[Peace-discuss] News notes, 11/11

[C. G. Estabrook]

NOTES ON THE WEEK'S NEWS, FOR AWARE MEETING, 11/11

	[NB: This week's notes are divided into ten sections:  1. SOURCES,
	2. COVERAGE OF THE WAR, 3. OFFICIAL PROPAGANDA, 4. ECONOMY, 
	5. BOMB STORIES, 6. MILITARY OPERATIONS, 7. CIVIL LIBERTIES, 
	8. "WAR ON TERRORISM"  ELSEWHERE, 9. ANTHRAX, and 10. PROGNOSES.]

1. SOURCES

[AFP] Agence France-Presse; [ALL] major papers; [AP] Associated Press;
[BBC] British Broadcasting Corporation; [CHE] Chronicle of Higher
Education; [CMW] CBS Market Watch; [CNN] Cable News Network; [CP]
CounterPunch; [DPA] Deutsche Presse-Agentur; [FR] French papers; [FR]
French papers; [FR2] France 2 (TV); [FT] Financial Times (London); [GL]
Guardian (London); [GM] Globe and Mail (Toronto); [GR] German papers; [HI]
Hindu (India); [HT] Hindustan Times; [IHT] International Herald Tribune;
[IL] The Independent (London); [IPS] Inter Press Service; [LAT] Los
Angeles Times; [LM] Le Monde; [MI] Mirror (UK); [NA] Nation; [NBC] NBC
Network News; [NI] News International (Pakistan); [NJ] National Journal;
[NST] New Scientist; [NWK] Newsweek; [NY] New Yorker; [NYT] New York
Times; [OL] Observer (London); [OS] Orlando Sentinel; [PR] Progressive
Review; [PV] Pravda; [RT] Reuters; [SC] The Scotsman; [SJM] San Jose
Mercury News; [TEL] Telegraph (London); [TI] Times of India; [TL] Times
(London); [UK] British papers; [UPI] United Press International; [UST] USA
Today; [WP] Washington Post; [WSJ] Wall Street Journal; [WT] Washington
Times

2. COVERAGE OF THE WAR

[RT 11/10SA] Pakistan's Dawn newspaper said on Saturday that in an
interview from inside Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden said he had nuclear and
chemical weapons and might use them to respond to US attacks.  "I wish to
declare that if America used chemical or nuclear weapons against us, then
we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as
deterrent," the newspaper quoted bin Laden as telling a well-known
Pakistani journalist in Afghanistan on Wednesday night.

[AP 11/9F] A planeload of food and medicine provided by UNICEF landed
Thursday in the border city of Termez, Uzbekistan, intended for
Afghanistan, but border guards refused to open the bridge across the
Afghan frontier until the Taliban are forced out of Mazar-e-Sharif.  The
UNICEF plane, flying from Copenhagen, Denmark, brought 44 tons of milk
powder, biscuits, and medicine for Afghani children. It was the fourth aid
plane to fly to Termez.

[WSJ 11/8TH] Tajikistan offered to let the US use three of its air bases.

[WP 11/8TH] Refugees arriving in Pakistan report that the Taliban is
gaining support, especially in the south. "Even the people who did not
really like the Taliban are now supporting them," said one man.

