U.S. Agency Sees Global Network for Bomb Making
By DAVID JOHNSTON
WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 -- Government forensic investigators examining how terrorists manufacture improvised explosives have found indications of a global bomb-making network, and have concluded that Islamic militant bomb builders have used the same designs for car bombs in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, government officials said this week.
"Linkages have been made in devices that have been used in different continents," said one forensic expert involved in the intelligence effort. "We know that we have the same bomb maker, or different bomb makers are using the same instructions."
The previously undisclosed intelligence operation has expanded on studies of past cases like investigations of the thwarted shoe-bomb attack aboard a Paris to Miami flight in December 2001. In a test, detonation of a similar bomb on a grounded aircraft blew a 2 feet by 2 feet in the fuselage -- a potentially catastrophic event aboard a pressurized plane in flight.
In another example of the investigators' work, bomb analysts have collected fragments from hundreds of improvised devices detonated in attacks in Iraq, including large car and truck bombings and smaller assaults using explosives packed in empty artillery shells and even concrete blocks. That project has led to a better understanding of the devices and to efforts to provide commanders in Iraq with faster countermeasures to help protect American troops.
But there are many questions still unanswered about who is behind various bombings, including some of the major suicide bombing attacks in Iraq. Intelligence analysts have said they believe that Al Qaeda has been weakened by the campaign against terrorism and lacks a central command, as well as financial and recruiting structures. But the bomb investigations suggest that the terrorist network still may be disseminating bomb-making skills to a generation of militants who have fanned out around the world.
Many bomb makers may have learned how to make improvised explosives in the 1990's at Osama bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan, and the methods taught there may now be showing up elsewhere.
Intelligence analysts did not say there was evidence of a single controlling entity behind the construction of the larger car and truck bombs often used in the most deadly attacks, although they suggested that there might not be many people with the technical skills to build larger bombs.
Some counterterrorism officials have emphasized the need to identify and locate the relatively small number of master bomb makers responsible for the most lethal bombings.
Behind the effort to analyze the bombs is a new forensic intelligence unit, the Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center, or Tedac. The F.B.I., which took the lead in the center's creation, has found that in the last five years almost 90 percent of terrorist attacks against Americans have involved improvised explosives.
"Tedac is a multiagency effort to analyze improvised explosive devices," said Dwight E. Adams, director of the F.B.I. laboratory. "It gathers and shares intelligence related to the construction of these devices. Its purpose is to save lives."
The center's work has not previously been disclosed. Terrorism specialists in Congress were briefed on it this week.
While there is still debate about who is behind the bombings in Iraq, and none of the larger and most deadly attacks by suicide bombers have been solved, intelligence analysts said that they believed followers of Al Qaeda or ideologically sympathetic allies may be involved in some of the bombings. But the examination of bombs used in Iraq has so far yielded little information about the identity of who made them. Many bombs of different types explode every day in the country.
Examining tiny bits of bomb housings, wirings, detonation cords, fuses, switches, the chemical composition of the explosives and the electronic signatures of remote switching devices often used to detonate bombs, experts at the center have begun to compile a data bank about terror bombs. In some cases, forensic scientists have been able to obtain evidence of who made the bomb through a fingerprint or DNA material left on an explosive part.
The unit became operational in December after President Bush approved it, and lawmakers were told of the existence of the organization in recent days, the officials said. It has a broad mandate to examine not only bombings against Americans, but those directed against other countries like the recent assassination attempts against President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.
The unit, which is based at the F.B.I.'s laboratory in Quantico, Va., has drawn on experts from the Defense intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and other intelligence agencies.
In countries like Iraq, even sophisticated analysis has often failed to solve terrorist bombings. Investigators have collected valuable clues, including the fingerprints of the driver and license plate of the truck that carried the bomb that detonated outside the United Nations mission in Iraq in August 2003, killing dozens of people. Even so, in a country with no fingerprint files or vehicle records, authorities still do not know who was behind the attack.
The study of the unexploded device built into the sole of the shoe worn by Richard Reid, a British citizen who was sentenced to life in prison, is a model for how the new analysis center will operate. In that case, forensic examiners were aided by experts from the Federal Aviation Administration and Transportation Security Administration.
