Senator Wants Bioterrorism Manhattan Project ("BioTerrorGreatest Threat Facing US")(Terror Update)

ATLANTA (Reuters) - Describing bioterrorism as the greatest threat facing the United States, Georgia Democratic Sen. Max Cleland called on Monday on the federal government to face the problem with the same determination it displayed in developing nuclear weapons during World War Two.

In a panel discussion at Emory University in Atlanta, Cleland said the U.S. government should streamline its bureaucracy and free up funds for a new "Manhattan Project" to be led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Atlanta-based CDC, a federal agency responsible for monitoring public health threats, has led the medical investigation into an outbreak of anthrax bacteria linked to letters mailed after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

Four people have died and 13 others have been infected with the disease during the outbreak.

"This is a race for the best minds, the best talent and the best technology we can find in the realm of biological, chemical and radiological warfare," said Cleland, who was joined by CDC Director Jeffrey Koplan, Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes and several public health advocates.

Cleland, who is sponsoring a bill that would give the Department of Health and Human Services more power to declare and respond to public health emergencies, said it was essential that a bioterrorism strategy be developed within three years.

"If we don't put our best foot forward, have the best facilities and have the best minds, I think you would be threatening the national security of the United States," Cleland said.

Both the HHS and the CDC were criticized last month for appearing slow to respond to the public's fears of anthrax and other bioterrorist threats.

More than 32,000 Americans were forced to start taking antibiotics after anthrax-laced letters were sent to media outlets and to the Capitol Hill office of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a South Dakota Democrat.

There has not been a new case of anthrax since Oct. 31 when a New York hospital worker died of the more severe inhaled version of the disease.

The CDC's Koplan admitted the outbreak had been a "trying time" for the agency, but he noted that the CDC had succeeded in its main objective of containing the anthrax contamination after the first group of confirmed cases.

"There have been lots of successes as we've gone along and it includes a limited number of cases of disease," Koplan said.

G E N E V A , Nov. 19 — The United States today accused Iraq, North Korea and possibly Iran of violating an international treaty banning weapons of germ warfare and said Syria and Libya might be able to produce biological weapons.

U.S. Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton said Iraq had "developed, produced and stockpiled biological warfare agents and weapons" despite having signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. "We are also quite concerned about Iran, which the United States believes probably has produced and weaponized BW (biological weapons) agents in violation of the Convention," he told a convention review conference in Geneva.

The conference aims to evaluate progress in agreeing steps to tighten the 30-year-old ban, a move given new impetus by the recent anthrax attacks in the United States that followed the Sept. 11 mass killings by suicide plane hijackers in New York and Washington.

Earlier this year, the United States rejected as "unworkable" a proposed new protocol for the treaty that should have made it easier to check if member states were abiding by it.

Although the United States was heavily criticized for blocking the protocol, the result of more than five years of negotiations, Bolton said the plan would have done nothing to deter states bent on arming themselves with weapons of germ warfare.

"Countries that joined the BWC and then ignored their commitments and certain non-state actors would never have been hampered by the protocol," Bolton said.

Washington has tabled a number of alternative proposals for tightening the convention, including a call to member states to pass laws imposing severe penalties on anybody involved in activities violating the treaty as well as making it easy for those accused in another country to be extradited.

Bolton told the opening session of the three-week conference that Washington believed North Korea had developed and produced and may have weaponized germ warfare agents, while Syria and Libya could be capable of producing small quantities and Sudan had displayed interest in doing so.

From ABC Here:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/iraq011119_germs.html

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MULLAH OVERSAW

November 19, 2001 -- Afghanistan's Taliban chiefs reportedly took an unusual interest in a veterinary lab that produced millions of doses of anthrax vaccine. After the Islamic militia seized power in 1996, it moved the lab from the northern town of Charikar to the capital of Kabul, and a mullah was brought in to supervise the operation, the London Mirror says today.