3. OFFICIAL PROPAGANDA

[NYT 11/9S] A vague and interminable piece on US propaganda efforts: ...To
reach foreign audiences, especially in the Islamic world, the State
Department brought in Charlotte Beers, a former advertising executive, who
is using her marketing skills to try to make American values as much a
brand name as McDonald's.  The foreign message crafted in Ms. Beers' new
shop at Foggy Bottom dovetails with the domestic news management led by
Karen Hughes at the White House. From a nerve center set up two weeks ago
in the Old Executive Office Building, the top communications directors of
the administration including veterans who ran war rooms for presidential
campaigns talk every morning ...  Barry Zorthian, the chief spokesman for
the American war effort in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, said this conflict
is "much tighter than Vietnam."  On Sunday, Karl Rove, a senior political
adviser to President Bush, will visit Hollywood, where he is expected to
receive a warm welcome from producers and directors eager to show their
patriotism.  Sean Daniel, a former studio executive and producer of "The
Mummy," said he expected Hollywood to help.  "We'll contribute in a modern
way what was done in the Second World War," Mr. Daniel said. "There has to
be a way for the most popular culture on earth to help spread or help
focus on our commonly shared beliefs, like the fact that what we're doing
is right."  [In Prague in 1994} "Karl Rove saw for himself how powerful
[Radio Free Europe] had been, bringing in the news about those communist
countries to their own people in their own language, and it made it
crystal clear to him that it had to be saved," said Kevin Klose, who was
the head of Radio Free Europe then and is now president of National Public
Radio.  Like the old Office of War Information in World War II, the
administration has sought to harmonize the daily message about the
progress of the war through the creation of the White House war room.
Representatives of various agencies work together there, including
officials from the Pentagon, Health and Human Services and the new Office
of Homeland Security.  And Ms. Beers has begun addressing groups of
foreign journalists in Washington, many from Muslim nations. Those
sessions are closed to American journalists.  "We can't give out our
propaganda to our own people," said Price Floyd, deputy director of media
outreach at the State Department.  Frank Mankiewicz, a former Democratic
spokesman now with the public relations firm of Hill and Knowlton, [said],
"It's trying to fit one kind of struggle into another form and it's not
working. It's too obvious."  [SOD] Rumsfeld, while paying lip service to
Persian Gulf war guidelines for news media coverage of combat, has
enforced policies ensuring that journalists have little or no access to
independent information about military strategies, successes and failures;
the Central Command has yet to allow reporters to have any contact with
troops.  "A whole generation of military officers grew up believing that
the press was the problem, if not the enemy," [former WP reporter Don]
Oberdorfer said.  Rumsfeld said on Tuesday that the United States had
never specifically asked for German troops but rather the country's "broad
support."  European journalists have also become suspicious that American
news media have been co-opted by the government, or at least swept up by
patriotism. "The journalists and the media directors suffer, in my
opinion, from a `post Vietnam patriotic syndrome,' " wrote Freimut Duve, a
German who heads the office on free speech at the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe in Vienna. One flier [dropped in
Afghanistan] offers justification: "On September 11th, the United States
was the target of terrorist attacks, leaving no choice but to seek justice
for these horrible crimes."  Another provides an advisory: "We have no
wish to hurt you, the innocent people of Afghanistan. Stay away from
military installations, government buildings, terrorist camps, roads,
factories, or bridges [sic].  If you are near these places, then you must
move away from them. Seek a safe place, and stay well away from anything
that might be a target" ... most Afghans are more focused on their own
fight for survival than the war against terrorism. As bombs hit the
cities, people flee to the villages. As bombs hit the villages, people
flee to the borders. They are destitute and frightened and hungry.  The
Taliban's Radio Shariat was quickly silenced by the air raids.  Last week,
Congress voted to create Radio Free Afghanistan.  On Wednesday, the Voice
of America warned hungry Afghans that food had been stolen from United
Nations warehouses and that the Taliban may have poisoned it.  "It is hard
to believe that anyone even those as evil as the Taliban leaders would
ever poison food intended for starving people," the editorial said. "But
then, who believed before Sept. 11 that anyone would hijack civilian
airliners and deliberately crash them into buildings to kill thousands of
innocent people?" In Pakistan, the battle for the headlines largely seems
to have been won by Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban's ambassador in
Islamabad. Virtually every weekday, he has hosted a news conference from
the embassy's veranda.  [So Pakistan shut him down.]

[WHG 11/6T] PRESIDENT BUSH: I am going to the United Nations to give a
speech on Saturday. And I am going to praise those nations who have joined
our coalition. But a coalition partner must do more than just express
sympathy; a coalition partner must perform. And our coalition partner here
has performed; we work together.  And that means different things for
different nations. Some nations don't want to contribute troops, and we
understand that. Other nations can contribute intelligence sharing, and
for that we're grateful. But all nations, if they want to fight terror,
must do something. It is time for action. And that's going to be the
message of my speech at the United Nations.  I have no specific nation in
mind, at least as I stand here now. Everybody ought to be given the
benefit of the doubt. But over time, it's going to be important for
nations to know they will be held accountable for inactivity. You are
either with us or you are against us in the fight against terror. And
that's going to be part of my speech at the United Nations... PRESIDENT
CHIRAC: Just one comment. I would just like to remind you, ladies and
gentlemen, that through Resolution 1373, the Security Council of the
United Nations acknowledged the legitimacy of U.S. action, and also
outlined the obligation for all countries to join the fight against
terrorism. So, of course, all nations and countries contribute according
to their capabilities. But there is no way they can get out of this
commitment. It is the legitimacy and the legitimate reaction of the U.S.
that was endorsed.

