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Panasonic 2.4 Ghz Cordless Telephones -- peter jerry, 09:28:55 02/08/11 Tue

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"stop loss" program -- Manpower and Reserve Affairs, 13:15:12 01/04/02 Fri



Assistant Secretary of the Army (Manpower and Reserve Affairs) Reginald J. Brown approved a second increment to the Army's limited "stop loss" program. This stop loss increment expands the coverage of the first stop loss increment to the Ready Reserve and brings additional skills and specialties under stop loss coverage for both the Active Army and the Ready Reserve. Stop loss allows the Army to retain soldiers who are determined to be essential to the national security of the United States in the service beyond their date of separation for an open-ended period. Those affected by the order generally cannot voluntarily retire or leave the service as long as reserves are called to active duty or until otherwise relieved by proper authority.
Officer and Warrant Officer Specialties, and Enlisted Military Occupational Specialties (MOS) Subject to Stop Loss 2 are:
The following U.S. Army Reserve (Ready Reserve) officer, warrant officer and enlisted specialties are included:
(Commissioned Officers who have career field designated out of Specialties 18, 38 and 39 are not affected by this stop-loss)
The following enlisted MOSs are included:
The following Army National Guard (Ready Reserve) officer, warrant officer and enlisted specialties are included:
(Commissioned Officers who have career field designated out of Specialty 18 are not affected by this stop-loss)
The following enlisted MOSs are included:
The following Active Army officer and enlisted specialties are included:
(Commissioned Officers who have career field designated out of Specialty 39 are not affected by this stop-loss)
The following enlisted MOSs are included:
Reginald J. Brown, Assistant Secretary of the Army (Manpower and Reserve Affairs), approved the first increment of Stop Loss in support of Operations Noble Eagle and Enduring Freedom on November 30, 2001. The first increment focused on Active Army Special Forces and selected Aviation soldiers.
Prior to Operations Noble Eagle and Enduring Freedom, the Army last used stop loss during Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm in 1990. In that same year, President George H. Bush delegated stop loss authority to the Secretary of Defense during Operation Desert Shield.
Most involuntary discharges would not be affected by stop loss, nor would stop loss change any policies or regulations currently in effect that might lead to an involuntary administrative discharge.
The Army will reevaluate stop loss on a monthly basis and use it as a tool to maintain unit readiness.
For media queries or more information please call U.S. Army Public Affairs Media Relations Division, Personnel and Human Resources Team at 703-697-7487 or 703-697-7550.
Soldiers should contact their servicing Personnel activity for more details or questions.



Link to original news item:
http://www.dtic.mil/armylink/news/Jan2002/r20020102r02-001.html


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MEMORANDUM FOR CORRESPONDENTS -- Army Public Affairs Media, 13:12:43 01/04/02 Fri

MEMORANDUM FOR CORRESPONDENTS #M02-001
Jan. 4, 2002


Senior Army leaders and aviation industry officials will present key aspects of the Army Aviation Objective Force at the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) Aviation Symposium and Exhibition Jan. 8 to 9 at the Fairview Park Marriott Hotel, Falls Church, Va. Registration for the symposium and a reception will occur on Jan. 7.

At 8:30 a.m. EST on Jan. 8, Lieutenant General Johnny M. Riggs, Director, Objective Force Task Force, will present the keynote address, outlining the Army's critical aviation platforms that will transform Army Aviation to the Objective Force. Mr. Claude M. Bolton, Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology will present the keynote dinner remarks at 7 p.m. on Jan. 8, highlighting perspective on Army Aviation.
In a series of presentations during the symposium, senior Army Aviation leaders will discuss Aviation leadership and operational concepts, the Transformation Plan, Army Reserve Command and Army National Guard Aviation, and concepts on advanced rotorcraft and unmanned air vehicles. Presentations on Jan. 9 will focus on industry perspectives from key aviation industry officials. Key presenters include:
Mr. Claude M. Bolton, Jr., Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology
Dr. Kenneth Oscar, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology
LTG John S. Caldwell, Jr., Military Deputy to the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology
MG Robert Armbruster, Deputy for Systems Management and HTI
MG Joseph L. Bergantz, Program Executive Officer, Aviation
MG John M. Curran, CG, U.S. Army Aviation Center
MG Larry J. Dodgen, CG, U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command
MG Raymond F. Rees, Vice Chief, National Guard Bureau
Mr. Roger A. Krone, VP and GM, Army Programs, Military Rotorcraft, The Boeing Company
Mr. Dean C. Borgman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation
GEN Terrence R. Dake, United States Marine Corps, Retired, Senior VP, US Government Business Unit, Bell Helicopter Textron
Mr. Steve Gaffney, President and GM, ITT Avionics
Mr. Joseph G. Thomas, VP and GM, Unmanned Air Vehicle Programs, AAI Corporation
Dr. William H. Forster, VP, Land Combat Systems, Northrop Grumman Corporation
Media interested in covering the Seminar may register at http://www.ausa.org or by calling Pat Taylor, AUSA Public Affairs, at 800-336-4570 x 212 or 703-907-2624 or e-mail at ptaylor@ausa.org. That website also provides the schedule of presentations.
Army Public Affairs officers will be present during the Symposium to facilitate media availabilities.


For more information, contact Army Public Affairs Media Relations Division at (703) 697-4314/3491. This document is also available on Army Link on the Internet at http://www.dtic.mil/armylink/


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Executions leave historic stain -- Richard B. Williams, 09:04:59 01/03/02 Thu

Richard B. Williams: Executions leave historic stain

Richard B. Williams
Denver

Wednesday, January 02, 2002 - As a young man growing up in the Northern Plains, one of my heroes was Abraham Lincoln. That is, until as an adult, when I discovered how he ordered the hanging of 38 Indians simply for defending their land.

The story begins with the Sioux of Minnesota, who had been moved onto a reservation and then mistreated by the Indian agent Thomas Galbraith, who cheated the tribe out of its annuities and denied its members their food rations. Demanding the food that languished in warehouses, the Indians appealed to trader Andrew Myrick, who bluntly said, "Let them eat grass or let them eat their own dung." This incident typifies the treatment that Indian people received in the United States during that period of time, and was pivotal in the conflict between Indians and whites in the 1800s.

Starving and desperate, four young men stole some chicken eggs from a local farmer. In an ensuing skirmish, three whites wound up dead, inciting the Minnesota Indian War of 1862. The whites of Minnesota appealed to the President Lincoln to rid their state of the Indians, either by death or removal - even though the settlers had illegally moved onto land that belonged to the tribes. Gen. John Pope of Minnesota had captured some 1,500 Sioux during this conflict, 1,200 of whom were women and children, promising that if they gave up peacefully they would be treated as "friends." They instead became prisoners of war, and Pope said his intent was to "kill them all." On Nov. 5, 1862, a tribunal of the prisoners began with as many as 40 cases a day, some trials lasting only a few minutes. In one of the most illegal court proceedings in U.S. history, the defendants in the trials had no lawyers to represent them, nor were they allowed to bring any witnesses in their own defense. Few o!
f the
men on trial even knew the English language, and the interpreters were not even sworn in by the court.

Of the 1,500 on trial, 307 were sentenced to death.

Lincoln, with a thorough understanding of the injustice that was taking place, was torn between the loss of support in a key Northern state and offending foreign nations who might consider the executions unjust and ally themselves with the Confederacy. Neither of these options, of course, gave much care for the welfare of the Sioux. After conferring with his advisers, Lincoln chose 38 convictions from the list and ordered the executions.

At 10 a.m. on Dec. 26, the 38 Indian prisoners were marched onto a scaffold as civilians in the streets began to cheer. The Sioux warriors clasped hands and sang sacred songs to begin their journey to the spirit world as the scaffold fell. Their deaths are America's largest official mass execution, and are particularly scornful because of the utter lack of due process in obtaining the convictions.

Shortly after the hangings, all Indians were forced from Minnesota. In the following years, however, some of the tribes moved back to the area and settled, including the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux, who held on to a meager existence for the next 150 years. Now operating one of the most successful gaming institutions in the country, it is ironic that this small tribe, which was once defeated and exiled, is now a successful economic force in Minnesota. Rather than remain bitter, the members of the tribe have demonstrated their kindness and forgiveness by helping the people of Minnesota with employment and charitable gifts to the surrounding communities. They have overcome the role of history to get back on their feet, and are helping others. They are the true heroes in a story that gives new meaning to the "great American experience."


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Bush to Ignore Rule on Written Notices of Intelligence Actions -- Heidi Przybyla, 09:02:22 01/03/02 Thu

Bush to Ignore Rule on Written Notices of Intelligence Actions
By Heidi Przybyla | Bloomberg
Crawford, Texas, Dec. 28 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush said he'll use presidential authority to sidestep a rule requiring his administration to provide Congress with written notice of U.S. intelligence activities.

Bush made the announcement in signing the intelligence authorization act for fiscal year 2002, which includes an amendment stating that reports to Congress should ``always be in written form.''

Requiring written notice of planned U.S. intelligence activities may ``impair foreign relations'' and national security, Bush said in a statement. The law also increases the overall intelligence budget 7 percent.

The move follows a spat between the president and members of Congress over how much classified information he should provide Capitol Hill about U.S. military operations in Afghanistan. In October, Bush tried to limit access to such information to leaders of both parties and the chairmen of the congressional committees with jurisdiction over the military.

Bush sent Congress a memo laying out the restrictions after leaks from an intelligence briefing produced stories that said administration officials told members of Congress there was a ``100 percent chance'' of retaliatory terrorist strikes should the U.S. attack Afghanistan over the Sept. 11 terrorist assaults in New York and Washington.

After Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle and legislators of both parties argued that information-sharing is part of the process, Bush backed away from the restrictions on who would get intelligence briefings from the Defense and State departments.


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U.N. fears abuses of terror mandate -- William Orme, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, 09:00:02 01/03/02 Thu

U.N. fears abuses of terror mandate
Some regimes using agency's campaign to justify repression

By William Orme, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

UNITED NATIONS -- Demands by the Security
Council that U.N. members act against global
terrorism are being used by some regimes to justify
repression of domestic dissent, U.N. officials and
independent human rights advocates say.

The anti-terrorism campaign has been used by
authoritarian governments to justify moves to clamp
down on moderate opponents, outlaw criticism of
rulers and expand the use of capital punishment.

Compliance with the Security Council requirements
"could lead to unwarranted infringement on civil
liberties," Bacre Waly Ndiaye, the chief human rights
officer at the U.N. Secretariat, told the council's new
counterterrorism committee. "There is evidence that
some countries are now introducing measures that
may erode core human rights safeguards."

In an unexpectedly swift response to the attacks on the World Trade Center
and the
Pentagon, the Security Council called on U.N. members on Sept. 28 to
provide
information within 90 days about their legal restrictions on fund-raising,
financial
transfers, arms acquisition and immigration.

But there is no agreement on what constitutes terrorist activity, U.N.
experts say,
and some governments are presenting what critics contend are police-state
measures as part of the U.N.-endorsed campaign.

"In some countries," Ndiaye told the counterterror committee at its Dec. 13
meeting, "nonviolent activities have been considered as terrorism, and
excessive
measures have been taken to suppress or restrict individual rights,
including the
presumption of innocence, the right to a fair trial, freedom from torture,
privacy
rights, freedom of expression and assembly, and the right to seek asylum."

Ndiaye carefully refrained from identifying those countries, but human
rights
advocates quickly came up with a long list, from Algeria to Zimbabwe. In an
interview at his office here last week, Ndiaye said he was concerned that
the
campaign could backfire and undermine U.N. efforts to promote democracy and
the rule of law in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and his native West
Africa.

"The challenge is how to make counterterrorism measures compatible with
human
rights," he said. "Unfortunately, under the guise of fighting terror, some
governments are pursuing other agendas. Our concern is that this may
provide
cover to many governments to get rid of their opponents."

Insulting Mugabe may be outlawed

On Dec. 20, the Cuban legislature, with President Fidel Castro presiding,
unanimously passed a law that state media said expanded the application of
capital
punishment for crimes defined as terrorism, including the use of the
Internet to
incite political violence.

A week earlier, the government of Zimbabwe published a proposed law that
would
make it a crime to "undermine the authority of or insult" President Robert
Mugabe,
who is again seeking reelection. Mugabe's aides defended the legislation as
necessary to combat terrorists, a category they said includes most of the
president's
opponents as well as critical journalists.

"We agree with President Bush that anyone who harbors, finances or defends
a
terrorist is himself a terrorist," a presidential spokesman said.

In Central Asia, the government of Uzbekistan has defended its jailing of
moderate
Islamist opponents as part of the world campaign against "evildoers," while
Kyrgyzstan has intensified internal travel controls on dissidents.

The trend to toughen statutes aimed primarily at domestic dissent worries
advocates
such as Michael Posner, executive director of the New York-based Lawyers
Committee for Human Rights.

"We are going to see repeated examples of governments using the new
security
environment as a pretext for silencing dissidents," he said. "This gives a
green light
to the Mugabes of the world to go after their opponents under the cover of
what
the U.S. and the U.K. are doing" to fight terror.

The chairman of the Security Council's counterterrorism committee, British
Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock, has agreed to Ndiaye's request that he add a
human rights specialist to the committee's advisors, who already include
specialists
on money laundering and intelligence gathering. But the council's priority
is to
combat terrorism.