"He and his Taliban superiors were interested in the technical detail of what happened here, although they had no background in science," said Dr. Abdul Quader Raoufi, the anti-Taliban director of the lab. "Sometimes, many of their officials would turn up unannounced . . . We'd rather have been running the labs on our own. But the mullahs were in charge of everything."

He added that there was danger information "could get into the wrong hands," and the Taliban could have learned how to handle and develop anthrax at the lab.

U.S. authorities say they found no link between the Taliban or Osama bin Laden and anthrax-laced letters mailed to U.S. media and politicians.

MORE than 80% of Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network is outside Afghanistan and even if he is killed or captured, his supporters will continue to pose a threat, according to experts who have studied the organisation, writes Nick Fielding.

There are thought to be about 10,000 Al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. Shortly before the September 11 attacks, members of the network were told to return there. Others, including some from Britain, flew out to join the organisation once the American air attacks started.

But this is only a minority of the foreign Muslims who have passed through the nine camps run by Al-Qaeda in eastern Afghanistan and are now scattered throughout the world. In the wake of the American attacks, cells have been uncovered in Germany, France, Spain and the United States.

However, investigators have failed to track down key middlemen responsible for back-up and funding. In Germany, where the conspiracy was hatched, the authorities have identified at least five Al-Qaeda members believed to be the "missing links" but have insufficient evidence to persuade prosecutors of their guilt.

They remain at large — as do Mohammed Ahmed, who received £70,000 wired to him in Dubai from the hijackers in the US, and Abu Zubaydah, believed to be a key organiser in Europe. The classic cell structure operated by Al-Qaeda, where there is little if any contact between each unit, makes it almost impossible to penetrate.

German intelligence officials believe up to 70,000 people from 50 countries may have been trained. Horst Stachelscheid, a director of Germany's domestic intelligence service, told a conference last week that Al-Qaeda was responsible for "strategic attacks", such as those on America, but associated groups carried out lower-level ones.

Even without their leader, these lower-level groups will continue to pose a threat for years to come. "Certainly, we don't expect the death or capture of Bin Laden to mark the end of this," said one American intelligence source. "In fact, we are expecting something pretty horrible here [in the US] precisely because of the developments in Afghanistan."

Finance from disaffected wealthy Muslims will provide dormant cells with the money they need to mount operations. Al-Qaeda fighters are trained to bide their time and blend into their adopted communities.

Muslim Moderate Kabbani Firm on Terrorist Nuclear Threat

Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com

Monday, Nov. 19, 2001

Shaykh Hisham Kabbani, founder of the Islamic Supreme Council of America (ISCA), stands by and renews his 1999 warning that brainwashed Islamic extremists have infiltrated mosques and Muslim student and community groups, and have bought more than 20 nuclear warheads carried in suitcases.

In his infamous January 1999 address to the U.S. Department of State, Kabbani cautioned officials about imminent danger to America posed by nuclear-armed Islamic extremists. He further described 5,000 suicide bombers being trained by bin Laden in Afghanistan ready to move to any part of the world.

In a recent pronouncement, ISCA said: "Shaykh Hisham Kabbani warned of the dangers of mass terrorism to American cities, and he was brushed aside as a dangerous alarmist. Muslim organizations are no doubt beginning to regret their treatment of him."

Part of that strident alarm sounded by Kabbani in 1999: "We want to tell people to be careful, that something major might hit quickly because they [Islamic extremists] were able to buy more than 20 atomic nuclear [war]heads from some of the mafia in the ex-Soviet Union. ...

"Through the universities, there will be the most danger. If the nuclear atomic warheads reach these universities, you don’t know what these students are going to do, because their way of thinking is brainwashed, limited and narrow-minded."

Kabbani, an American citizen of Lebanese descent, holds a degree in Islamic jurisprudence, which authorizes him to give legal rulings. He has written several papers and reports on Jihad, the history and evolution of extremism, and radical Islamic groups.