[DR 11/9F] NBC FRIENDS' TOPS BUSH'S THURSDAY NIGHT SECURITY SPEECH by a
rate of more than 2-1; CBS's SURVIVOR: AFRICA also easily outperformed
Bush.  In several East Coast markets, Bush finished a distant fifth place
behind FOX's FAMILY GUY, and UPN's WWF SMACKDOWN.

[CMW 11/8TH] Beginning in February, the National Opinion Research Center,
working at the behest of a consortium of media companies, labored for
months to tally uncounted votes in the disputed election that eventually
led to Bush's victory in Florida and, ultimately, to his presidency.
NORC's tabulation of 180,000 ballots that did not register votes during
initial machine counts was complete before Labor Day and was slated for
media release in mid-September. The data were held back at the behest of
sponsors who felt they did not he resources to analyze it properly with so
many reporters busy covering the attacks. See full story.  However, NORC
quietly turned over its findings early this week. The Associated Press
said Thursday that its first coverage will go out on the wire Sunday for
newspaper use the following day. Follow-ups begin Monday for use Tuesday.

4. ECONOMY

[WSJ 11/9F] Writers from the British periodical The Economist say that one
good effect of 911 is that the anti-globalization movement is dead; mad
Michael Kelly of the WP agrees.

[RT 11/5M] Ralph Nader said on Monday the United States was "ripe for a
revolt'' against corporate power grabs following the Sept. 11 attacks.
Joined by representatives of groups including Greenpeace and Friends of
the Earth, Nader criticized congressional leaders, the Bush administration
and big business for taking advantage of the attacks: "There is a whole
range of power grabs going on ... There is an escalation of the corporate
takeover of the United States ... The ground and soil are ripe for a
revolt by the American people." The groups have formed ``Citizens Agenda
Against Corporate Raids on the Treasury and an Outburst of Wartime
Opportunism'' to fight ``non-patriotic'' government spending and policies
as well as threats to civil liberties: "Under the guise of 'national
security' our federal treasury is being raided and our democratic rights
are being taken away while Congress feeds sympathetic campaign
contributors at taxpayer expense, sends working people to fight, and
leaves the unemployed, the disenfranchised and American families to
suffer."

[AP 11/6T] The Federal Reserve cut a key interest rate Tuesday by a half
point ... The Fed's cut, the 10th this year, is aimed at cushioning the
economic blow from the Sept. 11 attacks. In their aftermath, consumer
confidence has plunged, unemployment has soared, and manufacturing, the
weakest part of the economy, has sunk deeper into its own recession.
Economists are hopeful lowering borrowing costs will persuade consumers
and businesses to spend and invest, which would prevent further weakening
of the economy.  After a closed-door meeting, Federal Reserve Chairman
Alan Greenspan and his colleagues announced they were cutting the target
for the federal funds rate, the interest banks charge each other on
overnight loans, to 2 percent, the lowest since September 1961. In
response, commercial banks were expected to reduce their prime lending
rates, the benchmark for millions of consumer and business loans, by a
similar half-point to 5 percent, the lowest level since June 25, 1972.
["Fed funds - the rate at which banks lend each other money overnight -
haven't been 2% since 1961; the discount rate hasn't been 1.5% since 1955.
They're scared. And they've left the door open for more." -D. Henwood]