"The counterterrorism committee is not going to be the tool to resolve
human rights
problems around the world," said a European official at the committee who
asked
not to be named.

The U.N.'s own human rights advocates are limited to an advisory role in
Security
Council proceedings, noted Ndiaye, the New York deputy of Mary Robinson,
the
Geneva-based U.N. high commissioner for human rights. She in turn reports
to
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Robinson, a former president of Ireland, is viewed with suspicion in
Washington,
Moscow and Beijing because of liberal stands that are widely admired by
human
rights activists. Russia and China have publicly interpreted the Security
Council's
counterterror push as an endorsement of their own armed campaigns against
Muslim rebels, which have drawn strong criticism at U.N. human rights
forums.

By the midnight deadline Thursday, more than 100 of the U.N.'s 189 member
states
had filed their replies to the council, and most of the rest pledged to
submit
responses when the U.N. resumes sessions early this month. The published
responses range from long catalogs of efforts to disrupt terrorist networks
to
cursory reiterations of official policy.

A two-page memo from Venezuela

The U.S. report, which American officials say was intended as a "template"
for
other countries, runs 23 pages. Venezuela, which has been accused of
sheltering
Colombian terrorists, sent a two-page memo pledging cooperation with the
council
and summarizing its long-standing international treaty commitments. The
hard-line
military regime in Myanmar, in an equally terse submission, depicted itself
as a
victim of global terrorism, citing last year's occupation of its embassy in
Bangkok,
Thailand, by dissidents it labeled "expatriate terrorists."

Within Myanmar itself, however, "there are no terrorists," the government
assured
the Security Council.

One of the first Middle Eastern submissions came from Syria, which is
poised to
join the council for a two-year term this month. The Syrian response makes
a virtue
of Syria's strict controls over both the economy and the political system,
contending that financial support for terrorists is effectively curtailed
by the
absence of any private banking system or independent charities. The Syrians
cite as
a further deterrent their "harsh penalties" for threats to the public
order, including
capital punishment for such offenses as the "disruption of means of
information,
communications or transport."

The United States still officially calls Syria a terrorist state because of
its backing of
Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon and because of Damascus' history
as a
haven for Islamic Jihad and other militant Palestinian factions. Syria
asserted in its
report that although it has ratified several regional and international
conventions
against terrorism, the "legitimate struggle against foreign occupation"
does not fall
under the definition of terrorism in these treaties. Syria, which does not
recognize
Israel, condones armed attacks by Palestinians within Israel's borders as
well as in
the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israeli and Palestinian diplomats said in interviews that the U.N.
counterterror push
has already blunted outside criticism of methods used on both sides to
combat
accused terrorists, including preventive detention and restrictions on
speech and
assembly. The Israeli submission to the Security Council cites laws on the
books
since Israel's founding that impose fines and jail time for "propaganda
speeches" on
behalf of terrorists or the possession of literature published by such
groups. For
decades, civil libertarians in Israel have urged that these statutes be
rescinded.

Foreign condemnation of Israel's "extrajudicial killings" of accused
terrorists has
been muted since September, said Yehuda Lancry, Israel's U.N.
representative.

Palestinian officials say that although they have come under intense
criticism for
arresting dissidents without charges or published evidence, the pressure on
the
Palestinian Authority to stop terror attacks has now relegated such
concerns to the
sidelines.

"The atmosphere everywhere has changed since Sept. 11," said Nasser Kidwa,
the
permanent Palestinian observer at the U.N. "The American people themselves
are
saying, 'Forget about due process, we want to stop terrorism,' and you are
hearing
things that would have been unmentionable here before, like military
tribunals."

The prospective American military tribunals, though perhaps the single most
significant change in U.S. counterterror policies since Sept. 11, are
notably not
highlighted in the report submitted by the U.S. government to the Security
Council
last month. Yet the tribunals' ultimate impact on regimes elsewhere might
be greater
than any other counterterror initiative by council members, human rights
activists
say.

In a joint letter to Bush early last month, eight leading American human
rights
groups said his order authorizing the tribunals -- which could impose the
death
penalty -- will be cited by foreign dictators "for decades to come" as a
justification
for summary executions.

"The credibility and effectiveness of the United States in opposing such
repressive
procedures will be seriously harmed by this precedent," the letter said.

The United States, in an embarrassment to the State Department, was voted
off the
Human Rights Commission in Geneva last year. The U.S. is expected to
reclaim a
seat on the commission when it reconvenes in March, but human rights groups
that
strongly supported U.S. membership say they are now concerned that
Washington
will be a less aggressive advocate for judicial reform and the protection
of dissent.

"The State Department's last annual human rights report was filled with
critical
references to due-process concerns in places like Colombia, Egypt and
Turkey,"
said the Lawyers Committee's Posner. "Whether they are going to be able to
say all
that again without subjecting themselves to ridicule is an open question."

U.N. human rights officials say they are also concerned that the
counterterror focus
could pose problems for U.N. efforts to encourage independent judiciaries
and free
election environments in violence-racked societies such as East Timor,
Sierra
Leone, the Yugoslav region of Kosovo and -- in the coming year --
Afghanistan.

"'The terrorists pose a threat to both security and human rights, and many
countries
may, and rightly, resort to exceptional measures," said Ndiaye, a burly,
soft-spoken
Senegalese lawyer and former Amnesty International official. "But even
after 9/11,
defendants still deserve a fair trial, and a government's opponents still
have the right
of speech and assembly. These should not be restricted. If you do, you are
undermining the very reason that you are fighting against them."


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ABOARD THE USS FORD -- Yokosuka bureau chief, 08:18:10 01/03/02 Thu

Thursday, January 3, 2002


By Joseph Giordono, Yokosuka bureau chief
Pacific edition, Thursday, January 3, 2002

ABOARD THE USS FORD — It seems as if there is no such thing as a "routine" deployment anymore.

For ships such as the USS Ford, an Everett, Wash.-based frigate on a six-month deployment to the Western Pacific, that means a new mission: patrolling the Strait of Malacca in search of pirates and terrorists.

Despite being away from their families during the holidays, crewmembers say their role is important in the changing world environment.

"There is $850 million in commerce that goes through the straits every day. We are here to protect that from pirates and terrorists," said Cmdr. David Matawitz, the Ford’s commanding officer. "This is a vital mission. Things are changing so fast. But this is vital to the effort and vital to the world economy."

Matawitz and his crew have been out to sea for about two months of a planned six-month deployment, escorting merchant marine ships through 300 miles of one of the world’s busiest waterways.

Though he declined to discuss mission specifics, Matawitz said in a recent interview that the ship has not yet been forced to board or search a suspect vessel.

"September 11 proved that terrorists can hit anywhere in the world," said Lt. Cmdr. Paul Hugill, the Ford’s executive officer, pointing out that the World Trade Center was a financial, as well as symbolic, target. "Freedom of the seas is vital to U.S. and world interests. That has been the Navy’s historic mission, and that is our current mission."

According to Matawitz, the Ford is part of a multinational effort to patrol the waterway, which separates Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Matawitz said the Ford worked with ships from Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom and Australia, among others.

Crewmembers said they understand their mission’s importance and know the timing is determined by their regular two-year deployment cycle. Stateside ships generally follow a pattern of 18-months of work and training before deploying on a six-month cruise.

Ford crewmembers just wish their deployment didn’t stretch over every major family holiday — including Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s and Easter.

"It makes it even harder this year, because this is the first year that I’m married," said Petty Officer 1st Class Brian Luckett, who spent a previous tour at Yokosuka Naval Base, Japan. "I’ll be on the ship for my birthday, my wife’s birthday and my daughter’s birthday. But that’s the job we are supposed to do."

Luckett says his wife, also in the Navy, will spend the holidays with her parents, who live not far from Everett. But he will have to make do with telephone calls, like the one he made on Thanksgiving.

"I was lucky enough to be able to call, and that helped out a little bit," he said.

Like Luckett, Petty Officer 3rd Class Phillip Smith said his family forgives his holiday absence as long as he calls home.

"It doesn’t matter what time it is or where they are, but as long as I call my family, I’m OK," said the Houston native. "It doesn’t matter if it’s two or three in the morning there, they just want to hear my voice and talk to me for a couple of minutes. I think overall it’s a little easier for the guys like me who are single."

Being on extended deployment also means long periods without mail. When their mail does catch up to them, however, the crew takes anything they can get.

"It doesn’t matter if a letter or a magazine is a month old by that point. It’s something to read and it’s something from home," said Petty Officer 1st Class Gale Vasquez, a member of the San Diego-based helicopter air detachment assigned to the Ford.


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India says it will use full military might -- From combined dispatches, 08:14:41 01/03/02 Thu

January 3, 2002


India says it will use full military might

From combined dispatches
NEW DELHI — India said yesterday it was prepared to use its full military might to defend itself amid threats by Pakistan-based Islamic guerrilla groups to mount further attacks on the country.
Nuclear rivals Pakistan and India have come to the brink of war in the wake of an assault last month on India's Parliament that New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-based Kashmiri separatists.
"Whatever weapon is available, we will use it to defend ourselves," Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee said in his constituency of Lucknow in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
"And if because of that weapon, the attacker is defeated if he is killed, we should not be held responsible," said Mr. Vajpayee, who analysts say is under pressure to appear tough in advance of state elections in the politically crucial state of Uttar Pradesh.
In Islamabad, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf warned India it would pay a heavy price for any attack, but promised that his country would not be the first to go to war.
"Pakistan wants peace and de-escalation, but should a mistake of attacking Pakistan be made, they would regret their decision," Gen. Musharraf told a joint meeting of the National Security Council and the Cabinet.
India carried out nuclear tests in 1998, which were followed by tit-for-tat blasts by Pakistan. India has adopted a "no first use" policy for its nuclear weapons, saying they would only be used in retaliation. But Pakistan, whose conventional forces are far inferior, has not adopted a similar policy.
After the Parliament attack, in which 14 persons — including the five attackers — died, India demanded that Pakistan crack down on Muslim militants operating from its soil against India and said all options were open — including war — unless Islamabad acted.
Earlier, Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes told Reuters that Indian forces have completed their biggest-ever buildup, but are "not in battle positions."
He held out hope that diplomacy could still avert a war with Pakistan. "Efforts are being made to defuse the situation through diplomatic intervention," he said.
Despite the crisis, both Mr. Vajpayee and Gen. Musharraf plan to attend the summit of South Asian nations that begins in Katmandu, Nepal, tomorrow.
Plans for a meeting of the two leaders on the fringes of the summit have been scrapped, but Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh and his Pakistani counterpart, Abdul Sattar, "shook hands with smiling faces" at a pre-summit meeting, a conference spokesman said.
All political parties in India are urging the government to use diplomacy as the first option.
But Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, accused of the Parliament attack, threatened further violence.
Security was tightened at India's famed Taj Mahal monument after Indian officials said they had received an e-mail from Lashkar-e-Taiba threatening to blow up the landmark to love.
And Jaish-e-Mohammed said in a statement published in Kashmir newspapers that it would carry out new attacks on Indian security forces.
"We are in possession of more deadly and sophisticated weapons, and they will be fully used against the military and paramilitary forces of India in the coming days," the group said.
Hours later a grenade exploded in Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir state, wounding 20 persons, including five policemen, police said. Elsewhere, in a space of 24 hours, 18 persons were killed across strife-torn Kashmir.
The border remained tense as Indian police said four Pakistani soldiers were killed when Indian and Pakistani troops fired mortars and heavy machine guns across the frontier.
Pakistan has so far rounded up around 100 activists in response to India's demands to arrest militants, according to officials of the Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba.
India has called the arrests a step in the right direction.
But Jaish-e-Mohammed said it would seek to escape the net by shifting its offices into the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir, which covers two-thirds of the disputed region.
Amid mounting international alarm about the specter of war, President Bush has weighed in with calls for restraint by both parties, telephoning Mr. Vajpayee and Gen. Musharraf and urging talks.


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The U.S. military is airlifting hundreds of paratroops -- Reuters, 08:10:02 01/03/02 Thu

By Jonathan Lyons and Jeremy Page

WASHINGTON/KABUL (Reuters) - The U.S. military is airlifting hundreds of paratroops into southern Afghanistan to join the hunt for leaders of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network and his Taliban protectors.

As Washington's Afghan allies tried to negotiate the bloodless surrender of ousted Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Pentagon said it was counting on Afghanistan's interim government to hand him over if he were taken.

In the United States itself, all eyes were on the first person indicted in connection with the September 11 suicide hijackings there as Zacarias Moussaoui appeared in court facing charges that could carry the death penalty.

"The U.S. forces in Afghanistan continue to be focused on what we have said are our primary objectives right now. That is to pursue and get the Taliban and the al Qaeda leadership," Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said in Washington.

With its air campaign winding down, the U.S. military has been concentrating on ground operations, raiding suspected Taliban hideouts and questioning captured Taliban and al Qaeda fighters.

But the trail of bin Laden himself, accused by Washington of masterminding the September 11 attacks that killed almost 3,300 Americans and other nationals, appears to have gone cold in the mountainous expanse that divides Afghanistan from Pakistan.

