[Peace-discuss] News notes, Feb. 10 (Part 1 of 2)

[C. G. Estabrook]

	NOTES ON THE "WAR ON TERRORISM" THIS WEEK
	FOR AWARE MEETING 20020210

[These notes are followed by a remarkable annotated bibliography of
ALTERNATIVE RESOURCES ON THE U.S. "WAR AGAINST TERRORISM" developed by the
American Library Association. --CGE]

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 04, 2002

NOAM CHOMSKY ON WORLD SOCIAL FORUM IN PORTO ALEGRE, BRAZIL: "Just back
from Brazil. I was only there about 36 hours, almost every moment of it
filled with talks, press interviews, meetings with activist groups
(campesino, East Timorese, etc.), and the obligatory dinner with the
governor and some left intellectuals (some old friends) -- except in this
case it was good; really seems to be a solid and successful mostly
labor-based social democratic government for the past 10-15 years. What I
saw of the WSF itself was pretty impressive. First of all, huge number of
people, maybe 4-5 times last year. And lots of vitality, enthusiasm, and
dedication. Managed to catch a bit of the opening celebration in an
outdoor amphitheater, with a huge mob. That was impressive too: mainly
dance and song performances by street children who had been organized and
assisted in government programs. Couldn't attend any of the innumerable
sessions, but heard that they went very well: exactly the right topics,
and very good people participating. Just looked through the press here. I
see that there was an NYT reporter there, but he seems to have left before
the conference opened and didn't report on anything that was happening
while he was there, or even attend the press conference (which he implies
I called; actually, called by the government and WSF organizers; he also
says most people at the conference preferred to stay away, his version of
the fact that the press conference was a press conference in a room for
about 150, jammed with press, TV, radio from the region and around the
world). But from what I could see, exciting and promising, and a
substantial step forward from the year before." [private communication]

U.S. and British planes patrolling a [self-declared] no-fly zone over
northern Iraq bombed Iraqi air defense systems Monday ... It was the first
time U.S. and British planes had bombed Iraq's north since the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks, said Capt. Brian Cullin, a spokesman for U.S. European
Command in Stuttgart, Germany. [They have frequently bombed other parts of
the country before and since 9/11.] ... U.S. and British planes based in
southeast Turkey have been flying patrols over northern Iraq since
September, 1996. The two countries say the operation is designed to
protect the Kurdish population of northern Iraq from Iraqi leader Saddam
Hussein. "There's a day-to-day commitment made by three very strong
coalition partners ... toward a population we still feel we have an
obligation to protect," Cullin said ... Turkey, host to the air patrols
and a launching pad for strikes against Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War, has
expressed anxiety over the prospect of war in Iraq, fearing that the fall
of the Baghdad regime could lead Kurds in northern Iraq to create a
Kurdish state. That could in turn boost aspirations of autonomy-seeking
Kurds in Turkey.  Turkey's Prime Minister, Bulent Ecevit, warned the Iraqi
leader on Monday to admit U.N. weapons inspectors in order to head off
possible U.S. military action.  Iraq has refused since 1998 to allow U.N.
inspectors into the country to check if the Baghdad regime has dismantled
its weapons of mass destruction. Baghdad has rejected a U.S. warning to
admit the inspectors or face the consequences. [AP]

Bush sent to Congress on Monday a $2.1 trillion budget that brings back
deficits to fund the biggest military buildup since the Cold War and
record spending on security at home.  Bush, who literally wrapped his
budget for fiscal 2003 in the flag by adorning the document with the Stars
and Stripes, called for cuts at the Labor Department, the Army Corps of
Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency and other departments,
shifting resources to the war against terror and away from domestic
programs ... Bush also asked for $591 billion in additional tax relief
over the next decade ... Under the budget, the military stands to benefit
most, with proposed spending increases of $48 billion in fiscal year 2003.
Bush's projections for the next five years would raise defense spending by
$120 billion to $451 billion by 2007.  If approved by Congress as
expected, it would be the largest increase in military spending since
President Ronald Reagan's Cold War-era buildup 20 years ago, and would
augur well for the top military contractors -- Lockheed Martin Corp.,
Boeing Co., Raytheon Co., General Dynamics Corp. and Northrop Grumman Corp
.  Bush includes $7.8 billion for missile defense, unchanged from the
current year. But critics of the testing program to shoot down missiles
from "rogue" states cite a Congressional Budget Office estimate that it
could cost $238 billion over the next 15 to 25 years.  Bush also proposes
more than doubling spending on homeland security to $37.7 billion in 2003,
including $5.9 billion to combat bioterrorism and $10.6 billion to help
stop would-be terrorists at the border.  To make room for these huge
increases, Bush is calling for controversial cuts in a wide range of
domestic programs, including grants that support job training in poor
areas. [REUTERS]