His stock has risen considerably since Sept. 11. He has been appearing regularly on TV and doing high-level briefings. Last month he briefed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff on Uzbekistan.

ISCA, which features the entirety of the 1999 speech on its Web site as a sort of Gettysburg Address, regularly culls the news for any and all clippings that vindicate or corroborate Kabbani’s dire warnings.

A recent case in point: the State Department's rigorous new screening of Arab and Muslim men seeking student visas. More obvious: Osama bin Laden's recent boast that he controls chemical and nuclear weapons.

Hallmarked by a long flowing beard, robe and headdress, Kabbani is a heavyset man with intense eyes set in a friendly face that is often smiling. He admits being hurt by the alienation he has suffered since 1999 at the hands of Muslim groups, including the Council on American Islamic Relations and Muslim Students Association. At one point he received FBI protection.

However, years after his controversial warning speech, Kabbani's resolve remains and he continues to speak out in ways sometimes unpopular with some fellow Muslims. An example is his recent plea to Muslims to inform on those who might have any knowledge of extremist cells and activities that would help investigators:

"I urge all our members of the Islamic Supreme Council of America and many Muslims, that I know in the United States and abroad, to come with every tip they have, with every information that they have, in order to tell the different agencies about it, and inform them as soon as possible, in order to avoid any harassment for the Muslim community."

An under-fire Kabbani explained in 1999 exactly what he meant when he told the State Department that 80 percent of American mosques had been taken over by extremists. His point, he said, was that a "few extremists" were taking over leadership posts, despite a "majority of moderate Muslims," thus "influencing 80 percent of the mosques."

Today, he sticks even closer to his guns and adds embellishing data: Kabbani visited 114 mosques in the United States. "Ninety of them were mostly exposed, and I say exposed, to extreme or radical ideology," he said.

Kabbani bases his exposure conclusion on speeches, board members and materials published. One telltale sign of an extremist mosque, said Kabbani, was an unhealthy focus on the Palestinian struggle.

When not embroiled in the never-ending fallout from his speech, Kabbani fights what he likes to style his personal "holy war" or "jihad.' Following ancient teachings, he divides jihad into four kinds: "jihad by the heart, jihad by the tongue, jihad by the hand and jihad by the sword."

Kabbani's jihad by the tongue: "Removing all misconceptions and stereotypes in clarifying the image of Islam held by non-Muslims, building a trusting relationship and working with them in ways that accord with their way of thinking, are all primary forms of jihad."

He added: "Islam doesn’t teach terrorism, or allow you to kill anyone. Islam tells you to toss a flower on your enemy in order to bring him to your side, not to fight with him."

Kabbani wants to be a voice against terrorism and ideological extremists who use Muslims in America as a vehicle for exploiting foreign political causes.

All this is tough on a quiet scholar who typically goes into seclusion for 40 days each year. "When I was younger, I used to do it for six or nine months at a stretch. That's training your spiritual power and your energy."

Continuing horrors slow New York City's recovery By MELISSA KLEIN AND NOREEN O'DONNELL

THE JOURNAL NEWS

(Original publication: Nov. 19, 2001)

NEW YORK — Ten weeks after the Twin Towers collapsed into a mass grave, American flags fill every one of the 152 poles surrounding the Rockefeller Center ice-skating rink, a patriotic display in place of the international colors that used to fly there.

Splashes of red, white and blue — pasted on hard hats, hanging from fire escapes, stuck to the sides of the No. 6 train on the Lexington Avenue line — are consistent reminders of the horror this city has endured.

Even as people were struggling with the overwhelming grief of the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center, letters tainted with anthrax began arriving in the mail, contaminating post offices and sickening office workers. Then, a new blow came Nov. 12 — the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 into a neighborhood in the Rockaway section of Queens.

