[eggplant43]

A place to post articles that interest you, but don't really fit into any of the existing threads. Pick any topic you like. As long as you enjoyed the article, and feel it is worth sharing with others.

[eggplant43]

Posted on Sun, Sep. 08, 2002

A philosopher compares the Western and Islamic worlds

The West and the Rest
Globalization
and the Terrorist Threat
By Roger Scruton

ISI Books. 200 pp. $19.95

Reviewed by Frank Wilson

British philosopher Roger Scruton's The West and the Rest does a superb job of placing into context the horrendous events of Sept. 11, 2001. His book is a marvel of clarity and concision, with an extraordinary amount of information packed into its 200 pages.

"When distinguishing 'the rest' from the West," Scruton explains in his preface, "I do not mean to imply that... the world is divided into opposing camps... . However, it seems to me that there is a great difference between those parts of the world where the Western political project has taken root, and those where it has not. I focus on Islam, since it offers a clear alternative to that project... ."

The difference can be traced to "the contest between the religious and the political forms of social order." In the West, thanks to the confluence of "two great institutions" - "Roman law, conceived as a universal jurisdiction, and Christianity, conceived as a universal church" - the contest has been resolved through the "separation of religious and secular authority." In the Islamic world, it simply has not been resolved.

Scruton then explains how St. Paul - who was a Roman citizen - designed the early church "not as a sovereign body, but as a universal citizen, entitled to the protection of the secular... powers but with no claim to displace those powers... ." This, he points out, was not only in accord with Jesus' own teaching in the parable of the tribute money, but was made into doctrinal orthodoxy by Pope Gelasius I in the fifth century.

Nothing resembling such a corporate personality exists in the Islamic world, where "there is no legal entity called 'The Mosque' to set beside the various Western churches." The goal of Western political systems, and the criterion of their legitimacy, Scruton argues, is citizenship, which "depends on pre-political loyalties of a territorial kind... rooted in the sense of the common home and of the transgenerational society that resides there. In short, citizenship as we know it depends on the nation... ." But the Koranic vision of society is "alien... to any idea of territorial jurisdiction or national loyalty."

There are other complicating factors. Not only is there the dream of "another kind of citizenship... in which national loyalties would be extinguished in an all-embracing order," but there is also the postmodern repudiation of "the cultural inheritance which defines us as something distinct from the rest."

"In place of the Enlightenment emphasis on reason as the path to objective truth," Scruton writes, "has come the 'view from the outside,' in which our entire tradition of learning is put in question as a preliminary to its rejection. The old appeal to reason is seen merely as an appeal to Western values." This "dethroning of reason goes hand in hand with a hostility to the belief in objective truth," which "is impossible to defend without at the same time presupposing it."

Finally, there is globalization, not "merely the expansion of communications, contacts, and trade around the globe," but "the transfer of social, economic, political, and juridical power to global organizations... located in no particular sovereign jurisdiction, and governed by no particular territorial law."

"With al-Qaeda... we encounter the real impact of globalization on the Islamic revival. To belong to this 'base' is to accept no territory as home, and no human law as authoritative."

A single detail serves to illustrate the point: When Mohamed Atta "left his native Egypt for Hamburg to continue his studies in architecture, it was not to learn about the modernist buildings that disfigure German cities but to write a thesis on the restoration of the ancient city of Aleppo, where the philosopher al-Farabi [whose ideal state was guided by Islamic law] once resided... . When he led the attack against the World Trade Center, Atta was assaulting a symbol of economic, aesthetic, and spiritual paganism."

Scruton may be a conservative, but British conservatism differs in key respects from the kind usually encountered on these shores. His call for reexamining "our... commitment to 'free trade,' conceived as the WTO [World Trade Organization] conceives it," "our easy acceptance of the multinational corporation as a legitimate legal person," and "our devotion to prosperity, and the habits of consumption that have led us to depend on raw materials... which cannot be obtained within our territory" will resonate with many who do not think of themselves as conservatives and cause others who do - including this reviewer - to fine-tune their thinking.

Scruton does not pretend to solve the problems he addresses, but he has framed those problems compellingly. His arguments are nuanced, and the evidence he marshals in support of them is formidable.


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

[Mulderator]

Andrew Sullivan
The Sunday Times of London
August 11, 2002

Memo to Europe: Grow up on Iraq

This summer of phony war looks even weirder when you compare the European and American press. In London and Paris, Berlin and Brussels, the papers are full of speculation about war with Iraq. There are demands that parliament be recalled; there are rumors of potential cabinet resignations; there are secret polls showing the enormous unpopularity of George Bush among Britons. In Germany, the Chancellor is even making opposition to war a key plank of his re-election campaign. But in the imperial capital, thousands of miles away, a strange calm prevails. The Senate has just held hearings on a potential war against Saddam, but the administration says it is not yet ready to give testimony. Congress is in recess. The president has gone to Texas. Many Americans are on vacation. Newspapers are covering the issue, but it has yet to rise to an actual, impassioned, substantive debate. And there's little mystery why. Despite the efforts of anti-war newspapers such as the New York Times, polls consistently show somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of Americans support war. The president has rhetorically committed himself to such an outcome. Privately no one close to the administration doubts it will take place - probably this winter. Americans are not blithe about this war: it will be their sons and daughters who die in it. But neither are they prepared to ignore a threat to the West as dangerous as any we have faced.