The Bush administration is proposing a big budget increase for the CIA
[in] the proposed 2003 budget, estimated to be between $1.5 billion and $2
billion; that would bring the agency's budget to above $5 billion annually
... The agency, which has faced some criticism for failing to detect the
Sept. 11 attacks, has been a leading force in the war on terrorism, in
Afghanistan and elsewhere. In the days after the attacks, President Bush
endorsed CIA Director George J. Tenet's plan for covert war against
al-Qaida, and CIA officers were operating in Afghanistan well before the
first U.S. military units arrived. The proposed increase is believed to
include spending to train and arm counterterrorist teams in many of the
countries supporting the war on terror ... The spending increase also
includes the CIA augmenting its own paramilitary force ... The CIA would
also receive money to train and deploy more traditional case officers
overseas, said a U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Increased funds would be provided for unmanned aerial vehicles, like the
Predator drone, which both collected intelligence and attacked targets
with Hellfire missiles during the war in Afghanistan.  "George Tenet was
given a blank check to wage covert warfare against al-Qaida," said John
Pike, an analyst at GlobalSecurity.Org. Other increases were expected
throughout the U.S. intelligence community, which has a total budget
estimated at between $30 billion and $35 billion ... The community [sic]
includes several military organizations, including the National Security
Agency, which conducts communications intelligence; the National
Reconnaissance Office, which designs and operates spy satellites; and the
National Imagery and Mapping Agency, which interprets satellite pictures
and makes military maps. [AP]

PRESIDENT BUSH has been keeping a "war on terrorism scorecard" in his desk
drawer and using it to cross off photographs of al-Qa'eda and Taliban
leaders as they have been killed or captured. "Early on, I said, 'I'm a
baseball fan. I want a scorecard'," Mr Bush explained in an interview with
Bob Woodward of the Washington Post.  "And I understood that when you're
fighting an enemy like al-Qa'eda, people - including me - didn't have a
sense of who we're fighting. And I have actually got a chart." Pointing to
a photograph of Muhammad Atef, Osama bin Laden's military chief and
planner of the September 11 attacks, who was killed in November, he said:
"There's an X right there." Across the photo of Ayman Zawahiri, another
al-Qa'eda leader, an X had been rubbed out, but was still just visible.  
There were reports of Zawahiri being dead, but these later proved to be
wrong. "We thought we had Zawahiri," Mr Bush explained. [TELEGRAPH UK]

RELATIVES of Todd Beamer, who died in one of the aircraft hijacked on
September 11, are trying to secure the trademark to his rousing last
words, "Let's roll", uttered before he led passengers trying to seize
control of the airliner. Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania. The Todd M
Beamer Foundation is seeking to stop others using the phrase for personal
gain and ensure that any profits are given to relatives of the dead. "It's
horrible for people to want to profit off the events of September 11,"
said Doug MacMillan, executive director of the foundation. "If anybody
should be benefiting, it is the victims." Workers rebuilding the Pentagon
wear "Let's roll" on their hard hats, tens of thousands of "Let's roll"
bumper stickers have been produced and President Bush used it in his State
of the Union speech last week. Neil Young wrote a song, Let's Roll,
honouring Mr Beamer and his fellow heroes. There are at least a dozen
other applications to trademark the phrase or variations of it, such as
"America, let's roll". On Sept 22, Iman Abdallah, of Newark, New Jersey,
applied for a trademark to use the phrase on T-shirts. He has refused to
withdraw the request. American Promotional Events, an Alabama fireworks
distributor, changed its mind after filing its own application and now
says it will work with the Beamer Foundation. But the phrase might not be
a valid trademark because it is part of everyday American speech. Tom
Holt, a patents lawyer, told Fox News: "You can't appropriate for your own
use words plucked out of the dictionary."