Clarke said Wednesday that several hundred members of the Army's 101st Airborne Division had arrived at a military airfield in the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar in the south.

The paratroops, who will eventually total more than 1,000, would replace more than 1,000 Marines already there, she said.

U.S. officials said earlier the Marines would be diverted to other unspecified duties.

Clarke told reporters U.S. forces were now questioning 221 al Qaeda and Taliban "detainees" at facilities in Afghanistan and aboard the Navy warship Bataan in the northern Indian Ocean.

She spoke as Afghan officials negotiated with trapped Taliban fighters. "It's been made very clear that we expect to have control of him (Mullah Omar)," said Clarke.

"IT IS THEIR DECISION"

A spokesman for Haji Gullalai, intelligence chief in Kandahar, said envoys sent to negotiate the surrender of Mullah Omar had returned, and they hoped the talks would lead to his capture without bloodshed.

"We are still waiting to hear from them about our demands," the spokesman said. "Basically, we have told them clearly that we want the issue to be resolved without bloodshed and it is their decision how they want to respond."

Mullah Omar, a reclusive cleric rarely seen in public and who lost one eye fighting the 1979-89 Soviet occupation, is believed to have taken refuge in the mountains around Baghran in southern Helmand province, some 160 km (100 miles) northwest of Kandahar.

He is thought to have up to 1,000 fighters defending him.

But it was not clear if he was under the control of local tribal chieftains who might be prepared to hand him over.

In the United States, Moussaoui, a 33-year-old French citizen of Moroccan descent, appeared in a court in Alexandria, Virginia, not far from the Pentagon that was badly damaged in the September 11 suicide attacks.

"In the name of Allah I do not have anything to plead. I enter no plea. Thank you very much," he told the court.

Moussaoui was charged with conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism, to commit aircraft piracy, to destroy aircraft, to use weapons of mass destruction, to murder U.S. government employees and to destroy property.

His lawyers entered a plea of not guilty on his behalf, and the judge ordered opening arguments to begin on October 14.

Moussaoui's mother headed back to France after issuing a public plea that her son's life be spared. She declined to visit her son after authorities said an FBI agent would be present.

As post-war Afghanistan struggles to rebuild, a team from 12 nations contributing to a British-led foreign security force in Kabul began surveying the shattered capital.

The 25-strong team from Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Greece, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Romania met British troops at the force's headquarters in a dilapidated former sports club in the center of the city.

Impoverished by more than 20 years of warfare, foreign invasion, anarchy and Taliban misrule, Afghanistan's New Year began on a bitter note, with charges that U.S. bombs had killed 107 civilians at a village near the town of Gardez.

The U.S. military rejected the accusation from local Afghans, saying its planes had destroyed a compound used by al Qaeda and the Taliban.

A U.S. intelligence official said the military believed its bombs had killed Taliban intelligence chief Qari Ahmadullah during the last week of December. "We think he's most likely dead," the official told Reuters on condition of anonymity. Earlier, The New York Times newspaper quoted Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai as saying he was worried about the mounting civilian casualties.

"We want to finish terrorists in Afghanistan -- we want to finish them completely ... But we must also make sure our civilians do not suffer," he told the paper.


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U.S. plans bombings in Somalia -- THE WASHINGTON TIMES, 08:06:37 01/03/02 Thu

U.S. plans bombings in Somalia
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES


U.S. and allied military forces are stepping up aerial-reconnaissance flights over Somalia in preparation for raids against al Qaeda terrorist bases in the north African nation, according to U.S. intelligence officials.
Intelligence reports also disclosed that some 100 al Qaeda terrorists were identified recently in Somalia. The terrorists were spotted as part of the Islamic rebel group there known as Al-Ittihad Al-Islam, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The Mogadishu-based group, known as AIAI, is linked to Somali warlord Hussein Mohammed Aideed and has close ties to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist group in Afghanistan.
"Somalia will likely be next," said one defense official familiar with defense planning.
Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, Adm. John Stufflebeem, deputy director of operations for the Joint Staff, said U.S. forces are "on the hunt" for ousted Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, who is believed to be hiding in an area northwest of Kandahar.
U.S. and allied forces also continued to search for bin Laden, the terrorist leader behind the September 11 attacks, whose last known location was the mountains south of Jalalabad.
The reconnaissance flights over Somalia include aerial surveillance by U.S. EP-3, British Nimrod and French Atlantique aircraft, the officials said. The number of flights increased sharply last week, they said.
The aircraft are helping identify targets for future bombing raids, such as terrorist training camps in the southern and northern parts of Somalia and port facilities, the official said.
U.S. intelligence reports over the last several months have stated that weapons from terrorists in Afghanistan have been transported to Somalia on the Horn of Africa.
The head of U.S. special operations commandos yesterday said bin Laden is not likely to be found alive in Tora Bora caves.
"I don't think he's up there. What we've brought up there [to search] was pretty significant," Col. John Mulholland said at a Special Forces base outside Afghanistan. "I do think he's either dead, buried under some tonnage of rock, or he's out of there."
In Kandahar, Afghan officials said they are negotiating for the surrender of Mullah Omar without fighting.
"We are still in contact with the people there to find a way to end this issue peacefully," an official working for intelligence chief Haji Gulalai told Reuters.
Adm. Stufflebeem said the negotiations were not specifically directed at Mullah Omar.
"But I think it's a leap of faith if we believe that that is on the benefit or on the behalf of Mullah Omar himself," Adm. Stufflebeem said. "These are Taliban forces that are looking to negotiate themselves out of a predicament with anti-Taliban forces."
Mullah Omar used a lull in fighting around Kandahar last month, ostensibly for negotiations with anti-Taliban forces, to escape the city that had been surrounded.
Mr. Gulalai is leading efforts to find Mullah Omar, who has been pinpointed to a location near Baghran, about 100 miles northwest of Kandahar. About 1,500 Taliban fighters are said to be protecting the militia leader.
U.S. Special Forces troops are involved in a military operation to catch Mullah Omar, according to news agency reports from Afghanistan. Marines also are taking part.
In Kabul, foreign military forces began arriving to participate in an international peacekeeping force. "Today marks the arrival of the multinational [reconnaissance] party from all the troop-contributing nations that intend to place forces into the International Security Assistance Force," British Col. Richard Barrons said.
Meanwhile, U.S. defense and intelligence officials said the military believes that a bombing raid last week killed Taliban intelligence chief Qari Ahmadullah.
Marines in southern Afghanistan searched a former Taliban and al Qaeda compound in the region Tuesday, the U.S. Central Command said.
The intelligence-gathering mission with some 200 Marines was one of several operations during the past several weeks, according to Maj. Brad Lowell, a spokesman for the command in Tampa, Fla.
Victoria Clarke, the Pentagon's chief spokeswoman, said the United States expects the anti-Taliban forces to turn over Mullah Omar if he is captured.
"It's been made very clear that we expect to have control of him," she said. "We've made it very, very clear consistently what we expect the disposition of these people should be, particularly the leadership."
In a related development, 11 more al Qaeda prisoners were turned over to the United States and taken to a detention center on a U.S. base near Kandahar, the Pentagon said. The additional prisoners bring the total number in custody to 221.
Adm. Stufflebeem said U.S. forces are seeking information that will assist in shutting down and finding al Qaeda terrorists. "We are casting a relatively wide net to build intelligence," he said, referring to the work of 200 Marines north of Kandahar.
Meanwhile, several hundred members of the Army's front-line 101st Airborne Division have arrived at a military base in Kandahar in transports during the past several days.
The last time bombs were dropped was Friday near Gardez, when a compound occupied by Taliban forces was hit, Adm. Stufflebeem said.
Adm. Stufflebeem also said U.S. special-operations forces are searching caves near Tora Bora for evidence and terrorist leaders.


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Military Commando colonel views caves as dead end -- Susan Sevareid, 08:02:41 01/03/02 Thu

Military
Commando colonel views caves as dead end
By Susan Sevareid
Associated Press

Web Posted : 01/03/2002 12:00 AM

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Osama bin Laden isn't likely to be found in caves being searched by U.S. special forces in the Tora Bora area of eastern Afghanistan, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Task Force said Wednesday.

"I don't think he's up there," Col. John Mulholland told American journalists at a special forces forward operating base outside Afghanistan. "... I do think he's either dead, buried under some tonnage of rock or he's out of there."

But commanders at the base said U.S. special forces teams continue searching caves in the Tora Bora area looking for anything that might help dismantle bin Laden's al-Qaida network and catch the man accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks.

They weren't specific about what had been found.

The country where the forward operating base is located couldn't be identified under ground rules for reporters visiting a place that until recent days has been off-limits.

In a war in which the United States has relied little on conventional ground troops, small groups of special forces work with local Afghan fighters to overthrow the Taliban leadership and hunt down al-Qaida militants.

Reporters were taken to a special forces base in southern Afghanistan later Wednesday and heard members of the 5th Special Forces Group describe the activities of their teams in the Kandahar area. Here, the goal is to help secure a city that was the birthplace and the heart of Taliban territory.

A few residents waved at the armed special forces as they rode on pickups to a base in the city. The Americans said most Afghans have been friendly.

Through unilateral and joint patrols with Afghan allies, the special forces in Kandahar are keeping watch for hard-line fighters who may remain, checking residents' tips on hidden weapons or locations used by former fighters and assessing humanitarian needs.

"What I call it is keeping my finger on the pulse of the city," said Col. Dave, commander of the Special Operations Command and Control Center and military adviser to Kandahar Gov. Gul Agha.

Citing security concerns, many soldiers will give only their first name and rank.

Caves searched in the Tora Bora area in recent days by other special forces teams haven't been elaborate, the U.S. commanders said.

Americans saw nothing of the cave network bin Laden was reputed to have there, or of tunnels created to connect caves, Mulholland said.

Often, he added, caves had been looted by the time the U.S. teams went inside.

He didn't rule out that more elaborate complexes exist.

Though the special forces search in the Tora Bora area appears to be winding down, Mulholland said he's not prepared to say the role for special forces in Afghanistan has peaked.

Parts of the country, particularly in the north, are in transition, while the south still requires the United States to play more of a military role, he said.


01/03/2002


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Afghan Official Believes Bin Laden Alive -- From: ABC News, 07:58:47 01/03/02 Thu

Afghan Official Believes Bin Laden Alive

ABCNews.com
January 03, 2002

Osama bin Laden is "most likely" alive and hiding with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar in Afghanistan, the foreign minister of the country's interim government said Wednesday.

Abdullah Abdullah said the whereabouts of both men were unknown, but he echoed U.S. intelligence sources who say there are indications that bin Laden is not dead. Unlike American officials, though, Abdullah said he believes bin Laden has not left Afghanistan.

"It is most likely that he will be with Mullah Omar," Abdullah said Wednesday on ABCNEWS' Good Morning America . "And since we haven't seen the body, we could say that he is still alive. But there are also some reports from some corners of Afghanistan that he is still around in the southern part of Afghanistan."

Sources told ABCNEWS this morning that some Taliban were surrendering and turning over their weapons to forces of the new Afghan government west of Kandahar, but Abdullah said he still did not expect a quick end to the conflict with the remaining holdout supporters of the hard-line Islamic regime.

"I cannot be certain about full surrender of the Taliban, the pockets of Taliban in different parts of the country this week," he told Good Morning America . "But I think this will happen. Either they will be captured or they will surrender. But the search for Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden, I'm not optimistic that it will end this weekend or next."

But Abdullah denied a report this morning that Afghan forces were negotiating the surrender of Omar with Taliban holdouts near the town of Baghran.

Jamal Khan, a commander for the local Afghan intelligence chief, told The Associated Press Wednesday that negotiations have been going on for two days with Baghran's loya jirga , or grand council, of tribal leaders.

"I have not received such a report," Abdullah told Good Morning America . "His whereabouts are not known, neither to us nor to the coalition, I gather, but sooner or later he will be captured."

Meanwhile, some 200 U.S. Marines searched an abandoned compound in southern Afghanistan that allegedly housed senior Taliban and al Qaeda figures, but U.S. officials said the mission was not related to the hunt for Omar.

Marines who returned from the mission told ABCNEWS they came away with small arms and intelligence documents, and no shots were fired. They called the sweep-and-surveillance operation one of the largest ground operations inside Afghanistan so far.

Omar is believed to be hiding near the town of Baghran, about 100 miles northwest of Kandahar, in rough, nearly inaccessible mountain country -- and Afghan leaders are believed to have mounted a mission to find him.

Searching the Compounds

In recent days, there has been speculation that the Marines would soon play a direct role in the mission to capture the Taliban leader. On Monday, shortly before revelers rung in the new year, U.S. Marines in full battle gear and at least 4,000 Afghan fighters left Kandahar for the mountains of central Afghanistan, where Omar and up to 3,000 of his die-hard supporters may be holed up.

The sight raised suspicions that the United States may be involved in the effort to capture Omar, but both Navy Cmdr. Dan Keesee of U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla., and Adm. Craig Quigley from Central Command rejected such speculation. Quigley said several hundred Marines have "exploited" several locations north of Kandahar, searching compounds they knew were empty for possible intelligence.

Earlier, Afghan sources in the governor's office and the office of the local intelligence chief in Kandahar told ABCNEWS that the governor called together all the local chieftains and commanders, asking each to supply 60 to 100 fighters for the campaign against Omar and his loyalists.

Meanwhile, an intercepted phone call from Iran suggests that bin Laden is still alive -- if not in the best of health.

A senior military official told ABCNEWS the communications, intercepted over the past few days, used a code word for the accused terrorist mastermind, and suggested "you should keep [bin Laden] off of the television. He looks bad, he looks sick and it is demoralizing to his people."

Additional information also indicates that people close to bin Laden are behaving in a way that shows he is still in very much in charge, a U.S. intelligence official said.

In other developments:

U.S. defense officials believe that American bombs killed the Taliban intelligence chief at a compound in the eastern part of Afghanistan last week. The officials said it is believed that Qari Ahmadulla was killed in Naka, in the eastern province of Paktika, on Dec. 27, when U.S. planes attacked a house where he was staying with his associates.

A European security team arrived in the Afghan capital of Kabul on Tuesday to begin preparations for the expected influx European troops that will provide peacekeeping support.

Eight prisoners, including American John Walker, were moved from the USS Peleliu to the USS Bataan on Monday, U.S. officials said.

President Bush has appointed Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, a top-ranking Muslim in the U.S. government, as special envoy to Afghanistan.

At some 200 vaccination centers across Afghanistan, U.N. officials began an effort to immunize 9 million Afghan children against measles in a project it hopes will prevent 35,000 deaths from the disease each year.

ABCNEWS' Bill Blakemore in Kandahar, Afghanistan, ABCNEWS Radio, and Martha Raddatz and Rebecca Cooper in Washington contributed to this report.

To see more on this story, go to http://www.ABCNews.go.com

Copyright 2001 ABCNEWS.com.


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Pentagon Doubts Omar Report -- AP, 07:56:43 01/03/02 Thu

Pentagon Doubts Omar Report

Associated Press
January 02, 2002

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Defense Department said Wednesday that it doubts negotiations under way for the surrender of Taliban forces include their leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar.

An estimated 1,000 to 1,500 Taliban fighters who have been holding out near the city of Baghran were negotiating with anti-Taliban forces, said Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem.

"But I think its a leap of faith if we believe that that is on the behalf of Mullah Omar himself," Stufflebeem said. "These are Taliban forces looking to negotiate themselves out of a predicament."

A commander of the anti-Taliban forces, Jamal Khan, said his officials had confirmed that Omar was in hiding somewhere in Baghran, a mountainous region north of Kandahar.

Afghan military leaders have been negotiating indirectly with Omar for two days through Baghran's grand council of tribal leaders, said Khan.

But Stufflebeem said at a Pentagon news conference: "I don't know that there are ongoing negotiations specific to Omar."

Omar is wanted by the United States because his radical Islamic government has harbored Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorist network.

The last time surrender talks with Omar were announced, he slipped away from the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, where U.S. sources say virtually the entire Taliban leadership somehow managed to flee and leave the city to anti-Taliban fighters.

Stufflebeem said U.S. special forces were continuing to look for Omar and bin Laden. But he did not confirm Afghan reports that U.S. troops were participating in a major operation to capture Omar near Baghran.

Meanwhile, U.S. Central Command has confirmed that Marines searched a former Taliban and al-Qaida compound in southern Afghanistan.

Tuesday's intelligence-gathering mission by about 200 Marines was the latest of about a dozen such forays the Marines have undertaken in the past several weeks, said Maj. Brad Lowell, a spokesman for the command in Tampa, Fla.

The Marines left their base in the southern city of Kandahar late Monday night in a convoy of vehicles, headed for the compound in Helmand province, Lowell said. They and anti-Taliban Afghan forces were searching the fenced compound of about 14 buildings for information about the radical Islamic militia and the al-Qaida terrorists they harbored, Lowell said.

The Marines were equipped for combat supported by strike helicopters, Lowell said.

Another group of about 100 soldiers left the Kandahar base aboard Marine helicopters Monday evening. Lowell said he had no information about them. U.S. special forces likely would be involved in any search for the Taliban leader, helping to direct airstrikes and advising Afghan forces on tactics.

But Karzai, Afghanistan's interim prime minister, said the troops were Marines helping in an operation to try to capture Omar, who has been missing since Kandahar fell to Karzai's forces early last month.

Meanwhile, another 11 prisoners were handed over to the United States and taken to the detention center on the U.S. base in Kandahar, said Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke.

The new arrivals brought the number of Taliban and al-Qaida prisoners at the Kandahar base to 200 and in U.S. custody overall to 221.

Twelve prisoners were being held by the United States at the Bagram air base north of Kabul, and U.S. forces have one prisoner in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif. Eight prisoners, including American John Walker Lindh, were being held aboard the U.S. Navy's USS Bataan, after being moved early in the week from the USS Peleliu, Lowell said.

The Peleliu is home to the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, whose members are preparing to leave Kandahar and return to their ship. Soldiers from the Army's 101st Airborne Division will take over for the Marines at the Kandahar base. Clarke said Wednesday morning that a couple hundred had arrived.

Other Marines at the Kandahar airfield are members of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is based on the Bataan.

Associated Press writer Matt Kelley contributed to this report.

Copyright 2002 Associated Press.


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Vietnam Veteran's Flag Stolen -- Brooke, 21:52:49 01/02/02 Wed

Vietnam Veteran's Flag Stolen

A West Side resident and Vietnam veteran discovered on New
Year's Eve that some people in the Duke City have a distorted view of
what the American flag stands for - when he discovered that his had
been stolen.

Joe Salas, who lives in Taylor Ranch, found his 5-foot by 8-foot U.S.
flag missing when he woke up Monday morning.

Salas, who served 17 months in Vietnam, heard a vehicle outside early
that morning, but attributed it to neighbors leaving early for work,
not thieves.

"When I came out to get my newspaper, I realized that they had stolen
my 5x8 flag," he said.

"It represents everything that we are as Americans, and it represents
everything that we wish to succeed in and hope to be. . They need to
understand what this American flag stands for, and it doesn't stand
for being a thief."

Residents in the metro area have reported several flags stolen from
outside homes, and two flags were burned by vandals in a Northeast
Heights neighborhood


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Bosnian with grenade in mouth tests training of soldiers at Eagle Base -- By Rick Scavetta, Bosnia bureau, 15:22:43 01/02/02 Wed

Bosnian with grenade in mouth tests training of soldiers at Eagle Base

By Rick Scavetta, Bosnia bureau
European edition, Wednesday, January 2, 2002

Police and neighbors try to convince Rizo Delic, to give up the grenade he was holding in his mouth just outside the pedestrian gate to Eagle Base on Tuesday.


EAGLE BASE, Bosnia and Herzegovina — New Year’s Day nearly started off with a bang for peacekeepers here, as a Bosnian man wandered toward a U.S. base with a grenade in his mouth.

About 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, a man neighbors identified as Rizo Delic stumbled in front of the pedestrian gate at Eagle Base, apparently intoxicated and wielding a knife. From his lips, a hand grenade dangled by the pin.

Well behind concrete blockades and concertina wire, U.S. troops normally tasked to frisking incoming workers switched gears to deal with the threat. Infantrymen locked the front gate and called local police.

"Then we moved outside for — eyes on," said Sgt. George Benore, 22, of the 10th Mountain Division, based at Fort Drum, N.Y. "We are trained for this. We were prepared mentally."

As Bosnian police officers talked to Delic, an Army sniper crawled into a tower overlooking the street.

"They [police] defused the situation. We provided the cover, hoping he wouldn’t do something to our men or the civilians," said Benore, whose squad of soldiers manned the gate.

Dozens of local workers — either Brown & Root employees or contractors — gave Delic wide berth as he tripped over his own feet, the grenade swinging from his teeth. An Army interpreter called out over a megaphone, "Civilians should step away from the gate."

On at least two occasions, the grenade dropped to the slush-covered street. From behind the wire, troops jokingly asked, "Where’s his dash-10, so he can learn to use it." A "dash-10" refers to Army technical manuals.

The incident began at the Happy Day Motel, a suspected brothel a short walk from the Eagle Base in the village of Dubrave. Delic suspected the motel owner attacked his cousin last week, villagers said.

Last Wednesday, soldiers on gate guard witnessed three cars block a local man along the road outside the wire fence. The attackers stepped from the cars and beat the man severely, one soldier said.

Neighbors said Delic went seeking revenge — knife in hand. How the situation changed to Delic threatening to detonate the grenade is a mystery, although Bosnians just shrugged it off as somewhat normal for villagers in Dubrave.

After nearly a half-hour, Delic left in a car with family members, apparently still carrying his grenade, and local police sauntered back to their van. It is unknown whether they made any attempt to confiscate the grenade or pursue an arrest.

Soldiers followed the correct policy of allowing local authorities to take care of local problems, said Maj. Ed Larkin, an Eagle Base spokesman. Their response was based on training and discipline, he said.

"They stopped, they thought, and protected the area," Larkin said. "That’s a credit to the noncommissioned officers on the gate and base defense force."


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Special Operations soldier wounded in Afghanistan firefight -- Stars and Stripes, 15:14:41 01/02/02 Wed

Wednesday, January 2, 2002


Special Operations soldier wounded in Afghanistan firefight

By Jon R. Anderson, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Wednesday, January 2, 2002



KABUL, Afghanistan — A Special Operations soldier was wounded during a shootout near Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, say officials.

"A vehicle carrying Special Ops folks did come under fire," said U.S. Central Command spokesman Maj. Brad Lowell.

The attack came just after noon Monday.

Teams of 5th Special Forces Group soldiers have been operating in the Jalalabad region — which includes the Tora Bora cave complex — for several weeks. The units have been hunting for Taliban and al-Qaida holdouts in the area.

Lowell said the U.S. troops returned fire and "one Special Operations member did receive a gunshot wound to the leg."

It was not a life-threatening injury, said Lowell, who added that the soldier was evacuated to a military hospital in the area.

While the Special Operations team was able to secure the area, their attackers escaped, he said.


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Returning to Iraq -- By LON WAGNER AND AMY WATERS YARSINSKE, 15:11:06 01/02/02 Wed

By LON WAGNER AND AMY WATERS YARSINSKE,
Returning to Iraq, The Virginian-Pilot
© January 2, 2002


The convoy rolled out of Baghdad the morning of Dec. 10, 1995, and headed toward the crash site.

Nine months had passed since Iraq agreed to allow a visit to the wreckage of Scott Speicher's F/A-18, though Baghdad had postponed it three times. A year had gone by since Timothy Connolly urged his superiors at the Pentagon to secretly dispatch a team to the desert.

Two years had passed since Qataris found Speicher's jet.

Only the night before in Baghdad, the International Committee of the Red Cross had given the Iraqis the latitude and longitude of the crash site. But as the team neared the wreckage, Bedouins stood along the sandy path and waved their arms, directing the vehicles to the site.

The United States had sent investigators from the Army's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, including an anthropologist to help examine human remains. Experts from the Navy's crash investigation unit in China Lake, Calif., also went to the site, along with a medic, an explosive-disposal expert and three linguists.

The ICRC sent four people. The Iraqis sent two people and ordered soldiers to encircle the perimeter of the camp for protection.

The group had left the fertile flatlands and lakes surrounding Baghdad and, just three hours later, stood on a moonlike surface. They were 1,000 feet above sea level, in the desert. As far as they looked, all they could see was sand and a few scattered clumps of grass, shrubs and vines.

Just to the north, trails radiated out from Bedouin camps.

Speicher's Hornet was right-side up. Big chunks of it, easily recognized parts like its engines, lay in a circle no more than 60 feet wide.

Without moving one shovel of sand, military experts knew what that meant. The jet had lost power, gone into a flat spin and dropped almost straight to the desert floor.

Speicher's jet had not, as first thought, been blown to bits in the sky.

Investigators quickly noticed one other thing: The cockpit was missing.

Obviously, others had gotten to the crash site before the Americans.



Investigators started at the nose of the F/A-18 and roped off an area to excavate. It looked to them like the wreckage had been searched by people who knew what they were doing.

A pile of backfill, a mound of sand dug from somewhere else, had been heaped near where the cockpit should have been. Popped rivets lay on the ground nearby. The backfill, the experts thought, was less than a month old.

Components from the Hornet's computer had been removed, too.

As the work near the jet continued, other members of the team formed skirmish lines, spreading out and walking slowly to look for other evidence.

Two thousand feet to the north, they spotted something man-made, a tall arch sitting upright on a sandy knoll. They got closer and saw that it was the frame of the canopy, the transparent shield that covers the cockpit. It looked like Bedouins had stood it on end as a landmark.

To the south, they found one of the HARM missiles Speicher was to drop on the first night of the Gulf War.

A couple of days later, Navy flight mishap investigator Bruce Trenholm got a call on his radio. The other team members had found something a couple of miles away and wanted him to look at it.

He drove north and found the group standing in a circle. One of the Iraqis said a Bedouin boy had found a jumpsuit while herding his sheep.

They told Trenholm it was Speicher's flight suit. Trenholm could see that it was a U.S. NOMEX suit, standard aviator coveralls resistant to fires up to several hundred degrees. He also could see that it had faded from its usual olive color to a more greenish yellow.

He'd have to investigate to make sure it was Speicher's.

Near the flight suit, they found a cluster of pilot survival items: pieces of straps from a parachute, an inflatable raft, a 20 mm shell and pieces of an anti-G suit that a pilot wears to lessen aerodynamic forces.

They found a signaling flare. Someone had tried to light both ends, one for daytime and one for night. The pyrotechnics were still inside the night end, which meant maybe it hadn't worked.

On the team's fourth day in the desert, Trenholm spotted a small item sitting on a rock. Part of it had been sheared off when the jet hit the ground, but he knew what it was: the data storage unit of a Hornet.

If the information could be recovered from it, the DSU could unveil a minute-by-minute mechanical account of Speicher's last flight.

On their last day in the desert, the team anthropologist and others excavated a rectangular rock pile near the canopy. They thought it might be a makeshift grave.

They dug down several feet but found no remains.

The next day, Dec. 15, the team pulled out. Some of the most valuable evidence would turn up in the weeks to come, as the DSU and the flight suit were analyzed.

But during those five days, team members got a look at what Speicher would have seen if he'd landed safely. Miles of sand in any direction, far from anybody who could help him.

One other thought picked at Trenholm's brain. It was cold. Freezing.

This was December. Speicher was shot down in January.

If it was cold now, in a tent, with plenty of layers and thick sleeping bags, Trenholm knew it would have been bone-cold for Speicher.

A battered flight suit was recovered in the Iraqi desert, and the size of the Velcro left on the suit matched the patch, shown here, worn by members of Scott Speicher's squadron .
A few weeks later, Tony Albano got a message during a training flight that Trenholm was trying to track him down.

Albano, Speicher's roommate on the carrier Saratoga during the war, by that time was with a squadron in Meridian, Miss. Albano and Mark Fox, another squadronmate from VFA-81, agreed to meet Trenholm at Florida's Cecil Field.

In Jacksonville, Trenholm explained that he had been on the International Red Cross mission to the Iraqi desert, they had found a flight suit and he wanted Albano to look at it and see if he thought it was Speicher's.

He told them about the Bedouin boy who said he found the suit and that most of the Red Cross team members figured the Iraqis had planted it.

He told them that the legs were slit in the back, like an emergency worker or doctor would cut a suit off someone who was face down. He told them he'd estimated Speicher's height at 5 feet 11 inches, his weight at 168 pounds and his flight suit size at 38 long. The suit was a 38 long.

Then Trenholm reached into a paper bag and pulled it out.

The last time Albano had seen that suit, Speicher was wearing it, and they were slapping hands, wishing each other luck on their first wartime missions.

Now, here it was, found lying in the sand, coming out of a bag.

Albano saw that the suit was a little tattered, pockets were missing and the patches were gone. He knew that pilots remove those patches to ``sanitize'' their flight suits before flying into enemy territory.

He looked at Trenholm.

``I'm positive that's his flight suit,'' Albano said.

Then Fox hopped into his car, went to his house and grabbed his old flight suit. A circular patch of Velcro fastener on Speicher's right sleeve matched Fox's ``Sunliners-Anytime-Anyplace'' patch. An oval of Velcro on the left sleeve lined up perfectly with a patch that read, ``F/A-18 Hornet 1000 Hours.''

Trenholm then told Speicher's squadronmates about the condition of the jet, and the canopy and the parachute straps and the life support gear.

Five years after that awful night, there seemed to be even fewer answers. And the same old question.

``Oh God,'' Albano thought. ``Well, what happened to him?''

Soon after the team returned to the United States, a top official at the Defense Department's POW/MIA office met with Sen. Robert Smith to tell him what the group had found.

Smith, a New Hampshire Republican, was on the Senate Armed Services Committee and had tracked the Speicher case since the Qataris found the wreckage in 1993. Smith's own father was a naval aviator who was killed near the end of World War II, two days before Smith's fourth birthday.

On Jan. 17, during his briefing with the POW/MIA official, Smith heard grave news: The Red Cross team had found nothing to suggest Speicher could have survived.

A few weeks later, the aircraft investigators, life support experts, aviation engineers and anthropologists filed their reports. Their findings colored in a fairly thorough picture of what had happened to Speicher during his final mission.

That picture differed sharply from what Smith had been told.

On Feb. 15, an aircraft mishap investigator at the Navy's Safety Center in Norfolk reported a time line of Speicher's last flight. The information had come from the damaged memory unit the team recovered.

Speicher lifted the Hornet off the deck of the Saratoga at 1:36 a.m.

At 1:43 a.m., his jet recorded a code indicating a HARM launch computer failure. One, two or all three of his missiles might have been inoperative.

Two hours later, nearing the target, the jet's computer recorded another code: Speicher's ALR-67 radar warning receiver. The device would have detected threats from air or land. It might have had a minor problem or a complete failure. Speicher could have looked at another gauge to see how well the device was working.

At 3:49, Speicher turned off the jet's autopilot.

Seventeen seconds later, something slammed into his Hornet so hard that it lost power.

Engineers reported that the rocket motors that blast the canopy from the aircraft had burned even marks on its frame. That signaled a good ejection. They determined that the charred paint on the inside of the canopy, and the way the outside had melted, meant that Speicher had been engulfed for about three seconds in a 600- to 700-degree fire.

Speicher would have had second-degree burns on exposed skin, such as the back of his neck. But because of survival vests, the NOMEX suit and his anti-G suit, it would take a fire hotter than 700 degrees and longer than 10 seconds to cause fatal burns.

One of the engineers wrote: ``This pilot was over enemy territory, in extremis situation and sitting in the middle of a hot cockpit fire. Logic dictates that the only way this pilot is getting rid of his canopy is by ejecting.''

Trenholm's report picked up with the ejection.

He determined that the canopy's distance from the wreckage meant that when Speicher pulled the ejection handle, it separated as it should have.

Team members sift the sand beneath the aircraft, hoping to find Speicher's remains. They're wearing face masks as shields against boron fibers in the wreckage Department of Defense file photo.
The flight suit, signal flare, life raft items and anti-G suit materials were all in pretty good shape. If the ejection had failed, Trenholm knew, those things probably would have burned until they were unrecognizable.

Up to that point, 58 air crew had ejected from F/A-18s. Six had been injured fatally, and a majority were injured either from the jolt when the parachute opened or from landing.

But most pilots who ejected lived.

Trenholm found out that China Lake, years earlier, had issued a warning about the GQ 1000 Aeronautical Parachute that Speicher was using. Those parachutes sometimes allowed pilots to fall too fast, causing landing injuries.

His report concluded that Speicher probably had been injured either when the parachute opened or during his landing. Speicher's flight suit had some stains, maybe blood, but not enough to suggest that he had serious injuries.

Smith had been told the team found no evidence that Speicher survived.

But no one had turned up any evidence he had died, either.


News researcher Ann Kinken Johnson contributed to this series.


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US war on terrorism quietly enters Phase 2 -- Danna Harman, 15:02:15 01/02/02 Wed

US war on terrorism quietly enters Phase 2

In deference to the US, Somalia and Yemen are cracking down on militants.

By Danna Harman | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Nairobi, Kenya - As the world watches Afghanistan, the US is quietly embarking on the next phase of its war on terrorism. This low-grade campaign, however, does not involve aerial assaults on the handful of countries identified by the US as harboring terrorist networks.
Instead, the US is making sure that countries such as Somalia and Yemen - where Osama bin Laden allegedly operated in recent years - police themselves.

"These governments are afraid they might be the next US target, and are therefore clearly keen to show they are cooperating in the war against terrorism," says one foreign diplomat in Nairobi.

In recent weeks, the governments of both Somalia and Yemen have tracked down and arrested several people with suspected links to Mr. bin Laden's Al Qaeda network. Dozens have been killed in these operations or in the chaos surrounding them.

One country being closely watched is Somalia. In recent weeks, top US officials have repeatedly said they suspect links between the transitional government in Somalia and extremist personalities - and have hinted that action might be taken soon against these forces.

Interim Somali President Abdiquassim Salad Hassan has vigorously denied any such links and vowed to help the US weed out any terrorists there. Last week, his government arrested eight Iraqis and a Palestinian on suspicion of having links with Al Qaeda.

The arrests came one day after a diplomat from the US Embassy in Nairobi went to Mogadishu, the first visit by a US official to the Somali capital since 1995. Although the diplomat, Glenn Warren, refused to speak to the press about his visit, local papers said he had met with members of the ruling Transitional National Government (TNG) there.

Less hospitable to terrorists

An adviser to the US government, who requested anonymity, says the arrests are a sign that US pressure on the TNG is bearing some fruit. But the arrests were largely symbolic, he says, adding that he is skeptical that the Somali government would risk a destabilizing backlash by arresting any real extremists.

"The TNG will try to show its goodwill by arresting or deporting a handful of non-Somalis and claiming they're Islamists," he says. "I doubt the TNG will nab a real Al Qaeda figure; more likely they'll arrest a few poor Iraqi migrants looking for cooking jobs in Mogadishu."

Ted Dagne, a specialist in African affairs at the US Congressional Research Service, says the US objective in Somalia, which lacks an effective government, is simply to make it less hospitable to terrorists.

"The US is using preventative measures in Somalia, rather than punitive ones," Mr. Dagne says, suggesting that the US will need to go much further if it wants to address the root causes of the problem of extremism in Somalia.

"The absence of a central authority is a major contributing factor in making Somalia a conducive environment for terrorist and extremist groups," Dagne argues. "A stable Somalia under a democratic central authority is perhaps the only guarantee for a terrorist-free Somalia. But establishing a representative government is a major undertaking."

Since the arrests in Somalia, violent clashes have taken place among different clan groups there, with 35 reported killed within the following week.

More flare-ups

While it is difficult to link the fighting directly to the government arrests, the outbreaks are symptomatic of rising tensions in the country - and reminders of how quickly violence can flare up there.

Meanwhile, the US has reportedly asked the Yemeni government to allow US forces to participate in the hunt for Al Qaeda members.

While the State Department denies those reports, the Yemeni government says its own troops have been searching since Dec. 18 for people identified by Washington as Al Qaeda members, and that at least 24 solders and six tribesmen have been killed in the ensuing battles.

Yemeni Prime Minister Abdul-Qader Bagammal said last week that his country is determined to oust any and all Al Qaeda militants from its territory, and President Ali Abdullah Saleh ordered his forces to use an "iron fist" to deal with any security threat.

"Yemen and the United States are cooperating in intelligence in the current antiterror campaign," says a government spokesman.

The Yemeni security forces, he adds, are "capable of doing their duty and tracking down wanted terrorists and any elements who threaten the country's security on their own."

Casting a wider net

Somalia and Yemen are not the only countries where quiet operations - encouraged by the US - are taking place. US military officials believe Al Qaeda cells operate in 50 to 60 countries worldwide.

Bin Laden's network is said to have ties to Chechnya, where Russian President Vladimir Putin has long portrayed the fighting as Russia's battle against terrorists. While critical of Russia's handling of this conflict in the past, the US has changed gears since Sept. 11 and is said to be supportive of Putin's policy there.

In Egypt, 22 people, including professors, lawyers, and doctors, were arrested last month and charged with belonging to the banned Muslim Brotherhood. They face military trials this week and could be jailed for up to 15 years.

Speaking recently at an event with the Louisiana Governor Mike Foster, a keen rabbit-shooter, President Bush vowed that bin Laden and his followers would be caught wherever they were. "Sometimes those rabbits think they can hide from the governor," he said. "But eventually he smokes them out and gets them."


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Pentagon repairs to cost $700 million -- AP, 14:59:00 01/02/02 Wed

01/01/2002 - Updated 08:36 PM ET

Pentagon repairs to cost $700 million


By Kenneth Lambert, AP
.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The victims' families and the nation still grieve, but the once-charred and jagged western flank of the Pentagon no longer looks much like the scene of an American tragedy.

Except for flags waving from two 140-foot-tall cranes, there is little indication that the 400,000 square-foot chunk now missing from the building is anything other than an ordinary construction project.

As the year in which terrorist hijackers rammed a passenger-filled jetliner into the Pentagon's side becomes history, the knoll across a highway from the crash site no longer routinely draws crowds of people coming to see for themselves, weep and pay respects.

Several makeshift memorials that sprang up in the days and weeks after the attack have for the most part disappeared. Movers packed up the hundreds of letters, teddy bears, photographs, flags and other mementos, perhaps for future displays.

Of the 4,600 Pentagon workers displaced, 1,000 are back in their offices. The rest continue on in rented space.

Pentagon at a glance

Facts and figures about the Pentagon, the impact of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack and the reconstruction effort:

• Building size: 6.6 million square feet.

• Miles of corridors: 17.5.

• Number killed in attack: 189, 125 inside and 64 on plane, including five terrorist hijackers.

• Number wounded: 110, eight critically.

• Range of hospital stays: for most severely burned, between about four weeks and over three months.

• Employees displaced: 4,600.

• Area damaged: 2 million square feet.

• Area torn down: 400,000 square feet.

• Debris: 47,000 tons from demolition, plus 10,000 tons removed in weeks immediately after crash.

• Cost of reconstruction: $700 million, on top of $1.2 billion total cost of already ongoing renovation of entire building.

• Target completion: Spring 2003.

Source: Department of Defense, Washington Hospital Center



Just more than two weeks ago, the last of the eight most severely wounded victims finally was discharged from Washington Hospital Center's burn unit — three months and a week after going in. The critically burned still face months of additional skin grafts, reconstructive surgeries and painful physical therapy.

The Pentagon itself is a beehive of activity, very much back in business — waging war in Central Asia and maybe someday beyond to find and destroy those responsible for the terrorist attacks in Washington, New York and Pennsylvania.

It also has regained an old title. The destruction of the World Trade Center's twin towers again gives the Pentagon the unconditional, but unwanted, honor of being the world's biggest office building.

"We used to say the largest under one roof," Pentagon spokesman Glenn Flood said, "but we are the largest now."

There has been some bitterness that the experience of those affected by the Pentagon attack has at times been overshadowed by the magnitude of the horror in New York.

Of course, what happened on Sept. 11 across the Potomac River from Washington would alone have been enough to transfix the nation. Terrorists diverted American Airlines Flight 77 from its course toward Los Angeles out of Dulles International Airport, slamming it at 350 miles an hour and from six feet up into the nerve center of America's defense.

The massive explosion and fire fed by 20,000 gallons of jet fuel spread destruction over 2 million square feet — almost a third of the building. It killed 189 people, 125 inside and 64 on the plane.

Luck — if it can be called that — had it that the terrorists aimed the Boeing 757 at the only part of the Pentagon that already had been renovated in an 11-year, $1.3 billion project meant to bolster it against attack. That significantly limited the damage and loss of life by slowing the plane as it tore through the building and reducing the explosion's reach.

In the renovated section outside the immediate crash zone, most damage was caused by smoke and water that poured out of brand-new sprinklers. Many of these offices are occupied again.

But there was extensive fire damage hundreds of feet away in unrenovated areas that had not yet had sprinklers installed. The fire was so intense it cracked concrete.

That meant a 100-yard wide piece of the Pentagon's western face had to come down, including all five floors and three of the building's five rings. In all, trucks carted off 47,000 tons of debris — six percent of the building.

The demolition took just one month and a day, aided by 24-7 work hours and landfills that stayed open all night.

Weary workers celebrated the day they finished, Nov. 19, by placing a Christmas tree on the roof. It marked a turning point toward the positive: They would now stop tearing down and start building up.

The reconstruction is expected to cost over $700 million and take until spring 2003. The most immediate — and ambitious — goal is to rebuild the outermost ring of offices by the one-year anniversary of the attack, when a memorial is to be dedicated.

Slabs of Indiana limestone cut to exactly match the original exterior started arriving two weeks ago, said Will Bybee, president of the Bybee Stone Co. in Bloomington, Ind. The new section eventually will require 18,000 cubic feet of stone, carved from the same vein, though not the same quarry, as the original.

Rebuilding the lives of the critically injured and those who lost loved ones will be much harder.

Some relatives of those killed are coping by forming advocacy groups to represent their interests on Capitol Hill and elsewhere.

Also, 110 people were injured in the attack, including the eight severely burned, said Navy Cmdr. Yvette Brown Wahler, director of the Pentagon Family Assistance Center. Some have gone back to their jobs, but the Pentagon was unable to say how many.

Dr. Marion Jordan, chief of the Hospital Center's burn-treatment facility, believes all of the eight will eventually be able to care for themselves and do at least some of the things they love. Some will now start recovering relatively quickly.

For others, it will take many, many months. Civilian accountant Louise Kurtz, the last to be discharged on Dec. 17, was burned over 70% of her body and lost all her fingers and parts of both ears, Jordan said. Others also lost many fingers or were burned deep into tendon and muscle, he said.

Leaving the hospital, however, was a huge first step toward reclaiming their lives.

"We celebrated each one of them leaving," Jordan said. "I don't get a whole lot of rest or peace of mind until I see the backs of them going out the door."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright 2001 The Associated Press.


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200 Marines on the Move Toward Abandoned Taliban Compound -- NORIMITSU ONISHI, 14:53:30 01/02/02 Wed

January 2, 2002

200 Marines on the Move Toward Abandoned Taliban Compound
By NORIMITSU ONISHI with JAMES DAO

Afghan Leader Warily Backs U.S. Bombing (January 2, 2002)

ANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Jan. 1 — Backed by helicopter gunships and Harrier jets, a convoy carrying about 200 United States marines rumbled out of Kandahar before dawn today to secure an abandoned Taliban compound, in what amounted to the most extensive American ground operation in the war.

The marines headed west of Kandahar, the former Taliban stronghold, into neighboring Helmand Province, which has become the focus of American military activity in recent days. Until now, the marines had been largely restricted to the Kandahar Airport and a desert base southwest of here, reflecting American concerns that ground operations would increase the possibility of casualties.

Army Special Operations troops are also working with Afghan fighters to search for Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader, in the mountainous region of Baghran in northern Helmand Province, where perhaps as many as 2,000 Taliban are still hiding. The Pentagon is also considering plans to send a larger number of ground troops, possibly marines, to Baghran to help hunt for Mullah Omar.

Afghan officials said today that the Taliban holdouts in Baghran had begun surrendering weapons and vehicles, according to an agreement that is supposed to lead to a full surrender this week.

Some Afghan commanders said they were unsure of Mullah Omar's location. But Hajji Gullalai, the regional intelligence director, said he was negotiating with people close to Mullah Omar over his surrender.

"We know where Mullah Muhammad Omar is," he said in an interview outside his office today. "We have some demands, and the Taliban have some objections. They have some demands, and we have some objections. But I'm confident the negotiations will be successful." He did not say whether Mullah Omar was in Baghran.

Senior Pentagon officials said "a body of evidence" indicated that Mullah Omar was in the Baghran area. For that reason, American military officers in Kandahar have been pressing Gul Agha Shirzai, the American-backed warlord who controls the region, to mount an offensive against the Taliban holdouts, offering the assistance of American commandos, warplanes and possibly other combat troops.

The mission in Baghran, however, suggests diverging interests between the Americans and Afghans. As President Bush indicated on Monday, capturing Mullah Omar remains a priority for the United States, particularly since the trail of Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, appears to have grown cold. The Pentagon has drawn criticism for not having posted American ground troops in the Tora Bora region to prevent Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters from fleeing.

But just as in Tora Bora, where Afghan fighters showed little interest in searching through the mountains and caves for Taliban and Al Qaeda members, the Afghans here have displayed little interest in hunting for Mullah Omar and other senior Taliban in Baghran. When Mr. Gullalai said on Dec. 17 that Mullah Omar was in Baghran, he also said seizing him was not a priority for Mr. Shirzai's government.

At the Kandahar Airport base, Col. Andrew Frick, the commander of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, said this morning that the marines had left Kandahar in the night, accompanied by Mr. Shirzai's soldiers. He said the marines had secured their location — a sprawling Taliban compound with 14 buildings — without encountering any hostility, and were expected to return by Wednesday morning.

Colonel Frick suggested the compound was in a rural area not too far from the main highway that cuts across southern Afghanistan. He said no marines were in Baghran, which is in a remote area 100 miles north of the highway.

Officials with the United States Central Command in Tampa, Fla., said the compound probably had also been used by Al Qaeda forces who may have left behind documents, videotapes or computers that could shed light on the terrorist network's activities. The marines mainly provided security, while Mr. Shirzai's soldiers combed the buildings for such materials, the officials said.

American forces have canvassed a dozen locations that had been occupied by the Taliban or Al Qaeda in the region, Colonel Frick said. But he added that the area's size required the deployment of the significant marine force for the first time.

There had been reports by American news photographers in Kandahar that the marines had departed for Helmand Province by helicopter on Monday, possibly to assist in an attack on Baghran. But the Central Command said today that those helicopters were probably carrying marines to ships off shore or to another Marine base southwest of Kandahar.

The Afghans here — who are of the same Pashtun ethnic group as most of the Taliban — have favored negotiations over fighting. On Sunday, Mr. Shirzai's commanders reached an agreement with Abdul Waheed, the Taliban commander in the Baghran region, for the surrender of the holdouts. Mr. Waheed is a former official in the Taliban foreign ministry and a close ally of Mullah Omar.

Afghan officials said today that Mr. Waheed had started giving up vehicles and weapons, and that the surrender process was on track. Negotiations had centered on whether Mr. Waheed would be allowed to keep some weapons and vehicles, Mr. Shirzai's commanders said.

It is not clear how the Afghans and Americans will react if the Sunday agreement fails to yield all the Taliban holdouts, weapon stockpiles and, especially, Mullah Omar. Afghan commanders said they were prepared to fight the Taliban in Baghran.

"We have 5,000 soldiers ready to fight in Baghran," Mr. Gullalai said. "When we capture all of the Taliban, we will search every place in Baghran for Mullah Omar."

He did not say, however, where the soldiers had come from. Most of Mr. Shirzai's commanders are here in Kandahar, and they have yet to send their troops to Baghran.

The Central Command also reported today that a new batch of 25 Al Qaeda soldiers had been brought to a Marine Corps detention camp at Kandahar Airport, bringing the total number of prisoners there to 189. Cmdr. Dan Keesee, a Central Command spokesman, said most of those new detainees were captured by Pakistani troops after they had fled across the border from Tora Bora.

Commander Keesee said eight Al Qaeda prisoners — including John Walker Lindh, the American captured with Taliban forces near Mazar-i-Sharif — were transferred on Monday from a brig on the Peleliu to another amphibious assault ship in the Arabian Sea, the Bataan.

The Peleliu — which carries the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, whose troops are also in Kandahar — is scheduled either to return to the United States later this month or to deploy on a new mission, Pentagon officials say.


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KATMANDU, Nepal -- BBC Reporter, 14:45:43 01/02/02 Wed

Wednesday, January 2, 2002; 2:20 PM


KATMANDU, Nepal –– Breaking weeks of tension, the foreign ministers of India and Pakistan shook hands and smiled on Wednesday, hinting that diplomatic talks could ease the crisis that has prompted a build-up of troops on their border.

But the lighter mood was marred by violence in Kashmir, the Himalayan territory divided between the two nations. Suspected Islamic militants detonated two grenades near the legislature in Srinagar, the summer capital of the Indian-ruled portion, killing one policeman and wounding at least 24 other people, police said.

In southern Kashmir, Indian and Pakistani forces traded fire across the disputed border – a more intense version of what is a common occurrence even in calmer times. India said it killed at least five Pakistani soldiers and destroyed as many as 19 of their bunkers during the fighting.

With Islamabad under U.S. and Indian pressure to crack down on Islamic militants, Pakistani police in recent days have arrested 50 members of the two militant groups blamed by India for a Dec. 13 attack on Parliament in New Delhi, officials from the groups said Wednesday. That attack sent tensions spiraling between the nuclear-armed rivals.

It was not known whether those arrested from the groups Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba included militants India says were directly involved in the Parliament attack or from a list of 20 "terrorists" New Delhi demands Islamabad extradite.

At a conference room in Katmandu, Nepal, Indian External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh and Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar shook hands, spoke amiably and smiled Wednesday during a meeting of South Asian nations.

"The ice is melting," Pakistani government spokesman Ashfaq Ahmad Gondal said after the Cabinet ministers of seven nations talked about economic development and then went to dinner together.

But Singh was "in no mood" for one-on-one talks with Sattar, an Indian official said later on condition of anonymity.

Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, are scheduled to join other leaders in Nepal Friday.

Vajpayee talked tough in an appearance in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh with a veiled reference to India's nuclear arsenal.

"Whatever weapon is available, we will use it to defend ourselves. And if because of that weapon the attacker is defeated...if he is killed, we should not be held responsible," he said.

India has not specifically ruled out meeting with Pakistan over the issue, though a Vajpayee spokesman said earlier that no talks were planned "at any level." Pakistan has said repeatedly it would be willing to meet with India and that tension should be defused through talks.

Sattar also suggested Pakistan would consider extraditing terrorism suspects if India met "legal requirements," The Nation newspaper reported Wednesday.

Blair Goes to the Region



British Prime Minister Tony Blair leaves for South Asia Wednesday but his government played down talk he might act as peacemaker between Pakistan and India.

"Expectations about the potential of the prime minister's visit to defuse tensions should not be raised too much," said Foreign Secretary Jack Straw , confirming that Blair would visit Bangladesh, India and Pakistan during his week-long trip.

"There is no Blair peace plan that the prime minister could or should take out of his pocket," Straw told BBC radio.

The South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation summit is pivotal because it offers the possibility of direct diplomatic contact between the two nations, which has been scarce of late. Last week, India sent home half of Pakistan's diplomats, and Pakistan responded in kind.

Pakistan Arrests 50



Tense relations worsened sharply after India accused Pakistan of sponsoring the Dec. 13 attack on Parliament, which killed nine Indians and the five attackers. Pakistan denies the claim, and the two militant groups, Lashkar and Jaish, have denied any role.

The two groups are the main Pakistan-based groups battling Indian rule in Kashmir – an insurgency that India accused Pakistan of fueling. Pakistan says its support for militant groups in Kashmir is only political.

Pakistan says India's demands to hand over militants can be answered only if New Delhi backs up its accusations.

"If a court in India were to indict them, if India were to provide proof, Pakistan may consider extradition," Pakistani spokesman Gondal said Wednesday.

Still, Pakistan has acted to arrest dozens of militants – even before its sweep of 50 members of the two groups in recent days. It has already detained the former leader of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, though it cited internal security as the reason, not India's demands.

India is insisting Islamabad take what New Delhi calls "meaningful and resolute steps" to stop terrorists based in Pakistan from carrying out acts of violence in Kashmir, a mountainous region over which the two countries have fought two wars.

The attack Wednesday near the legislature in Srinagar came two months after an Oct. 1 suicide attack on the state legislature building, which killed 40 people.

Police said the attackers exploded the first grenade at the main entrance of the heavily guarded legislature building and followed up with another blast outside a nearby abandoned movie theater.

At least 12 people, including eight policemen, were wounded in the first blast. One policeman later died of his wounds, officials said. Ten civilians and three soldiers were wounded in the second explosion.

Elsewhere Wednesday, Indian soldiers killed nine suspected Islamic militants in three different shootouts in the Hill Kaka area bordering Pakistan.

The fighting near the border, 137 miles northwest of Jammu, the winter capital of Jammu-Kashmir state, lasted for two hours, the army said.

The Indian army also said that it killed at least five Pakistani soldiers and destroyed their bunkers in retaliatory fire in the Naushera sector of Jammu.

© 2002 Washington Post Newsweek Interactive


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The Airbus A300 -- Washington Post, 14:42:58 01/02/02 Wed

By Don Phillips
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 2, 2002; Page A04


The Airbus A300 that lost its vertical tail fin and crashed into a New York neighborhood Nov. 12 had been blown backward onto its tail in 1987 by a violent storm that swept the Airbus factory in France as the wide-body plane sat outside awaiting completion, said sources close to the investigation.

There is no indication that the freak event had anything to do with the crash of American Airlines Flight 587, which killed 260 people on the New York-Santo Domingo flight and five on the ground. Airbus sources said the aircraft was carefully inspected after the storm and no damage was found.

But investigators said they cannot overlook potential evidence, no matter how old or remote, in a crash that has defied explanation and may take investigators into unknown territory.

National Transportation Safety Board investigators, Airbus sources and French authorities shy away from calling the disaster a "mystery crash," particularly because they have gathered useful information from the crash site and from the plane's flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder. Investigators know a lot about what happened but cannot say why it happened.

No one found any indication of terrorism. The engines checked out fine. Weather does not seem to have been a factor. But almost everything else remains on the table and many months may pass before investigators can confidently identify a probable cause.

All the major possible scenarios -- serious errors by an experienced crew, a heretofore unknown type of rudder malfunction, an unlikely flaw in the composite carbon-plastic tail fin attachments, hidden damage that eluded inspectors, or some combination -- are disturbing.

The American Airlines flight left John F. Kennedy Airport in beautiful weather the morning of Nov. 12, taking off to the west and turning gently to the south over Jamaica Bay. Everything seemed normal.

Less than two minutes into the flight, the plane was apparently hit twice by wake turbulence flowing from the wingtips of a Japan Airlines Boeing 747 flying several miles ahead. The wake, two whirling columns of air that are a normal part of flying, was enough to get the crew's attention and perhaps surprise passengers. But preliminary readings from the flight data recorder measure it at only 0.1 times the force of gravity, hardly enough to seriously affect a plane as big as the A300.

Within a second after the second wake encounter, however, the plane began a series of violent fishtail movements. The rudder, the hinged plate at the end of the vertical tail fin, whipped from side to side at least five times. The ailerons, plates on the wing that control rolls and turns, also repeatedly moved abruptly.

The vertical tail fin -- usually called the vertical stabilizer -- cracked off when the composite material above the attachments failed.

As the plane gyrated through the air, both engines were torn loose, one landing in the back yard of a home and the other in front of a service station. The fuselage and wings of the A300 did a belly-flop into a neighborhood of neatly kept homes.

Investigators are reasonably certain they know the sequence of events that led to the crash. But why did the rudder begin its sharp movements? And why did the vertical stabilizer crack loose?

Whatever happened in those last few seconds left the crew dumbfounded. The transcript of the cockpit voice recorder is being closely held, as usual, but investigators have described the crew's mood as "panic."

The rudder is seldom used by crew members unless they need to steady the plane after an engine quits. It is sometimes used during landing or takeoff. An automatic device called a yaw damper makes small rudder movements in flight to prevent "Dutch roll" -- the typical fishtailing as a swept-wing commercial jet comes out of turns -- or to steady the plane in turbulence.

Yet investigative sources now generally agree that sharp rudder movements began the crash sequence.

That is one reason investigators are paying particular attention to any record of damage or maintenance to the tail section. They determined early in the investigation that before the aircraft left New York, it experienced a malfunction of its yaw damper and its "pitch trim," which moves the horizontal stabilizer to keep the plane level. A mechanic reset the computer that controls both tail-mounted mechanisms and they operated normally, the safety board reported.

Then days ago, investigative sources said, an American Airlines pilot assigned to the investigation remembered he was training at the Airbus factory in Toulouse when a storm blew the same aircraft back on its tail. Sources said his memory proved correct.

Sources said the plane was almost complete but its engines were not attached to the wing. Without the heavy engines, the plane was tail-heavy. It was sitting outside the factory when the storm hit and it tipped back on its tail. How hard it hit is uncertain.

An Airbus source said the company inspected the plane thoroughly and found no damage, including in the tail section.

"I'd be surprised if this had anything to do with the crash," the source said.

The rudder and the vertical tail fin were found in Jamaica Bay. The tail fin was undamaged other than at its attachments, but the rudder was torn into several pieces.

Determining why the rudder was in pieces -- two main pieces and several smaller ones -- is a key part of the investigation. One possibility is "flutter," in which a flight surface such as the rudder begins vibrating and oscillating wildly, tearing itself apart almost instantaneously.

Flutter is a well-known aviation killer. Manufacturers and regulators such as the Federal Aviation Administration go to great lengths to ensure flutter is not possible in almost any conceivable scenario on any commercial aircraft.

Investigators know the rudder and its control pedals in the cockpit moved in tandem. But much interpretation of the flight data recorder will be necessary to determine whether the pilots pushed the pedals or the rudder somehow moved on its own, back-driving the pedals.

If the pilots pushed the pedals, then investigators would be dealing with a scenario in which experienced pilots badly mishandled their plane and overstressed the vertical tail fin. If the rudder moved first, then investigators must determine whether they have found some new failure in the rudder control mechanism or the computer that controls it.

Another, potentially more important question is why the vertical stabilizer tore off. Composite material is made to be stronger than metal; there is no record of any other Airbus tail fin being torn off in flight. It is possible that the plane's gyrations stressed the fin beyond its ultimate design limit or that some flaw was present in the composites.

Preliminary calculations, sources said, indicate the tail fin may well have been overstressed. But sources close to the investigation said it is far too early to make that determination.

What concerns investigators is that the crash of Flight 587 is the first involving composites in a key load-bearing role. Both the stabilizer and rudder have been shipped to NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. Because of the importance of the composites to the future of aviation, investigators will first spend weeks working up a test protocol. They will then perform almost every possible type of nondestructive test before moving to destructive testing.

Another issue that will stretch the investigation is the complexity of the digital flight data recorder. The Airbus recorder, with more than 200 measurements, is a dream for the safety board but also extremely complex to decipher and interpret.

A senior investigator said that normally at this point, an investigation would be coming together toward a solution. This one is still expanding.

"It hasn't started coming back together yet," he said. "We just don't have the tangibles yet."


© 2002 The Washington Post Company


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Not Guilty Plea Given in Moussaoui Case; Trial Set -- Washington Post, 14:40:53 01/02/02 Wed

Not Guilty Plea Given in Moussaoui Case; Trial Set

By Brooke A. Masters
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 2, 2002; 2:30 PM


Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person so far to face charges in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, invoked Allah and told an Alexandria courtroom this morning that he didn’t have anything to plead. A federal judge then accepted a not guilty plea on his behalf.

The judge set a schedule that could put him on trial for his life in October.

Wearing a green jail jumpsuit, Moussaoui, 33, a French national of Moroccan descent, asked permission to address the court directly when the time came to enter his plea. "In the name of Allah, I do not have anything to plead and I enter no plea," he said politely before ending his statement by telling the judge "thank you very much."

U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema replied, "I will take that as a plea of not guilty," and Moussaoui's lawyer Frank Dunham replied, "That is correct."

Prosecutors have until March 29 to announce whether they will seek the death penalty for Moussaoui, who is charged with six counts, ranging from conspiracy to commit international terrorism to conspiracy to murder federal employees. U.S. authorities believe that Moussaoui was training to be the 20th conspirator aboard the four jets that were hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon, World Trade Center and a Pennsylvania field, killing more than 3,100 people. But he never got on board a plane because he was arrested in August after employees of a Minnesota flight school alerted the FBI to behavior they found suspicious.

Today's half-hour hearing brought unusually tight security and a previously unheard of massive international media presence to the federal courthouse in Alexandria. More than 15 television satellite trucks ringed the square outside the courthouse, and journalists began lining up before 6:30 a.m. Camera-carrying technicians mobbed participants as they came and entered the front door – at one point, a lawyer for Moussaoui's mother was so surroundeded that he could barely get into his car.

At the government's request, Brinkema set an ambitious schedule for motions, which, if followed, would start jury selection Sept. 30 and set opening statements for Oct. 14.

Defense lawyer Gerald Zerkin had requested a delay until February 2003 to give the defense more time to translate foreign language documents and interview witnesses overseas.

"The defense feels it simply cannot prepare its case in the time suggested. . . . The government has already had three months," Zerkin said. Plus, he added, the prosecution's schedule could make it difficult for his client to get a fair trial because potential jurors would begin filling out questionnaires shortly after the first anniversary of the attacks. "The vast amount of publicity will not be purged by Sept. 30," he said.

But Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert A. Spencer argued that "the publicity issue is going to have to be dealt with by the court no matter when we do it."

Brinkema agreed. "I am also concerned about the need to balance the defense's need to prepare for the trial and the public's need to get this [case] over with," she said. "If the defense needs additional resources including additional counsel, that's something this court can deal with."

Brinkema said she did not anticipate major problems with finding an impartial jury in Northern Virginia next fall. Noting that when the attacks occurred, she was in the middle of choosing a death penalty jury on another case, the judge said she was surprised then to find that the hijackings had not had a personal impact on much of the Northern Virginia jury pool.

"It was surprising to hear how few had friends or relatives who were hurt at the Pentagon," she said. "I am satisfied that the Northern Virginia population will be an excellent jury pool and we'll have no problem."

Her comments spell trouble for the defense, should they decide to request a change of venue to another part of the state or the country. That kind of motion will be heard at an April 4 hearing that has been scheduled for routine criminal motions. Brinkema has also set a hearing for Jan. 9 to consider a request by the cable network Court TV to televise the trial.

Moussaoui's mother, Aicha el-Wafi, did not attend the proceedings. She had declined to visit with her son in the Alexandria jail because government officials said the FBI must be present during such a meeting.

Her attorney, Francois Roux, who attended today's hearing, said today that el-Wafi decided "it would be too difficult for her to see her son for the first time at the hearing. His mother is very upset. If she came this morning, she would disturb her son at this very important judicial moment."

Roux said el-Wafi is returning to France this afternoon. He said he found Moussaoui's court-appointed lawyers "very purposeful" but said he was surprised to see the defendant wearing prison clothing in the courtroom. In the United States, prisoners usually are given civilian clothing only for hearings where a jury will be present.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company


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Talks 'under way for Omar surrender' -- Ananova : Reporter, 14:39:28 01/02/02 Wed

Talks 'under way for Omar surrender'


Negotiations for the surrender of Taliban leader Mullah Omar are reportedly under way in southern Afghanistan.

A commander for the local Afghan intelligence chief says there are confirmed reports that Mullah Omar is hiding in Baghran.

Jamal Khan says Afghan military leaders have been negotiating for two days with Baghran's loya jirga, or grand council, of tribal leaders.

He said: "We have confirmed reports that Mullah Mohammed Omar is hiding somewhere in Baghran."

A major military operation involving US Marines and anti-Taliban soldiers began earlier this week.

American troops were dispatched from the Marine base at Kandahar airport to northern locations near Baghran to capture the Taliban leader.

Story filed: 13:54 Wednesday 2nd January 2002


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'Terrorists threaten to blast Taj Mahal' -- Ananova : Reporter, 14:38:09 01/02/02 Wed

'Terrorists threaten to blast Taj Mahal'

A Pakistan-based terror group has reportedly threatened to attack the Taj Mahal.

Lashkar-e-Toiba is said to have made the threat in an email to the website of Rajnath Singh, the chief minister of India's Uttar Pradesh state.

Security is being stepped up around the 17th century monument.

Uttar Pradesh's Home Secretary Naresh Dayal told rediff.com: "Our experts are on the job and I am sure we will be able to track down this mail, which spells out an open threat to the chief minister and a few other prominent BJP leaders of the state.

"We have also enhanced the security in and around the Taj Mahal, which was mentioned as among Lashkar-e-Toiba's main targets."

Another Pakistan-based terrorist group, Jaish-e-Mohammed, has also threatened to carry out more attacks on Indian troops stationed in Kashmir.