If the streams of pedestrians hurrying along Fifth Avenue look much as they did before Sept. 11, just below the surface their nerves are jittery and their emotions raw. The cacophony that was once just background noise — sirens, car horns, even a dropped UPS package — makes them start. Tall buildings in a city of skyscrapers are newly vulnerable.

"I was just up there at a conference on the 65th floor," Lewis Stockford said last week outside the GE Building in Rockefeller Center, where an 8-story flag now hangs from the scaffolding around the unlighted Christmas tree. "That made me nervous." Stockford, a 31-year-old information technology specialist from Brooklyn, was relaxing for a moment by the ice rink, one of the New York landmarks featured in a new advertising campaign timed for the holidays and designed to encourage tourists to visit. In one commercial, an instantly recognizable New Yorker, Woody Allen, glides and twirls across the empty ice.

Last week, as workers prepared the Christmas tree for its lighting, a small group took to the rink in advance of the crowds that come after Thanksgiving, one of many signs that New York City is returning to its pre-September rhythms.

Subway riders, like the woman tweezing her eyebrows on the Lexington line one morning, are again ignoring their fellow passengers. Bars and clubs are filling up. Tourists visit Rockefeller Center, looking down over the rink's railings taking photographs.

But things aren't quite the same. Security guards with hand-held metal detectors man the rink's entrance, screening skaters. Listen for a while to people in a city seared by the images of airplanes deliberately smashing into its tallest buildings, and some startling thoughts emerge.

"You kind of look over your shoulder when you hear a plane," Stockford said. "You turn your head to make sure it's not heading for you, and then you're OK."

Coming together

Ground Zero is, of course, not featured in the city's advertising campaign, but it has nonetheless become a grim stop on tourists' itinerary. They pause outside St. Paul's Chapel on Broadway, at one of several makeshift memorials that still dot the city. Potted mums, votive candles and rose petals decorate the sidewalk before a fence filled with posters from youth groups and drop cloths that visitors sign with messages.

Richard York, a construction worker from Queens, comes by on his lunch hour to read and reread the messages. He overhears conversations. Sometimes he tells the visitors that his brother, Raymond, died trying to save people in the towers.

Raymond York was a New York City firefighter who, because of an arm injury, had been reassigned to Rockefeller Center, where he gave safety demonstrations. On Sept. 11, he hitched a ride to the World Trade Center and rushed into the one tower still standing, even though the chiefs were telling everyone to get out. He died a month before he was to have retired from the department.

Now, Richard York said, he can't sleep at night, and he's become more religious, accepting the fliers that the proselytizers pass out on the edges of Ground Zero. The outpouring of love for the firefighters, as evidenced by the notes he reads outside St. Paul's, makes him feel good, he said.

"Every fireman I speak to is proud of him, that he did what he was supposed to do," York said. "It's just that in my mind … I say how can he not think of his wife and his children and mom and dad and me and all of us who need him so badly. But that doesn't come into your mind when you're a fireman. You think about saving lives."

That York and the other firefighters were so remarkably brave did not surprise Michael Batman, a teacher at the Mount Pleasant Christian Academy on the Upper West Side, who last week was at Lincoln Center, another stop for the new commercials. In the ad, Yogi Berra conducts the New York Philharmonic; Batman is more modestly supervising students as they interview passers-by for a project.

"I've seen New Yorkers be very kind, so I'm not surprised we stood up the way we were able to stand up," said Batman, 27.

But the tragedy has changed the city, he said, softening its sometimes nasty edge and bringing people together in their shared pain.

"Whether we're black or white, we have to learn to get over racial barriers," he said, "because we stand under one flag."

He was standing, in fact, under three enormous flags hanging from Avery Fisher Hall, the Metropolitan Opera House and the New York State Theater. But patriotism was matched by caution in the form of concrete barricades erected along Columbus Avenue.

Sherif Shehata, a financial analyst at the Metropolitan Opera who has worked at Lincoln Center for 13 years, gestured toward the barricades on his way to a meeting.