GEOV PARRISH:  The Super Bowl, played yesterday (a week later than
originally scheduled, due to September 11), is notable among major
American sporting events as well as major American pop culture events for
the extent to which it has always warmly embraced America's wars.  Beyond
the usual martial metaphors of the game itself (avoiding the blitz by
throwing the long bomb from a shotgun formation while the offensive line
kills them in the trenches), the National Football League's premier game
has gone out of its way in the past to promote and glorify the nation's
military.  The 1991 Super Bowl, played in the opening days of the Gulf
War, used its pre-game and halftime ceremonies (and assorted other
festivities) to plant wet fat kisses on the war that was at that very
moment massacring hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, with a few dozen
Americans lost. (The real toll came later -- illness and suicide among
U.S. soldiers, disease and privation among Iraq's families.)  And
yesterday brought more of the same. From Fox TV's repeated camera shots of
U.S. troops watching the game from Kandahar (at 4 a.m. local time?), to
Budweiser ads with the Clydesdale horses bowing to the Statue of Liberty,
patriotism and warfare and corporate branding were very much considered
interchangeable, all part of a spectacle suffused with smarmy jingoistic
bullshit.  Even the Irish rock band U2 -- whose lead singer, Bono, was
fresh from hanging out with the world's corporate and political elite at
the World Economic Forum in New York -- was in the spirit. U2 first rose
to fame off a breakthrough album in the early '80s called "War" -- the
band, born of a country plagued by war and terrorism, was against it, and
later songs like "Bullet the Blue Sky" specifically ripped U.S. military
adventurism and its impact on poor countries. Yesterday, Bono finished the
band's short halftime show with the inevitable tribute to 9-11 victims,
literally wrapping himself in the American flag, as though honoring 9-11's
dead -- many of whom weren't Americans -- somehow required solidarity with
the U.S. flag and with the waging of yet another war, or three, or five.
Permanent war, reduced to emotional spectacle and a brandable moment.  
The Super Bowl is the premier annual spectacle not just in professional
football, but in the world of advertising. A 60-second TV ad during the
game is the priciest air time in the world, costing more than the GNP of
some of the world's smaller countries. Ad agencies and trade publications
buzz for weeks with anticipation over the wildest, flashiest, most
expensive commercials of the year, which the world's biggest companies
unveil during The Game to the estimated 130 million people that are
watching in the U.S. alone.  Enter your tax dollars. It's one thing for
Budweiser to spend a small fortune waving the flag; it's another for we
taxpayers to foot the bill for ads touting controversial public policies.
In an unprecedented move, the White House Office of National Drug Control
Policy (home of the "Drug Czar") spent over $1.6 million each for two
30-second ads airing during the telecast of yesterday's game. That's over
$50,000 a second, by far the largest single-event advertising buy in U.S.
government history.  And what did we get for our money? Blatant propaganda
-- specifically, an argument closely linked to the Bush Administration.
The Drug Czar's ads focused on the idea that fighting the War on Drugs
also helps stop terrorism, because the money your local pusher makes
eventually finds its way into the pockets of Osama bin Laden and his
various terrorist colleagues. ("Where do terrorists get their money? If
you buy drugs, it might come from you.")  Now, this particular argument is
nonsense on several levels. If you put gas in your car, some of the money