[GL 11/6T] "At the [WTO] talks in Qatar on Friday, the nations of 'the
quad' [US, EU, Canada and Japan] will, they insist, rescue the castaways
of the new world order ... The draft declaration due to be discussed this
weekend was mostly written during two exclusive meetings: in Mexico in
August and in Singapore last month. Though the WTO has 142 members, only
21 nations, among them the world's richest and most powerful, were
permitted to attend. The documents the meeting produced were then
submitted to the other members for approval. They were not permitted to
make substantial changes.  As a result, the draft declaration contains
almost none of the concessions that developing countries, representing
most of the world's people, have requested. Powerful nations have refused
to stop subsidizing their exports of meat, grain, and sugar: by dumping
them in weak countries at artificially low prices, they destroy the
livelihoods of local farmers. Britain and Germany have insisted that they
will not relax the laws governing the patenting of drugs: poor countries
facing public health disasters will continue to be denied cheap medicine
... the powerful nations have abandoned the pretence of seeking consent.
Now they will simply bludgeon the developing world into submission." [G.
Monbiot]

[BBC 11/9F] Over 2000 delegates from 142 countries, as well as 800
journalists and 300 lobbyists, are gathering to plan fresh trade
negotiations in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar ... the meeting was formally
opened by the Emir of Qatar ... Brazil's trade and industry minister,
Sergio Amaral, told the BBC that there was no doubt that the world trading
system was unequal.  "Brazil has opened its markets," he said. "But when
we try to sell the products where we are most competitive we face high
tariff barriers." Under previous trade legislation, patent law was
extended to developing countries, stopping them from producing generic
brands of drugs, just as the Aids epidemic was in full flood.  Now
countries like Brazil want the right to produce cheap drugs. EU
negotiators are working on compromise language to meet Brazil's desire for
a public health exemption to the patent legislation - in opposition to the
US.

[AFP 11/11S] WTO: US and Japan offered differing views of anti-dumping
duties -- punitive tariffs imposed by Washington on imports it says have
entered the country at unfairly low prices.  US Trade Representative
Robert Zoellick stressed that such duties were necessary to preserve US
public support for free trade. Japan maintains they are simply being used
to shield an inefficient US steel industry.  Other points of discord
include the right of poor nations to override patents held by big
pharmaceutical companies.  The admission of China to the WTO, a move 15
years in the making, was repeatedly described as historic.  "This decision
is an historic one and the WTO's greatest leap towards becoming a
universal organization," added European Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy.

[RT 11/9F] US wholesale prices took their sharpest tumble on record during
October as energy costs fell by the largest amount since 1989 and
carmakers turned to cut-rate financing to lure buyers.  The Labor
Department's Producer Price Index, which measures costs at the factory and
farm gate, plunged 1.6 percent -- the biggest drop since records were
started in 1947.

5. BOMB STORIES

[AP 11/5M] Fuel-oil explosives/15,000lb bombs (Vietnam-era "daisy
cutters," largest bomb in US arsenal short of nukes) The BLU-82 combines a
watery mixture of ammonium nitrate and aluminum with air, then ignites the
mist for a huge explosion that incinerates everything within up to 600
yards. The shock wave can be felt miles away. The BLU-82 uses about six
times the amount of ammonium nitrate explosive that Timothy McVeigh used
in the bomb that blew up the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995. First
created during the Vietnam War to quickly clear jungle landing zones, the
daisy cutter also was used against Iraqi troops during the Gulf War.
Reports from the ground in Afghanistan indicate the huge bombs have been
used against front-line Taliban positions. The bombs cost about $27,000
each. They are dropped from a C-130 cargo plane flying at least 6,000 feet
off the ground, to avoid the bomb's massive shock wave. Each is more than
17 feet long and 5 feet in diameter - about the size of a Volkswagen
Beetle but far heavier.

6. MILITARY OPERATIONS

[SH 11/5M] The Fifth Afghan War, already costing the US from $400M to
$800M, could cost $1 billion a month for the duration of the conflict,
according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a
nonprofit Washington think tank with a record of accurate estimations of
past military operations. Those estimates do not include the price tag of
Operation Noble Eagle, the Pentagon's assignment of 40,000 National Guard
and reserve troops to homeland security duty -- at least $100 million a
month.  Cruise missiles lobbed by ships, warplanes and submarines cost
between $1 million and $2 million each. Through October, the Navy alone
had launched about 90 of the $1 million Tomahawk cruise missiles

7. CIVIL LIBERTIES

[WP 11/9F] The Justice Department announced it will no longer issue a
running tally of the number of people detained around the country ...
House and Senate negotiators agreed to prohibit any U.S. cooperation in
the establishment of the International Criminal Court, which is being
established in the Netherlands to prosecute war crimes, genocide and other
crimes against humanity.