And American response to European panic and resistance? It's perhaps best summed up by a slightly impatient sigh. "Europeans Queasy About American Power" is not exactly a shocking headline any more. It simply isn't news that the Guardian opposes the use of arms to pre-empt the re-emergence of one of the most evil and dangerous regimes in the world. It isn't news that the EU, as represented by Chris Patten, prefers to subsidize Palestinian terror rather than fret about the possible Iraqi use of biological weapons. American eyes simply glaze over at this habitual pattern of European denial and protest. If Europeans opposed even the war in Afghanistan, what chance is there they will support war against Iraq? Americans have seen it before. They'll see it again. Meanwhile, they have work to do.

But, at a deeper and more worrying level, it's increasingly true that many Americans simply don't care any more. They are used to Europeans instinctually opposing any use of military force; and they are used to reflexive (and often hypocritical) anti-Americanism from the European center and left. But added to this is a relatively new and unanswerable factor: why on earth, apart from good manners, should Americans care about what Europe thinks? Yes, diplomacy demands courtesy and "listening." But it's not at all clear what else it requires. Militarily, Europe is a dud, and well on its way to becoming a complete irrelevance. With the sole exception of Britain, the Europeans have contributed a minuscule amount of the money and manpower to defang (but not yet defeat) al Qaeda. They couldn't even muster enough initiative and coordination to prevent another genocide in their own continent in the 1990s. They have cut their defense spending to such an extent that, with the exception of Britain, they are virtually useless as military allies. And these cuts in military spending are continuing - even after September 11. If a person who refuses to lock his door at night starts complaining about the only cop on the beat, sane people should wonder what has happened to his grip on reality. Does he actually want to be robbed or murdered? Similarly, it is one thing for Europeans to say that they are ceding all military responsibility to maintain international order to the United States. It is quite another for Europeans to then object when the United States takes the Europeans at their word and acts to defend that world order.

And the need for such order has not been abolished in the last decade. The world is still a terrifyingly dangerous place - perhaps, with the advance of destructive technology, more dangerous than at any time in the past. It was once impossible to conceive that radical terrorists could acquire the capacity to destroy an entire city like New York or Rome. But they are now on the verge of that capacity, and last September demonstrated to the world that they would show no hesitation in using it. An average, bewildered American therefore feels like asking of nervous Europeans: just what about September 11 do you not understand? These murderous fanatics could not have been clearer about their intent and capabilities. They want to kill you and destroy your civilization. This must change the prudential equation when faced with a menace like Saddam Hussein. When a tyrant like Saddam is doing all he can to acquirre biological, cehmical and nuclear weapons, when he has already invaded a neighboring state, when he has used chemical weapons against his own people, when he is subsidizing terror elsewhere in the Middle East, when he has extensive ties to Islamist terrorist groups around the world, doesn't the benefit of the doubt shift toward those who aim to disarm and dethrone him? And doesn't the mass grave of 3,000 Americans in the middle of New York City change the equation just a little?

This is the core of Americans' puzzlement about not just European vacillation but passionate opposition to taking on Saddam. When religious leaders actually argue that the United States is more moraly troubling than a butcher who has gassed his own people and waged wars of incalculable human cost, then you know some moral bearings have been lost. You know that the forces of appeasement and moral equivalence are as powerful today as they were in the 1970s when faced with Soviet evil and the 1930s when faced with Nazi evil. In this regard, it is useful to compare the response of Russia and Britain, with the official EU and widespread European hostility to the use of American force in the world. Both Russia and Britain provided key aid in the Afghanistan mission and both governments have been supportive of American concerns over Iraq. Both countries are acting as if they too have a responsibility to counter international terrorism and to sever its umbilical link to rogue states like Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Russia, Britain and America may disagree on some matters - their interests won't always coincide. But they share a common understanding of the threat we all face and have found a practical response to it. This is the difference between cooperating and mere whining. And it's a difference Washington appreciates.

In contrast, the Europe-wide hostility to American power and ingratitude for the Afghanistan campaign are bewildering. It's worth repeating an obvious fact: If it were not for America, al Qaeda, with support from Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Hamas, would still be ensconced in Afghanistan, planning new and more deadly attacks against the West. If it weren't for America, it is a virtual certainty that London and Paris would have by now experienced similarly catastrophic events as September 11. If it weren't for America, militarized fundamentalist Islam would, with the help of millions of Islamist immigrants, be gaining even more strength in Continental Europe. Yet European response to America's world-saving Afghanistan mission has not been thanks, appreciation or support. It has been increased criticism of the United States for seeking to continue the job in Iraq and elsewhere. At times, it even seems that Europeans believe that America's self-defense is more of a problem for world order than terrorist groups, aided by local tyrants like Saddam, coming close to acquiring weapons of mass destruction. On this score, many Americans don't just differ with many Europeans, they are repulsed by their inverted logic and moral delinquency. And they have a point. In a recent essay in National Review, a conservative magazine, Victor Davis Hanson summed up a common American view toward European complainers:

"Iraq? Stay put — we don't necessarily need or desire your help. The Middle East? Shame on you, not us, for financing the terrorists on the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority and Israel? You helped to fund a terrorist clique; we, a democracy — go figure. Racism? Arabs are safer in America than Jews are in Europe. That 200,000 were butchered in Bosnia and Kosovo a few hours from Rome and Berlin is a stain on you, the inactive, not us, the interventionist. Capital punishment? Our government has executed terrorists; yours have freed them. Do the moral calculus."