Mr. Reid acknowledged he was a follower of Al Qaeda. But subsequent forensic investigation showed that the design of his shoe bomb followed specific details in training manuals found by American forces at training camps in Afghanistan. The design closely followed the manuals. For example, the fuse was cut at precisely the angle the manual advised.
It remains unknown who built the shoe bomb, but investigators doubt it was Mr. Reid. Forensic analysts found a partial fingerprint on the bomb and a single strand of human hair, but neither matched Mr. Reid's.
The forensic conclusions about the seriousness of Mr. Reid's shoe bomb have deepened concerns about the possibility of attacks aboard commercial airliners and provided a backdrop to the concerns that led American authorities to cancel abruptly several international flights to the United States in recent months.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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Iran confirms buying nuclear equipment from subcontinent dealers
Tehran, Iran-AP -- Iran is confirming it purchased nuclear equipment from international dealers but says it doesn't know from whom.
A foreign ministry spokesman told reporters today that some of the dealers were from "subcontinent countries" but had no further details.
His comments come a day after Malaysian police released a report citing a businessman who said operatives of Abdul Qadeer Khan (ahb-DOOL' kah-DEER' khahn) sold uranium enrichment equipment to Iran for three (m) million dollars in the mid-1990's.
Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, has admitted selling technology and know-how to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
Iran says its nuclear program is peaceful but the U-S suspects the Islamic nation of conducting a secret program to build a nuclear weapon.
Copyright 2004 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Bhutto says Musharraf in nuke cover-up
LONDON (Reuters) - Pakistan's former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has accused the country's president
of covering up a vast scandal involving the leaking of nuclear secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea.
Speaking on Sunday in Britain where she lives in exile, Bhutto said President Pervez Musharraf's decision
to pardon the top scientist at the centre of the scandal -- Abdul Qadeer Khan -- only fuelled suspicion the
president himself was involved.
"It seemed to me to be a big cover-up," said Bhutto, an arch-rival of Musharraf. "I know Qadeer Khan, and
I find it very hard to believe that he could have exported nuclear technology on his own... One person could
not do it because of the enormous security," she told BBC television.
In a dramatic televised confession earlier this month, Khan, who was revered as the father of Pakistan's
atomic bomb, said he acted independently in leaking secrets as head of Pakistan's nuclear programme from
the 1970s.
A day later, Musharraf pardoned the scientist, saying he remained a national hero despite passing secrets
to Libya, Iran and North Korea.
>> HOW WILL THEY PULL IT OFF?
washingtonpost.com
A Secret Hunt Unravels in Afghanistan
Mission to Capture or Kill al Qaeda Leader Frustrated by Near Misses, Political Disputes
By Steve Coll
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 22, 2004; Page A01
First of two articles.
The seeds of the CIA's first formal plan to capture or kill Osama bin Laden were contained in another urgent manhunt -- for Mir Aimal Kasi, the Pakistani migrant who murdered two CIA employees while spraying rounds from an assault rifle at cars idling before the entrance to the CIA's Langley headquarters in 1993.
For several years after the shooting, Kasi remained a fugitive in the border areas straddling Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. From its Langley offices, the CIA's Counterterrorist Center asked the Islamabad station for help recruiting agents who might be able to track Kasi down. Case officers signed up a group of Afghan tribal fighters who had worked for the CIA during the 1980s guerrilla war against Soviet occupying forces in Afghanistan.
The family-based team of paid agents, given the cryptonym FD/TRODPINT, set up residences around the city of Kandahar. They were rugged, bearded fighters -- often in teams of a dozen or so -- who rolled around southern Afghanistan in four-wheel-drive vehicles, blending comfortably into the region's militarized tribal society.
In the years before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the CIA carried out a secret but ultimately unsuccessful manhunt for bin Laden. It was based at first on the band of Afghan tribal agents, and later expanded to include other agents and allies, especially the legendary guerrilla leader Ahmed Shah Massoud. But the search became mired in mutual frustrations, near misses and increasingly bitter policy disputes in Washington between the Clinton White House and the CIA.