might wind up in the pockets of a Middle Eastern terrorist, too. (Or, more
destructively, in the pockets of Big Oil.) But concerning drugs, in
Afghanistan, specifically, it was the Taliban who after decades of futile
Western efforts were largely successful at wiping out poppy (and thus
heroin) production in Afghanistan -- so successfully that only last spring
the Bush Administration was paying the Taliban as a reward for their
stellar anti-drug works.  By contrast, in the two months since the
Northern Alliance and their various brutal warlords have assumed power,
rural farmers have rushed to replant their poppy crops, and an enormous
new wave of heroin for Europe and North America will be on its way in a
few months. So far, the War on Terrorism has caused more drug production,
not stopped it.  At a larger level, it's not drugs that fuel political
violence throughout the world -- it's their prohibition, and the forcing
of drug transactions into the black market. There, as the CIA well knows,
lies the world's most efficient system for funneling large amounts of
untraceable money.  From Afghanistan to Southeast Asia to Latin America,
the CIA has for decades been accused (often irrefutably) of reaping huge
profits from illicit drugs, money which -- as with its illegal arms sales
in the '80s that went to anti-Nicaraguan contra operations -- has tended
to go directly into funding our terror campaigns. If the U.S. does it,
it's no surprise that al Qaeda et al would, too. The effort to eradicate
certain popular drugs -- including the War on Drugs touted by yesterday's
TV ads and the Drug Czar office that paid for them -- has literally
created, and perpetuated, the very black market now accused of being a
source of cash for al Qaeda's jihad. Ending drug prohibitions would do far
more to thwart terrorism than the War on Drugs ever could.  Other ironies
abound. The War on Drugs is also being used as the excuse for U.S.
military involvement around the world, particularly in the Andean region
of South America. There and elsewhere, U.S. liaisons with paramilitary
thugs (including a hundred American mercenaries for every John Walker),
with their peasant massacres and other human rights atrocities, is helping
to breed new generations of anti-American terrorists. And two fruitless
decades of War on Drugs propaganda, complete with two million people in
U.S. prisons, erosion of civil liberties, and neither an end in sight nor
a vision of what victory would look like, eerily evokes how the Bush
Administration has envisioned the War on Terrorism.  Lastly, as with the
War On Terrorism -- where it's only particular kinds of terrorism (theirs,
not ours) that we object to -- the War on Drugs is a selective affair,
too. Some drugs are profitable and OK, even though they kill thousand each
year; some are worth life sentences or worse. Hence, year after year, part
of the Super Bowl spectacle is the highly anticipated Budweiser
commercials. Use -- er, drink -- responsibly.  But hey, it's the Super
Bowl, entertainment, a time to suspend belief. A perfect setting for an
administration whose rhetorical excesses have been veering lately into the
absurd. (E.g., Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as some new form of World War
II fascist "Axis of Evil," when none of them have any proven links to
September 11, and probably, among all three of them, don't have enough
money to afford calling each other long distance.)  George Bush is free,
of course, to say ridiculous and nonsensical things, even when they piss
off allies and commit soldiers to battle; heck, it's what he does best.
That, too, is entertainment. But spending $3,200,000 of our tax dollars on
Super Bowl propaganda is neither entertaining nor appropriate.
[WorkingForChange.com]