[OL 11/11S] Britain is to be placed under a state of 'public emergency' as
part of an unprecedented government move to allow internment without trial
of suspected terrorists.  In a historic initiative that will incense civil
liberties groups, David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, will lay the order
before the House of Commons in the next 48 hours, to be followed by
anti-terrorist legislation which will be rushed through in the next four
weeks.  The order, which says the events of 11 September are 'threatening
the life of the nation', will allow Britain to opt out of Article 5 of the
European Convention on Human Rights, which bans detention without trial.
It will pave the way for indefinite imprisonment of foreign nationals who
the Government suspects are terrorists, and comes less than 24 hours after
warnings from America that Britain is a top target for Osama bin Laden's
al-Qaeda terrorist network.  The move reveals the seriousness the
Government places on the threat to Britain. Such orders can be used only
in times of war or when there has been an event that puts the security of
the nation at risk. Whitehall sources said the order would not be reviewed
'for at least a year'.

[CP 11/9F] Liberals continue come out for torture!  NWK liberal columnist
Jonathan Alter writes that it's needed to "'jump start' the stalled
investigation."  (Even his metaphor is hackneyed and incorrect -- or is
it?  Electrical cables to the genitals was one of the techniques taught by
CIA torturer Dan Mitrione in Uruguay.)  Alter writes, "we'll have to think
about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies, even if
that's hypocritical."  Liberal lawyer Alan Dershowitz is promoting the
idea of "torture warrants" issued by a judge.  It does not bother these
noble liberal spirits that torture is illegal under international law. "In
recent years the United States has been charged by the UN and also by
human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch as tolerating
torture in prisons in many states, by methods ranging from solitary,
23-hour a day confinement in concrete boxes for years on end, to
activating 50,000-volt shocks through a mandatory belt worn by a prisoner
... Torture destroys the tortured and corrupts the society that sanctions
it. Just like the FBI today, the CIA in 1968 got frustrated by its
inability to break suspected leaders of the Vietnamese Liberation Front by
their habitual methods of interrogation and torture. So they began more
advanced experiments, in one of which they anaesthetized three prisoners,
opened their skulls, planted electrodes in their brains. The prisoners
were then revived, put in a room, and given knives. The CIA psychologists
then activated the electrodes, hoping they would then attack each other.
They didn't. The electrodes were removed, the prisoners shot and their
bodies burned. Alter can read about it in Gordon Thomas's book, Journey
into Madness. (The overall history narrated above can be found in St Clair
and Cockburn's Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press."

[OL 11/11S] For America's supporters, the blind cohesion of the United
States is impressive but also worrying ... the country appears nowhere
near ready for the total review and overhaul of the institutions - the
FBI, CIA and State Department - which failed the people so drastically ...
much necessary self-examination is suppressed in the cause of unity and to
reassure a president whose lack of rhetorical subtlety and modulation does
seem to betray a pretty basic intellect - even to Americans.  It is in
this fiercely uncritical mood that the issue of torture has been raised
... America is capable of inflicting great pain and fear in the execution
of convicted murderers. There are now about 70 executions a year in the US
... despite the UN convention that prohibits the execution of people who
committed their crimes when they were under 18 years of age. (Only Somalia
and the US refused to sign.) ... America has in the last few decades been
remarkably close to regimes which routinely practise torture. The US
Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, is someone who could
testify to this as Ambassador to Honduras between 1981 and 1985 ... his
[tenure] included the torture of more than 100 women who fled El Salvador
and were disposed of by being thrown from helicopters. The US also
supported General Pinochet's regime in Chile where the socialist
opposition was terrorised with unbelievable barbarity. This is to say
nothing of the torture used in Saudi Arabia and to a lesser degree in
Israel, both countries which enjoy US support. ... as Amnesty
International points out, is that America ratified the UN convention
against torture ... it has been the wisdom of successive administrations
that the American people would often prefer to be kept in the dark about
what has been done in their interests.