Israel, of course, plays a central role in this divide. It is still shocking to read, say, the BBC's accounts of what is happening in Israel and the West Bank, compared with even the most pro-Palestinian of major media in America. It is almost a given in the European media that Israel is the problem, Israel the aggressor, Israel the immoral protagonist in the conflict. To read the Independent or the Daily Mirror is to see a world where Israel is always guilty until proved innocent - in Jenin, for example, where the Independent declared a war crime before any real evidence had been presented. The fact that Israel is a democracy, while there is not a single democracy in the entire Arab world, is ignored. The fact that Israel exists in part because of Europe's legacy of genocidal anti-Semitism is also conveniently forgotten. The fact that Israel occupies the West Bank out of self-defense in the 1967 war is also expunged from memory. The incidental killing of civilians in Israel's acts of military self-defense are routinely regarded as morally equivalent to the deliberate targeting of civilians by Palestinian terrorists. And the routine, vile, Nazi-like hatred of Jews, an anti-Semitism that is now a key part of the governing ideology of the Arab states, is simply ignored, or down-played or denied.

When Americans see these double-standards, when they witness reflexive hostility to Israel in the European media, they naturally wonder if anti-Semitism, Europe's indigenous form of hate, isn't somehow behind it. And when Europeans respond with outrage toward this inference, it only compounds the problem. We're not anti-Semitic, we're anti-Israel, they claim. But while the slightest infraction of civilized norms by the Israelis is trumpeted from the mountaintops, the routine torture, despotism, intolerance and corruption that is the norm among Israel's neighbors barely gains a column inch or two. And the mis-steps and human rights violations of other countries - China in Tibet, Russia in Chechnya, Sri Lanka against the Tamils, and most famously, Serbia against Bosnian Muslims - never quite make the sniff-test of outrage and action. (Remember: it was America who finally rescued the Muslims of the Balkans, while Europe fiddled and diddled.) In this context, it is simply natural to ask of Europeans: isn't it a little suspicious, given Europe's history, that it's Israel that always gets your critical attention?

Talk to many Europeans and their self-defense gets even worse. They will soon tell you that America's support for the only democracy in the Middle East is a function of the "all-powerful Jewish lobby" in Washington. It doesn't occur to them that references to such a lobby's subterranean influence are themselves facets of anti-Semitism so deep it barely registers. When the Guardian can run a column days after September 11 with the headline, "Who Dare Blame Israel?" you can see how deep the anti-Semitic rot has buried itself into the liberal mind. When the French have a best-seller on how the plane that crashed into the Pentagon was part of a CIA-Jewish plot, you can see why Americans are circumspect. When synagogues are burned, when Jewish cemeteries are desecrated and an anti-Semitic fascist comes in second in the first round of French voting, is it a shock that Americans see Europe as a place that hasn't really changed that much in fifty years in some respects?

There are, of course, deeper structural reasons for Europe's aversion to American power. By unilaterally disarming itself, Europe is making a statement about how the world should be governed: by mediation, diplomacy, international agreements, polled sovereignty. The American analyst Robert Kagan famously expanded on this theme in a much-discussed recent essay. The experience of the EU - the way in which ancient enemies like France and Germany now cooperate in a conflict-free, post-nationalist arena - is regarded as morally and strategically superior to America's still-tenacious defense of sovereignty and millitary force. What this analysis misses, of course, is a little history. The only reason the E.U. can exist at all is because American military force defeated Nazi Germany. The only reason why all of Germany is now included in the E.U. is because American military force defeated the Soviet Union. Europhiles mistake the fruits of realpolitik with its abolition. And they don't realize that the best and only guarantor of European peace and integration - now threatened from within and without by Islamist terror - is American force again. Instead of cavilling at such intervention, these Europeans should be praying for it - in order to save their own political achievement.

This is not to dismiss the serious questions to be asked about any Iraq war. Should it be a massive land invasion with over 200,000 troops - or a smaller force of, say, 50,000 supplemented by special forces? How do we prevent Saddam using chemical or biological weapons if attacked? How could this destabilize the region in worrying ways - as opposed to the right ways? Is Turkey on board? How do we cope with a post-Saddam Iraq? These are onerous matters and they deserve a thorough airing. But their premise is responsibility for world order. Europeans may believe that they have abolished realpolitik in their internal affairs, that national interest is a thing of the past, that military power is an anachronism. And within the confines of a few European countries, they may be right. But in the wider world - especially in the combustible Middle East - history hasn't ended and a new threat to world peace is rising, with the most dangerous weapons in world history close to its grasp. If Europeans believe that it can be palliated by subsidy or diplomacy or appeasement or surrender, then they are simply mistaking their own elysian state of affairs for the Hobbesian world outside their borders. They are misreading their own times - as profoundly as they did in the 1930s.

America, in contrast, has no option but to tackle this threat - or face its own destruction at the hands of it. The longer America takes to tackle it, the greater the costs will be. The threat is primarily to America, as the world hegemon, but Europe is not immune either. The question for European leaders is therefore not whether they want to back America or not. The question is whether they want to be adult players in a new and dangerous world. Grow up and join in - or pipe down and let us do it. That's the message America is now sending to Europe. And it's a message long, long overdue.

August 11, 2002, The Sunday Times of London
copyright © 2002 Andrew Sullivan

[JewisHeritage]

Bruce: Great idea ... Great thread! ... However you forgot to block Mulder from posting here!

[eggplant43]

[eggplant43]

September 9, 2002

Locked Up and Patted Down: A Year of Making U.S. Safer

By TODD S. PURDUM


WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 — Cockpit doors are stronger, but not all cargo is screened for bombs. The directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency now jointly brief the president on terrorist threats, but there are still critical gaps in intelligence gathering and analysis. The Super Bowl has become a superfortress, but the local cineplex remains a soft target. The government issues a rolling rainbow of threat alerts, but Congress and the White House are still battling over the creation of an agency to coordinate security.