"It's just not safe anymore," said Shehata, 37, who lives on Long Island. "When you're at work, work takes your mind away from it, but the minute you go home, you watch the news."

'I'm very paranoid'

Back downtown, Yvonne Vaughan was returning to Battery Park City nine weeks to the day she fled with the 18-month-old boy for whom she baby-sits. As she occupied the toddler, Robert James, outside the residential complex built in the World Trade Center's shadow, his mother packed the family's belongings so they could move out for good.

Nothing was the same. The nannies and babies were no longer in the park Vaughan had visited with Robert James, and, in fact, there was not much of a park left.

Vaughan said she was not the same, either.

"I'm very paranoid," said Vaughan, a Brooklyn resident. "I have a daughter that's 22 and a son that's 25, and we're constantly on the cell phone, talking to them to make sure that they're OK. Believe me, I thank God that my daughter works in Brooklyn, and she's close to my home and she doesn't have to commute. Otherwise I don't know what I'd do."

Vaughan had been thinking about a December vacation, but after last Monday's plane crash she said she would not fly. As for Thanksgiving, she said she was thinking of it as just another meal.

"The holidays are going to be blah," she said. "How can you celebrate and have a celebration when you know young men are out there and you don't know what's going to happen here?"

Across town, Yvette Bassknight is going ahead with her vacation to the Dominican Republic, scheduled before Monday's crash.

"I tried not to think about it until my co-worker called me, and told me she doesn't want me to die and I should cancel my flight," said Bassknight, a subway token booth clerk who lives in Brooklyn. Upset, she hung up on her friend. "But I can't let that get to me," she said. "Because going across the street I could get hit by a car and die. So I just have to pray to God and walk with God and ask God to please bring me through." Her soldiering on is just the attitude New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has been urging on the people of his city. He has gone on television to tout the city's spirit and, in one advertisement, stands in Times Square with Gov. George Pataki to encourage visitors. On Broadway last week, opposite the Winter Garden Theater, Eric Bageot talked about that same spirit. The sales executive for the Gamma photography agency has been so busy since the terrorist attacks, selling pictures of the devastated cityscape and of later events, that he has had little time to sort through personal feelings. "New York is New York and it's not going to stop us from doing what we're doing here," said Bageot, who emigrated from France and now lives in Harlem. "I really feel that we're the best at what we do here in New York and we're going to keep on doing what we do, the best we can. Those people are not going to stop us." A constant reminder The closer to Ground Zero, the more disruptions people still contend with. At Battery Park City, the elementary school that served the area has yet to reopen and students are being bused across town to the Lower East Side. Esther Min is among the mothers who wait to pick up their children on the neighborhood's almost deserted streets. Although the family has a weekend house in Yorktown Heights, family members have decided to stay in Manhattan, at least for now. Min, a lawyer, and her husband both work in the same building on lower Broadway, and living in Battery Park City during the week means they avoid a long commute. It also means they have to walk past the former Twin Towers site. Min remembers the thousands of people she used to see going to work in the complex whose lives were destroyed in an instant. "The biggest change, at least to me, is that nothing is really important or significant anymore," Min said. "Nothing is serious, nothing is important." Life has changed immeasurably for her 8-year-old son, Jay Park, who is no longer allowed to play outside because of the smoke and soot in the air. Most of the time he plays alone because his closest friends have moved away. She has bought him a cell phone because he could not reach her for hours on Sept. 11, but not a gas mask, something he requested after the anthrax outbreaks. "He said what good is it to have money if we all die," she said. Min tries not to let fear dominate her life, but she said the one thing she cannot do now is look at clouds. They remind her of the clouds of smoke and debris she walked through to find her son that day. "Every time when I see the clouds, it just comes right back to my eyes," Min said. "I can't deal with it. It just gets me very irritable and angry for no reason."

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