[IL 11/11S] Opposition to the war from the US Right, e.g., Bill Kauffman,
an American who writes for Chronicles: "We are not yet living in a police
state; not even close. But neither are we quite living in America any
more. Erstwhile civil libertarians endorse national ID cards. The ominous
whisper of a military draft is in the air. When in the privacy of the
family homestead I ventured the opinion that the 11 September attacks were
a wicked response to wrong-headed US intervention in the Middle East, a
dear family member counseled, "Don't say that too loud, Bill. Someone will
report you to the police." She was serious. The American precepts of
individual rights, local self-rule and avoidance of foreign wars are so
deeply buried under the rubble of empire that to mouth what once was a
commonplace ("let's keep our noses out of others' business") is now a
virtual act of sedition. "Our calling" has become the eradication of
terror from the world, according to President Bush. We are to "rid the
world of evil", vow his speechwriters: mad and hubristic guff from callow
thirtyish policy geeks who don't know a gun's stock from its barrel. ...
Patriots - by which I mean Americans who love their untelevised country -
despise war, not least for its catastrophic domestic consequences. In time
of war, power flows to the center. Regional culture withers,
idiosyncrasies are smothered, young men are sent across the globe to serve
as armed employees of the central government. People shift their loyalties
from the local and immediate to the abstract and remote; already, local
charities are reporting huge shortfalls as generous souls send their
donations to the bureaucracies of New York and Washington ... Empire is
not worth a single American (or Afghan) life; defending Israel is not
worth sacrificing what remains of our traditional liberties; overthrowing
the Taliban is not worth bleaching the color out of regional America. The
time for dissenters to keep quiet out of respect for the dead is over.
Simple patriotism demands that we take up the plaint of a peaceable
statesman from the Vietnam era: Come home, America. Come home now, while
there is still a recognizable America.

[For more Right/Libertarian opposition to the war, see www.antiwar.com.]

[CHE 11/9F] After six weeks of scattered activity, a nascent campus
antiwar movement is building momentum, as protesters coordinated a fast on
a dozen campuses on Wednesday and Thursday, and planned to hold regional
conferences this weekend at UC Berkeley (California Students Against the
War) and Boston U (Northeast Regional Conference Against War and Racism).
Smaller conferences are planned elsewhere.  The Berkeley conference will
include a session titled "Converting the Anti-Capitalist Movement Into the
Anti-War Movement." The Boston conference features a talk by Ralph Nader.
Berkeley students also held a protest on Thursday in front of the San
Francisco offices of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, opposing legislation proposed
by Senator Feinstein and Sen. Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican, that would
prevent the federal government from issuing student visas to individuals
from countries on the State Department's list of terrorism sponsors; the
proposed legislation would still permit the issuing of visas to students
from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the homelands of most of the September 11
hijackers. Other protests this week included a 36-hour water-only fast
that began at 9 a.m. Wednesday. The event took place on more than a dozen
campuses, led by Occidental College.

[LAT 11/9F] DOJ has decided to listen to conversations between lawyers and
their clients in federal custody if the attorney general has a reasonable
suspicion that such conversations are being used to develop terrorist
attack plans.

[NI 11/5M] 'Hundreds of Pakistanis remain detained all over the US in a
ruthless manhunt not seen in the US since World War II. Of the 1,100
detained by the US authorities since September 11, at least one third are
Pakistanis, say Pakistani community workers. Pakistani Americans plan to
take out a protest demonstration at the arrival of President Musharraf
against the "non-cooperation and callous indifference" of the Pakistani
Consulate.  The biggest group of detained people is from New York where
nearly 200 Pakistanis are unaccounted for, says Huma Ali, a colleague who
has been following their trail. In most cases, nobody knows where these
people are being kept or if their detention is lawful. "It's like Nazi
camps," said Huma. He said the US agencies "raid the residences of
Pakistanis without any notice, search their houses and take them away. For
days, you can't tell where these people are," said Huma, who plans to lead
the protest demonstration.'