One year after the worst terrorist attacks on United States soil, Americans are safer but still far from safe.

In recent days, the top Bush administration officials charged with securing the nation at home and abroad have all cited progress but also acknowledged the continuing threat in their public comments. Tom Ridge, the homeland security chief, considers another attack almost certain. Vice President Dick Cheney says the problem is "obviously not" solved, and the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, says "there will continue to be vulnerability."

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said: "I think we're clearly safer than we were a year ago, because the No. 1 force that could hurt us, Al Qaeda, while not destroyed, is on the run. And over all, the war on terrorism overseas is going quite well. But you worry three to five years from now whether we'll be safe when the next Al Qaeda arrives, because what we're doing domestically to make ourselves safer is very halting, slow and incomplete."

The Immigration and Naturalization service has put the names of more than 300,000 foreigners with criminal records into the F.B.I. database, so law enforcement can track them. But it still has no precise count of foreign students who have overstayed or violated their visas.

The F.B.I. has reassigned hundreds of agents to investigate the Sept. 11 attacks and has redirected resources in an effort to prevent future ones. But the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, has said that he cannot be certain that the government will thwart another attack, which many officials regard as almost certain.

The C.I.A. is trying to recruit more people fluent in Arabic but still has a critical shortage of sources who have actually penetrated terrorist cells. Although the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. have made some strides in coordinating their intelligence gathering and analysis, and more federal agencies, especially the Pentagon, are vying to collect intelligence on terrorists, rivalries among federal agencies still hobble timely analysis and coherent dissemination of the stream of overseas intelligence that floods into the government.

Safety, of course, cannot be guaranteed, especially in a democracy that holds individual freedom among its most cherished values. The real issue is whether the institutions of American life have taken reasonable precautions to protect the public; for the most part, neither the government nor private organizations have taken more than the first halting steps.

Washington is spending about $1 billion a year on programs aimed at keeping nuclear material out of terrorists' hands, but experts say the efforts are uncoordinated. The Federation of American Scientists has just issued a report concluding that emergency workers around the nation still lack training to deal with an attack using weapons of mass destruction.

Baltimore now tests its drinking water three times a day, instead of once, but assessments of the vulnerability of water systems nationwide are not even scheduled for completion until next year.

Over all, the Bush administration has sought to roughly double spending on counterterrorism efforts at home and abroad, to $45 billion next year. But President Bush has threatened to veto the Senate version of the bill creating his Department of Homeland Security on the ground that it maintains civil service rules that he says hamstring managers' ability to fire or promote workers.

"Safer compared to what?" asked Ivo H. Daalder, an expert at the Brookings Institution here. "I would argue safer compared to Sept. 10. We are more likely to make it more difficult, but it doesn't mean we're not going to be attacked. It doesn't mean we're safe. We're not."

Mr. Ridge's office has compiled a list of 71 signs of "progress since Sept. 11," including the expanded use of air marshals, the arrests of more than 500 illegal immigrants on a variety of charges and the restructured counterterrorism efforts at the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.

But many of the 71 items are still only proposals, and with the vast bulk of the nation's vital infrastructure — including shipping, banking, communication networks, power grids and transportation — under private, not public, control, measuring comprehensive progress is all but impossible.

The fiscal and economic aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks has left about half of all United States cities less able to meet their financial needs, according to a recent survey by the National League of Cities. Two-thirds cited a need for more money for equipment and training to support local efforts. While 80 percent of all cities cited cyberterrorism as a concern, barely a quarter of cities reported that their contingency plans addressed that problem.

Mr. Daalder, the Brookings expert, said that perhaps the biggest problem was a continuing "failure of imagination" about the range of potential threats. "We haven't even started to put into place people we will pay to think about the impossible happening, and how to guard against it," he said.

In a speech last week, Richard L. Armitage, deputy secretary of state, said: "Today, America has unprecedented pre-eminence — we've got power, prestige, influence and clout far beyond that known in the history of man. And this is true in all respects: economic, military, cultural and political. In a way, you'd think that this should be all we need to address any challenge to our security, and yet we've never been more aware of our vulnerabilities."

The Nuclear Threat: Tracking the Goods and the Guardians

There is no evidence that Al Qaeda has nuclear weapons, experts say. But the cold war left the world awash in the materials and knowledge needed to create nuclear weapons, and indeed awash in the weapons themselves.

Last month, after two years of delays, the Department of Energy decided to move several tons of weapons-grade plutonium and uranium from a poorly guarded laboratory in Los Alamos to keep it from being stolen.

The same month, heavily armed Serbian troops, under the supervision of Russian, American and United Nations officials, flew 100 pounds of bomb-grade uranium from the Vinca nuclear reactor near Belgrade to Russia, where it will be blended with ordinary uranium and made unusable for weapons.

The Bush administration recently signed an agreement with Uzbekistan to remove a similar stash of dangerous fuel from the Ulugbek reactor there.

The United States spends about $1 billion a year on various programs to reduce this threat and is deploying better sensors to detect radioactive material.

But these activities are spread among the Energy, State and Defense Departments and numerous smaller agencies and laboratories, and some experts say a lack of coordination leaves the nation at risk. In June, the National Academy of Sciences recommended that a single agency be in charge of all research on nuclear terrorism.

Nuclear materials — even the kind used in hospitals and other civilian applications — can be used with conventional explosives in what antiterror officials call a dirty bomb to spray radioactive material over a wide area. While they admit that the threat of such an attack is high, scientists say that it would do more economic and psychological harm than physical damage.