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2002

"BUSH'S BUDGET OPTS FOR DEBT TO FUND WAR" ... the "mammoth $379-billion
defense budget," would mean the "largest percentage increase since the
United States escalated its involvement in the Vietnam War in 1966." [LA
TIMES]

Saturday's hypercritical Enron report on itself ... "clearly raises the
specter that at the foundation of the company's downfall was a series of
multimillion-dollar crimes [including] false valuation of assets, bogus
deals between related parties, and millions of dollars pocketed by
participants along the way." [NY TIMES]

In an NYT article's final paragraph, the paper suggests that the U.S.
hasn't nabbed any al-Qaida leaders. [NY TIMES]

The NYT says that a number of countries were perturbed by Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz's comments that, "We are at war. Self-defense
requires prevention and sometimes pre-emption."

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 06, 2002

The Bush administration is proposing to expand military aid to this war-
racked nation by training the Colombian Army to protect a 500-mile-long
oil pipeline from leftist rebels, senior American officials visiting
Colombia said today. Such a program would be a sharp departure from a
policy that until now has focused on eradicating drugs.  The
administration is seeking Congressional approval of a $98 million request
that would pay for helicopters, communications equipment and training for
Colombian troops to guard the Caño Limón pipeline, which transports crude
oil pumped by Occidental Petroleum of Los Angeles from the country's
eastern oil fields to a Caribbean port ... [AND THEN, IN THE 11TH GRAF OF
12--] Human rights groups in the United States also harshly criticized the
plan, releasing an extensive report today highlighting ties between army
units and the paramilitaries [AND NO FURTHER INFO ON IT!]. American law
requires that Colombia show it has severed ties between security officials
and paramilitary gunmen before receiving aid, a condition that groups like
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said had not been met by
Colombia's government.  [NY TIMES]

Strange article by reporter James Risen in the NYT begins, "The Central
Intelligence Agency has no evidence that Iraq has engaged in terrorist
operations against the United States in nearly a decade, and the agency is
also convinced that President Saddam Hussein has not provided chemical or
biological weapons to Al Qaeda or related terrorist groups, according to
several American intelligence officials."

Stranger article by establishement liberal Robert Kuttner (founder of
journal The American Prospect): IF ONE political figure looks prophetic
these days, it is Ralph Nader.  The Enron collapse is having a ripple
effect on the rest of Wall Street, reflecting years if not decades of
corporate balance-sheet abuses, insider enrichments at the expense of
workers, pensioners, and communities, and bipartisan regulatory defaults.  
President Bush's new budget cuts outlays for children, hospitals, worker
training, and spending on the needy. A serious prescription drug program
is nowhere in sight. Regulatory agencies - including the Securities and
Exchange Commission in the Enron era - take major hits.  Even education
spending, the signature program of this compassionate conservative, lags
inflation. All these cuts mock the disingenuously liberal themes of Bush's
State of the Union Message last week. The Democrats, meanwhile, have
little to offer except to scold the president for running a small deficit
- during a recession and a war.  Nader's latest book is jauntily titled
''Crashing the Party,'' which Nader indeed did. To read the book is to be
reminded both of the unique and prescient role Ralph Nader has played in
American life for four decades and just how right he has been about the
bipartisan capitulation to concentrated corporate power ...  Nader
applauded corporations as creators of wealth and of jobs. But he
understood they had to be leashed in their other role - as poisoners of
the air, the water, the workplace, the innocent consumer, and the
political commons. The worst menace of concentrated corporate power, Nader
understood, was not economic but political. The years have proven him
right.  The various public interest groups and corporate accountability
projects that Nader organized in the 1960s and 1970s used the power of
aroused citizens, their elected officials, and newly energized regulatory
agencies, to restore some balance between corporate power and a democratic
society. By 1970, Nader was releasing investigative reports at a furious
pace, working with effective liberal legislators, a still lively labor
movement, and a friendly press that still sided with the underdog.  Even
Richard Nixon signed scores of Nader-inspired laws that protected
consumers and restrained corporate abuses.  But corporate America had had
a bellyful. In the 1970s, big business resolved to reclaim its dormant
political power, and the political balance shifted. In the 1980s,
corporate America roared back and never let go.  Much of Nader's newest
book is a memoir of his campaign, but a lot of it is an explanation of why
he decided to run: The book documents how big money has come to dominate
both parties and how the Democrats since 1980 - with some notable
exceptions - have ceased to play an effective opposition role to the
corporate agenda. In short, how democracy has withered.  The quest for
corporate sovereignty over the sovereignty of the people is an affront to
our Constitution and our democracy, he writes. Indeed, in their largest
and most transnational form, the global corporations reject allegiance to
nation or community.  I didn't vote for Ralph Nader. I feared his
candidacy would just elect Bush, and it may well have. But as Nader points
out, the election was Gore's to lose. And future elections will be the
Democrats' to lose as long as they run tepid campaigns with stiff,
poll-tested candidates captive to the same corporate agenda.