[AP 11/8TH] Last week, prosecutors cited the Civil War-era law on sedition
in the case of a student being detained in New York. The federal grand
jury that brought the case against an associate of two of the hijackers is
investigating ``seditious conspiracy to levy war against the United
States,'' the indictment stated. The law imposes up to 20-year prison
terms when two or more people ``conspire to overthrow, put down, or to
destroy by force the government of the United States, or to levy war
against them.'' While the law is seldom invoked, prosecutors used it to
win convictions in two high-profile cases against four Puerto Rican
nationalists and against a Muslim cleric and co-defendants who plotted to
blow up the United Nations. The U.S. law on sedition dates back to the
1790s when the Alien and Sedition acts of the John Adams administration
targeted people who criticized the government. The acts expired and were
not renewed, but a new law passed during the Civil War served as the basis
for the current statute.  The government used the sedition law after World
War I to convict anarchists.  In the 1950s, the Supreme Court upheld
convictions of communists on sedition charges for teaching doctrines that
were held to be subversive.  "These weren't people blowing things up; they
were basically basement seminars where people would read Marx," said
constitutional law professor Richard Primus of the University of Michigan.

[AP 11/6T] Zero tolerance in the fight against terrorism: a Dunlap IL high
school uses lie detectors on students to find out whether the teen-agers
violated the school's code of conduct by attending a party where alcohol
was consumed.  Seven of the 10 students who submitted to the lie detector
exams - all of them football players - flunked the questioning last month
and were barred from competing in the first round of the state playoffs.

8. "WAR ON TERRORISM" ELSEWHERE

[AFP 11/10SA] Israeli army seized 12 Palestinians in night raid into
autonomous Palestinian territory in the northern West Bank. An Israeli
unit backed by armour entered the village of Araqa, west of Jenin, on the
trail of Palestinians who shot dead an Israeli woman at the wheel of her
car on Friday.  The troops arrested 12 Palestinians "suspected of
involvement in terrorist activities" and destroyed the house of a gunman
who killed three Israelis in Afula, northern Israel, on October 4, the
army said.  The Israeli army frequently mounts raids into Palestinian
autonomous territory, and still holds the northern West Bank towns of
Jenin and Tulkarem, which it entered after tourism minister Revahem Zeevi
was assassinated on October 17.  It also maintains a tight stranglehold on
Nablus, but has pulled out of Ramallah, Bethlehem and Beit Jala.  [US NSA
Rice accused Yasser Arafat Thursday of failing to do enough to stop
terrorism and said that Bush had "no plans" to meet with him at the United
Nations.]

[FT 11/9F] Aid agencies and economists in Somalia have warned that the US
decision to close Barakat, the country's largest remittance company, could
push the country, already reeling from civil war and famine, into the
hands of extremists.  The US and its allies this week began shutting down
the company's operations, saying it had skimmed off tens of millions of
dollars to fund the terrorist operations of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda
network.  US officials said the Dubai company's chairman, Ahmed Nur Ali
Jim'ale, was a close bin Laden associate. But to many ordinary Somalis,
living in a country without formal banks, Barakat - a business that
encompasses financial services, telecoms and construction - is the only
way to access money from their relatives abroad. Remittances are the
country's largest source of foreign exchange, estimated at Dollars 500m a
year, and dwarf foreign aid flows. The transfers are highly efficient and
attract fees of up to 6 per cent.

[IL 11/6T] A year-long hunger strike by leftist Turkish militants became a
bloodbath yesterday after police stormed three houses, trying to force the
protesters to go to hospital. At least four people died after setting
themselves on fire. Police said their bodies were found underneath their
beds. The lightning raids were the latest Turkish attempt to deal with a
protest over jail conditions that has left more than 40 dead of
starvation, further hurting the country's human rights record and sparking
a series of fatal bomb explosions.

[IL 11/9F] THE GERMAN government came to the brink of collapse yesterday
when Joschka Fischer, the Foreign Minister, threatened to resign over his
Green party's reluctance to support the country's first combat mission
since the Second World War. 15 Green MPs still refusing to endorse their
government's decision to dispatch up to 3,900 troops to the war zone. At
least two Social Democrat MPs belonging to Chancellor Gerhard Schroder's
party are also planning to vote against the deployment next week.  The
bill authorising the deployment is almost certain to go through because
two of the three opposition parties have pledged their support ... The
Chancellor and his Foreign Minister both stressed that Germany had no
choice in the matter. Mr Fischer said: "You can discuss a lot - even
criticise a lot, for all I care - about the strategy pursued by the United
States. But the core question is whether we want to leave the US, our ally
that is responding to this attack, standing alone."  The vote to allow
German troops to go to Kosovo raised a fury in the Green party, resulting
in a physical assault on Mr Fischer at one point.