Worse, terrorists could set off a fire in the used fuel at a nuclear reactor, perhaps by crashing a plane into the pool where the highly radioactive fuel rods are kept underwater, said Dr. Frank von Hippel, a Princeton physicist.

Nuclear experts worry even more about the detonation of a stolen or homemade nuclear bomb.

An analysis by the Institute for Science and International Security recently concluded that Al Qaeda would be capable of building a crude bomb — one that could be delivered by truck or ship — if it had the right amount of enriched uranium, about 100 pounds.

According to recent estimates by the Federation of American Scientists, Russia has produced about 1,000 tons of enriched uranium. Strategic and tactical nuclear weapons should eventually account for about 150 tons based on the cuts Russia has agreed to make in the arsenal. Russia has agreed to blend about 500 tons of this enriched uranium with ordinary uranium and sell it to the United States as reactor fuel, removing it from the potential black market. But this still leaves several hundred tons not covered by any agreement.

Moreover, tons of enriched uranium are at civilian research reactors scattered about the world, said Matthew Bunn, a research associate and nuclear expert at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Many such institutions lack robust security, he and other experts say.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, since 1993 there have been around 400 instances of trafficking in nuclear fuel or other radioactive materials. In all about 26 pounds of enriched uranium and almost a pound of plutonium have been seized in various arrests. Because of sloppy or nonexistent accounting, Mr. Bunn said, nobody knows how much has been stolen and not recovered.

To help shore up security and thwart nuclear smuggling, the Department of Energy has been providing training and surveillance equipment, including 30,000 Customs manuals, to Russian officials over the last decade. Some of this equipment is now coming back home and being retrofitted, said H. Terry Hawkins, director of the division of nonproliferation and national security at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Last spring, scientists from several national laboratories unveiled a handheld device that will allow customs inspectors to get a reading on what is inside a cargo container, based on radioactive emissions. Scientists hope to begin testing a larger device soon that will probe the contents of cargo containers by beaming neutrons or gamma rays at them, said Dr. William Dunlop, a nuclear physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The hope, officials say, is to install such devices in distant ports.

"The battle for homeland security," Mr. Hawkins said, "begins in places difficult to pronounce." DENNIS OVERBYE

Aviation: Beyond Screening People and Bags

The federal government is trying to meet new deadlines set by Congress to improve the screening of passengers and checked bags, but security experts inside and outside government say that even in the unlikely event that both goals are met this year, they will not make aviation secure enough.

The public focus has been on two measures linked to deadlines: by Nov. 19 all screeners at checkpoints are supposed to be federal employees; by Dec. 31 all baggage loaded into cargo holds is supposed to be checked for explosives.

Representative John L. Mica, the Florida Republican who is the chairman of the House aviation subcommittee, said the Nov. 19 requirement for federalizing the screeners would probably be met. "We probably will have the passenger screening army in place," Mr. Mica said. The baggage screening deadline may not be met, he said. But, he added, "Far worse, we're losing sight of the other areas that could have great potential risk, like cargo security and the airport perimeter and general aviation."

Steve Elson, a former Navy Seal who was a security official in the Federal Aviation Administration but quit in frustration, asked: "Who is watching the ramps? I guarantee you I can walk onto ramps. So can you, and so can Al Qaeda."

Another hole is in the integration of intelligence information about possible plotters and the dissemination of that information.

In August, the Transportation Department awarded a major contract to build the computers to search databanks for information about travelers and workers to detect possible security risks, selecting, for example, foreign visitors living for long periods without fixed addresses or steady jobs.

Measuring how much has been achieved in aviation is difficult, intentionally so. From the number of air marshals on the planes to the fraction of checked bags selected for search, many details are classified. Nobody can say how many pilots will arm themselves if a bill approved by the House and Senate takes effect.

The airlines, meanwhile, are losing money at record rates. In the first half of the year they carried 258.6 million passengers, down 11.4 percent from the first half of 2001; the number of takeoffs and landings in that period fell by about 16 percent. No one is sure how much of the falloff is the economy and how much is fear. But despite the federalization of the security work force, security may suffer when the airlines are short of cash.

On the other hand, there has been a long-term change in the psychology of air travelers, as demonstrated by the passengers who tackled Richard C. Reid, the man accused of trying to blow up a jet last December with explosives hidden in his shoes. Anyone walking toward a cockpit now is likely to be noticed and challenged. MATTHEW L. WALD

The Infrastructure: National Smorgasbord for Terrorists

For all the attention paid to high-profile, symbolic targets like the John Hancock Tower in Chicago or the Mall of America outside Minneapolis, experts on domestic security see a far more complex challenge in the seemingly endless array of sites known as critical infrastructure.

The Golden Gate is, after all, just one of 590,984 bridges around the nation. There is one Hoover Dam, but 54,065 public and private water systems. Eighty-five deep-draft ports. One hundred and three nuclear power plants. Untold miles of highways, railroads, underground tunnels and oil pipelines, innumerable electricity grids and telecommunications hubs, each vulnerable to attacks with the potential to disrupt commerce if not endanger lives.

"You've got to boil it down in such a way so that people don't roll their eyes and say it's too big," said Mayor Martin O'Malley of Baltimore, who has been a leading advocate of domestic security. "No, you can't protect every inch of American soil, and you know what? You don't need to. But there are critical areas that warrant better protection, smarter eyes, fences, cameras."

Nowadays, ships must give 96-hour notification before pulling into the nation's ports. Most nuclear plants have doubled their fenced-in perimeters, spending about $200 million on security upgrades. Florida bought two mobile $1 million gamma-ray devices to inspect truck cargo.

In Gilbert, Ariz., two police officers are freed from radio calls during heightened security alerts to patrol power plants and water wells, among other critical sites. Pembroke Pines, Fla., like scores of other cities, has posted a 24-hour armed guard outside its water plant; other places, like Palatine, Ill., simply changed the locks or, as in St. Charles, Mo., added a security camera. In Gary, Ind., visitors to the sanitary district facility must now be escorted by employees. In Elizabeth, N.J., new No Parking signs ring the natural gas tank.

But vulnerability assessments of the water systems will not be complete until next year. Port authorities received only 13 percent of the $700 million in federal grants they requested for security measures. In Boston, inspection of cargo containers at the harbor has tripled, but is still only 15 percent.

"We still have yawning vulnerabilities," said Stephen Flynn, senior fellow in the national security studies program at the Council on Foreign Relations. "Virtually all the focus has been on the narrow issues of physical security, which are necessary baseline steps. What they have not done very well is, let's assume those measures fail, the attack is successful, what's our response?"

Juliette Kayyem, who runs the domestic preparedness program at the Kennedy School of Government, said the Bush administration was ideologically disinclined to impose mandates on the private sector or on local governments and that officials in smaller cities were losing their focus on terrorism in favor of more pressing issues, like the economy.

Donald F. Kettl, a public policy professor at the University of Wisconsin who is studying domestic security for the Century Foundation, said, "There are still a lot of cracks in the system because of the basic fissures in American federalism." JODI WILGOREN

Immigration: Who's Here, Why and for How Long?

With a heightened priority on tightening the nation's borders, few federal agencies have faced as much scrutiny since Sept. 11 as the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Long saddled with a reputation for antiquated computers and staggering paperwork backlogs, the agency increased the scrutiny of foreigners entering the United States after the attacks.

The immigration service is working more closely with the Treasury Department and the F.B.I. to track possible terrorists. Inspectors at ports and other border crossings now have access to the State Department's consular database to prevent visa fraud.

To crack down on foreigners who remain in the United States despite deportation orders, the agency has entered the names of 314,000 "criminal aliens" into the F.B.I.'s database so local police officers can identify them.

But the immigration service still has no firm data on how many foreign students have overstayed or violated their visas — despite a 1996 law requiring a tracking system for the 547,000 people holding student visas. A computer network to track foreign students is expected to be doing the job early next year.

As part of the effort to screen out potential terrorists, new Justice Department regulations will take effect beginning Sept. 11 that ultimately would require some 100,000 foreign students, tourists, researchers and other visitors to register with the federal government, officials said.

Visitors from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria, as well as many residents of about 20 largely Muslim and Middle Eastern nations, will be fingerprinted, photographed and required to fill out a long form. The regulations would not affect those with green cards.

Separately, the immigration service has proposed shortening the length of a standard tourist visa to as little as 30 days.

The Justice Department has issued new rules that allow the attorney general to authorize state or local law enforcement officers to track illegal immigrants. This reverses a longstanding legal tradition and has prompted some police departments to express concern that the new measure could jeopardize their relations with immigrants, who would be less willing to report crimes.

The Justice Department also decided to start enforcing a 50-year-old law that requires immigrants to report their change of address to the immigration service within 10 days of moving. But in July, the I.N.S. acknowledged that 200,000 change of address forms were sitting in boxes in underground storage.

"The federal government has taken a number of sensible steps and made tremendous progress in deterring the admission of potential terrorists," said Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an immigration policy group. "But inside the country, the government has acted in a heavy-handed way that hasn't made us any safer." ERIC SCHMITT

[eggplant43]

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

September 9, 2002

A Spirit Reborn

By WILLIAM SAFIRE


WASHINGTON

Abraham Lincoln's words at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery will be the speech repeated at the commemoration of Sept. 11 by the governor of New York and by countless other speakers across the nation.

The lips of many listeners will silently form many of the famous phrases. "Four score and seven years ago" — a sonorous way of recalling the founding of the nation 87 years before he spoke — is a phrase many now recite by rote, as is "the last full measure of devotion."

But the selection of this poetic political sermon as the oratorical centerpiece of our observance need not be only an exercise in historical evocation, nonpolitical correctness and patriotic solemnity. What makes this particular speech so relevant for repetition on this first anniversary of the worst bloodbath on our territory since Antietam Creek's waters ran red is this: Now, as then, a national spirit rose from the ashes of destruction.

Here is how to listen to Lincoln's all-too-familiar speech with new ears.

In those 266 words, you will hear the word dedicate five times. The first two times refer to the nation's dedication to two ideals mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, the original ideal of "liberty" and the ideal that became central to the Civil War: "that all men are created equal."

The third, or middle, dedication is directed to the specific consecration of the site of the battle of Gettysburg: "to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place." The fourth and fifth times Lincoln repeated dedicate reaffirmed those dual ideals for which the dead being honored fought: "to the unfinished work" and then "to the great tasks remaining before us" of securing freedom and equality.

Those five pillars of dedication rested on a fundament of religious metaphor. From a president not known for his piety — indeed, often criticized for his supposed lack of faith — came a speech rooted in the theme of national resurrection. The speech is grounded in conception, birth, death and rebirth.

Consider the barrage of images of birth in the opening sentence. The nation was "conceived in liberty," and "brought forth" — that is, delivered into life — by "our fathers" with all "created" equal. (In the 19th century, both "men" and "fathers" were taken to embrace women and mothers. ) The nation was born.

Then, in the middle dedication to those who sacrificed themselves, come images of death: "final resting place" and "brave men, living and dead."

Finally, the nation's spirit rises from this scene of death: "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom." Conception, birth, death, rebirth. The nation, purified in this fiery trial of war, is resurrected. Through the sacrifice of its sons, the sundered nation would be reborn as one.

An irreverent aside: All speechwriters stand on the shoulders of orators past. Lincoln's memorable conclusion was taken from a fine oration by the Rev. Theodore Parker at an 1850 Boston antislavery convention. That social reformer defined the transcendental "idea of freedom" to be "a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people."

Lincoln, 13 years later, dropped the "alls" and made the phrase his own. (A little judicious borrowing by presidents from previous orators shall not perish from the earth.) In delivering that final note, the Union's defender is said to have thrice stressed the noun "people" rather than the prepositions "of," "by" and "for." What is to be emphasized is not rhetorical rhythm but the reminder that our government's legitimacy springs from America's citizens; the people, not the rulers, are sovereign. Not all nations have yet grasped that.

Do not listen on Sept. 11 only to Lincoln's famous words and comforting cadences. Think about how Lincoln's message encompasses but goes beyond paying "fitting and proper" respect to the dead and the bereaved. His sermon at Gettysburg reminds "us the living" of our "unfinished work" and "the great task remaining before us" — to resolve that this generation's response to the deaths of thousands of our people leads to "a new birth of freedom."

[eggplant43]

September 9, 2002

A Year Too Real

By BOB HERBERT


It still doesn't seem quite real. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Monica Watt was standing in a courtyard of the Gateway Plaza apartment complex in Battery Park City, just a block from the enormous towers of the World Trade Center. She was with two of her three children — Amanda, who was 5 and severely handicapped, and William, who was 2.

Her husband, Bill, had gone off to work and their 7-year-old daughter, Melissa, had already left for school.

William spotted the plane first. He pointed and said, "Look, Mommy."

The sight was immediately disorienting. The plane didn't belong where it was. It was too low. Too close. In an interview last week, Ms. Watt said she had the odd thought, "I've never seen a plane in that airspace before."

They watched as American Airlines Flight 11 plunged into the north tower. It was precisely 8:46 a.m.

"I'll never forget the feeling," said Ms. Watt. "There was an explosion, and you just saw the glass and everything else blow out of the side of the building."

William stared, and began to shiver.

Moments later a school bus arrived to pick up Amanda. William was still staring at the north tower, and by that time people were beginning to jump. "You'd see a woman in a business suit and a man holding hands," said Ms. Watt. "And you're almost saying, `Don't! Don't!' And then you'd see them leap."

The second plane hit while she was talking to the bus driver. Now there was no doubt that it was a terrorist attack. Ms. Watt grabbed her children and went up to their 14th-floor apartment. She strapped Amanda into a wheelchair, picked up a few items and then joined the crush of residents evacuating the building.

She wanted to get to a promenade behind the building that runs along the Hudson River. As she looked back at the trade center, she said to the superintendent, who was unlocking a gate for her, "You don't think those buildings are going to fall, do you?"

Just as the superintendent was saying no, the south tower began to collapse.

"When that tower went down," said Ms. Watt, "I thought at the time that an atomic bomb had gone off. It was the loudest explosion I have ever heard."

She tried to push Amanda to a safe spot, she said. "People were screaming, `The building's coming down!' I stuck William under my shirt and went up against the wall. I just put my face to the building. The worst part was when all this stuff started raining down on us. You didn't know if it was going to be a foot deep, or 30 feet or 50 feet. It was pitch black and you couldn't breathe. The air was just taken away from you.

"I thought, `This is it — we are going to die.' And I really just knelt down and prayed."

Ms. Watt and her children were eventually rescued by a fireboat on the Hudson. They were taken, along with many others, to New Jersey, and the family was reunited that night.

The story of the Watt family since then is really the story of the city of New York since then. The family was stunned, frightened, traumatized. But recovery, however difficult, was the only option.

They lived in a hotel for several months, then moved back to the Gateway Plaza building. "William had a tough time," said Ms. Watt. "He would look out the windows and go, `No towers. Towers gone.' "

He drew pictures, with his sister Melissa's help, of people leaping from the trade center, some of them in flames. When he was outside and the wind was blowing, he would scream that buildings were falling on him. And every time he saw the attack replayed on television, he thought it was happening again.

The healing process was long and hard and continues. A therapist from the Children's Health Fund visited the apartment regularly to counsel William, and that helped. He still draws pictures of the towers, but now there are ropes and ladders and rescue workers at the windows. And as his family has settled more or less comfortably into its new life beside ground zero, he has become more accepting of the idea that the worst is behind him. Sometimes he actually says, "It's over."

Dr. Irwin Redlener, president of the Children's Health Fund, said youngsters across the city, like William, "and like all of us, really, are in a sense adjusting to the new reality of what we had to face then, and what we may have to face in the future."

It was a year unlike any other. Unreal, and all too real, all at the same time.

[Moby]

This Andrew Sullivan (Times London),
He wouldn't happen to be half American, a third British and just over 4/25th's Russian by any chance?

[eggplant43]

What is happiness, what makes us happy?


http://www.msnbc.com/news/805124.asp

[eggplant43]

Russian oil for America: step toward a new world order?

Peter Baker The Washington Post

Monday, September 9, 2002



MOSCOW In their hour of need, as the Nazis were marching on Moscow during World War II, desperate Russians received a lifeline from the United States in the form of supply convoys sailing into the Arctic port of Murmansk. Now some six decades later, Russia wants to turn the ships around.