As of Wednesday, you will be breaking the law by possessing food made with
hemp, thanks to a DEA ruling that bans even trace amounts of THC in food
products. [CURSOR.ORG]

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 07, 2002

U.S. planes bombed suspected Taliban and al Qaeda positions in eastern
Afghanistan on Thursday as a missile attack by a pilotless CIA drone
triggered speculation that Osama bin Laden himself had been killed. U.S.
officials in Washington said they believed a tall al Qaeda leader had been
killed in the CIA missile strike in the east of the country but the
Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) news agency said three Afghan
civilians had been killed ... A U.S. official in Washington said a CIA
Predator drone had fired a Hellfire missile at a group of men thought to
include a senior al Qaeda official. "The central figure had a close
encounter of the worst kind with a Hellfire missile," the official said.
But the private AIP news agency said a U.S. missile hit a group of young
men in the Zawar Khili area, 35 km (20 miles) southwest of Khost town and
15 km (10 miles) from the Pakistani border on Tuesday night. "Two people
were killed on the spot and one died on the way to hospital," the AIP
said. AIP, citing tribal elders, identified the three dead men as Munir
Ahmad, Jehangir Khan and Daraz Khan. "They were standing and chatting when
hit by the missile," said the elders. They also said there were no al
Qaeda people in the area, AIP said ...  As the U.S. bombing has petered
out in the wake of the defeat of the Taliban, old tribal and ethnic
rivalries have resurfaced as factions jockey for power in the post-Taliban
era, throwing into question the interim government's authority. In the
north about 40 fighters were said to have been killed last week in clashes
between commanders loyal to Dostum's mainly ethnic Uzbek movement, the
Junbish-i-Millie, and the mainly ethnic Tajik Jamiat-i-Islami movement led
by Mohammed Atta. Dostum is deputy defence minister while the ethnic Tajik
force is seen as loyal to Defence Minister Mohammad Fahim, leading to
fears the northern feud could pit the interim government's two top defence
officials against each other.

CIA Director George Tenet testified before Congress and said that about
1,000 al-Qaida operatives have been arrested throughout the world, which
the NYT says is a "much larger" figure than officials have previously
stated. But he warned that the organization's operatives "have considered"
attacks against "high-profile government or private facilities, famous
landmarks and U.S. infrastructure nodes, such as airports, bridges,
harbors and dams." [SLATE]

The U.S. released 27 Afghans it had captured in a controversial raid last
month. But the Pentagon hasn't apologized for the death of at least 16
people during the attack. "The important thing is that they fired first,"
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said of the Afghans killed.  But an
Associated Press report, says, "Afghans who witnessed the raid said that
U.S. Special Forces burst into a small religious school and killed 19
people, most of them where they slept." [AP]

The Washington Post catalogs other potential attacks gone wrong, then
essentially charges the Pentagon with stonewalling. "In many of the
cases," the paper says, "military authorities military officials have
cited ongoing investigations as justification for not disclosing details
of incidents weeks or even months."  Describing one incident, the Post
says, "An official with one relief organization, who asked that his name
and that of his group not be identified, said that members of his staff
had gathered credible reports of at least 52 civilian casualties,
including many attending a wedding party in a village in eastern
Afghanistan bombed by the United States on Dec. 29."

In an interview with the WP, Afghan leader Ahmed Karzai said that the U.S.
did mistakenly kill civilians during two controversial raids, one a
helicopter assault a few weeks ago and another a December bombing of a
vehicle convoy. Karzai also confirmed that U.S. military officials in the
area have already apologized.

The Washington Times reports that dozens of Afghan warlords were given
$200,000 payments and satellite phones to secure their cooperation in the
war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.  The warlords transferred the money
via hawala, the underground banking system that the U.S. government sees
as an obstacle in the war on terrorism.