India has blamed the two terrorist groups for the December 13 attack on parliament in which 14 people were killed, including all five attackers.

Story filed: 18:33 Wednesday 2nd January 2002


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HUNT CONTINUES -- MC Reporter, 10:02:49 01/02/02 Wed

WASHINGTON (AP) - A former Taliban and al-Qaida compound in southern Afghanistan was searched by combat-equipped U.S. Marines as the hunt for Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar continued.

Tuesday's intelligence-gathering mission by about 200 Marines was the latest of about a dozen such forays the Marines have undertaken in the past several weeks, said Maj. Brad Lowell, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command.

The Marines did not come under hostile fire, Lowell said.

The Marines left their base in the southern city of Kandahar late Monday night in a convoy of vehicles, headed for the compound in Helmand province, Lowell said. They and anti-Taliban Afghan forces were searching the fenced compound of about 14 buildings for information about the radical Islamic militia and the al-Qaida terrorists they harbored, Lowell said.

The Marines were equipped for combat supported by strike helicopters, Lowell said.

Another group of about 100 soldiers left the Kandahar base aboard Marine helicopters Monday evening. Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan's interim prime minister, said the troops were Marines helping in an operation to try to capture Omar, who has been missing since Kandahar fell to Karzai's forces early last month.

U.S. officials have refused to say who those soldiers were or what their mission was. Lowell said he had no information about them. U.S. special forces likely would be involved in any search for the Taliban leader, helping to direct airstrikes and advising Afghan forces on tactics.

Meanwhile Tuesday, 25 suspected al-Qaida members captured in Pakistan arrived at the detention center on the U.S. base in Kandahar, Lowell said. They had been captured after heavy fighting last month drove them out of Afghanistan's Tora Bora region, where U.S. officials believe bin Laden had stayed.

The new arrivals brought to 189 the number of Taliban and al-Qaida prisoners at the Kandahar base. An additional 12 prisoners were being held by the United States at the Bagram air base north of Kabul, and U.S. forces have one prisoner in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

Eight prisoners, including American John Walker Lindh, were being held aboard U.S. Navy ships in the Arabian Sea. On Monday, they were moved from the USS Peleliu to the USS Bataan, Lowell said.

The Peleliu is home to the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, whose members are preparing to leave Kandahar and return to their ship. Soldiers from the Army's 101st Airborne Division will take over for the Marines at the Kandahar base.

Other Marines at the Kandahar airfield are members of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is based on the Bataan.

On Sunday, a U.S. spy drone crashed while returning from a mission in support of the war in Afghanistan, a Central Command statement said. The unmanned plane was not shot down, and its wreckage will be recovered, the statement said.


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US forces launch mission to capture Taliban leader -- Ananova : Reporter, 15:02:55 01/01/02 Tue

US forces launch mission to capture Taliban leader

US Marines have launched a mission to capture Mullah Mohammed Omar, says the Afghan leader.

The interim prime minister says the Taliban leader is believed to be hiding in mountains northwest of Kandahar.

Pentagon officials have confirmed a mission is in progress, but refused to comment further.

Officials at the Central Command, based in Tampa, Florida, say they are unaware of an operation to capture Omar.

"If he's there, he'll be arrested," Prime Minister Hamid Karzai said. "We are determined to see him arrested."

In southern Afghanistan, dozens of US forces were seen boarding CH-46E Sea Knight helicopters at their base in Kandahar, Omar's hometown and the Taliban's final stronghold in southern Afghanistan.

The helicopters, which can hold up to 25 soldiers each, took off toward the northwest just before sunset.

A B-52 bomber and fighter jet also could be seen heading in the same direction.

Afghan officials suspect Omar is in the Baghran area, a remote, mountainous region about 100 miles northwest of Kandahar.

A US intelligence official earlier said American officials also think Omar is probably there.

Story filed: 08:57 Tuesday 1st January 2002


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'Reaching for Glory' -- By GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, 14:43:44 01/01/02 Tue

'Reaching for Glory': The Workings of Lyndon Johnson's Mind
By GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS
Oct. 14, 1964, is a very bad day for Lyndon Johnson. With only three weeks left in his race against Barry Goldwater, his personal lawyer, Abe Fortas, calls to report that the president's longest-serving aide, Walter Jenkins, has been arrested for performing oral sex on another man in the basement pay toilet of a Washington Y.M.C.A. An incredulous Johnson immediately takes charge of damage control. He directs Fortas to force Jenkins's resignation and to spirit damaging files from Jenkins's White House safe; orders the F.B.I. to produce an official report declaring that Jenkins is not a national security threat; asks the Pentagon to scour Jenkins's military reserve file for positive comments from his commanding officer, Barry Goldwater; urges the attorney general to intensify a bribery investigation of Goldwater's running mate, William Miller; coaches the first lady on how to secretly assure the Jenkins family that its financial future will be secure; and commissions a poll on the scandal's impact from his private pollster. Johnson suspects a Republican frame-up and fears the Jenkins arrest will cost him the presidency. ''Every farmer in the country is upset about it,'' he tells Fortas. ''It could mean . . . the ballgame.''

Of course, it didn't. Thanks to the first Chinese nuclear test, the fall of Nikita Khrushchev and Goldwater's reluctance to press the issue, the Jenkins story was only a blip in Johnson's 1964 landslide. Thanks to his penchant for recording his personal conversations and his family's generous wish to preserve the historical record, his tour-de-force display of political skill, ruthlessness and paranoia can now be observed in ''Reaching for Glory,'' the second volume of Johnson's White House tapes, edited by the historian Michael Beschloss. (It can be heard as well: cassette tapes at $26 and CD's at $32 are available from Simon & Schuster.)

Between November 1963 and January 1969, L.B.J. secretly taped 642 hours of conversations and dictation. Volume One, ''Taking Charge,'' begins the day of John F. Kennedy's assassination and ends shortly after the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, passed in August 1964. ''Reaching for Glory'' covers September 1964 through August 1965 -- a period Beschloss calls the ''pivotal'' year of Johnson's presidency, in which he pushed his Great Society programs through Congress and plunged the country into Vietnam.

It is well-plowed ground, most memorably in Robert Dallek's biography ''Flawed Giant'' and Joseph Califano's memoir, ''The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson.'' But even the most polished work of history can't match the thrilling intimacy conveyed by these transcripts (to which Dallek and Califano did not have access). Better yet are the recordings themselves, on which you can hear the voice, roughened by years of Cutty Sark and cigarettes, often hoarse from exhaustion and overuse. His press secretary, George Reedy, once said that when Johnson called, it felt as if he could ''crawl through that wire'' to talk to you. Reading these pages gives you the chance to crawl right up the line with Johnson -- to feel him bully and flirt, lobby and whine. When Nixon needed to think, he picked up a legal pad and wrote outlines. Reagan composed letters. Clinton played solitaire. When Johnson needed to think, he picked up the phone. It was his all-purpose political tool. ''Reaching for Glory'' provides an incomparable portrait of a president at work, and the workings of a president's mind.

They also reveal, as Beschloss puts it, a man of ''ostentatious contradictions.'' The day after the 1964 election, Johnson is complaining to Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago about how the Republicans were running ''kind of a Klan operation'' to keep blacks from voting for him; hours later, he is joking with an old Texas friend about using similar tactics to keep whites from voting against him. Aides are saintly sons one minute, self-serving incompetents the next. But the starkest contradiction is the gulf between his mastery of the home front and his muddling in Vietnam.

Johnson was a cunning political strategist and peerless parliamentary tactician. It is easy to imagine Adam Clayton Powell pulling the phone from his ear as Johnson browbeats him for failing to push an education bill through his committee. Perhaps the Clinton White House fund-raising mess could have been averted had one of us on staff read about Johnson's refusal to hold a fund-raiser for the Kennedy Center at the White House. ''I didn't want to start raising funds at the White House -- even for the Red Cross or United Fund,'' he tells ABC's president, Leonard Goldenson, ''because one person . . . in the room could . . . have something pending in Congress, and they'd say that he was buying his way into the White House.'' Vice President Hubert Humphrey gets strict marching orders on how to pass the president's legislative program: ''I want you to be walking down the halls . . . having the administrative assistants telling you what's happening and getting the gossip.''

That's what Johnson had been doing since his days as a young Congressional aide in the 1930's. His supreme confidence in domestic politics was built on this bedrock of experience. But when discussing Vietnam with the Senate majority leader, Mike Mansfield, he confesses, ''I'm no military man at all.'' It shows. Dealing with domestic policy, he gives orders; on foreign policy, he seems to take them. In his conversations about Vietnam, he is tentative, full of doubt, wary of his military advisers but unwilling to take them on for fear of looking weak. Early in 1965, he tells Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, ''I don't see any way of winning'' in Vietnam. The next month, he sends two Marine battalions into battle; a year later, he calls up more than 600,000 additional troops.

But if Johnson didn't have the courage to act on his doubts, neither did his closest advisers. In these conversations, McNamara and the national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, offer no convincing alternative to incremental escalation. ''We're drifting from day to day here,'' McNamara admits as he and Johnson discuss the decision to send in the Marines. ''I'm just telling you that the field commanders recommend it and can't think of any other solution.''

Of all the president's counselors, the most prescient turns out to be his old mentor, the conservative chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Richard Russell. He thinks victory is impossible and consistently urges Johnson to find some way to ''get out with good grace,'' like encouraging the installation of a government in South Vietnam that ''didn't want us in there.'' The senator's methods may have been unsavory, but his mind was sharp. Reacting to the passive performance of the South Vietnamese Army, he tells Johnson, ''If they're going to try to fight that kind of war, I'm in favor of getting out of there.''

So was Johnson. But he wasn't willing to risk the personal humiliation, or the possible loss of American power and prestige that he feared would follow a Vietnam pullout. Over and over again, he indicates that he knows the war is unwinnable. Yet he digs in deeper. ''Vietnam is getting worse every day,'' he tells Lady Bird in July 1965. ''It's like being in an airplane and I have to choose between crashing the plane or jumping out. I do not have a parachute.''

''When he is pierced, I bleed,'' she reports to her tape-recorded diary. Mrs. Johnson has given Beschloss permission to supplement her husband's tapes with entries from her diary, and they provide a poignant counterpoint. Early on, she worries that her husband is sleeping too little or eating too much; their exchanges are sweet and light. She grows more tense as Johnson becomes distraught over Vietnam. Aides like Bill Moyers and Richard Goodwin consult with psychiatrists because they're so concerned about the president's wild mood swings.

But Aug. 27, 1965, is a happy day in Lady Bird's diary. It is the president's 57th birthday, and the White House chef has made a cake decorated with symbols of his Great Society programs. ''He was like a man riding on a crest of achievement and success,'' she says. ''He was also a happy and relaxed man.'' Deservedly so. A generation later, the programs Johnson had enacted that frenetic year -- Medicare, Head Start, the Voting Rights Act -- continue to strengthen America. Vietnam, of course, still shadows us. So the judgment that lingers, and stings, is Johnson's self-criticism, as recorded by his wife: ''I'm not temperamentally equipped to be commander in chief.''


George Stephanopoulos, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, is the political analyst for ABC News.


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Agent Orange hotspots located, -- Brooke, 14:33:08 01/01/02 Tue

I found your new forum and decided to post my news here instead of your guestbook. I hope this is ok to do.



Agent Orange hotspots located, by BBC Science's Helen Sewell

(EXCERPT) Scientists investigating the effects of Agent Orange in
Vietnam have found that people living in a so-called hotspot have the
highest blood levels of its poisonous chemical dioxin ever recorded in
the country.

Agent Orange, which has the dioxin (TCDD - short for
2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin) as one of its constituents, was
last used in 1973.

But today, some residents of Binh-Hoa, near Ho Chi Minh City, have 200
times the normal amount of dioxin in their bloodstreams.

Agent Orange was widely used by the US military during the Vietnam War
as a defoliant so that Vietnam's dense jungle could not provide cover
for Viet Cong forces.

'Startling' results

It was when US veterans started to become ill with a variety of health
problems that investigations suggested that Agent Orange could be
involved.

The most dangerous ingredient was the dioxin, a pollutant that stays
in the environment for decades.

There are still about 12 dioxin hotspots in Vietnam, in areas where
very heavy spraying took place.

Scientists from the United States have been working with the
Vietnamese Red Cross in these areas, testing residents to see whether
they are suffering any ill effects.

The lead scientist, Professor Arnold Schecter of the University of
Texas, says they are "very startled" by the results.

Export worry

In a paper to be published in the journal Occupational and
Environmental Medicine, he says that in Binh-Hoa, 95% of people
sampled had elevated levels of dioxin in their bloodstream, and some
had 200 times the average amount.

Dioxins, which include TCDD and other related compounds, can cause
cancers and problems with reproductive development, the nervous and
immune systems.

It is thought the high levels of dioxin found in Binh-Hoa residents
result from the chemical leaching into watercourses where it is
absorbed by fish and ducks, which form part of the Vietnamese diet.

The issue is very sensitive for Vietnam, which exports these foods all
over the world.

See also:

03 Jul 01 |
Asia-Pacific Deal reached on Agent Orange 15 Nov 00 |
Asia-Pacific Agent Orange's toxic legacy 29 Mar 00 |
Health Agent Orange link to diabetes Internet links:

US Air Force health study


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