To help the United States in its war on terrorism, Russia may build a deep-water port at Murmansk where it could load supertankers with plentiful Russian oil and ship it to America. The United States would be less vulnerable to disruptions in the oil supply from the Middle East, and Russia's oil barons would have a huge new market to cultivate.

A year after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks redefined U.S.-Russian relations, George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin are working to turn their new friendship into a tangible new partnership between the world's largest energy consumer and the steward of one of the world's largest energy reserves. Ignoring skeptics, the two presidents signed an energy cooperation agreement at their May summit meeting in Moscow, and the plan to convene a two-day oil and gas conference in Houston on Oct. 1.

If they succeed, the partnership could be among the most far-reaching changes to the international order in the aftermath of Sept. 11. For the first time, Russia would provide significant economic goods to the United States, no longer playing the role of financial supplicant as it has since the demise of the Soviet Union. Closer energy ties would also further diminish U.S. dependence on oil from the Middle East and give Bush flexibility in confronting Iraq.

"The United States wants to be prepared for some kind of disruption," said Konstantin Reznikov, the senior oil analyst at Alfa Bank in Moscow. "The relationship between the United States and the Middle East - and Saudi Arabia in particular - deteriorated after the September 11 events, so now they're targeting to get more crude oil from other regions."

The U.S. energy secretary, Spencer Abraham, echoed that view during a recent visit to Moscow to promote cooperation. "Russia will play a pivotal role in ensuring global energy security," he said, adding that "the more diverse the sources of energy are, the less likely it is that disruption on one part of the planet will interrupt supplies."

Some Russian oil executives estimate that Russia, which currently supplies virtually no oil to the United States, could soon provide as much as 1 million barrels a day, or nearly 10 percent of U.S. imports, replacing most of Saudi Arabia's supplies if necessary. Already, Russia has surpassed Saudi Arabia in oil production.

No one is more enthusiastic about the prospect than Mikhail Khodorkovsky, head of Yukos, the second-largest Russian oil company. He figures that the United States could survive with its own oil reserves and Russian help.

"Say a disruption from some Middle Eastern suppliers, say 1 million extra barrels a day from Russia, and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and America doesn't have anything to worry about for a year and a half," he said. "And in a year's time, Russia can increase its shipments by a million barrels a day."

Khodorkovsky sent the first supertanker of oil directly from Russia to the United States this summer, followed by a second supertanker a month later and by a smaller, third ship last week.

"America, here's a gift from Siberia!" trumpeted a Russian newspaper.

But some oil executives and analysts dismissed the shipments as little more than public relations, asserting that the additional cost makes it a bad economic bet for Russian companies and outlining the myriad logistical difficulties of transporting oil halfway around the world from Siberia to the United States. "I'm not sure for Russian oil companies it makes economic sense at this point," said Stephen O'Sullivan, head of research at United Financial Group, a Moscow-based brokerage firm. "It's clear that America really wants Russian oil, but I'm not sure they're going to be that happy to pay an extra $1.25 per barrel."

Simon Kukes, president of Tyumen Oil, the third-largest Russian oil company in Russia, believes the shipments to Houston have been important, but he figures it will take five years, not one, to reach an rate of 1 million barrels a day in exports to the United States. "We're making too much noise about Russia being a replacement for Saudi Arabia‚," he said. "In the nearest future, it's impossible."

With the world's largest natural gas reserves, Russia has always been an energy powerhouse, but lately it has again become a dominant player in world oil markets, after years of decline.Russian oil production has risen since 1999, along with capital investment. Production reached 7.7 million barrels a day in August. Many believe production could rise to 9 or 10 million barrels a day within a few years.

But while Saudi Arabia exports nearly all its oil, Russia sells less than 5 million barrels a day abroad, making it still by far the second-largest exporter. Moreover, Saudi Arabia has the capacity to produce an extra 3 million barrels a day with the flick of a switch, allowing it extraordinary market influence, while Russia is producing at full capacity.

[Mulderator]

eggplant--give someone else a chance for Godsakes!

[eggplant43]

Scientists Develop Computer Mouse for the Blind

Mon Sep 9, 9:32 AM ET

LEICESTER, England (Reuters) - Scientists looking for ways to help blind people get more out of computers have developed a mouse that goes bump and combined it with sound representations of graphs that would otherwise be inaccessible.



Mike Burton of Glasgow University told reporters at the British Association for the Advancement of Science ( news - web sites) annual festival the mouse vibrated every time it met a line on a graph, giving a blind operator a tactile tip-off.

"The technique is a very good way of presenting information to blind and sighted people," he said. "The bottom line is that the cheapest and most flexible solution works."

Likening the jumping mouse to electronic Braille, Burton said one of the most daunting tasks facing visually impaired people was trying to assimilate information giving an overview of data or events.

Reinforcing the tactile jolt of the mouse, fellow Glasgow University scientist Stephen Brewster said his team had developed sound graphs that could be combined with the mouse.

Lines on a graph were represented by tones that would vary in pitch according to whether the line was rising or falling.

Several such tones could be used to represent different lines of the same graph as the user entered a "soundscape."

"You can get across quite complex information just using sound," he said, adding that the technique could even be of use to sighted people such as share traders who could be alerted on their mobile phones by a tone representing a move up or down.

He declined to speculate on the sound of a stock market crash.

[eggplant43]

eggplant--give someone else a chance for Godsakes!

Jump on in

Sorry, I was going to garden, and it started to rain, so what else was I to do?

[Mulderator]

Originally posted by eggplant43:
What is happiness, what makes us happy?


http://www.msnbc.com/news/805124.asp

For men, that is a very easy question. For women, there is no answer!