Croatia's secret service has leaked transcripts of Slobodan Milosevic's
telephone conversations, including one in which President Clinton told
him: "I think I can count on you." [TELEGRAPH UK]

The number of Americans with million-dollar incomes more than doubled from
1995 through 1999, as their salaries and their profits from stocks soared,
government figures to be published today show. The percentage of their
income that went to federal income taxes, however, fell by 11 percent. The
incomes of Americans who made less grew as well, though by far less, and
the share of their income that went to taxes rose slightly, according to
Internal Revenue Service income tax data for the five years through 1999,
the latest year available. The wealthiest Americans paid a smaller share
of their income in taxes because in 1997 Congress reduced taxes on capital
gains, which account for a significant share of their income. Congress
also cut taxes for the middle class, but only one in five taxpayers
qualified for those cuts, which involved new tax credits for children and
education expenses. So, as a group, the portion of their income going to
taxes rose. For those with million-dollar incomes, the share of their
income that went to taxes fell to 27.9 percent in 1999, from 31.4 percent
in 1995. For those Americans who did not make a million dollars, the
portion of their income going to taxes edged up in those years, to 12.8
percent from 12.5 percent. About 205,000 taxpayers made $1 million or more
in 1999, up from less than 87,000 in 1995. The average income of those who
made $1 million or more rose by $568,000 to $3.2 million. [NY TIMES]

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2002

Nicholas Kristof travels to the Philippines and reports that the U.S. is
sending 660 troops and $100 million to battle "a gang of about 60 brutal
thugs," who in recent years have had "no proven links to al-Qaeda." [NY
TIMES]

Bush has reversed an earlier decision and concluded that the Geneva
Conventions will protect captured Taliban at Guantanamo Bay because their
country, Afghanistan, was a signatory to the conventions. However, the
conventions will not apply to al-Qaida, which didn't sign the accords.
Neither group will be classified as P.O.W.s. The Taliban don't deserve
P.O.W. protection, Bush believes, because they didn't obey the laws of war
as the conventions define them ... they can be interrogated indefinitely,
tried before a military tribunal, and are not required to be repatriated
after the end of the war, the papers say. Then how does it help a captured
fighter, legally or practically, to be protected by the Geneva Conventions
if he is not granted P.O.W. status? [SLATE]

The International Committee of the Red Cross said on Friday it considered
Taliban and al Qaeda fighters held by U.S. forces to be prisoners of war,
despite Washington's refusal to accept that. [REUTERS]

Starting next week, federal agents will arrest thousands of Middle Eastern
illegal immigrants, looking for people with ties to terrorist groups.
Anyone they can't find a reason to detain will be immediately deported. In
a Jan. 25 internal Justice Dept. memo acquired by The Washington Post,
Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson urged participants to keep the
"Absconder Apprehension Initiative" secret: "It would be
counterproductive, and potentially dangerous, to provide the absconders
with official warning that agents and officers will be seeking to locate
and capture them." Investigators will offer detainees money or visas for
providing information. [SLATE]

Venezuelan Air Force Colonel Pedro Soto publicly slammed President Hugo
Chavez, charging he leads a "non-democratic" government and demanding that
the president step down ... "A government in which the president controls
the Supreme Court, the National Assembly and the Armed Forces cannot be
called a democracy," Soto charged. "The president is not the owner of
Venezuela; we elected him to govern," Soto added. "We could never have
imagined he was going to put in place a system that in Venezuela and
elsewhere in the world has not worked, and has yielded violence and
extreme poverty." Soto said military discontent was running high because
the armed forces were being used to Chavez' political ends, citing for
example the government's Bolivar 2000 Plan which uses military staff and
civilian crews for social projects. Soto called them "outside the scope"
of the the military's duty "to protect national sovereignty." ... Harsh
criticism of the populist former paratrooper Chavez by Soto -- who
insisted 75 percent of other active duty military brass shared his views
-- came on the heels of an unusually blunt week of US criticism of the
Venezuelan president. US Secretary of State Colin Powell on Tuesday
questioned Chavez' commitment to democracy and the war on terrorism and
criticized his visits to countries like Iraq and Libya. Powell said Chavez
was aware of the complaints. And on Wednesday, Central Intelligence Agency
director George Tenet told a Senate panel that he was worried about
growing unrest in Venezuela, which is the United States' third largest
supplier of crude oil.

Olympic Games open in Utah, with more U.S. troops deployed around Salt
Lake City than in Afghanistan ... The Administration rejected the
traditional request by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for a
ceasefire during the Games. [TIMES UK]

[continued in part 2]