The Australian national election returned the ultra-conservative and
increasingly racist Liberal Coalition.  Labor which had adopted the same
anti-refugee policies and war support held most of its seats, but the
Government received a 2% swing (practically unheard of in a third term).
The Greens which were the only party to oppose the war and for refugees,
doubled its votes and the Democrats who have a softer approach than the
Government or Labour maintained themselves - unusually 20% of Australians
gave their primary vote to smaller parties. The good news is that One
Nation (racist and popularist) vote collapsed - the bad news is that this
was because the two major parties adopted its policies on refugees. The
first test amongst the allies about the war shows a willingness to go all
the way with the USA. Some small grace is given by a very small minority
from conservative to labor consciously voted for anti-war pro-refugee
Greens and Democrats - but it is a small grace at best.

9. ANTHRAX

[WSJ 11/8TH] The Postal Service acknowledged yesterday that they cleaned
the wrong letter-sorting machine at the Brentwood processing facility,
meaning the anthrax-tainted machine was still contaminated when the
building reopened Sunday. Officials closed the facility again yesterday.

10. PROGNOSES

[MI 11/9F] General Musharraf in UK said that bombing Afghanistan "is
perceived in the whole world as a war against the poor, miserable and
innocent people of Afghanistan". He added that continuing attacks during
Ramadan would have "negative fall-out in the entire Muslim world." [Bush
announced at a news conference Saturday that $1 billion has been earmarked
for Pakistan.}

[LAT 11/11S] one former defense official: "Absent a major new initiative,
we have every reason to expect there will be an act of nuclear terrorism
in the next decade, maybe sooner."

[DPA 11/8TH] A ground invasion of Afghanistan would require at least
500,000 troops, a decorated veteran of the Russian war in Afghanistan told
the newspaper Le Figaro for its Thursday edition. "Afghanistan is all
mountains. Five men perched on a hill would be enough to decimate a
battalion," said Ruslan Aushev, former general and currently president of
the Moslem republic of Ingushetia. Aushev, who led a Russian regiment in
Afghanistan for more than four years, criticized the American bombing
campaign. He noted that the Russians had bombarded the Afghan mountains
for over ten years. "And what was the result?" he said. "Nothing. When it
was raining bombs, (the Afghans) simply hid in their caves and waited."
Aushev also told Le Figaro that Americans did not understand the nature of
their target. "The Americans talk about destroying bases, communications
networks," he said. "But what bases? There, any cavern is already a base.
The Americans have seen too many films."

[AFP 11/10SA] UN Secretary General Kofi Annan opened the annual debate of
the UN General Assembly with a plea to world leaders to keep their focus
on poverty, AIDS and environmental degradation.  The debate, which usually
kicks off the diplomatic year in mid-September, was postponed for almost
seven weeks at the request of New York authorities.  For the first time in
history, all 189 member states were expected to be represented at the
debate, at least 43 of them by their heads of state and government and 115
by foreign ministers. Annan reiterated "four burning issues" as priorities
for his second five-year term, which begins January 1.  Recalling the
ambitious goals of the millennium summit at the start of last year's
general debate, he said "none of the issues that faced us on September 10
has become less urgent."  Flows of official development aid to the Third
World shrunk from 0.34 percent of the GNP of the richest nations in 1990
to 0.24 percent by the end of the decade, while contributions per head of
population among donor countries fell from 77 to 66 dollars.

[HT 11/6T] "An attacker who makes no distinction between a nasty regime
and its subject people simply unites the two."  That what the US did in
Iraq and is doing in Afghanistan.  And it's what bin Laden (or whoever)
did in America.

	*	*	*

[AND FINALLY, Mark Twain, who wrote more about politics than they told you
about in high school, once observed, "It is by the goodness of God that in
our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of
speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either
of them."]

Regards, 
	==============================================================
	C. G. Estabrook
	Visiting Professor of Sociology
	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [MC-190]
	109 Observatory, 901 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana IL 61801 USA
	office 217.244.4105 / mobile 217.369.5471 / home 217.359.9466  
        <galliher at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu>