of American Scientists.

Among contractors being investigated are those that do classified work for the CIA, whose work is aimed at bioterrorism defense.

CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said the agency is cooperating with the FBI. He said all its work with virulent anthrax was done by a couple of outside contractors.

The scientist who helped the United States refine anthrax and turn it into a weapon said Tuesday that bacteria spores used in the recent attacks could have been processed in a variety of ways, making it more difficult to trace the spores to their source.

``You can process the stuff in so many different ways, I don't think that it will be the smoking gun,'' said William C. Patrick III. Patrick led the Army's biological weapons program until it ended in 1969 and taught scientists at Dugway how to turn wet clusters of bacteria spores into a dry powder.

Patrick, who holds patents for techniques used to make weapons-grade anthrax, suggested the culprit is not necessarily linked to a large lab. The type of spores sent through the mail could have been processed in a crude laboratory ``as long as you are dealing with small quantities of material,'' he said.

Similarly, Rosenberg said the key to the investigation will involve finding someone with a motive, rather than further scientific analysis of the anthrax.

The law enforcement official said the FBI is looking into a variety of possibilities, including political or ideological motivations and the potential for financial gain from the attacks, such as someone connected to an environmental cleanup company.

Investigators are considering whether the person who sent the letters could be a lab worker rather than a scientist or a chemist.

On the Net: FBI's anthrax investigation page: http://www.fbi.gov/majcases/anthrax/amerithraxlinks.htm

--------

PREVENTION
U.S. Will Offer Anthrax Shots for Thousands

New York Times
December 19, 2001
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and DAVID E. ROSENBAUM
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/19/national/19VACC.html

WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 - Federal health officials said today that they would offer the military's anthrax vaccine, as well as extra medicine, to thousands of workers on Capitol Hill and postal employees who were exposed to anthrax and remain at slight risk of developing the disease, even after a 60-day course of antibiotics.

Because the vaccine is licensed just to prevent infection with anthrax, and not to treat people after exposure, the shots will be made available as part of an experimental study run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This is the first time that the government has offered ordinary citizens a vaccine against a biological weapon.

Tommy G. Thompson, secretary of health and human services, said he was making the offer "out of an abundance of caution." He and the government's top health experts, who acknowledged that they were just beginning to learn how to treat anthrax in people, steered clear of recommending the vaccine.

There is scant scientific data to support its use by people already exposed to the germ. But a handful of studies in monkeys has shown that potentially dangerous anthrax spores can linger in the lungs 75 days after exposure and that vaccine combined with antibiotics protected the animals.

The vaccine poses a risk of side effects. But in most cases, the problems have been minor, including swelling, headaches, rashes, chills and fever. Extremely rarely - in fewer than one in 100,000 people - the vaccine can cause severe allergic reactions.

Officials said people exposed to high concentrations of the anthrax germ - they put the number at 3,000, including Capitol Hill staff members and postal employees in Washington and New Jersey - should consult their doctors and decide whether to take the vaccine, which will be administered in three doses over four weeks along with 40 days of antibiotics; to simply take the extra 40 days of antibiotics; or to stop treatment and call a doctor if they experience any suspicious symptoms.

"We would love to be in a position of being so wise and having so much information behind us that we could say, `Well, go ahead and do it, there's no risk and there are no problems,' " said Dr. D. A. Henderson, who as director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness is Mr. Thompson's chief adviser on bioterrorism. "But there is risk."

Dr. Ivan C. A. Walks, the health commissioner of the District of Columbia, whose office is following thousands of postal workers who were exposed to anthrax after letters containing the germ were sent to Capitol Hill, said research had so far not offered clear guidance.

"The best and brightest scientists in the country have studied this, and I've got all those studies on my desk," Dr. Walks said. "If I can't figure out whether you should take the vaccine or not, how can I expect you to figure out on your own whether to take the vaccine?"

On Capitol Hill, where a letter containing anthrax was opened on Oct. 15 in the office of Senator Tom Daschle, the majority leader, some workers are eager for the shots. Military experts briefed the Capitol Hill workers this week and recommended that they take the vaccine. Dr. Henderson said vaccinations might begin there as early as Wednesday or Thursday, run by the Capitol physician, Dr. John F. Eisold.

Mr. Daschle, who was not present when the letter was opened, said he was urging his staff members to be vaccinated. "I think it's a wise course of action," he said, "simply because of the unknowns."

But among postal workers - two of whom died of inhalation anthrax after the C.D.C. failed, initially, to recommend antibiotics for them - there is reticence. A spokeswoman for the United States Postal Service, Kristen Krathwohl, said the announcement caught her agency off guard. She said the Postal Service was trying to line up "high-level expert advice for postal workers" before making the vaccine available. A spokesman for the Postal Workers Union, Danny Frank, said the union was not taking a position on whether employees should take the shots.

"I really don't know anything about the vaccine," said Denise L. Manley, 49, a machine clerk at the Brentwood office, where two workers contracted anthrax and died. "I am doing some background work."

The differing sentiments may explain the health agency's reluctance to give an explicit recommendation, one official said. "They're right in the middle of a firestorm," that official said. "You've got people in the Postal Service saying these are just guinea pigs being experimented upon by an unsafe vaccine. And you've got people in Daschle's office saying, `The military can get it. Why can't we get it?' "

Five people have died of inhalation anthrax, the most serious form of the disease, and more than 12 others have become sick since early October. More than 30,000 Americans have been placed on antibiotics as a precaution. Of those, 10,000 were advised to continue taking antibiotics for 60 days, because they were the most likely to have been exposed. But many have stopped treatment because the pills made them feel ill.

Officials at first said the antibiotics would be enough to prevent infection. They explained today's announcement by saying the knowledge of anthrax was evolving. "Further reflection on the literature by people both inside and outside the government have led us to where we are today," said Dr. Jeffrey P. Koplan, director of the disease control centers.

He noted that the vaccine had been given mostly to young military recruits and that the authorities did not know how other people, particularly the elderly, pregnant women and people with impaired immune systems, would react to it.

The vaccine is made from a weakened strain of the anthrax bacteria and provokes an immune response. There are no studies in humans that show how the vaccine might work after exposure to anthrax spores.

In paying for the vaccine, the health agency had to agree to indemnify its maker, BioPort, of Lansing, Mich., against claims arising from the vaccinations. In weighing the vaccine offer, a complicating factor was the Food and Drug Administration's closing of Bioport's plant for failing cleanliness standards.

Mr. Thompson has been talking with the Pentagon to buy nearly 219,000 doses of vaccine at a cost of nearly $600,000 to have on hand in case of a widening emergency. At the same time, the centers for disease control has asked the F.D.A. for permission to administer the vaccine in an experimental setting.

-------- business

Federal Regulators Decide on Exelon

The Associated Press
Wednesday, December 19, 2001; 8:05 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3150-2001Dec19.html

CHICAGO -- The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has ended its investigation into allegations of improper trading activity by Exelon Corp., the electric utility giant said Wednesday.

On Oct. 3, FERC ordered Chicago-based Exelon to prove that PECO Energy, the company's Pennsylvania-based electric transmission and distribution business, did not violate the Federal Power Act by conducting operations that would benefit Exelon's wholesale trading unit, Power Team.

Federal regulators also alleged that PECO might have shared nonpublic transmission information with Power Team.

Three weeks later, Exelon filed a response countering FERC's allegations, company officials said.

"We at Exelon are delighted that FERC accepted our evidence refuting its allegations," Elizabeth Moler, Exelon's senior vice president for government affairs and policy, said in a prepared statement.

Attempts to reach FERC for comment were unsuccessful Wednesday night. Phone calls to FERC's Chicago regional office were unanswered; calls to several FERC numbers in Washington did not go through.

Exelon distributes electricity to 5 million customers - 3.5 million in northern Illinois through ComEd and 1.5 million in the five-county Philadelphia region through PECO Energy. It also distributes natural gas to 425,000 customers in Pennsylvania.

The company is the nation's biggest provider of nuclear power, with more than 70 percent of its 19,000-megawatt generating capacity coming from nuclear plants.

--

Federal Energy Regulation Commission

washingtonpost.com Staff
Tuesday, August 7, 2001; 1:14 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A91899-2001May29?language=printer

Mission

FERC is an independent federal regulatory agency responsible for seeing that the wholesale electricity prices that generators charge utility companies are "just and reasonable." It does not regulate the retail electricity rates that households, businesses and organizations pay directly -- that is up to state utility commissions. FERC also oversees rates for transmitting electricity between states, hydroelectric licensing, certification of natural gas and oil pipelines and pipeline transmission rates.

It has about 1,200 employees, with headquarters in the District near Union Station. Its budget this year is $175.2 million.

History

FERC was created through the Department of Energy Organization Act in 1977, when the Energy Department was established. Its predecessor, the Federal Power Commission, was abolished and its duties divided between FERC and the Energy Department. The FPC was established in 1920 to regulate the electric power and natural gas industries.

The FPC's authority over electricity rates was greatly strengthened with the passage of the Federal Power Act in 1935, one of the landmark laws of the New Deal.

Who's in Charge

FERC is run by five commissioners who are appointed by the president to five-year, staggered terms. No more than three members may belong to the same political party. One member is designated by the president to serve as chairman. • Chairman Curt Hebert Jr., Republican, appointed by President Bush, announced Aug. 6 that he would resign by the end of the month. • Linda Key Breathitt, Democrat • William L. Massey, Democrat • Pat Wood III, Republican • Nora Mead Brownell, Republican

On the Web
FERC http://www.ferc.gov/

-------- drug war

DEA will double prevention agents

December 19, 2001
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20011219-27336888.htm

The Drug Enforcement Administration plans to double the number of agents assigned to work with local law enforcement officials and community leaders to help in drug prevention and treatment programs, DEA Administrator Asa Hutchinson said yesterday.

"Agents are tired of dismantling an organization and a year later come back and see that they've moved in again or another organization has," Mr. Hutchinson said in announcing a new program to integrate the agency's drug enforcement efforts with a coordinated plan for field agents to help reduce demand.

"The answer to America's drug problem must come from the community. This is good, grass-roots democracy at its old fashioned best," he said. "DEA is proud to partner with neighborhoods across the nation to make a safer America."

The program, called Integrated Drug Enforcement Assistance (IDEA), will create what Mr. Hutchinson described as "partnerships" between DEA drug agents and existing community organizations to suppress demand by users through prevention and treatment programs.

The plan calls for an increase in the number of "drug reduction agents" assigned around the country from 22 to more than 40, who will establish long-term anti-drug programs with police agencies, schools, churches and other organizations. The DEA will spend nearly $5 million over the next two years to add agents in the field.

Mr. Hutchinson, at a press conference at DEA headquarters, said the program will target communities willing and able to commit to long-term solutions in order to address not only their immediate drug-trafficking problems but also the underlying conditions that allow drug trafficking and drug use to flourish.

"With DEA's leadership, other federal agencies and sources of expertise and funding will be called to the table in an effort to broaden the resources available to the community," he said.

He cautioned that the plan would not diminish efforts by the DEA to identify, arrest and prosecute drug traffickers, only add to the agency's effort to control the drug problem.

"There should not be any competition between the enforcement side and the demand reduction side," he said.

Mr. Hutchinson said drug-trafficking targets will be identified by the DEA and the agency will work with state and local law enforcement to develop and execute an enforcement operation against them.

He said the DEA and community groups will work together to identify local drug-abuse problems, barriers to dealing with the problems and solutions to those problems.

He said the plan will include an on-site DEA agent working with experts in crime prevention, alternative judicial systems - such as drug courts - restorative-justice initiatives, drug testing and law enforcement training.

-------- india

India places troops on high alert

December 19, 2001
By Harbaksh Singh Nanda
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/19122001-124802-8465r.htm

NEW DELHI, Dec. 19 (UPI) -- India placed its armed forces on high alert and began moving additional troops and weapons along the border with Pakistan.

India is under tremendous domestic pressure to respond to last week's attack on its parliament, which India blames on Pakistan-based Islamic rebels. Thirteen people, including the five gunmen, were killed in the attack.

At least five trains carrying troops and equipment have arrived in Jammu town of the strife-torn Kashmir region, The Hindustan Times newspaper quoted defense ministry sources as saying.

Troops on vacation have been recalled to their units and leave has been cancelled for all troops for the next six months.

Families of troops living near border positions have been asked to remain prepared for an evacuation.

India says its troops have been positioned after Islamabad moved additional troops along the international border.

Islamabad has denied its involvement in the parliament attack last Thursday and warned New Delhi against any military advance.

The two rivals have already fought three wars in the last 54 years.

The main stumbling block between the two is Kashmir, a Muslim majority state of India, which has been the site of a separatist uprising for the last 12 years. More than 36,000 people have been killed in the insurgency.

The United States has asked India to show restraint against Pakistan, a coalition ally of Washington in its fight against terrorism in Afghanistan.

Indian leaders have rebuked Washington's advice, saying it will decide on its own what action to take against Islamabad.

----

India says all options open

December 19, 2001
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/19122001-041105-7151r.htm

NEW DELHI, Dec. 19 (UPI) -- Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee Wednesday said India is using diplomacy to put pressure on Pakistan over last week's suicide raid on parliament, but insisted all other options were open.

Vajpayee told parliament that he will build a consensus before ordering any action against Islamabad.

Despite an international call to show restraint, the Vajpayee-led coalition government is under tremendous domestic political pressure to order military strikes on Pakistan-based terrorist training camps.

The United States has called on India to use caution and restraint while taking any action against Islamabad, Washington's ally in its war against terrorism in Afghanistan.

"We have exercised much restraint. We are exploring diplomatic avenues. But other options are also open. Whatever we decide will be well thought out and after a comprehensive examination of all issues," Vajpayee said.

In an apparent reference to the United States and other countries' counseling to India to show restraint, Vajpayee said without naming any country that "those counseling us restraint should also give the same advice to our neighbor."

Indian authorities have blamed two Pakistan-based Islamic rebel groups and Islamabad's Inter Services Intelligence group for the December 13 terrorist attack on Indian parliament which left 13 people dead, including all five attackers.

India has asked Islamabad to ban the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed groups. Islamabad has instead demanded proof linking these groups with the attack on parliament.

Speaking about the possibility of a war against Pakistan, Vajpayee said, "Such feelings should not be generated. Decisions on war or peace are not taken in a fit of anger."

"We have options and we will consider all pros and cons and weigh them before coming to a firm decision."

He accused Islamabad of playing a "dangerous game" and said, "We are not relying on diplomacy alone... We hope the international opinion will be in our favor. India will face the challenge posed by terrorism."

India's major political parties are standing behind the government in efforts to battle terrorism.

"The Congress will back the government in its efforts to track down and bring to justice terrorists who are threatening nation's integrity today," opposition Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi said in parliament.

Meanwhile, both India and Pakistan have advanced their troops along the border.

Indian army chief Gen. S Padmanabhan said, "Certain (Pakistani) forces should have gone back (from the border) but they haven't gone back."

"We watch everything that is happening across the border," he said. "We have a very clear idea about what we are doing and what we will do."

At least five trains carrying troops and equipment have arrived in Jammu town of the strife-torn Kashmir region, The Hindustan Times newspaper quoted defense ministry sources as saying.

Troops on vacation have been recalled to their units and leave has been cancelled for all troops for the next six months.

Families of troops living near border positions have been asked to remain prepared for an evacuation.

India says its troops have been positioned after Islamabad moved additional troops along the international border.

The two rivals have already fought three wars in the last 54 years.

--------

India Raises the Pitch in Criticism of Pakistan

New York Times
December 19, 2001
By CELIA W. DUGGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/19/international/asia/19INDI.html

NEW DELHI, Dec. 18 - On the first full day of business since a suicide squad attacked India's Parliament last week, the country's home minister, L. K. Advani, today accused Pakistan's intelligence agency and two Islamic militant groups operating there of having "the temerity to try to wipe out the entire political leadership of India."

Mr. Advani, a hawk in the world's most populous democracy, offered the government's first formal statement to Parliament on the attack that killed 14, including the 5 who carried it out. It was India's harshest verbal fusillade yet.

"Last week's attack on Parliament is undoubtedly the most audacious and also the most alarming act of terrorism in the nearly two-decades-long history of Pakistan-sponsored terrorism in India," Mr. Advani said.

But opposition leaders in India who were hoping the government would lay out its strategy for responding to the attack were disappointed. Specifically, they wanted to know if India was contemplating a military strike at training camps in the part of Kashmir Pakistan controls. Mr. Advani gave no clue.

Still, his remarks drew condemnation from Pakistan. Its foreign ministry denied today that Pakistan had a role in the attack and called Mr. Advani's remarks irresponsible, inflammatory and threatening.

The ministry said it was ready to bring any Pakistanis to justice if India provided evidence of their complicity. It also warned in its statement that an Indian military strike "will receive a swift and strong response and could have grave consequences for the region."

Escalating tensions - or war - between the two nuclear-armed nations could distract, if not destabilize, Pakistan when the United States needs the help of its military government to capture Osama bin Laden, who may escape from Afghanistan into Pakistan - if he hasn't already.

The Bush administration wants to keep a lid on the half-century-old conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, a land both claim, but the United States' all-out war on the Taliban and Al Qaeda makes it awkward to ask for restraint from others. Behind the scenes, American officials are pressuring Pakistan to crack down on the militant groups India has blamed.

Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, said today that India had a right to defend itself against terrorism, but also suggested it should act in a way that "does not complicate a situation that is already complicated."

At regular intervals here today, Star Television's all-news channel showed a clip of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell asking India to share information it gathers about the Parliament attack with Pakistan, which he described as eager to cooperate in prosecuting those responsible.

In Parliament today, many saw his statement as evidence of a United States double standard on terrorism. Why should India share results of its investigation with the country harboring the terrorists who attacked it, lawmakers asked.

Mulayam Singh Yadav, a powerful populist leader, mocked the government's contention that India's standing in the world was rising, saying, "No country in the world is speaking out for us."

The police say three men and one woman arrested on Saturday have confessed to involvement in the plot on Parliament, which India says was executed by Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, fundamentalist Islamic groups based in Pakistan.

The United States considers both groups terrorist outfits. American officials have said Pakistan's military has supported such groups covertly because they share Pakistan's aim of dislodging India from Kashmir, which is predominantly Muslim.

Lashkar-e-Taiba claimed responsibility last year for an attack on a military installation in the Red Fort, one of New Delhi's top tourist attractions. Jaish-e-Muhammad said it had conducted an Oct. 1 suicide attack on the legislative assembly in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir that killed 38, then recanted.

The man who formed Jaish-e-Muhammad, Masood Azhar, was freed two years ago from an Indian prison to fulfill one of the demands of the hijackers of an Indian airliner that landed in Kandahar, Afghanistan. India held Pakistan-based militants and Paskistani intelligence responsible for the hijacking at the time.

Earlier this month, a large cache of documents with the name of Harkat ul-Mujahedeen, a predecessor of Jaish-e-Muhammad, was found in a house in Kabul, as well as a written list of the hijacked passengers and two boarding passes from the flight. Neighbors said the house was a headquarters for Pakistani militants.

Mentioning the hijacking and the attacks on the Red Fort and the Kashmir assembly, Mr. Advani said the attack on Parliament "establishes that terrorism in India is the handiwork of Pakistan-based terrorist outfits known to derive their support and sustenance from Pak I.S.I." He was referring to the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

Mr. Advani called Pakistan "a theocratic state with an extremely tenuous tradition of democracy" that was "unable to reconcile itself with the reality of a secular, democratic, self-confident and steadily progressing India."

Addressing members of Parliament from his Bharatiya Janata Party today, India's prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, rejected Pakistan's proposal for a joint investigation, saying those who attacked Parliament had links to the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the party's spokesman V. K. Malhotra said.

Nor did Indian officials say India would share the evidence it has gathered with Pakistan. "The fact that we possess this evidence has been conveyed to Pakistan," said Nirupama Rao, spokeswoman for India's Ministry of External Affairs. "We expect Pakistan to take action against these groups, but there has been no credible response so far."

Today, lawmakers returned to India's Parliament House for the first time since the attack Thursday, passing walls still spattered with blood and gouged by bullets.

-------- iraq

New York Daily News, on Saddam Hussein

Editorial Rdp
The Associated Press
Wednesday, December 19, 2001; 12:53 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A735-2001Dec19?language=printer

So, Saddam Hussein has a sense of humor. Who knew? But there's no other way to view his call for an emergency Arab summit in aid of the Palestinians except as a joke.

His cynical appeal even includes a suggested meeting in, of all places, the Islamic holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Since Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, the Saudis don't permit Iraqis into their country.

If there is to be an Arab summit, its aim should be to remove Saddam from power. And if the Arabs won't do it, America should. ...

----

Regimes seek way to support attack on Iraq

By Nicholas Kralev
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 19, 2001
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011219-795903.htm

Some centrist Muslim and Arab governments are considering what concessions to demand of the United States in exchange for supporting - or at least not opposing - an attack on Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, diplomats from the region said yesterday.

Emboldened by the U.S.-led military victory in Afghanistan and the self-implicating Osama bin Laden tape released last week, those governments are exploring ways to take advantage of a positive - though not completely favorable - shift in public opinion, diplomats said.

They said the Muslim and Arab states most likely would ask the Bush administration to consult with them on both military operations and an exit strategy for an attack on Iraq, as well as seeking generous economic assistance.

"Our concern is not a war against Iraq, but an exit strategy after the war," one Turkish official said in an interview. "We are against any division of Iraq and change of borders in the Middle East.

"We are fully aware that we'll have no veto power" on Washington's decision to go after Saddam, "but we would like to be kept in the loop in terms of strategy," the official said. "We wouldn't shed a tear when he is gone, but we need to see a strategy."

An Egyptian official said his government is confident the United States would consult Cairo "at every step" and "we have to study it very well." A decision whether to support Washington publicly would be based on what "pretext" it has to topple Saddam and how that would affect the "strategic balance in the region."

While bin Laden's involvement in the September 11 attacks gave President Hosni Mubarak's government a solid justification for its support for the U.S.-led campaign against the Taliban, the Egyptian public would be harder to convince in case of an attack on Iraq, the official said.

"Egyptians wouldn't be happy without strong evidence of indictment," he said.

Public opinion in other countries, such as Turkey and Jordan, could also be influenced by Washington's willingness to commit economic assistance, diplomats said. Egypt is already the second-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid after Israel.

The Turkish people, for example, can't easily forget the way the United States treated them after the 1991 Gulf war, the Turkish official said. Turkey lost more than $35 billion as a result of being part of the anti-Iraq coalition - both during and after the war - yet it received less than $3 billion in compensation, he said.

"This is still vivid in the public mind and would become a problem when potential operations are being contemplated," he said, referring to possible action against Saddam.

The United States and Britain currently use Turkey's Incirlik military base to enforce the northern no-fly zone in Iraq.

Although the Bush administration claims it hasn't yet decided on the next stage of its war against terrorism, the State Department says a U.S. policy calls for a change of the regime in Baghdad.

Yesterday, Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer warned of a possible Iraqi chemical or biological attack on Israel if the United States extends its war on terror to Iraq.

"If he has his back to the wall, Saddam Hussein will renew his attacks on Israel, and there is no guarantee that it will not be biological or chemical weapons, or even both at the same time," he said.

But two former prime ministers, Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, said a U.S. attack against Saddam was almost inevitable.

"There is no way to avoid confrontation with Iraq," Mr. Barak said. "There is no possibility of a stable new world order if, at the end of this war, Saddam Hussein is still in office, as if nothing had happened."

Mr. Netanyahu said he had no doubt Washington would "end up taking the decision to attack Iraq, because the mixture of terrorist mentality and military capacity in unconventional weapons put the future of civilization in danger."

-------- israel

Israeli warplanes buzz south Lebanon

Briefly December 19, 2001
Washington Times
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011219-607932.htm

SIDON, Lebanon - Israeli warplanes overflew south Lebanon again yesterday, a day after the most intense overflights of the region in a year, drawing protests from Beirut and the United Nations.

"The command of the U.N. Interim Forces in southern Lebanon [UNIFIL] has lodged a severe complaint to the Israeli army leadership for yesterday's big violation of Lebanese airspace," UNIFIL spokesman Timor Goksel told reporters.

Mr. Goksel said Monday's overflights by Israeli jets, helicopters and drones were "the most serious violations of Lebanese airspace since the May 2000 Israeli withdrawal" from southern Lebanon after 22 years of occupation. "UNIFIL did not witness any justification on the ground for this," he added.

----

Defense chief says attacks aided cause

By Paul Martin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 19, 2001
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011219-37103536.htm

HERZLIYA, Israel - The September 11 attacks on the United States led to a decisive swing toward Israel in its ongoing battle against the Palestinian uprising, the Israel Defense Forces' chief of staff told a conference of leading security experts yesterday.

Until then, the Palestinians had enjoyed some success in their strategy of seeking to internationalize the conflict and depict Israel's response as a war of repression against civilians, Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz said.

However, he said, the world's tolerance of the use of bombing and strikes at civilian targets was radically reduced by the suicide attacks on New York and Washington.

Gen. Mofaz also maintained in a speech to the high-powered Herzliya Conference on the Balance of National Strength that Israeli intelligence showed Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had authorized both shootings and suicide-bomb attacks against civilians inside Israel.

He claimed that since March this year, Mr. Arafat has worked in concert with the radical organizations responsible for most of the attacks, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and that the lines between them and his own security services has "become blurred."

Despite the charges, other Israeli officials conceded yesterday that the government was maintaining high-level contacts with Palestinian leaders. Israel declared last week that it considered Mr. Arafat irrelevant to efforts to end the intifada.

"There are contacts under way at different levels and varying degrees of intensity," said a Foreign Ministry source quoted by Reuters news agency. "There is no decision by the government against meeting the Palestinians or talking to them."

The source said the Israelis were not speaking to Mr. Arafat directly, and it was not clear whether the contacts were intended to undermine his leadership of the Palestinian Authority.

Extremist Palestinian groups have vowed to defy Mr. Arafat since he called publicly Sunday for an end to the violence.

Gen. Mofaz said the Palestinian leaders had tried without success to differentiate themselves from the acts of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terror network, portraying themselves instead as freedom fighters seeking to liberate their homeland.

"The scale is tipping in our favor," Gen. Mofaz declared, while warning his audience that the battle was not conclusively decided. He likened the conflict to a "marathon, not a sprint."

The general also said the time was now right to ease the pressures on "innocent" Palestinian citizens, who have undergone serious suffering as a result of Israel's military incursions and its encirclement of the major cities under Palestinian control.

He said it made military sense to alleviate the hardship, and so reduce civilian support for the uprising.

The violence in the Palestinian territories continued yesterday. Ambushes in the West Bank left three Israelis wounded Monday and one yesterday. Three Palestinians were killed on Monday, a day after Mr. Arafat's televised appeal to end violence.

Arab foreign ministers are likely to rally behind Mr. Arafat at an emergency meeting in Cairo tomorrow and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein yesterday called for an emergency Arab summit to discuss "the aggression on the Palestinian people."

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

--------

Palestinians Arrest Security Men, Hamas Mulls Truce

December 19, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-mideast.html

GAZA (Reuters) - The Palestinian Authority arrested 12 of its own security men in an effort to rein in anti-Israeli militants and a senior Hamas official said on Wednesday the Islamic group was considering halting suicide attacks.

A senior Palestinian security official said the security men from the southern Gaza Strip had been detained since Monday, a day after Palestinian President Yasser Arafat called for an end to suicide bombings and armed attacks on Israelis.

``They were arrested for violating the cease-fire orders,'' he told Reuters. The detainees are members of Palestinian Authority security forces but also belong to a militant wing of Arafat's Fatah movement, a Palestinian security source said.

Arafat, under intense international pressure to act after a wave of suicide bombings in Israel, outlawed the military wings of Hamas and other groups and arrested dozens of militants.

Hassan Youssef, a Hamas leader in the West Bank, said the group was studying the issue of suspending martyrdom attacks.

``It has not been decided yet but the movement is aware of the interests of the Palestinian people and will take a decision that stems from their higher interests,'' he told Reuters.

Top Hamas officials in Gaza said earlier they knew of no decision to suspend a campaign of suicide attacks which have killed scores of Israelis in a 15-month-old Palestinian uprising.

Palestinian forces closed down a Gaza workshop used to make mortar bombs and detained three of its owners, security sources said. On Tuesday the Authority closed six Hamas offices in Gaza.

Israel has accused Arafat of going after low-level activists rather than ringleaders of attacks against Israelis since the start of the uprising in September 2000 during which more than 1,000 people from both sides have been killed.

An Israeli Defense Ministry spokesman said the detainees ''must be incarcerated, interrogated to gain information with which to thwart terrorist acts, and then brought to justice.''

Militants have vowed to defy Arafat's truce call.

But Marwan Barghouthi, the West Bank leader of Arafat's Fatah faction, told Reuters on Wednesday that Islamic and national Palestinian factions were ``reconsidering means and ways of resisting occupation, particularly martyrdom attacks.''

U.N. ASSEMBLY TO MEET ON VIOLENCE

The U.N. General Assembly was to hold an emergency session on Thursday to discuss the Middle East. Diplomats said Arab states were expected to propose a resolution calling for an immediate end to the violence and affirming that the Palestinian Authority was essential to any peace efforts.

Israel has cut off its ties with Arafat following the most recent wave of attacks, but Israeli and Palestinian officials confirmed that high-level contacts between the sides continued.

On Wednesday, Israel offered to loosen its military grip on Nablus, the biggest Palestinian city in the West Bank, to give Arafat an incentive to crack down on militants, a senior Israeli source told Reuters.

An Arafat aide gave a cool response to the offer, which coincided with U.S. pressure on Arafat to do more to translate into action his call for an end to armed attacks on Israelis, and for Israel to be ready to reciprocate.

Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said Israel had suggested to the Palestinians they take over the northern West Bank city of Jenin or Nablus, which he described as a center for ``terrorist activities.''

``If they take it over, we shall immediately withdraw our forces,'' Peres told Reuters. He said in a statement a full truce would renew Israeli public support for peacemaking efforts.

The Israeli army tightened its blockade of Palestinian cities after recent bombings by Hamas. Palestinian officials say the restrictions hamper efforts to arrest militants.

``The issue is not lifting the siege in one area in order to conduct a security mission...we need to see a comprehensive and complete withdrawal of the Israeli troops from all Palestinian territories and an end to the closure and siege,'' Arafat aide Ahmed Abdel-Rahman told Reuters.

POWELL CALLS ARAFAT, SHARON

Secretary of State Colin Powell telephoned Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Tuesday.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Powell told Arafat the Palestinians had taken some positive steps but ''there need to be more actions to make an effective end to violence.''

Powell told Sharon that ``Israel needs to be prepared to do its part to create an environment in which Palestinians can sustain and expand their efforts,'' Boucher said.

The Fatah movement in the Gaza Strip said in a statement on Wednesday that it was obeying Arafat's cease-fire call, but added Palestinians retain their right to resist Israeli occupation.

Since Arafat's call, the Israeli military has shot dead three Palestinians, including a Hamas member and a 12-year-old boy. Palestinian fire has wounded at least five Israelis.

At least 784 Palestinians and 233 Israelis have been killed since the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation erupted in September 2000 after peace talks stalled.

-------- nato

Rumsfeld Presses NATO To Focus on Terrorism

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 19, 2001; Page A34
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62277-2001Dec18?language=printer

BRUSSELS, Dec. 18 -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld today proposed reducing NATO forces in Bosnia by a third next year, saying the peacekeeping mission there is placing a strain on the United States and other NATO members "when they face growing demands from critical missions in the war on terrorism."

Addressing defense ministers at the start of a two-day meeting at NATO headquarters focusing on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Rumsfeld said the alliance's 19 member nations need to spend more on defense and prepare for a number of new "asymmetric" threats, such as cyberwar and terrorists armed with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

"It should be of particular concern to all of us," Rumsfeld said, "that the list of countries which today support global terrorism overlaps significantly with the list of countries that have weaponized chemical and biological agents, and which are seeking nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the means to deliver them."

Opening the session, Rumsfeld reminded his counterparts that he had warned them during his last trip here to prepare their forces for surprise threats that were difficult to imagine, let alone defend against.

"Sitting around this table six months ago, not one of us imagined that, by the time we would next meet, the World Trade towers would lie smoldering, the Pentagon would have come under attack, coalition forces would be at war in Afghanistan and, for the first time in the history of this alliance, Article V of the NATO Charter would have been invoked."

Article V, invoked on Sept. 12, one day after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, holds that an attack on one NATO country is an attack on the alliance as a whole. Rumsfeld noted that the provision, designed to guarantee American defense of Europe in the event of an attack by the Soviet Union, was put into force so Europe could help defend the United States.

His comments on terrorism were echoed by NATO Secretary General George Robertson, who told reporters after formal talks concluded that the alliance is helping fight the war against Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network and is committed to extending the reach of its forces beyond Europe.

"The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has an impressive record," Robertson said. "We are at this very moment running three major and successful peace support operations in the Balkans, we're pursuing an ambitious enlargement agenda, we're engaged in a development of a broader, deeper relationship with Russia, and under Article V of the Washington treaty, we're making a significant contribution to the international campaign against terrorism."

But Robertson said NATO nations are not spending enough on defense and noted that "major deficiencies and major shortfalls" exist in the alliance's implementation of the Defense Capabilities Initiative. The program was created after NATO's successful 1999 air campaign in Kosovo to close the yawning gap in military capabilities between the United States and its NATO partners.

"The simple message from the defense ministers of NATO today," Robertson said, "is this: You can't get defense on the cheap."

Asked whether any NATO members had expressed concern about the United States' desire to expand its war on terrorism beyond Afghanistan, Robertson said the issue never came up, and he made it clear that NATO considers itself a partner in the global campaign.

Senior U.S. defense officials said that with 18,000 peacekeepers in Bosnia, 3,100 from the United States, Rumsfeld's proposed reduction could reduce the force by about 6,000 troops. If applied proportionately to all nations' forces, the officials estimated, about 1,000 Americans could go home -- or depart for more pressing overseas assignments.

There are 57,000 peacekeepers in Bosnia, the Serbian province of Kosovo and Macedonia, 8,800 of whom are Americans. A British proposal under consideration to create a unified command in the Balkans could bring about additional reductions, U.S. and NATO officials said.

On the issue of increased NATO cooperation with Russia, afinal communique issued by the defense ministers endorsed a proposal known as "NATO at 20" to "give new impetus and substance" to the nascent relationship. With NATO nations and Russia now meeting as a body called the Permanent Joint Council, the relationship encompasses, among others things, cooperation on counterterrorism and on peacekeeping in the Balkans, where Russian troops are among the NATO-led force.

Rumsfeld also endorsed greater "practical cooperation" between NATO and Russia. But he made it clear that the expanding relationship would have clear limits.

"Our goal should be to find concrete ways for NATO to work together with Russia where interests coincide," Rumsfeld said. "But at the same time, NATO membership must mean something. And NATO must protect its prerogatives of independent decision and action among the 19 signatories. . . . No country should be treated as a de facto member of the alliance, or given privileges that are otherwise denied to NATO aspirants."

The communique confirmed that the heads of state of NATO nations would begin the next round of NATO expansion in November 2002 in Prague, with nine nations applying for membership. One NATO source said that one to five nations could get in, with Slovakia and Slovenia considered front-runners. Other possibilities are the three Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

Rumsfeld, addressing his counterparts, said NATO's solidarity under Article V is the principle that will carry the alliance "into the new millennium."

"We are an alliance of democracies, and it is democracy that is under attack," he said. "The terrorists struck us because of what we represent: freedom, religious tolerance and justice."

----

Court Rejects Complaint Against NATO

DECEMBER 19, 06:37 ET
By PAUL AMES
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=EUROPE&STORYID=APIS7GG7NSG0

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) - The European Court of Human Rights on Wednesday refused to accept a complaint against NATO brought by a group of Yugoslavs whose relatives were killed in the 1999 allied bombing of Serbian television.

Judges at the court in Strasbourg, France, unanimously declared the case inadmissible because the action occurred outside its jurisdiction in Yugoslavia, which is not part of the 43-member Council of Europe.

The complaint was brought by six Yugoslavs. Five of them had family members who were among 16 people killed when NATO planes bombed television headquarters in Belgrade during the Kosovo conflict. The sixth was himself injured.

In a statement, the court said Yugoslavia ``clearly did not fall within this legal space.''

It added that the European Convention on Human Rights ``was not designed to be applied throughout the world, even in respect of the conduct of contracting states.''

The Yugoslavs lodged their complaint in October 1999 against the 17 European NATO member nations, who are all members of the Council of Europe and signatories of the Convention on Human Rights.

Their lawyers said the bombing of the TV station violated articles of the convention guaranteeing right to life, freedom of expression and right of an effective remedy for complaints.

NATO planes bombed the headquarters of Radio-Television Serbia early on April 23, 1999, one month into NATO's 78-day air campaign against Yugoslavia.

NATO's two non-European members - the United States and Canada - are not signatories to the human rights convention and therefore were not named in the case.

-------- pakistan

Hundreds of Qaeda Fighters Slip Into Pakistan

New York Times
December 19, 2001
By DOUGLAS FRANTZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/19/international/asia/19STAN.html

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Dec. 18 - Hundreds of Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters have slipped across the Afghan border and evaded the Pakistani Army to disappear into remote tribal areas, Western and Pakistani officials said today.

The officials said many fighters had crossed into Pakistan through frozen mountain passes and trails south of the Tora Bora region, avoiding the heaviest deployments of Pakistani troops.

Since the resistance of Al Qaeda fighters in Tora Bora began to crumble in recent days, the United States has been pressing, with mixed results, to seal possible escape routes for Osama bin Laden and other leaders of his terrorist group.

At the same time, the Bush administration is pressing for new intelligence from captured fighters that might help in the hunt for Mr. bin Laden and the broader war against terrorism.

Today, American marines took custody of 15 prisoners at a temporary prison camp at Kandahar International Airport. A team of eight F.B.I. agents went there to question the fighters on a number of subjects, most importantly whether any of them had knowledge of planned attacks against the United States or other countries, or the location of terrorist cells.

Al Qaeda fighters who have escaped appear to have blended in with Pashtuns whose tribal lands straddle the Afghan-Pakistani border and who have proved reluctant to alert the army, which is viewed with suspicion, Western and Pakistani officials said.

These officials have access to intelligence information and reports from Pakistani Army commanders in the tribal areas. They said the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and senior leaders of Al Qaeda remained a mystery.

The officials said no one could say for certain whether Mr. bin Laden had escaped through Pakistan or remained in Afghanistan.

Many Taliban leaders have also escaped, and large areas of Afghanistan remain lawless, subject to the control of local warlords. In an attempt to bring security to the country, Afghan and British officials agreed today on the size of the first contingent of an international force. They agreed that fewer than 100 British royal marines would be deployed before the new interim government takes office on Saturday.

The fact that the deployment is smaller than expected appears to be a victory for Northern Alliance hard- liners, who opposed a large foreign force. Ultimately, the force will grow to 2,000 to 4,000 soldiers.

American bombing paused today as the appropriate means to pursue Al Qaeda were assessed.

Asked if there had been a shift in the air strategy, Gen. Peter Pace, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, replied: "I would say it's a very natural transition from occupying territory that was previously held by the enemy to now having most of their territory under opposition control and now beginning to focus in on the pockets of enemy resistance and then determining what the best weapons system is. And sometimes the best weapons system is an individual with a rifle."

Although it was the first day since the first week of the war that American warplanes did not drop bombs, officials said scores of aircraft, including Navy F-14's and F-18's as well as Air Force B-52 and B-1 bombers, had been sent into the skies over Kandahar and Tora Bora, where they circled, awaiting calls from ground spotters of emergent targets. Those calls never came.

Italian Harriers from the carrier Garibaldi and French Super Étendard fighter jets from the carrier Charles de Gaulle flew missions with American aircraft in Afghanistan today for the first time. They did not drop bombs either, American officials said.

In northern Afghanistan, an American soldier assisting in clearing mines at Bagram Airport north of Kabul suffered serious but not life- threatening wounds to his leg and foot today when he stepped on a mine, Pentagon officials said. He was not identified.

Anti-Taliban commanders in the Tora Bora region said 500 to 1,000 Al Qaeda and Afghan Taliban soldiers had disappeared, while officials in Islamabad said Pakistan had detained fewer than 100 Al Qaeda members.

Part of the discrepancy may come from the possibility that Pakistanis are releasing Afghan and Pakistani fighters and holding only foreigners. But officials said they were having other troubles, too.

"The Pakistan Army is having problems arresting everyone," one Pakistani official said, "because once they get into the tribal area, it is difficult to identify them without someone pointing them out.

"Most Pashtuns are reluctant to snitch on them, and officials do not report individual cases as long as these are not detectable by the Americans or senior officials sent from Islamabad."

The flight of Al Qaeda members and other Taliban troops from the caves in the snow-capped mountains that mark the border puts Pakistan's military government in a tough spot.

On one hand, it has strongly backed the American-led coalition, providing access to its airspace and military bases and cutting off formal relations with the Taliban before its collapse. Last week, for the first time, Pakistan deployed a significant number of armed troops, estimated at 4,000, in the autonomous tribal regions to block potential exits for those fleeing the American bombing.

At the same time, the government recognizes that cracking down too hard on Taliban fighters, particularly Afghans, could stir trouble among Pakistanis who remain sympathetic to the Taliban or feel that the American bombing has gone far enough.

Complicating domestic concerns is the pro-Taliban attitude that persists within elements of Pakistan's military and its intelligence agency, something that the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has pledged to wipe out.

James F. Dobbins, the American special envoy to Afghanistan, said in Islamabad today that it was impossible to prevent some members of Al Qaeda from escaping over the wild border into Pakistan. He did not estimate how many might have escaped.

Mr. Dobbins spoke after meeting with Pakistani officials here. He said they had assured him that reinforced patrols were trying to intercept anyone escaping from the Tora Bora region. "Pakistani officials reaffirmed their commitments to us as regards the strict border controls," said Mr. Dobbins, who arrived in the Pakistani capital after reopening the United States Embassy building in Kabul on Monday.

"It's a mountain range, so I think the passes are sealed," Mr. Dobbins said. "I don't think it's possible to prevent individuals from crossing the border. I think it is possible, once they have done so, to apprehend them over time and to ensure they are dealt with appropriately."

Since the besieged Al Qaeda fighters were surrounded by hostile anti- Taliban Afghan forces and American and British troops, escaping the rugged mountains and heavy woods toward Pakistan was the only route left for them.

A senior Pakistani official said regular troops, paramilitary forces and some tribal militias were keeping a 24-hour vigil along the border with Afghanistan. He said they were using helicopters as well as donkeys and mules to try to plug exit points.

Soldiers are stationed near checkpoints along the main roads and have also established remote camps to keep an eye on the paths used routinely by smugglers, according to reports from travelers.

The Pakistanis have concentrated on trying to seal the most likely exits opposite Tora Bora by concentrating troops and surveillance along a 25- mile stretch.

But the 1,500-mile border, rugged landscape and reluctance of some tribe members to cooperate have made it impossible to stop everyone, the Western and Pakistani officials said.

Officials said many fighters were believed to have made the arduous journey farther south to areas that were not as well monitored by helicopters and troops. If they can make it out of the most heavily patrolled region, there are many opportunities to slip unnoticed into Pakistan.

People who came across the border at Chaman in southwestern Pakistan in recent days said there were no checks of Afghans or Pakistanis entering the country and only cursory examinations of the papers of foreigners.

-------- somolia

Senior German Official Says U.S. to Target Somalia in War on Terror

December 19, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-NATO-Somalia.html

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- The United States has decided to take its fight against Osama bin Laden's terror network to Somalia, a senior German official said early Wednesday.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there was no longer a question of whether to go after al-Qaida terrorists in the east African nation, but only when and how.

At NATO headquarters in Brussels, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said: ``We are not going to speculate on any next operation.''

When pressed, he added: ``Countries that harbor terrorists worry us. Somalia is one potential country, but there are others as well.''

At Tuesday's meeting of NATO defense ministers, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld mentioned Yemen and Sudan as countries suspected of supporting terrorism.

And in Yemen that day, Yemeni forces trained and equipped with U.S. funds engaged armed tribesmen in a bid to capture suspected al-Qaida members, government officials and tribal sources said.

Tanks, helicopters and artillery pounded mountain villages and hillsides in what appeared to be the most serious military operation yet in an Arab country in search of suspects allegedly connected to al-Qaida, blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.

Earlier this month, nine people identified by aid workers and a regional security official as Americans visited a town in western Somalia, where they met with local faction leaders and Ethiopian military officers.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Americans met with leaders of the Rahanwein Resistance Army, a clan-based faction opposed to Somalia's fledgling transitional government and with Mohamed Saeed Hirsi, the leader of an Ethiopian-backed faction also opposed to the government.

U.S. officials have said the United States is concerned Somalia's lack of central authority makes it an attractive base for terrorists.

Iraq also has been identified by President Bush and other senior administration officials as a potential U.S. target.

At various times, Somalia has been mentioned, along with the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Tajikstan and Uzbekistan, by Bush administration officials as countries with terrorism problems.

Several African countries called on the United States to avoid military action in Somalia and cooperate with the transitional government, which has expressed readiness to ``get rid of any terrorist camps if it was proved they existed on Somali lands.''

Their joint statement, issued in Cairo by the Sudanese Embassy, was from the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development, a grouping of east African nations, and the 15-nation Group of Sahel and Sahara States.

-------- spies

Russia reports spying by Iraq, North Korea

World Scene
Washington Times
December 19, 2001
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011219-78659772.htm

MOSCOW - Some of the countries Moscow has avidly courted, including Iran, Iraq and North Korea, have conducted spy operations in Russia or tried to start them up in the past year, the head of the KGB's main successor agency said yesterday.

But Nikolai Patrushev, director of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, made no mention of U.S. spy activity during a meeting with editors.

According to news reports, 10 foreigners were caught in the act of spying in Russia this year.

---

Official: US Still Spies on Russia

DECEMBER 19, 07:41 ET
By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/main.html?FRONTID=EUROPE&STORYID=APIS7GG8M080

MOSCOW (AP) - Despite the warming of Russia's relations with the West, U.S. and other Western intelligence services are still keen to steal Russia's military secrets, a senior Russian counterintelligence official said in an interview published Wednesday.

``If leaders of other countries shake hands with (Russian President) Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, that doesn't mean that intelligence services have laid down their weapons,'' said Gen. Valery Falunin, who is in charge of the military counterintelligence in the Moscow region. ``They are working, and working quite actively.''

Asked by the daily Moskovsky Komsomolets who are his service's top adversaries, Falunin said: ``The traditional set: the secret services of the United States and other NATO member states, plus neighboring countries.''

Falunin's interview contrasted with the statements of his patron, Nikolai Patrushev, the chief of the Federal Security Service, the main successor of the KGB, which includes military counterintelligence.

Speaking at a meeting with Russian media editors Tuesday, Patrushev made no mention of U.S. spy activities - a significant omission apparently reflecting the improved relationship with Washington.

Patrushev only mentioned the U.S. security services in the positive context - pointing at increased cooperation of Russian intelligence ``first of all with the American CIA and FBI'' in the effort to hunt down terrorists.

But Falunin focused mostly on alleged U.S. espionage efforts. He referred to one case that he described as an attempt by U.S. military intelligence to obtain documents relating to state-of-the-art Russian military hardware.

``The Americans were acting in an extremely blatant way, practically in the open,'' Falunin said. ``They apparently believed that military counterintelligence was paralyzed and were quite surprised when they saw it wasn't.''

In connection with the case, a Russian court last month sentenced a Russian citizen to 15 years in prison for espionage. The convict was identified only by his last name, Kalugin. Two other Russian citizens, identified only as the Ivanov brothers, were sentenced to 1 1/2 -year sentences for divulging state secrets.

----

Czechs want U.S. radio moved

World Scene
Washington Times
December 19, 2001
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011219-78659772.htm

PRAGUE - The Czech government may ask a U.S.-backed radio station that beams news to countries across Central Asia and the Middle East to move out of Prague's city center to a safer location, Prime Minister Milos Zeman said yesterday.

The Czechs fear the glass-plated downtown headquarters of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty may become a target of a bomb attack. Last month, the chief of the Czech secret service BIS said the station "was at the center of interest of the Iraqi intelligence services."

----

Taliban, Pakistan linked, general says

December 19, 2001
By Richard S. Ehrlich
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011219-68214968.htm

KABUL, Afghanistan - Northern Alliance forces moving into Interior Ministry offices here last month found eight direct phone links to Islamabad, proving close ties between the Taliban and Pakistan's military intelligence service, a senior official said.

Gen. Niamaullah Jalili, the head of Afghanistan's Secret Intelligence Service, also said in an interview that with the defeat of the Taliban, he feels the greatest threat to Afghanistan's new order comes from hostile countries such as Pakistan.

Gen. Jalili, 43, spoke in his barren office within the Interior Ministry, which is protected by troops armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

Beneath a bare light bulb, the general sat behind a desk adorned with simple office supplies, next to empty shelves. New sofas and coffee tables provided the only comfort in otherwise stripped-down surroundings.

On moving into the building, Gen. Jalili said, he was surprised to discover "eight telephone lines from this Interior Ministry are linked directly to Pakistan, as local phone call lines, not long distance."

This proved the Taliban closely cooperated with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), he insisted, emphasizing: "I'm sure."

"Afghanistan is in danger from one thing, sabotage by foreign countries, those countries which are our enemies such as Pakistan," Gen. Jalili added. "We have to be very careful to protect Afghanistan against them."

After the Taliban fled Kabul on Nov. 13, Gen. Jalili scrutinized evidence left at various al Qaeda houses and training camps in Kabul, but was disappointed.

"We found rockets and bullets and military equipment but not much else. Routine documents," he said.

Gen. Jalili said he believes Osama bin Laden hid out at least until last week in the al Qaeda cave complex at Tora Bora, which was overrun by anti-Taliban tribal fighters in the past few days.

As for the Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, Gen. Jalili said: "I think he is already in Quetta, Pakistan.

"The Pakistanis and Mullah Omar have the same aim, the same strategy. The [Pakistani government] people who brought him here have taken him back."

Looking ahead, the general's greatest concern is how to replace needed equipment that was stolen or destroyed by fleeing Taliban bureaucrats.

"They even damaged this telephone, it is not working," he said in frustration after picking up his desk phone's receiver, waving it and plunking it down again.

"When the Taliban were ruling the country, this [office] was also used as the intelligence service of the Taliban. I was not here and the Taliban looted everything from this department.

"We hope for America's support. I want America to equip us with all sorts of devices."

Gen. Jalili said he has been hunting bin Laden and his followers in the al Qaeda network since before the Taliban fought its way to power in 1996.

"In the [1992-96] mujahideen government of President Burhanuddin Rabbani, I had the duty of finding out all the things about the terrorist network in Afghanistan," he said. "I was also working for the intelligence service then and had to deal with all the foreign terrorists, especially Osama.

"I had documents on the 21 people who were the first people in al Qaeda. The majority of those 21 people were from Egypt, including the brother of [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat's assassin."

Among bin Laden's Egyptian colleagues is Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the No. 2 man in al Qaeda whom many believe to be the planner of many of the group's attacks.

----

French agents to identify fighters

December 19, 2001
By Elizabeth Bryant
United Press International
http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/19122001-052724-6506r.htm

PARIS, Dec. 19 (UPI) -- French counterintelligence agents will be dispatched to Pakistan to verify the identities of possible French fighters for the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al Quaida network, Le Figaro newspaper reported Wednesday.

Of immediate interest is an alleged French-Algerian fighter, recovering from his wounds at a hospital in Peshawar, Pakistan. French media identified him this weekend as Abdur Rahman, 21, but it now appears that is a nom de guerre.

The French Embassy in Pakistan told Le Figaro Tuesday it had "activated" the inquiry into Rahman's nationality.

But in Paris, a French foreign ministry spokesman told reporters Tuesday that French officials had still not verified the fighter's identity.

"Today, his French nationality is not established," the spokesman said. "His name isunknown by our services."

So far, an Australian, David Hicks, and an American, John Walker, have been both found among Taliban fighters.

The number of Western fighters may soon increase, however, with Tuesday's arrival of eight American agents to Kandahar, Afghanistan, to interview prisoners.

Rahman is the first Taliban fighter to claim French nationality, the foreign ministry

spokesman said. The spokesman also said it was impossible to confirm Rahman's reported claim -- carried in a French newspaper Sunday -- that another 80 to 100 French had fought alongside bin Laden's forces.

"We have estimations concerning French Muslims who are or were in Pakistan -- several hundred -- but we don't have figures for Afghanistan, or for al Quaida fighters," the Foreign Ministry official said.

According to Le Figaro, French antiterrorist agents believe between 300 to 500 French Islamists left for Koranic schools in Pakistan in recent years. For many, the first stop was Britain, the Balkans or Algeria, where they honed their radical Islamist beliefs.

That was apparently the case of Rahman. The last European address of the alleged French al Quaida fighter was Britain, the French Embassy in Pakistan told Le Figaro.

-------- un

War on terrorism, Afghan post straining U.N.'s annual budget

By Betsy Pisik
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 19, 2001
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011219-7340228.htm

NEW YORK - Budget experts at the United Nations are negotiating deep into the night this week in an effort to shoehorn into an existing budget millions of dollars in unexpected expenses to fight terrorism and establish a new office for Afghanistan.

The United States, Russia and many European governments with large U.N. assessments are insisting that the international organization meet these new demands without raising its overall budget, meaning that all new programs will have to be offset with cuts elsewhere.

"We're interested in holding the budget line, reviewing certain ongoing operations to see if there aren't economies of scale in other things," said Patrick Kennedy, the U.S. official in charge of U.N. management and budget issues. "Negotiations are going very slowly."

To make matters even more difficult, U.N. financial analysts are, for the first time in years, grappling with steadily rising inflation and the erosion of the U.S. dollar, which could cost the organization an extra $75 million a year or more.

"The reason [the budget] is going up is inflation and the exchange rate - not because of any more people being added, trips being taken, or anything else," said Joseph Connor, the U.N. undersecretary general for administration and management, in an interview with The Washington Times.

Budget and management experts from most of the organization's 189-member nations have been meeting as many as three times a day to negotiate a U.N. operating budget for 2002-03.

Many developing nations, who fear the squeezing of programs they depend on, advocate an increase in the organization's roughly $1.3 billion annual budget. They repeat U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's comment that the Washington-imposed zero-growth budget has become "a starvation diet" that cannot be sustained much longer.

"This is ridiculous," said one East Asian envoy. "If you are going to add demands, you have to pay for them. We all will pay for them."

Delegates cannot break for Christmas until the budget is resolved: Just before New Year's, the organization sends bills to governments for their share of expenses.

The 15 peacekeeping missions and two genocide tribunals are funded separately.

The budget negotiations - which were to have concluded last week - are unexpectedly complex this year because of two late additions to the mix. Diplomats say it is too soon to know how much the new offices for counterterrorism and Afghanistan will cost.

The Security Council last month passed a binding resolution demanding all U.N. member states comply with far-reaching obligations to open up secret banking systems, share intelligence and cooperate on police work. That committee could cost about $3 million a year, according to Washington's estimations.

"We have to provide backup, we know that," Mr. Connor said, noting that is too early to know exactly how such a committee would be organized and how much it would cost to run.

The same is true of the political office for Afghanistan, which has yet to be established. The $93 million allotted for political missions - including human-rights observers in Guatemala and two dozen U.N. special envoys to conflicts around the world - will have to be stretched to fund the Afghanistan office.

--------

UN Report Sets Criteria for Military Intervention

December 19, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-un-intervention.html

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Confronting one of the most controversial issues at the United Nations, a Canadian- sponsored study said military intervention was justified to prevent genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass killings, forced expulsion and widespread terrorizing of civilians.

After a year-long study and roundtables with political leaders, the report, however, cautioned that armed intervention should be a last resort to avert massive human suffering when a government could not or was unwilling to protect its citizens.

``There must be no more Rwandas, no more occasions when the international community does nothing in the face of large-scale human killing, ethnic cleansing, misery, distress,'' said Gareth Evans, a former Australian foreign minister and co-chair of the commission that produced the report.

The study, ``The Responsibility to Protect,'' released on Tuesday, was sponsored by the Canadian government, which contributed $1 million to the $2.5 million project. The Carnegie Corp., the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation as well as other governments donated funds.

The issue sparked an impassioned debate in 1999 when U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan opened the General Assembly with a warning that national sovereignty had its limits in face of flagrant human rights violations. He made the same point the center of his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on Dec. 9.

Both Evans and Algerian Mohammed Sahnoun, the other co-chair of the commission and a U.N. adviser on Africa, told a U.N. press conference that the 15-member U.N. Security Council had to authorize any such intervention. If it were unable, then the General Assembly should step in.

ETHNIC CLEANSING

``The very term 'international community' will become irrelevant unless the community of states can act when large groups of peoples are being massacred or subject to ethnic cleansing,'' Sahnoun said.

But the report acknowledged that intervention would not work against a major power, especially the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China, who have veto power on the Security Council.

``To intervene against a major power would also certainly trigger a catastrophic conflagration, which would in most circumstances be even worse than the particular situation that you are intervening to deal with,'' Evans said.

The report mainly analyzed the 1990s when Western governments and the United Nations were criticized for not responding forcefully to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda or the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica, Bosnia. At the same time, NATO was subjected to criticism for its 1999 bombing campaign against Yugoslavia to stop persecution of Albanians in Kosovo.

``I think there is a recognition that the 1990s were not exactly a triumphant a decade when it came to getting this issue of intervention right,'' Evans said.

``Either we didn't do it at all as we should have, as in Rwanda, or we did it in a half-baked and inappropriately useless fashion in Somalia and Bosnia,'' he said.

The report deliberately excluded the U.S. intervention of Afghanistan as well as the current crisis between Israel and Palestinians as not fitting its criteria of humanitarian intervention to protect civilians within the boundaries of a single sovereign state.

-------- us

Afghan War Shows Air Power's Ability

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 19, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Afghan-Air-Power.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1996-2001Dec19?language=printer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In their thundering attacks on Afghanistan's cities and caves, U.S. warplanes demonstrated how much air power can do and how much it has improved as a weapon of war.

In the Persian Gulf War, it was unheard of for an unmanned plane to pound targets with missiles, or for a wide variety of bombs with satellite-guided tails to steer themselves, as has been done in Afghanistan. Even since the successful 1999 NATO bombing campaign over Kosovo, the military has refined its bombing capabilities.

The result: ``By any historical standard, we've been able to restrict the scope of violence to the people who have it coming to them, in an extraordinary way,'' said Eliot Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies who directed the Air Force's study of air power in the Gulf War.

Now, as the war in Afghanistan moves into a phase likely to feature less U.S. air power, military experts point to two key factors in the success of the bombing campaign:

--Smarter smart bombs: Precision-guided weapons have gotten more precise and flexible, and become more prevalent throughout the military.

--Better targeting information: Thanks to advances in communication technology, pilots have more timely and accurate data, which shortens the time between locating a target and smacking it.

``Increasingly, we can see it and increasingly, we can kill it,'' said Dan Kuehl, a professor at the National Defense University.

The air campaign has not been without its risks, however, as demonstrated by the deaths of three Green Berets killed by an errant U.S. bomb earlier this month and scattered reports of civilian casualties. Experts on air power also caution that Afghanistan's primitive air defenses did not expose U.S. warplanes to the risk they would face in many parts of the world.

``The biggest danger is in terms of learning the wrong lessons, to assume that other countries will be this poorly defended,'' said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. ``You wouldn't want to fly most of our aircraft over a well-defended country.''

Still, the Afghan campaign has demonstrated how U.S. air forces, whether land- or sea-based, have become the leading edge of American military power.

``It's consistent with the American way of war,'' said Air Force Historian Richard P. Hallion. ``Always emphasize firepower dominance and engage a foe at a distance.''

The proliferation of precision-guided weapons helps do just that. Such weapons were the exception during the Gulf War, making up maybe 10 percent of munitions. In Kosovo, the majority of U.S. bombs were laser-guided, which can run into trouble in bad weather. In Afghanistan, the bombs are mainly all-weather and satellite-guided.

To trace the progress of American air capability, Thompson offers some historical contrasts: At the end of World War II, it took more than 800 flights by the Army Air Force to damage a particular Japanese aircraft engine plant. In the Gulf War, it often took many flights to destroy one target. In Afghanistan, an average carrier-based aircraft is hitting three or four targets per flight, and a bomber can hit as many as a dozen on one mission.

``Air power has enabled us not only to win quickly, but to do it humanely,'' Thompson said. ``We get the war over quickly and, generally speaking, we don't hit civilians.''

The big star of the Afghan effort is the JDAM -- Joint Direct Attack Munition -- a $20,000 kit that transforms an unguided, or ``dumb,'' bomb with a 1,000- or 2,000-pound warhead into a ``smart'' weapon that uses the satellite-linked global positioning system to guide itself to its target.

It was developed after the Gulf War showed the need for precision weapons that would not be affected by clouds or adverse weather, and made a limited debut in Kosovo. In Afghanistan, it is one of the military's most-used weapons.

``The JDAMs are less accurate than laser-guided bombs but a heck of a lot cheaper and they can be dropped by a wider range of aircraft,'' said John Pike, a military analyst at GlobalSecurity.org.

Equally important to the success of the air war have been improvements in targeting information. The same technological advances that make a Palm Pilot or a Blackberry pager work are at play in what military planners call ``networkcentric warfare.''

Some of that information is being relayed by unmanned aircraft controlled by someone at a computer on the ground. And for the first time in Afghanistan, the Predator unmanned aircraft are not just relaying information to warplanes; some have been firing Hellfire anti-tank missiles.

The advances in communication in the Afghan war also have a human component -- U.S. special forces on the ground have been a big help in relaying precise targeting information to pilots above.

Analysts caution, however, against the inclination by some to overplay the dominance of air power to the exclusion of other kinds of force.

As Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this week: ``Sometimes the best weapon system is an individual with a rifle; other times the best weapon is a plane with a bomb on it.''

----

Air Power Glance

The Associated Press
Wednesday, December 19, 2001; 3:50 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1743-2001Dec19?language=printer

A few stars of the Afghan air war:

-Joint Direct Attack Munition: JDAM kits turn conventional bombs into satellite-guided warheads that can be fired from 15 miles away and are accurate to within 30 feet. They are all-weather bombs, thanks to a global positioning system in the tail that is unaffected by clouds or other adverse conditions. They have been one of the most-used weapons in Afghanistan and cost about $25,000 apiece.

-Predators: These unmanned aircraft can fly over dangerous areas and transmit video and infrared and radar information to controllers on the ground. For the first time, some in Afghanistan have been outfitted with missiles that have been fired at al-Qaida and Taliban targets. A Predator system, complete with a ground control station and four aircraft, costs about $25 million.

-AC-130 gunships: Slow-moving but deadly, the AC-130 gunship offers pinpoint accuracy and a powerful psychological impact. The lumbering aircraft, costing up to $190 million depending on the version, can loiter at low altitude over a target and unload withering fire from side-mounted guns. The latest AC-130s have radar to detect targets at long range, as well as satellite-guided navigation systems.


-------- POLICE / PRISONERS

NATION IN BRIEF

Wednesday, December 19, 2001; Page A14
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62970-2001Dec18?language=printer

• MIAMI -- Three Secret Service agents pleaded guilty to stealing $1,300 seized from ATM thieves, covering up the crimes and lying to prosecutors. James Smith, Luis Flores and Manuel Flores -- who is not related to Luis Flores -- worked for the arm of the Secret Service that handles credit card fraud.

• DECATUR, Ga. -- DeKalb County Sheriff Sidney Dorsey began planning to kill his successor days after losing to him in an election, making sure he had an alibi and promising four hit men cushy jobs in his department as a reward, former deputy Patrick Cuffy testified.

----

Next: An ID Chip Planted in Your Body?

By Robert O'Harrow Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 19, 2001; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62663-2001Dec18?language=printer

A New Jersey surgeon has embedded under his skin tiny computer chips that can automatically transmit personal information to a scanner, a technology that his employer hopes will someday be widely used as a way to identify people.

One bioethicist called the procedure the stuff of science fiction. The chip, developed by Applied Digital Solutions of Palm Beach, Fla., is similar to that implanted in more than a million dogs, cats and other pets in recent years to track and identify them.

The new chip measures slightly smaller than a Tic Tac mint and has a miniature antenna that emits signals containing about two paragraphs worth of data when scanned by a handheld reader.

The device must undergo clinical trials and be approved by the Food and Drug Administration before it can be marketed, first to patients with other implanted medical devices, such as pacemakers.

The surgeon, who said he implanted the device in his hip and one arm in September, asked not to be named because he worries about the attention his initiative will draw. He said he decided to test the chip himself after seeing rescuers at the World Trade Center disaster site write their names and Social Security numbers on their arms so they could be identified in case they were injured or killed at the site.

Applied Digital has high hopes for the technology, in part because it is struggling financially and recently fell behind on loans from one of its major creditors. Its stock, which trades on the Nasdaq Stock Market, was as high as $3 in the past year. It closed at 38 cents yesterday.

Company officials said they hope to sell the device to patients with pacemakers, artificial hips and other implanted devices. The idea is that the chip will provide prompt and accurate medical information in the event of an emergency, they said.

The signal can contain a name, telephone number and other information. Or it can send out a code that, when linked to a database, can call up records. The scanner can read it through clothes from up to four feet away, company officials said.

Applied Digital executives said its new product also could serve as a tamper-proof form of identification. Corrections authorities have expressed interest in using the chips to better identify prisoners and parolees, officials said.

Airlines, nuclear power plants and other sensitive facilities may want to use the chips for employees, they said. Some parents may consider embedding chips in young children or elderly relatives who may not be able to say their names, addresses or telephone numbers.

"It depends on the spirit of the marketplace and the demand," said Keith Bolton, the company's vice president and chief technology officer, adding that use of the chip should be voluntary unless the law allows otherwise. "We're ready to begin."

Some medical and technology specialists said the device raises new questions about the nexus of humans and computer technology. And it could pose ethical or privacy dilemmas if implanted against someone's wishes, or if it exposes personal information to prying eyes.

Thomas Murray, president of the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute in New York, said the chip "evokes images of science fiction."

"We need to consider carefully the broader implications," Murray said. "Alongside the possible benefits, it has the potential to be misused by forces who do not have your interests at heart."

Although the system has been in development for a couple of years, company officials said they were uneasy about implanting the chips in people until recently, fearing there might be a backlash from civil libertarians and others.

On Sept. 16, the doctor, using a local anesthetic, used a syringe-like device to insert the chips under the skin of his forearm. He followed the same procedure to implant the chip on his hip.

The chip is coated with a substance that encourages the body to hold it in place, he said. After just over two weeks, all signs of the procedure were gone. "After that, it was like nothing had happened," the physician said. "I felt it was important enough to do, that I took responsibility myself."

Airports are beginning to use similar micro-devices to improve security by tagging bags with more detailed instructions about how they're to be handled and screened. Automakers are installing the chips in keys to deter auto theft. Libraries are beginning to use the technology to track books.

Three years ago, a British cybernetics researcher had a chip temporarily implanted to allow a computer to track his movements in a university building.

"The computer has jumped off our desktops and it is insinuating itself into every corner of our lives. Now it's finding its way into our bodies," said Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif. "This stuff is going to happen. These guys are the start."

Staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report.

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Riots break out again

December 18, 2001
UPI
http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/18122001-113813-8382r.htm

CANBERRA, Australia, Dec. 18 -- Police used water cannons and fired tear gas early Wednesday to retake control of the Woomera detention camp for illegal immigrants. Officials said at least five buildings and a perimeter fence were damaged in the second night of rioting by detainees demanding visas.

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15 Security Force Members Arrested

DECEMBER 19, 06:30 ET
By STEVE WEIZMAN
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=MIDEAST&STORYID=APIS7GG99Q00

JERUSALEM (AP) - The Palestinian Authority said Wednesday that it has arrested 15 security force members - the first time in nearly 16 months of conflict that Palestinian policemen were taken into custody on suspicion they participated in attacks on Israelis.

Israel's armed forces chief, Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz, said that of 242 people killed on the Israeli side since September 2000, at least 80 were killed by members of the Palestinian security forces.

As part of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's enforcement of a truce with Israel, Palestinian police also closed six offices of the Islamic militant group Hamas in the Gaza Strip late Tuesday. The offices were centers for youth, political and social activities. Hamas has carried out dozens of attacks, including suicide bombings, in Israel in recent years.

A Palestinian security chief in Gaza, Mohammed Dahlan, said the Palestinian Authority would not tolerate independent action by the militants. ``We will arrest anyone who violates Authority decisions,'' he told The Associated Press.

The arrests followed a weekend speech by Arafat in which he called for an end to attacks against Israel, including suicide bomb attacks, referring to them as ``terrorist activity'' for the first time.

Israel has been skeptical, saying Arafat was not making enough of an effort. Last week, Israel's Cabinet cut ties with Arafat and declared him ``irrelevant'' to its fight against terror attacks.

Israel's suspicions of Arafat's intentions were fanned again by remarks the Palestinian leader delivered in a meeting with a delegation of Palestinian residents of Jerusalem on Tuesday, at his headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

Arafat quoted the Prophet Muhammad as saying, ``one martyr in Jerusalem is worth 70 martyrs elsewhere,'' according to Israeli Arab member of parliament Ahmed Tibi, who was at the event.

Tibi said Arafat was trying to underscore the sanctity of Jerusalem.

Israeli security sources, meanwhile, reported a dramatic drop in Palestinian attacks, and the Israeli military noted only three relatively minor incidents overnight, including shooting on an Israeli army post in Gaza in which no one was hurt.

Secretary of State Colin Powell called Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Tuesday, and urged both leaders to resume security talks.

In his conversation with Arafat, Powell noted ``some positive actions from the Palestinian side,'' said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher. But Powell also told the Palestinian leader ``those actions need to becompleted, they need to be made effective, there needs to be more actions to make an effective end to the violence,'' Boucher said.

Sharon told Powell that Arafat is still ``giving the green light for terrorism,'' according to a statement from Sharon's office.

Arafat's truce call is backed only by a minority of Palestinians, according to a poll published Tuesday by the independent Jerusalem Media and Communications Center. The survey indicated that 57.6 percent of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza feel a ``cease-fire is unjustified in the current circumstances.''

Only 34.9 percent felt a truce was justified, and 7.5 percent had no opinion. Also, 64 percent backed suicide bomb attacks against Israelis.

The poll questioned 1,201 Palestinians in person and quoted a margin of error of three percentage points. It was conducted between Dec. 6-9.

A Hamas statement rejecting the cease-fire call said suicide bombings are ``the only weapon to preserve Palestinian rights.'' The Popular Front, which claimed responsibility for assassinating Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi on Oct. 17, retaliation for Israel's killing of PFLP leader Mustafa Zibri, said armed resistance would go on as long as Israeli occupation continued.

-------- death penalty

Abu-Jamal Death Sentence Thrown Out

By MICHAEL RUBINKAM
Associated Press Writer
DECEMBER 19, 05:22 ET
http://wire.ap.org/?FRONTID=NATIONAL&SLUG=MUMIA%2dABU%2dJAMAL

PHILADELPHIA (AP) - In a ruling that drew outcry from both sides, a judge overturned former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal's death sentence but failed to grant a new trial on charges he killed a Philadelphia police officer two decades ago.

Supporters reacted by saying Abu-Jamal is a victim of a corrupt judicial system and should be set free, while opponents maintained that he is an unrepentant cop-killer who deserves to die.

Abu-Jamal has been on death row for nearly 20 years for the 1981 murder of Officer Daniel Faulkner. His writings on the justice system have attracted supporters around the world, and his effort to win a new trial became a rallying point for death penalty opponents. Police groups and others convinced of his guilt say he should be executed.

Maureen Faulkner, widow of the slain officer, called U.S. District Judge William Yohn ``sick and twisted'' for issuing his decision Tuesday - only a week before Christmas and a little more than a week after the 20-year anniversary of the killing. ``It's sad (Yohn) cannot look at this trial and realize that Mumia Abu-Jamal received a fair trial, and was in control of his own destiny,'' Faulkner said. ``Instead, he wants to play the middle road and try to appease both sides and it doesn't work.''

Yohn ordered a new sentencing hearing but refused to grant a new trial and rejected all of Abu-Jamal's other claims. He gave the state six months to either conduct the new hearing or sentence Abu-Jamal to life in prison.

Abu-Jamal's supporters said they are relieved the death sentence was lifted, but they still called for a new trial, claiming Abu-Jamal was victimized by a racist justice system.

``The only way it would be a good ruling is if the judge was honest and fair and released Mumia,'' said Pam Africa, leader of the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal. ``He's got enough factual evidence to release Mumia.''

District Attorney Lynne Abraham said she will appeal. Abu-Jamal ``has always been a remorseless, cold-blooded killer,'' she said. ``We believe that the judge's decision is legally flawed.''

Both sides marked the 20th anniversary of the shooting on Dec. 9. Faulkner's supporters dedicated a plaque on the spot where he was gunned down and Abu-Jamal's supporters held a mass rally at City Hall. Abu-Jamal, 47, also was recently made an honorary citizen of Paris.

Abu-Jamal, a cab driver and sometime radio reporter, was convicted of shooting Faulkner, 25, after the white officer pulled over Abu-Jamal's brother. Prosecutors said Abu-Jamal was in his taxi across the street, saw the officer scuffling with his brother and ran toward the scene, shooting Faulkner first in the back and then in the face. Abu-Jamal has said he was shot by police as he ran to the scene and then beaten.

Faulkner was shot several times, and police found Abu-Jamal wounded by a round from Faulkner's gun. Police also found a .38-caliber revolver registered to Abu-Jamal at the scene with five spent shell casings.

Defense attorneys say the bullet that killed Faulkner cannot be positively traced to the gun.

Yohn's ruling had to do with how the jury was told to weigh mitigating and aggravating circumstances in deciding whether to impose the death penalty.

The jury said it had found one aggravating circumstance (the victim was a police officer) and one mitigating factor (Abu-Jamal's lack of a significant criminal record). In death-penalty cases, each juror is supposed to weigh aggravating factors against mitigating ones to decide if the defendant should be sentenced to death.

Yohn said the jurors should have been able to consider mitigating circumstances even if they did not unanimously agree that such circumstances existed. He said the jury instructions ran counter to a 1988 U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

``I think what we have is a ruling that is fairly consistent with a number of other decisions this year,'' said Larry Frankel, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Philadelphia. ``What we have is a fairly common error, and it reinforces our concerns about the fairness of the process in the state court system of Pennsylvania.''

Abu-Jamal exhausted his state appeals two years ago, but a petition filed in September argued that the defense had new evidence to clear him, including a confession from a man named Arnold Beverly. In a 1999 affidavit, Beverly claimed he was hired by the mob to kill Faulkner because the officer had interfered with mob payoffs to police.

Abu-Jamal's former lawyers, Dan Williams and civil rights attorney Leonard Weinglass, said they thought the confession was not credible, and Yohn refused to order Beverly to testify on Abu-Jamal's behalf.

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FBI Team to Question Detainees
Marines Take Custody of Captives at Camp in Kandahar

By Carol Morello
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 19, 2001; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62588-2001Dec18?language=printer

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Dec. 18 -- U.S. Marines took custody of 15 battlefield prisoners held by Afghan fighters tonight as a team of FBI agents arrived in the country to interrogate detainees, seek informants and offer rewards for information that could thwart future attacks against American interests.

The detainees arrived in the crisp night air at about 10:30, just hours after an eight-man team of FBI agents flew to the site of a newly constructed detention camp beside the airport that was seized by Marines on Friday. Marines have been told that hundreds more detainees might be on the way. It was not known precisely where the detainees were being brought from, but several hundred fighters were captured last month by Northern Alliance forces after a battle in the north.

"We're trying to ascertain if they have any information about any planned future attacks against Americans or American facilities," said Thomas C. Knowles, head of the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Unit. Knowles leads a team that includes members he described as Osama bin Laden case agents from New York and Washington. "Our second objective is to collect any information available on past attacks on Americans."

In addition to leads about the Sept. 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, the agents will seek information on the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, Knowles said.

Knowles said the FBI, which will be using military interpreters, has "certain tools" to entice al Qaeda loyalists to become informants. Asked if cash were a tool, he answered, "Yeah."

"There are several things our system has to offer," he added, speaking beside a dry courtyard pool surrounded by windows with broken panes in the Kandahar airport terminal. "The way they live here, and the way they could live if they had money. And if they're important enough, an offer to live in the United States."

Such an offer would not be made lightly, he said. The FBI agents flew to Afghanistan to interview detainees, instead of flying them to the United States for questioning, so there would be no asylum issues for hundreds of men who fought with the Taliban or bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

"You have to do it very carefully," Knowles said. "Just because someone rolls over to talk to you, do you want to bring him to the U.S.? I don't think so."

This is the first time since the 1940s, when FBI agents went to South America looking for Nazis, that the bureau has gone to a foreign country to investigate "while the bombs are still falling," said Knowles. A 17-year veteran of the FBI who once headed the legal attache program that places FBI agents in 44 embassies around the world, he sounded confident his team could learn something valuable here.

"The mobsters, the cartels," he said. "There are always people in an organization that will talk."

The prisoners are not considered prisoners of war. FBI rules on interviews are not as strict for detainees as they are for POWs, Knowles said.

If any have been indicted in the United States, however, the agents will be required to read them their Miranda rights and take them to the United States for trial.

The FBI has also sent two agents to Qatar. Newsweek reported that they are there to read Miranda rights to captured fighter John Walker, who is being held on the USS Peleliu. The FBI declined to comment on the report. Walker's family issued a statement today complaining that U.S. authorities had not delivered a letter to him that they sent two weeks ago.

Despite any legal restrictions, Knowles called the opportunity to question dozens, if not hundreds, of al Qaeda fighters in custody "a potentially target-rich environment for interviewing people." More agents will come to Afghanistan if needed, he said.

"This is their home base," Knowles said. "This is their back yard. . . . We want to become better aware of al Qaeda, preferably their future, but just as important, their past."

In preparation for an onrush of prisoners, the Marines have hurried to build a detention camp that is to be both humane and intimidating. They must provide humanitarian conditions as required under the Geneva Conventions, and they need heavy security to prevent a riot like the one that took hundreds of lives in the prison redoubt at Mazar-e Sharif.

The detainees brought here could be seen from a distance after they landed at a Marine base at Kandahar International Airport aboard a C-130. They shuffled single file, tethered to one another as if on a chain gang, with their hands tied to their sides, as they approached the detention camp constructed with concertina wire pens. They were blindfolded, each with a Marine escort to guide the detainee with a hand to the shoulder. Several of the detainees wore turbans and robes.

A Marine spokesman said the detainees, two of whom appeared to be injured and had to be assisted from a Humvee, had been turned over to the United States from custody at Shebergan Prison near Mazar-e Sharif. It was not known whether they were Taliban troops or al Qaeda loyalists, nor was it known whether they had surrendered or been taken prisoner.

Capt. Thomas J. Schmidt, the engineer in charge of the detention camp, said all detainees who were not too wounded to walk would be led in a column, tied by a rope to one another. They would be gagged to prevent anyone from provoking a riot, blindfolded to prevent their escape and restrained with flexible cuffs on their hands and feet. Eventually, the gags and blindfolds would be removed, and the restraints loosened, Schmidt said. After being searched for weapons, the detainees will be given a health screening by Navy physicians, who said they anticipate cases of malnutrition and perhaps tuberculosis. The detainees' possessions will be catalogued, and they will be issued name tags. Because they are Muslims, they will be fed vegetarian meals.

"They will have a dry place to sleep, access to latrines, clean clothing and an opportunity to practice their religion," Schmidt said. Reporters glimpsed a tin roof over a six-foot mud-and-adobe brick wall. Schmidt said the unheated building has a dirt floor and is divided into several sections with double rolls of razor wire. For security reasons, lights will be on 24 hours a day, with heavily armed Marine guards stationed inside and out to prevent escapes.

"It's probably the most secure place in Afghanistan right now," said Schmidt, who alternately called the facility "intimidating" and similar to humanitarian refugee camps he helped build in other nations.

-------- terrorism

Yemen Attacks Tribes Linked to Al Qaeda
Raids Follow Local Leaders' Failure to Deliver Suspected Members of Terrorist Group

By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, December 19, 2001; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62547-2001Dec18?language=printer

AMMAN, Jordan, Dec. 18 -- Yemeni troops assaulted tribal forces in the central Marib region today with weapons fire from tanks, helicopters and artillery after local leaders refused to turn over five suspected members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network they were sheltering, according to local reports and news agencies.

At least 12 people were killed and 22 wounded in the fighting, among the first military actions outside Afghanistan in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States and the ensuing campaign against terrorism.

The assault, which came after negotiations between Yemeni officials and leaders of the Jalal tribe failed, is a significant step in support of the U.S. war on terrorism. The government is struggling to strengthen its control over well-armed tribes, and to reverse a reputation for harboring Islamic militants built on tourist kidnappings and the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, which killed 17 U.S. sailors.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today that Washington had been concerned about the presence of al Qaeda members in Yemen, but that the United States had no involvement in the operation.

"There are obviously a number of countries that have active al Qaeda cells, and Yemen is one," Rumsfeld said after a NATO meeting in Brussels. He also listed Sudan and Somalia as countries where al Qaeda members are or have been present.

According to the official Saba News Agency, U.S.-trained special forces swept through the Shabwah and Marib regions, about 85 miles east of the capital, Sanaa, early this morning in pursuit of suspected al Qaeda operatives. The news agency reported that several locals suspected of aiding the militants were arrested in the Shabwah area, and that troops had encountered armed resistance from members of the Jalal tribe in Marib, an area reputed for lawlessness.

The news agency reported that a number of soldiers had been killed. A local journalist who has been in contact with Yemeni defense officials and leaders of the Jalal tribe said that government forces had virtually sealed off an area around the village of Halsun in the Marib region. There were reports of continued fighting in the evening.

Yemeni officials could not be reached for comment, and it was not known whether any of the suspected al Qaeda members had been captured or killed.

Bashraheel Bashraheel, the head of international news for the Yemeni daily Al-Ayyam, said the military action was probably intended as a warning to tribal leaders from the government of President Ali Abdallah Salih, who met recently with President Bush in Washington and pledged to help suppress al Qaeda in bin Laden's ancestral home.

The Saudi-born militant's father was born in the Hadramawt region, in the far east of Yemen, and bin Laden is believed to have briefly sought shelter there after being expelled from Sudan in 1996.

"The tribe refused to hand them over and the government wants to show it will not compromise on this issue," said Bashraheel. "After Sept. 11 we knew that these people could get the country into major trouble. I think this will be enough for tribal leaders to hand over who they have."

By far the poorest country on the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen was united under one flag only in the past decade, after a civil war in which the Communist-led south was defeated. Flooded with weaponry, it has since been troubled not just by tribal lawlessness, but by the return of militants radicalized during the Afghan war against the Soviet Union. Some of the militants joined such groups as the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army, which the government has been pressed to eradicate.

There have also been persistent rumors of the existence of bin Laden training camps in Yemen, and of links between the accused terrorist leader and a network of radical Islamic schools and religious figures in the country. Yemen also figures among the possible sources of terrorist fundraising. The U.S. list of financial targets in the war on terrorism includes a network of Yemeni honey shops that are suspected of diverting some of their proceeds to al Qaeda.

Since the Cole bombing, which was attributed to bin Laden supporters in Yemen, relations between the United States and Yemen have been tense at times. There were complaints from the United States that Yemeni investigators were trying to close the case too quickly and not granting U.S. officials the right to interview suspects. More significantly, U.S. authorities were concerned that Yemeni investigators were unwilling to follow potentially embarrassing leads that pointed to a more organized bin Laden network with possible links to government officials.

The case has not come to trial, and since Sept. 11 Yemen has positioned itself as one of the countries, along with Sudan and Somalia, that are trying hard to overcome a history of Islamic militancy by offering to assist the U.S. effort.

Yemeni special forces have rounded up dozens of suspected foreign militants, who were then deported to countries including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Algeria, Bashraheel said. During his recent trip to Washington, Salih was reportedly given a new list of suspects and pledged to arrest them.

Bashraheel said that those being sought in the Marib region include an Egyptian who goes by the name Abu Assam, and a Yemeni known as Al Hadrami, both of whom are suspected of being involved in the Cole attack.

Staff writer Thomas E. Ricks in Washington contributed to this report.

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Broad Effort Launched After '98 Attacks

By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 19, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62725-2001Dec18?language=printer

First of two articles

Two years ago, Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet phoned the White House. The agency had a lead, he said, on Osama bin Laden.

Reports linked the al Qaeda leader to a temporary encampment in southern Afghanistan. Overhead photographs showed a well-equipped caravan of the sort used by hunters, a commanding figure at its center, and an entourage of escorts bearing arms.

National security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger canvassed the Small Group, as they had come to call themselves, of Cabinet-rank decision-makers on the most sensitive terrorist matters. President Bill Clinton gave the go-ahead to begin preparations for cruise missiles to launch.

Amid the urgent engagement of the White House came an unwelcome status call from U.S. Central Command. One of two submarines designated to fire the missiles, if so ordered, had left its Arabian Sea cruising grounds. "Well, get it back in the box!" urged a duty officer, according to a person who was present.

Clinton, said people familiar with the episode, waited impatiently as the CIA searched for confirmation. Finally, Tenet called back. The camp was not bin Laden's, he said. It was a falconing expedition of a wealthy sheik from the United Arab Emirates -- and bin Laden had never been part of it.

Thus dissolved another moment of hope in a covert war of long shots and near misses that most Americans did not yet know their country was fighting. Unfolding in the last two years of his presidency, long before the events of Sept. 11, Clinton's war was marked by caution against an enemy that the president and his advisers knew to be ruthless and bold. Reluctant to risk lives, failure or the wrath of brittle allies in the Islamic world, Clinton confined planning for lethal force within two significant limits. American troops would use weapons aimed from a distance, and their enemy would be defined as individual terrorists, not the providers of sanctuary for attacks against the United States.

Within those boundaries, there was much more to the war than has reached the public record. Beginning on Aug. 7, 1998, the day that al Qaeda destroyed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Clinton directed a campaign of increasing scope and lethality against bin Laden's network that carried through his final days in office.

• In addition to a secret "finding" to authorize covert action, which has been reported before, Clinton signed three highly classified Memoranda of Notification expanding the available tools. In succession, the president authorized killing instead of capturing bin Laden, then added several of al Qaeda's senior lieutenants, and finally approved the shooting down of private civilian aircraft on which they flew.

• The Clinton administration ordered the Navy to maintain two Los Angeles-class attack submarines on permanent station in the nearest available waters, enabling the U.S. military to place Tomahawk cruise missiles on any target in Afghanistan within about six hours of receiving the order.

• Three times after Aug. 20, 1998, when Clinton ordered the only missile strike of his presidency against bin Laden's organization, the CIA came close enough to pinpointing bin Laden that Clinton authorized final preparations to launch. In each case, doubts about the intelligence aborted the mission.

• The CIA's directorate of operations recruited, trained, paid or equipped surrogate forces in Pakistan, Uzbekistan and among tribal militias inside Afghanistan, with the common purpose of capturing or killing bin Laden. The Pakistani channel, disclosed previously in The Washington Post, and its Uzbek counterpart, which has not been reported before, never bore fruit. Inside Afghanistan, tribal allies twice reported to their CIA handlers that they fought skirmishes with bin Laden's forces, but they inflicted no verified damage.

• Operatives of the CIA's Special Activities Division made at least one clandestine entry into Afghanistan in 1999. They prepared a desert airstrip to extract bin Laden, if captured, or to evacuate U.S. tribal allies, if cornered. The Special Collection Service, a joint project of the CIA and the National Security Agency, also slipped into Afghanistan to place listening devices within range of al Qaeda's tactical radios.

The lines Clinton opted not to cross continued to define U.S. policy in his successor's first eight months. Clinton stopped short of using more decisive military instruments, including U.S. ground forces, and declined to expand the reach of the war to the Taliban regime that hosted bin Laden and his fighters after 1996.

Not until the catastrophe of Sept. 11 -- when terrorists used hijacked airliners to destroy the World Trade Center and damage the Pentagon -- did President Bush obliterate those boundaries.

More than once, advisers recall, Clinton sounded out Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about the prospect of using Special Forces to surprise bin Laden's fighters on the ground. But Clinton declined to authorize the large-scale operation that Shelton said would be required, and he chose not to order a less ambitious option to which the general would have objected.

Though his government came to believe that the Taliban was inextricably tied to bin Laden, Clinton never seriously entertained the use of military force against the Islamic fundamentalist regime, still less the kind of broad campaign that removed the Taliban from power 10 days ago.

At least twice, Clinton dispatched senior emissaries to the Taliban with threats no less stark than the formula Bush laid out in his speech to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20. Bin Laden, they said, was an enemy of the United States, and a regime that provided him sanctuary should be prepared for the consequences.

Clinton administration officials believed the Taliban would interpret the warning as a military threat.

The administration never made good on it. Put baldly, several principal advisers said recently, the political and diplomatic market would not bear such a war.

"Until September 11th," said Karl F. Inderfurth, who was assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs, "there was certainly not any groundswell of support to mount a major attack on the Taliban. This is just a reality."

'He's Going to Beat Us Again'

Within days of the August 1998 embassy bombings, the combined efforts of the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency pinned responsibility on bin Laden's organization.

With only Attorney General Janet Reno dissenting, Clinton directed two retaliatory strikes on Aug. 20. One, near the Afghan town of Khost, was timed to kill bin Laden and his associates in their beds at 10 p.m. local time. It missed, the CIA said afterward, by a few hours. The other demolished a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, that the CIA had linked to attempted production of chemical weapons for bin Laden.

Domestically and globally, Clinton National Security Council staffers Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon lamented recently, the missile attack came to be regarded -- wrongly, they argued -- "as the greatest foreign policy blunder of the Clinton presidency." Apart from the "public relations battering," Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's deputy counterterrorism chief at the time, wrote later, the episode inflicted a "broader blow . . . on the perceived integrity of U.S. intelligence and U.S. counterterrorist efforts generally."

Badly burned, Clinton and his national security cabinet turned their emphasis to detecting, disrupting and arresting members of terrorist cells in quiet cooperation with friendly foreign security services. This had been an ongoing project of the FBI and CIA since the World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

At the CIA's counterterrorism center in Langley, wall maps the size of Renaissance tapestries depicted the agency's growing knowledge of the al Qaeda network in an intricate web of crisscrossed lines. On occasion Tenet would ask aides to roll them up and carry them, sealed in tubular cases, to brief Clinton or the Small Group in Berger's office.

Beginning in 1996, the Clinton team made increasing use of what Berger described as "a new art form" in the international commerce in terror suspects. Scores of times in the next five years, they persuaded allies to arrest members of al Qaeda and ship them somewhere else. Frequently, somewhere else was not the United States.

Such a transfer without legal process was called "rendition." Most took place in secret and have yet to be disclosed. A State Department accounting of extraditions and renditions in the 1990s, published in April, named only 13. At least 40 more, according to sources, were removed forcibly from one foreign country to another on behalf of the United States.

Most remain unknown. One episode took place in Albania the week after the embassy bombings. After foiling a truck bomb plot against the U.S. Embassy in Tirana, American intelligence officers guided Albanian authorities to five arrests of Egyptian Islamic Jihad members. The Americans flew the five men to Egypt, where they were executed after a military trial.

In one briefing, Tenet said of bin Laden's network that the arrests were "breaking the organization brick by brick," but warned: "He's going to beat us again."

'No Way to Avoid Killing Him'

Clinton never launched another military strike against al Qaeda, but he invoked his authority as commander in chief to prosecute a subterranean campaign that intensified through the remainder of his presidency.

Immediately after the embassy bombings, he issued a "finding" under the 1974 Hughes-Ryan Amendment enabling intelligence agencies to fund covert operations against bin Laden. The finding's primary directive was to track and capture the al Qaeda leader, though it authorized use of lethal force in the attempt.

Within months Clinton amended the finding three times, using a form of presidential authority known as a Memorandum of Notification. Each was classified as sensitive compartmented information, Top Secret/Codeword.

The first change, almost immediate, was to broaden the authority of U.S. officers or their recruited agents to use lethal force, enabling them to engage bin Laden and the fighters around him without any prospect of taking him into custody.

"It became evident," said a party to the deliberations, "that there was no way to avoid killing him if we were going to go after him, and we shouldn't worry about it."

Clinton's second Memorandum of Notification expanded the target of the covert campaign. It named a handful of close lieutenants -- sources said fewer than 10 -- to be captured or killed if found separately from bin Laden.

As the hunt progressed, national security officials began to worry that bin Laden might flee Afghanistan. Some State Department officials believed fissures in the Taliban might drive him out, and bin Laden told an ABC News producer on Dec. 28, 1998, that "when a Muslim migrates repeatedly, he is doubly rewarded."

"We just decided early on that he wasn't going to get out of Afghanistan if we could help it," said an official familiar with the discussions. Bin Laden was believed to have helicopters at his disposal, and "there was also a concern he could get a Gulfstream" jet.

Berger and Tenet brought Clinton a third Memorandum of Notification. Clinton signed off on direct authority to shoot down private aircraft in which bin Laden traveled. Because such a flight would probably be deemed civil aviation in international law, and people unconnected to bin Laden might die, this was regarded in the White House as a significant step.

The CIA did not give up entirely on capturing bin Laden. Later in 1999, the Directorate of Operations dispatched a covert reconnaissance mission to a disused southern desert airstrip in Afghanistan. Flying fast and low, and departing undetected after a ground survey, the specialized team assessed the characteristics of the airstrip and its facilities to design a detailed plan for securing the perimeter.

Details of the location could not be learned. But U.S. Marines this month occupied a remote airfield 55 miles southwest of the southern Afghan city of Kandahar and have used it as a base of operations.

According to sources, the CIA contemplated using the airstrip if the occasion arose to evacuate someone -- either bin Laden, if he fell into friendly hands, or recruited agents in danger of being overrun.

'Boots on the Ground'

Through the first year of the Clinton team's effort, the White House and Pentagon pressed to shorten the fuse on a military strike against bin Laden.

In the days after the embassy bombings, the Joint Staff informed the National Security Council that it would need 24 to 36 hours' notice to place munitions on target in Afghanistan. Because of Arab sensitivities, the administration assumed it could not use the nearest U.S. air bases in the Persian Gulf. The only alternatives were redeployment of Navy ships armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles or B-2 stealth bombers flying from the continental United States.

Dissatisfied with this answer, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen ordered the Navy to place two nuclear-powered attack submarines on permanent station in the nearby waters of the northern Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. This brought the "strike window" down to about six hours. The two Los Angeles-class boats were packed entirely with slow-flying Tomahawk land-attack missiles, which would need as much as 90 minutes to reach Afghanistan.

Planners also considered the deployment of AC-130 gunships, equipped with powerful cannon and chain guns. They can be refueled in flight, and are employed by Air Force Special Operations teams trained for stealthy entry and exit. Some officials believed there was a chance of obtaining permission from Uzbekistan to use the former Soviet air base at Khanabad.

More than once, according to people with direct knowledge, Clinton asked Shelton, a former Special Operations commander, whether he could drop a small ground combat team into an al Qaeda training camp to engage bin Laden directly. Some of his advisers supposed this would reduce the most stringent demands on intelligence. To hit bin Laden with a missile, the CIA had to be able to place him inside the explosive radius of a warhead at a precise time at least six hours in the future. Special Forces, they said, might find him at a camp without having to forecast his movements inside it.

In the Small Group, Berger and Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright asked repeatedly about what they came to call the "boots on the ground" option, using the Delta Force. Shelton, reacting privately at the Pentagon, considered the proposals naive.

In an interview, the former Joint Staff chairman said the government never had good enough information on bin Laden's whereabouts half a day ahead, and little prospect of getting it. Even with a target, it would take at least twice as long for a ground team to get there as a missile.

"You ought to have some pretty good intelligence or you have to keep the special operators there 365 days a year, betting on the come," Shelton said. "If you lean that far forward, you probably have tipped your hand about what you are getting ready to do. You've got a footprint. You have to keep a surface ship off the Pakistani coast, and the Pakistanis had started patrolling out in that area, and that would be a sure giveaway."

Risks to the exposed ground troops, Shelton said, meant a much larger operation than his colleagues had in mind. "The greatest risk is that you would have a helicopter or a [special operations] aircraft that would encounter mechanical problems over those great distances, or you have an accident," he said. "You want to have the capability if that happens to go in and get them, which means a combat search and rescue capability, and if you want to send those people in, you have to have an air refueling operation."

Shelton, a senior colleague said, "wanted nothing to do" with a tiny incursion known in the Special Forces community as "going Hollywood." And the political leadership, the colleague said, wanted nothing to do with something larger.

"Absolutely nothing prevented us from running the kind of operation we're running now, if there had been a commitment to do that," Shelton said.

'Where's Waldo?'

There is, even now, no satisfying answer to the central mystery of the Clinton administration's covert war. How is it possible that the president had intelligence good enough to launch missiles at bin Laden within 13 days of the embassy bombings, yet never had it again? Did the intelligence task grow that much harder, or did the president and his national security apparatus grow less tolerant of risk?

In Small Group meetings, Albright compared the hunt to one of those arcade games in which the player, tantalized, tries to grasp a coin with a claw controlled clumsily from outside. In light moments, some of the president's advisers began referring to the problem in terms of a picture puzzle for children: "Where's Waldo?"

"I can tell you where he's been, I can tell you where he's going," Tenet said in one such gathering, succinctly defining the requirements of "actionable" intelligence. "The problem is, can I tell you where he'll be for the next six to 10 hours?"

Within the limits of the military's operational plans, what Tenet had was not enough.

"We did on numerous occasions provide information on where we thought he was at any given moment, but it's impossible for anyone to tell you where someone is going to be with absolute certainty half a day away," said an intelligence official. "Cruise missiles are excellent weapons for shooting at fixed targets, but they're not so good at targets that have a mind of their own."

A person standing 100 yards away might survive the strike of a Tomahawk's standard warhead, officials said. And Clinton refused to authorize use of "area weapons" -- one is a warhead of cluster bombs -- that would have killed women and children around bin Laden.

The Joint Staff and especially the Navy, meanwhile, tired of driving circles under the Arabian Sea.

"There was a growing sense over time," said Brian Sheridan, who was assistant secretary of defense for special operations, that the national leadership should "get off the pot" and decide whether it had a target. "There was a great willingness to support the mission if the mission is going to be real, but otherwise, let's not disrupt normal mission and training cycles."

Clinton declined to be interviewed for this story. Those closest to his thinking said he did not change his main criterion for approving a strike, which remained "a substantial probability of success."

All Clinton's senior advisers feared an error, convinced that shooting and missing would glorify bin Laden and expose the United States to ridicule.

"We consumed all the intelligence we had," Albright said. "It's so easy to finger-point. We tried everything we could, everything we could."

Former officials said bin Laden, already careful to disguise his movements, became considerably more elusive after the near-miss at Khost. And the intelligence on Khost, they said, had been "a unique opportunity," as a senior official put it. "It gave detailed notice of a forthcoming gathering, and you just don't see that kind of stuff often at all."

Those explanations do not fully account for the lack of results. People familiar with the changing intelligence mosaic said the CIA continued to obtain "all source" information about bin Laden throughout Clinton's presidency, some of it of very high quality. "All source" refers to the combination of electronic intercepts, photographs with visible and infrared light, imaging radar, tips from foreign intelligence liaisons and reports of human agents on the ground.

According to two sources, the CIA's clandestine service recruited and maintained communication with an informant in Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban. The informant had ties to an office of Taliban internal security, and sometimes learned there of bin Laden's plans or whereabouts. Though valued and frequently proved accurate after the fact, the information was twice removed from its source. The Taliban knew something of bin Laden's movements, and the informant knew something of what the Taliban knew.

The information never arrived in time to mount a strike, officials said. And the U.S. agent was neither willing nor able to attack bin Laden himself.

Near the end of 1999, according to people familiar with the discussions on both sides, Saudi Arabian officials notified their CIA liaisons that bin Laden's mother had requested a travel permit to leave the country. Hoping she would lead to her son, they offered to assist the placement of a homing beacon in her luggage.

The Saudis later complained they were not taken seriously. Americans familiar with the episode said they never received sufficiently specific information on the woman's travel plans.

For all the difficulties, there were three occasions after August 1998 when Clinton's top advisers came close to concluding they had "actionable intelligence." Each time the president directed preparations to fire.

One of the potential targets turned out to be the gulf sheik's falconing party. Another was a tent in a desert encampment. The third was a stone compound, built around a central courtyard full of al Qaeda operatives.

The last of these occasions came on an autumn weekend in the final weeks of the 2000 presidential campaign. It ended with a telephone call from Tenet to Berger. "We just don't have it," Tenet said, according to someone briefed on the conversation. Berger called the president and the Small Group, and once again Tomahawk gyroscopes spun down in silent waters 7,400 miles away.

'Not Enough. Unsatisfactory.'

To supplement direct military efforts, the CIA's clandestine service recruited three separate proxy forces for the bin Laden hunt.

One came at Pakistan's initiative. Throughout the first nine months of 1999, the Pakistani government led by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif -- caught between its restless pro-Taliban military and its desire to curry Western economic aid and assistance -- resisted U.S. pressure to cut support for the Taliban. With tensions with India high over the disputed territory of Kashmir, the Sharif government regarded a friendly Afghan border as crucial.

Sharif offered Washington an alternative. Pakistan would create a small commando force, trained and equipped by the CIA, to cross the Afghan border and try to kill or capture bin Laden.

Some of the project's American sponsors thought it had a chance. Others in government doubted it. Sources familiar with their positions in NSC meetings said Berger, Albright, deputy national security adviser James Steinberg and Undersecretary of State Thomas R. Pickering believed Sharif was playing for time, deflecting American pressure with a dramatic proposal he knew could come to nothing. Sharif was toppled by a coup in October 1999 led by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, now a key ally of the Bush administration in the Afghan war.

The National Security Agency reported that the commando planning had been compromised in the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate of the Pakistan Military. That service, known as ISI, had close ties not only to the Taliban but also, indirectly, to al Qaeda itself.

"We had evidence that the ISI was penetrated," an official said. "People were very skeptical about it, but there wasn't a down side unless it's spending a lot of time and effort on something that has no chance of succeeding."

In Uzbekistan, to the north, Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, chief of the U.S. Central Command, cultivated a growing military-to-military relationship. Uzbek commanders wanted arms and training for a counter-insurgency unit to put down their own rebel Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. In secret negotiations, they intimated that in return they would make the unit available to hunt bin Laden if the opportunity presented itself. It did not.

The only known covert operation inside Afghanistan involved the supply and lavish funding of a militia element that was hostile to both the Taliban and al Qaeda. In Small Group meetings, participants called this force "the tribals."

Eager to please, the tribals twice reported that they had exchanged fire with motorcades in which bin Laden had been traveling. On one occasion, they said they laid an ambush with land mines and a crossfire of automatic weapons. On another, they said the skirmish involved small arms only. The CIA could not verify either claim.

"We all looked forward to the phone call in which they said, 'We have him,' " said one person who was briefed on the reports. "But you never knew whether they really were telling you the truth, because clearly there was money paid."

In Clinton's last year as president, the Small Group drafted a memorandum that brought together all the efforts to hunt down bin Laden.

Clinton, sources said, returned it with a handwritten reply: "Not enough. Unsatisfactory."

White House impatience and the military's fatigue with keeping its submarines "on a string," as Shelton put it, gave impetus to a new idea -- to send the Predator intelligence drone into Afghanistan.

The gossamer-weight unmanned aircraft, with a 49-foot wingspan, has the horsepower and top speed of a motorbike. But in the Balkans, where it got its first use in 1996, the drone had proved immensely valuable.

Flying at medium altitude, it took full-motion video by day and night and still images through clouds using synthetic aperture radar.

But Afghanistan would push its limits, requiring overflight of much greater distances with hostile airspace on all sides. Vice Adm. Scott A. Fry, who led the Joint Staff's operations directorate, pressed hard for the Predator over objections in the Air Force and the CIA's operations directorate.

When the drone finally flew a "proof of concept" mission for several weeks in August and September last year, the results were stunning. Tenet brought a two-minute video clip to the White House and played it for Clinton and Berger.

According to people who saw it later, it showed a tall bearded man in flowing robes -- bin Laden is well over six feet -- crossing a city street toward a mosque. A security team of more than a dozen armed men, moving with professional dispatch, cleared a forward perimeter as he moved.

The trial period ended when a Predator crash-landed. But it had spurred something new. In their final months in office, the Clinton national security team launched a controversial effort to arm the Predator with a Hellfire missile, ordinarily used by attack helicopters.

State Department lawyers maintained for a time that such a hybrid would fall under restrictions of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty.

The Air Force and CIA argued over who would fund and operate it. Opponents scoffed at the notion of a 950-pound aircraft laboring aloft with a 100-pound missile. Richard A. Clarke, National Security Council senior director, "broke a lot of china," as one colleague put it, in ramming the program forward. Not long after Clinton left office, the Air Force tested a working prototype.

Armed Predators began flying in the present Afghan war and have fired a number of missiles at Taliban and al Qaeda command posts.

'Arsonist in Your Basement'

The Clinton administration had defined its enemy as narrowly as its military instruments. Bin Laden and his aides were targets, but not the Taliban regime that gave them sanctuary. For a time in Clinton's final year in office, it appeared that might change.

American policy toward the Taliban had been ambivalent at first when the fundamentalist militia led by Mohammad Omar conquered the eastern city of Jalalabad and Kabul, the Afghan capital, in September 1996.

It shifted to hostility the next year over the regime's treatment of women. After the 1998 embassy bombings, bin Laden became the primary issue for Washington.

For the next two years, Clinton pursued a policy of economic sanctions against the Taliban and sent numerous messages to the de facto government of Afghanistan requesting bin Laden's delivery for trial.

Frustrated by the Taliban's lack of cooperation, Clinton's emissaries took on a more menacing tone in the spring of 2000. But though the administration deliberately raised the specter of military confrontation, it chose in the end to step back.

The new approach began on April 4, 2000. Pakistan's intelligence chief and leading Taliban supporter, Gen. Mahmoud Ahmed, had come to Washington. Pickering, the State Department's third-ranking official, summoned him unexpectedly for a blistering message intended equally for the Taliban leadership.

Ahmed spoke of bin Laden with what Pickering later called "the hospitality gambit." Bin Laden was the Taliban's guest, honored in the tradition of Afghanistan's Pashtun community. But the general offered to find a solution that both parties could accept.

Pickering told him the Taliban's guest had killed Americans and intended to do so again. "People who do that are our enemies," he said, "and people who support those people will also be treated as our enemies."

He urged Pakistan "not to put itself in that position." An American in the room said Malia Lodhi, Pakistan's U.S. ambassador, appeared to be shaken by the implicit threat. Zamir Akram, Pakistan's deputy chief of mission, said his delegation emphasized that "Pakistan was in no way supporting or condoning the activities of al Qaeda" and reminded Pickering of their joint work against suspects in the 1998 embassy bombings.

About the same time, Assistant Secretary of State Michael A. Sheehan, the department's counterterrorism coordinator, delivered the new message directly to the Taliban. He telephoned Foreign Minister Ahmed Waqil and read him a formal declaration known as a demarche.

"If bin Laden or any of the organizations affiliated with him attacks the United States or United States interests," he told Waqil, "we will hold you, the leadership of the Taliban, personally accountable. Do you understand what I am saying? This is from the highest level of my government."

When Waqil demurred, Sheehan added: "If you have an arsonist in your basement, and he leaves your basement every night and burns your neighbors, and you're protecting him, you become responsible for his crimes."

The next month, Pickering arrived in Islamabad. On the evening of May 26, he met with Mullah Ahmed Jalil, Taliban deputy foreign minister, at the Pakistani Interior Ministry in Islamabad.

Pickering formally presented him with bin Laden's indictment in the Southern District of New York for the embassy bombings. "We don't think your evidence is persuasive," Jalil replied. Even if there were proof, he said, bin Laden should be subject to judgment under sharia, or Islamic law.

Pickering told him, as Sheehan had told his boss, that "people who are helping other people kill Americans are our enemies and should consider themselves as such."

In Washington, however, Clinton's national security cabinet stopped short.

"There were verbal scoldings, but that was about it," Shelton said. "There never was any consideration of going after the Taliban. When discussions came up of what are we going to do, the military focus stayed on Osama bin Laden himself and his outfit."

No threat or inducement short of all-out war, Clinton's advisers concluded, would move Omar, the supreme Taliban leader. A limited bombardment would destroy the hard-won consensus behind U.N. sanctions against Afghanistan. And the first casualty would be the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, which consumed Clinton's final months in office.

"The hard part for everybody now is to keep yourself in 1998, 1999 and 2000, and not 2001," Albright said. "For what we knew, and what we had to operate with, I think we did the right thing."

Researcher Robert Thomason contributed to this report.


-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

Pacific Northwest federal utility chooses wind power

Wednesday, December 19, 2001
By Environmental News Network
http://enn.com/news/enn-stories/2001/12/12192001/s_45901.asp

The federal power utility that supplies roughly half of the electricity used in the Pacific Northwest is about to double the amount of electricity it buys from wind generation projects.

The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) agreed to purchase about 34 percent of the output from the Stateline Wind Project located on the Oregon-Washington border southwest of Walla Walla, Wash. The wind power should start flowing at the end of the month. BPA's purchase can provide energy for about 18,000 homes.

Announcing the purchase Friday, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said, "BPA's latest commitment to purchase wind power helps ensure that we are diversifying our energy portfolio. Energy diversity is important for America's energy security."

Steve Wright, acting BPA administrator, said, "BPA is excited to bring wind generated energy to its customers. Wind projects are becoming increasingly cost competitive. The acquisition of these projects will allow us to better understand the real costs of wind integrated with our hydro system."

The Stateline Wind Project is the Northwest's largest commercial facility to generate electricity using wind. The project is built, owned, and operated by Florida Power & Light, FPL Energy, LLC. When the first phase is completed, 399 wind turbines will be arranged in several strings on privately owned hilltops and ridges located west of Walla Walla and north of Pendleton, Ore., near the Columbia River bend.

Each Vestas V-47 wind machine can generate 660 kilowatts. The entire project can produce 265 megawatts, all of which is marketed by PacifiCorp Power Marketing.

The Stateline Wind Project underwent extensive review to minimize its environmental impact. Early biological studies indicated that the site receives little use by birds or other vulnerable species. The project uses tubular towers and buried cables in order to avoid adding new perching places for birds who might get hit by the moving blades of the turbines.

BPA currently purchases 34 megawatts of wind power from Foote Creek located in Wyoming, and it recently announced a 50-megawatt purchase from another wind power development in Condon, Ore.

Congressman Greg Walden, an Oregon Republican who is co-chair of the House Renewable Energy Caucus, said the BPA purchase is a win-win situation for Americans. "Renewable energy sources are important not only in reducing our reliance on foreign oil but in powering the American economy in environmentally friendly ways," he said. "Complementing existing energy sources, they can provide farmers and landowners with a source of income while advancing these two important national goals."

The small footprint of a wind turbine means farmers can continue to grow their crops or graze their livestock while producing clean, green energy and cash. Farmers may earn $1,500 to $2,000 per turbine by leasing their land to wind developers.

By the time it has completed a current round of wind power purchases, Bonneville will be one of the largest suppliers of wind power in the country.

BPA, a federal agency based in Portland, Ore., that has been selling electricity primarily from federally owned hydropower projects, issued an Request For Proposal in February, seeking 1,000 megawatts (MW) of new wind power. Describing the response, George Darr, BPA's renewable power resource program manager, said, "[It] blew us away." Wind companies submitted 25 proposals, totaling about 2,600 MW.

Wright explained that wind power will work to conserve water in the drought-plagued Pacific Northwest. "Harvesting the strong, steady winds of the Columbia River Basin works especially well with our hydro power base," he said. "When the winds blow, we can save more water in reservoirs. When the winds are still, we can release the river's power. Wind farms add to our local renewable resources."

----

Ecogen to challenge UK govt on wind farm ban

UK: December 19, 2001
Reuters
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13755/story.htm

LONDON - British wind power Ecogen said this week it had been granted permission to challenge a government move to stop it building an onshore wind farm in northern England.

The high court in London decided on Friday Ecogen had grounds for judicial review of the Department of Trade and Industry's (DTI) decision to block the 80-megawatt wind project at Kielder because of objections from the ministry of defence.

"We are very pleased we got through. The DTI argued they could do nothing but take the Ministry of Defence's (MOD) advice," Ecogen's managing director Tim Kirby told Reuters.

He said the company expected to go to court by March or April but meanwhile wanted to hold talks with the DTI so see if the problem could be resolved before the court hearing.

Kielder, in Northumberland, is near a military low-flying area and the MOD is worried the project's tall turbines will interfere with radar defence systems.

But Kirby pointed out the government had last week given the go ahead to a wind farm at Cafn Croes in Wales which he said was also in a low-flying area.

The MOD has also objected to two offhsore wind sites in the Irish Sea because of radar interference fears.

The Kielder project would raise England's onshore wind generation capacity by 70 percent to 190 MW from 120 MW presently installed.

The government is relying on the expansion of wind power to boost the use of green energy and cut emissions of greenhouse gases, cited by many scientists as a key contributor to global warming.

Ecogen is owned by a group of private shareholders including, UK engineering group AMEC .

------- environment

N.J. Leukemia Cases, Chemical Factory Linked

NATION IN BRIEF
Washington Post
Wednesday, December 19, 2001; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62970-2001Dec18?language=printer

TOMS RIVER, N.J. -- A six-year, $10 million government study of high cancer rates among children in this central New Jersey community found that contaminated well water and air emissions from a chemical factory were linked to some leukemia cases.

The study, released yesterday by state and federal health officials, was commissioned after 90 children in Dover Township were diagnosed with cancer between 1979 and 1995 -- 23 cases more than researchers would normally expect to find.

The report acknowledged uncertainty in some findings because of the statistically small number of people involved. It also pointed out that "no single risk factor evaluated appears to be solely responsible for the overall elevation of childhood cancer incidence" in the township.

----

CORPS ASKS FOR INPUT ON WETLANDS MITIGATION

December 19, 2001
ENS
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/dec2001/2001L-12-19-09.html

WASHINGTON, DC, After receiving harsh criticism for its new stance on wetlands mitigation, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is asking for input from other federal agencies.

In November, the Corps issued new regulatory guidance regarding how developers will compensate for destroying wetlands. Critics said the policy would allow developers to offset losses of wetlands on one site by protecting wetlands, or even dry land, elsewhere, leading to a loss of wetlands nationwide.

Conservation groups charged that the Corps ignored the national goal of achieving "no net loss" of wetlands, established during the first Bush administration.

"We want to make a sincere effort to address the concerns that have been raised in order to ensure proper protections to the aquatic ecosystem," said Brigadier General Robert Griffin, the Corps' director of Civil Works. "A primary concern was that the Corps had backed off from the policy of 'no net loss' of wetlands. That was certainly not the guidance letter's intent, so we need to make sure the language is clear and direct."

The Corps is asking other federal agencies to comment on the regulatory guidance letter until March 1, 2002.

The Corps said it prepared the guidance letter in response to recommendations in a report from the National Research Council, which recommended ways to improve the Corps' mitigation procedures.

Mitigation can offset adverse impacts by restoring former wetlands, enhancing existing ones, establishing new wetlands where none existed before, or preserving high value wetlands threatened by development.

In releasing the guidance letter, the Corps said the policy reinforces the goal of no net loss of wetlands, stating, "the concepts embodied in the guidance ... are intended to fully support the national no overall net loss policy for wetlands and to provide a basis for formulating decisions that will more effectively and fully mitigate impacts to other aquatic resources, such as flowing streams."

The Corps' Regulatory Guidance Letter and the National Research Council report are accessible online at: http://www.usace.army.mil/civilworks/hot_topics/rglmitigation.htm

----

This Year Was the 2nd Hottest, Confirming a Trend, U.N. Says

December 19, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/19/science/19WARM.html

GENEVA, Dec. 18 (AP) - The Earth's temperature in 2001 is expected to be the second highest in the 140 years that meteorologists have been keeping records, the United Nations weather agency said today.

"Temperatures are getting hotter, and they are getting hotter faster now than at any time in the past," said Michel Jarraud, deputy secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization.

Nine of the 10 warmest years since 1860 have occurred since 1990, the agency said, and temperatures are rising three times as fast as in the early 1900's.

As it has in the past, the organization attributed much of the warming to the greenhouse effect from burning fossil fuels.

"There are always skeptics on everything," said Ken Davidson, director of the agency's climate program, "but certainly the evidence we have today shows we do have global warming, and that most of this is due to human action."

In November, after four years of painful negotiations, delegates from 164 countries decided on the final details of a pioneering treaty aimed at fighting global warming.

While many large industrial countries said they were likely to ratify the agreement, President Bush rejected it, limiting its reach by sidelining the United States, the largest source of greenhouse gases.

If enacted, the treaty, called the Kyoto Protocol, would set the first binding restrictions on releases of carbon dioxide and other gases by industrial countries, which many scientists say have caused the warming trend.

But to gain legal force, the treaty must be ratified by at least 55 countries, including a group responsible for at least 55 percent of the heat- trapping emissions from industrial countries in 1990.

If that happens, the treaty will require that by 2012, participating industrial countries cut emissions of carbon dioxide and similar gases about 5 percent below their levels in 1990.

The agency said this year's global average surface temperature was expected to be 0.96 degrees Fahrenheit above the average for the past 40 years, which is 57 degrees.

The highest average, 58.1 degrees, was set in 1998, followed by this year, 1997, 1995 and 1990.

The high temperatures in 1997 and 1998 were partly the result of El Niño, in which warm water spreads over the surface of the central Pacific, but there was no such phenomenon this year.

Mr. Jarraud said the higher temperatures had led to an increase in storms, droughts and other unusual weather conditions, though he noted that "weather extremes are the result of complex interactions."

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

Mexicans want full road access

December 19, 2001
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/business/20011219-78987388.htm

BROWNSVILLE, Texas (AP) - Eleven Mexican trucking companies filed a class-action lawsuit yesterday, accusing the U.S. government of illegally denying them access to U.S. markets in accordance with NAFTA.

Plaintiffs' attorneys said the $4 billion suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Brownsville, was on behalf of at least 185 Mexican trucking concerns.

The complaint asserts that federal agencies, including the Department of Transportation, violated the Northern American Free Trade Agreement by denying them permits to operate within the U.S. interior and violated the U.S. Constitution by allowing Canadian companies more access than Mexican companies. It claimed U.S. officials discriminated against Mexican nationals by denying Mexican truckers the ability to invest in, own or control trucking companies based in the United States.

"It's inconsistent with NAFTA, and additionally, they've continued to use an application that requires the applicant to state whether he is of Mexican national origin, and those applications for companies of Mexican national origin have never been acted on," said lawyer Kent M. Henderson of the law firm Federico, Castelan and Sayre of Newport Beach, Calif.

Fernando Chavez, eldest son of the late labor leader Cesar Chavez, is the lead lawyer for the lawsuit.

"I believe NAFTA was implemented with the intent of opening up commerce and trade between the three nations," he said. "There is no problem when trade is coming back and forth across the border. What causes the problem is when an individual who's Mexican is bringing it across," he said.

A spokesman for the Transportation Department said he had no immediate comment.

Rob Black, spokesman for the Teamsters union, which represents more than 120,000 U.S. truck drivers, called the suit "baseless."

He said Canada has infrastructure in place to guarantee trucks safety; Mexico does not.

The issue of Mexican trucks in the United States has simmered since a part of the NAFTA agreement called for allowing trucks to travel first throughout Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas by December 1995 and throughout the United States by January 2000.

While Canadian trucks were allowed, the agreement was delayed for Mexican trucks by President Clinton.

After the White House threatened a veto on stricter legislation, a compromise was approved earlier this month that will require U.S. inspectors to conduct safety examinations of Mexican trucking companies and their vehicles, as well as driver's license verification.

Implementing the rules is expected to take months.

The $4 billion includes business and profits lost since 1995, Mr. Henderson said. He said the lawsuit was being filed in Brownsville because it is the source of much of the truck traffic between the United States and Mexico.


-------- activists

Urgent Action Needed to Defend the ABM Treaty

From: "DontBlowIt.org" <webmaster@dontblowit.policy.net>
http://dontblowit.policy.net/ (12/19/01)

Dear Friend of DontBlowIt.org,

While the Administration builds an impressive coalition of nations around the world to fight terrorism, it is unilaterally planning to withdraw from an international treaty that has been the cornerstone of nuclear stability for over thirty years.

Recently President Bush delivered formal notification to Russia that the US will withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in the next six months, clearing the way for unrestricted U.S. tests of a National Missile Defense plan.

Please call your Senators as soon as possible. Tell them that you are a constituent and are shocked that the US has announced its withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. Ask your Senators to oppose the President's actions and to voice their strong support for the ABM Treaty.

Congress still has the power of the purse - power to with hold funding for activities that would violate the ABM Treaty. Now, more than ever, we should be working with the international community to confront global security threats, not walk away from our treaty obligations.

Please call your Senators today!

We'd like to know how many people take this action, so please hit "reply" and email us back, letting us know you've contacted your Senators. Thank you for your support and for taking this urgent action!

Sincerely,

Laura Kriv DontBlowIt.org Campaign Manager

P.S. - Please forward this message on to your friends and family and help spread this "word of mouse" campaign. But please don't send this message indiscriminately - spam only hurts our cause.

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