An ambitious plan for the TRODPINT team to kidnap bin Laden from his bed and hold him in an Afghan cave telegraphed the CIA's audacity, despite what operatives saw as a restrictive mandate from the president. At the same time, the CIA's inability to pinpoint bin Laden's location or capture him drew pointed questions from the White House about the agency's effectiveness.
This account, a detailed history of the pursuit of bin Laden before the terrorist attacks of 2001, describes for the first time aborted CIA plans to seize bin Laden at his Kandahar farm, another attempt to rain Katyusha rockets on him, and the final struggle to work with Massoud, all in vain. It is based on several dozen interviews with participants and officials in the United States, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, as well as documents, private records and memoirs about the CIA covert action program in Afghanistan, which was designed in the 1980s to expel occupying Soviet forces and later to capture bin Laden or disrupt his activities.
When the TRODPINT team set out to find Kasi, one or two senior family members handled the face-to-face contacts with the CIA. Case officers working from the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad supplied them with cash, assault rifles, land mines, motorcycles, trucks, listening devices and secure communications equipment.
Together they concocted a bold plan to capture Kasi and fly him to the United States for trial. If the Afghan agents found Kasi, they would detain him until U.S. Special Forces secretly flew into Afghanistan to bundle the fugitive away. With the TRODPINT team acting as spotters, the CIA identified a desert landing strip near Kandahar that could be used for this clandestine American extraction flight. The White House approved the plan, and President Bill Clinton secretly dispatched a Special Forces team to southern Afghanistan to confirm the coordinates and suitability of the makeshift airstrip.
In the end, Kasi was found elsewhere. In late May 1997, an ethnic Baluch man walked into the U.S. Consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, and told a clerk he had information about Kasi. He was taken to a young CIA officer who was chief of base in the city. The informant handed her an application for a Pakistani driver's license recently filled out by Kasi under an alias. It contained a photo and a thumbprint that confirmed Kasi's identity.
Three weeks later, a team of CIA officers, Pakistani intelligence officers and FBI agents arrested Kasi at a Pakistani hotel, flew him to the United States and jailed him for trial. (He was convicted of murder in 1997, sentenced to death in 1998 and executed in Virginia on Nov. 14, 2002.)
In the weeks that followed Kasi's arrest, a new question was raised inside the CIA's Counterterrorist Center: What would become of their elaborately equipped and financed TRODPINT assets? The agents had filed numerous reports about where Kasi might be, but none of these had panned out. Ultimately, the team played no direct role in Kasi's arrest. Despite this questionable record, it seemed a shame to just cut them loose, some Langley officers believed.
The Hunt Begins
At CIA headquarters, the unit set up to track Kasi was located in the Counterterrorist Center. A few partitions away was another small cluster of analysts and operators who made up what the CIA officially called the "bin Laden issue unit."
The unit had been created early in 1996 to watch bin Laden, who was then living in Sudan. By that point, the United States had decided for security reasons to close the embassy and CIA station in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, where officers had previously been collecting intelligence about bin Laden's financial support for Islamic radicals in North Africa and elsewhere. In the spring of 1996, Sudan yielded to international pressure to expel bin Laden. The Saudi found sanctuary in Afghanistan in May.
The CIA had no station or base in Afghanistan, however, and it had no paid agents in the country at the time, other than those hunting for Kasi near Kandahar and a few loose contacts working on drug trafficking and recovering Stinger shoulder-fired missiles, according to Tom Simons, then U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, whose account is supported by several other U.S. officials familiar with the CIA's Afghan agent roster.
Back at Langley, the bin Laden unit transmitted reports regularly to policymakers in classified channels about threats issued by bin Laden against American targets -- via faxed leaflets, television interviews and underground pamphlets. The CIA's analysts described bin Laden at this time as an active, dangerous financier of Islamic extremism, but they saw him as more a money source than a terrorist operator.
To senior career officers in the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, the TRODPINT tribal team now beckoned as a way to watch bin Laden in Afghanistan. The paid Afghan agents could monitor or harass the Saudi up close, under CIA control -- and perhaps capture him for trial, if the White House approved such an operation. Operators and analysts in the bin Laden unit argued passionately for more active measures against him. Jeff O'Connell, then director of the Counterterrorist Center, and his deputy, Paul Pillar, agreed in the summer of 1997 to hand them control of the TRODPINT agent team, complete with its weapons and spy gear.
As bin Laden's bloodcurdling televised threats against Americans increased in number and menace during 1997, the CIA -- with approval from Clinton's White House -- turned from just watching bin Laden toward making plans to capture him.
Working with lawyers at Langley in late 1997 and early 1998, the TRODPINT agents' CIA controllers modified the original Kasi capture plan -- with its secret air strip for extraction flights -- so it could be used to seize bin Laden and prosecute him, or kill him if he violently resisted arrest.
A long and frustrating hunt for bin Laden had now formally begun.
During the three years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the hunt would eventually involve several dozen local paid CIA agents in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a secret commando team drawn from Uzbek special forces, another drawn from retired Pakistani special forces, and a deepening intelligence alliance with Massoud, the northern Afghan guerrilla leader. Despite these varied efforts, bin Laden continually eluded their grasp.
Years later, those involved in the secret campaign against bin Laden still disagree about why it failed -- and who is to blame.
On the front lines in Pakistan and Central Asia, working-level CIA officers felt they had a rare, urgent sense of the menace bin Laden posed before Sept. 11. Yet a number of controversial proposals to attack bin Laden were turned down by superiors at Langley or the White House, who feared the plans were poorly developed, wouldn't work or would embroil the United States in Afghanistan's then-obscure civil war. At other times, plans to track or attack bin Laden were delayed or watered down after stalemated debates inside Clinton's national security cabinet.
At Langley, CIA officers sometimes saw the Clinton cabinet as overly cautious, obsessed with legalities and unwilling to take political risks in Afghanistan by arming bin Laden's Afghan enemies and directly confronting the radical Taliban Islamic militia. But at the Clinton White House, senior policymakers and counterterrorism analysts sometimes saw the CIA's efforts in Afghanistan as timid, na?ve, self-protecting and ineffective.
Some of the agency's efforts involved intelligence collection about bin Laden's whereabouts; others grew into covert actions designed to capture or kill leaders of bin Laden's al Qaeda network. Both tracks were carried out in deep secrecy mainly by career clandestine service officers in the CIA's Counterterrorist Center and the Near East Division of the agency's Directorate of Operations.
Audacious Plans Take Root
As the TRODPINT team began its work on bin Laden early in 1998, a federal grand jury in New York opened a secret investigation into the Saudi's terrorist-financing activity. The probe had been prompted by a defector from bin Laden's inner circle, financial evidence from terrorist attacks in Egypt and elsewhere, and old files from earlier terrorist cases in New York. No one outside the Justice Department was supposed to know about the grand jury's work, but it began to leak to officials involved with the CIA's planning.
CIA officers working from Islamabad, led by station chief Gary Schroen, assumed in early 1998 that if their agents captured bin Laden in southern Afghanistan, a U.S. grand jury would quickly indict him. If not, the CIA or the Clinton White House would ask Egypt or Saudi Arabia to take custody of bin Laden for trial. Schroen kept asking the Counterterrorist Center at Langley, "Do we have an indictment?" The answers, according to several officials involved, were cryptic: Bin Laden was "indictable," the Islamabad station was told.
The TRODPINT team developed a detailed plan to hold bin Laden in a cave in southern Afghanistan for 30 days before American Special Forces flew in secretly to take him away. The agents located a cave where they could hide out comfortably. They assured their CIA handlers that they had stored enough food and water in the cave to keep bin Laden healthy during his kidnapping.
By imprisoning bin Laden in the cave, the agents hoped to ease his extraction. If enough time passed after bin Laden's initial capture, al Qaeda's agitated lieutenants would be less alert when the Americans flew in to bundle bin Laden off. Also, the detention would allow time to persuade either a U.S. lawyer or a foreign government to hand down criminal charges.
If CIA officers and their paid agents detained bin Laden for an eventual trial in the United States, they would be operating under the authority of Executive Order 12333, which allowed the CIA to aid the pursuit of international fugitives. The measure was signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and renewed by successive presidents. A thick archive of Justice Department memoranda and court opinions upheld the right of American agents to abduct fugitives overseas and return them to U.S. courts in many instances.
At the same time, Executive Order 12333 banned assassination by the CIA or its agents. [See related article.] CIA officers met with their TRODPINT agents in Pakistan to emphasize that their plan to capture bin Laden and hold him in the Afghan cave could not turn into an assassination. "I want to reinforce this with you," one officer told the Afghans, as he later described the meeting in cables to Langley and Washington. "You are to capture him alive."
Physical and Political Risks
As they refined their kidnapping plans in the spring of 1998, the bin Laden unit at the CIA's Counterterrorist Center looked with rising interest at Tarnak Farm. This was a compound of perhaps 100 acres that lay isolated on a stretch of desert about three miles from the Kandahar airport. On some nights, bin Laden slept at Tarnak with one of his wives. He chatted on his satellite phone in this period and lived fairly openly, protected by bodyguards. The question arose: Could the CIA's tribal agents be equipped to raid bin Laden's house and take him from his bed?
Tarnak's main compound was encircled by a mud-brick wall about 10 feet high. Inside were about 80 modest one-story and two-story structures. Flat plains of sand and sagebrush extended for miles. Kandahar's crowded bazaars lay half an hour's drive away.
CIA officers based in Islamabad spent long hours with the TRODPINT team's leaders to devise a plan to attack Tarnak in the middle of the night. The Afghans had scouted and mapped Tarnak up close; the CIA had photographed it from satellites.
The agents organized an attack party of about 30 fighters. They identified a staging point where they would assemble all of their vehicles. They would drive to a secondary rallying point a few miles from Tarnak.
The main raiding party would walk across the desert at around 2 a.m. They had scouted a path that avoided minefields and had deep gullies to mask their approach. They would breach the outer wall by crawling through a drainage ditch on the airport side.
A second group planned to roll quietly toward the front gate in two Jeeps. They would carry silenced pistols to take out two guards at the entrance. Meanwhile the other attackers would have burst into the several small huts where bin Laden's wives slept. When they found the tall, bearded Saudi, they would cuff him, drag him toward the gate, and load him into a Land Cruiser. Other vehicles back at the rally point would approach in sequence and they would all drive together to the provisioned cave about 30 miles away.
Satellite photography and reports from the ground indicated that there were dozens of women and children living at Tarnak. Langley asked for detailed explanations from members of the tribal team about how they planned to minimize harm to bystanders during their assault.
The CIA officers involved thought their agents were serious, semiprofessional fighters who were trying to cooperate as best they could. Yet "if you understood the Afghan mind-set and the context," recalled an officer involved, it was clear that in any raid the Afghans would probably fire indiscriminately at some point.
In Washington, Richard Clarke, the White House counterterrorism coordinator, drove out to Langley late in the spring of 1998 to meet with his CIA counterpart, O'Connell, who briefed him on the details of the Tarnak attack plan and how much it would cost. O'Connell also outlined the political risks, including the potential problem of civilian casualties.
Members of the White House counterterrorism team reacted skeptically. Their sense was that the TRODPINT agents were old anti-Soviet mujaheddin who had long since passed their peak fighting years and were probably milking the CIA for money while minimizing the risks they took on the ground. If they did go through with a Tarnak raid, some White House officials feared, women and children would die, and bin Laden would probably escape. Such a massacre would undermine U.S. interests in the Muslim world and elsewhere.
The CIA's top leaders reviewed the proposed raid in June 1998. The discussion revealed similar doubts among senior officers in the Directorate of Operations. In the end, as CIA Director George J. Tenet described it to colleagues years later, the CIA's relevant chain of command -- Jack Downing, then chief of the Directorate of Operations, his deputy James Pavitt, O'Connell and Pillar -- all recommended against going forward with the Tarnak raid.
By then there was no enthusiasm for the plan in the Clinton White House, either. "Am I missing something? Aren't these people going to be mowed down on their way to the wall?" Clarke asked his White House and CIA colleagues sarcastically, one official recalled.
Tenet never formally presented the raid plan for Clinton's approval, according to several officials involved.
The decision was cabled to Islamabad. The tribal team's plans should be set aside, perhaps to be revived later. Meanwhile the agents were encouraged to continue to look for opportunities to catch bin Laden away from Tarnak, where among other things, an ambush attempt would carry relatively little risk of civilian deaths.
Some of the working-level CIA officers involved in the planning reacted bitterly to the decision. They believed the kidnapping plan could succeed.
A Renewed Urgency
Less than two months later, on Aug. 7, 1998, two teams of al Qaeda suicide bombers launched synchronized attacks against two U.S. embassies in Africa. In Nairobi, Kenya, 213 people died and 4,000 were injured. In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the toll was 11 dead and 85 wounded. Within months, the New York federal grand jury previously investigating bin Laden delivered an indictment of the Saudi for directing the strikes, among other alleged crimes.
Inside Langley's Counterterrorist Center, some CIA analysts and officers were devastated and angry as they watched the televised images of death and rescue in Africa. One of the bin Laden unit's analysts confronted Tenet. "You are responsible for those deaths," she said, "because you didn't act on the information we had, when we could have gotten him" through the Tarnak raid, one official involved recalled her saying. The woman was "crying and sobbing, and it was a very rough scene," the official said.
Tenet stood there and took it. He was a boisterous, emotional man, and he did not shrink from honest confrontation, some of his CIA colleagues felt. After the Africa attacks, Tenet redoubled his pressure on the bin Laden unit's covert campaign to find their target.
By then, however, bin Laden had dramatically increased his security. He discarded his traceable satellite phone and moved much more stealthily around Afghanistan.
For those who had worked on the Tarnak raid plan, the questions lingered. Why had the CIA's leaders turned the idea down?
Down in the trenches of a bureaucracy enveloped in secrecy, the resentments festered, amplified by rumors, office grievances and the intensity of the daily grind.
On Aug. 20, acting on intelligence reports of a scheduled meeting of bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders, Clinton ordered 75 cruise missiles launched from a submarine in the Arabian Sea against a network of jihadist training camps in eastern Afghanistan. The attack killed at least 21 Pakistani volunteers but missed bin Laden.
'Weekend Warriors'
By mid-1999, the sense both at the White House and in Tenet's 7th-floor suite in CIA headquarters at Langley was that the Counterterrorist Center had grown too dependent on the TRODPINT tribal agents. One of Tenet's aides referred to them derisively as "weekend warriors," middle-aged and now prosperous Afghan fighters with a few Kalashnikovs in their closets.
At the White House, among the few national security officials who knew of the agents' existence, the attitude evolved from "hopeful skepticism to outright mockery," as one official recalled it.
At one point the agents moved north to Kabul's outskirts and rented a farm as a base. They moved in and out of the Afghan capital to scout homes where bin Laden occasionally stayed. They developed a new set of plans in which they would strike a Kabul house where bin Laden slept, snatch the Saudi from his bed and retreat from the city in Jeeps. The CIA supplied explosives to the agents because their plan called for them to blow up small bridges as they made their escape.
The agents never acted. Their rented farm was a working vineyard. William B. Milam, then U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, who was briefed on the operation, asked his CIA colleagues sarcastically, "So what are they waiting for -- the wine to ferment?"
To shake up the hunt, Tenet appointed a fast-track executive assistant from the 7th floor, known to his colleagues as Rich, to take charge of the bin Laden unit. Tenet also named Cofer Black, a longtime case officer in Africa who had tracked bin Laden in Sudan, as the Counterterrorist Center's new director. The bin Laden unit and its chief reported directly to Black; during the next two years they would work closely together.
When Black took over, the bin Laden unit had about 25 professionals. Most of them were women, and two-thirds had backgrounds as analysts. They called themselves "the Manson Family," after the crazed convicted murderer Charles Manson, because they had acquired a reputation within the CIA for wild alarmism about the rising al Qaeda threat.
Their reports described over and over bin Laden's specific, open threats to inflict mass casualties against Americans. They could not understand why no one else seemed to take the threat as seriously as they did. They pleaded with colleagues that bin Laden was not like the old leftist, theatrical terrorists of the 1970s and 1980s who wanted, in terrorism expert Brian Jenkins's famous maxim, "a lot of people watching but not a lot of people dead." Bin Laden wanted many American civilians to die, they warned. They could be dismissive of colleagues who did not share their sense of urgency.
"The rest of the CIA and the intelligence community looked on our efforts as eccentric and at times fanatic," recalled the then-chief of the bin Laden unit. "It was a cult," agreed a U.S. official who dealt with them. "Jonestown," said a second person involved, asked to sum up the unit's atmosphere. "I outlawed Kool-Aid."
Working with the Islamabad station, the bin Laden unit pushed for a surge in recruitments of agents who could operate or travel in Afghanistan.
Some of those were informal sources, helping the CIA because of their political opposition to the Taliban. Others were recruited onto the CIA's payroll. Case officers working the Afghan borderlands began to recruit a few Taliban military leaders, including a brigade-level commander in eastern Afghanistan. One young case officer operating from Islamabad recruited six or seven Taliban commanders operating in the eastern region. Yet none of the recruited agents was close to bin Laden. The CIA could not recruit a single agent inside the core al Qaeda terrorist leadership.
Black knew that the CIA was in trouble "without penetrations" of bin Laden's organization, as a classified Counterterrorist Center briefing to Clinton's national security aides put it late in 1999. "While we need to disrupt [terrorist] operations . . . we need also to recruit sources," even though "recruiting terrorist sources is difficult."
Looking for Help
The CIA had the best agent coverage around Kandahar. Even so, its classified tracking reports from multiple sources always seemed a day or two behind bin Laden's movements. The lack of a source in al Qaeda's inner circle made forecasting the Saudi's hour-to-hour itinerary impossible. Moreover, Kandahar was the Taliban's military stronghold. The Taliban had provided safe haven to bin Laden in Afghanistan in exchange for money and al Qaeda's troops. Even if the CIA pinpointed bin Laden downtown, there was no easy way to organize a capture operation; the attacking force would face strong opposition from Taliban units.
In the summer of 1999, a truck bomb detonated outside the Kandahar house of Taliban leader Mohammad Omar. Afterward, bin Laden used his wealth to build new compounds for the Taliban leader. In Omar's home province of Uruzgan, bin Laden built a new training complex for foreign al Qaeda volunteers.
The CIA ordered satellite imagery and agent reports to document this camp. Officers hoped bin Laden might wander in for an inspection. At one point a team of four or five Afghan agents from the original TRODPINT group approached the camp at night. Al Qaeda guards opened fire and wounded one of them, they reported.
Kabul was a relatively easy place to spy. The Afghan capital was a sprawling and ethnically diverse city, a place of strangers and travelers. At one point the CIA believed bin Laden had two wives in Kabul. He would visit their houses periodically. The Islamabad station recruited an Afghan who worked as a security guard at one of the Kabul houses bin Laden used. But the agent was so far down the al Qaeda information chain that he never knew when bin Laden was going to turn up. He was summoned to duty just as the Saudi's Jeeps rolled in.
Bin Laden's travels within Afghanistan followed a somewhat predictable path. He would often ride west on the Ring Road from Kandahar, then loop north and east through Ghowr province. The CIA mapped guesthouses in obscure Ghowr, one of Afghanistan's most isolated and impoverished regions. From there the Saudi usually moved east to Kabul and then sometimes on to Jalalabad before turning south again toward Kandahar.
Americans who studied this track called it "the circuit." At the White House, counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke tried to develop logarithmic formulas that attempted to predict where bin Laden was likely to move next when he was at any given point.
The CIA's bin Laden unit sought to trap bin Laden out of "KKJ," an insider's acronym for the densely populated cities of Kabul, Kandahar and Jalalabad. They hoped to catch him in lightly populated rural areas. Yet they struggled to find a convincing plan.
They knew that on the ground in Afghanistan by the summer of 1999 there was only one experienced, proven guerrilla leader waging war and collecting intelligence day in and day out against the Taliban, bin Laden and their radical Islamic allies. This was the legendary Tajik guerrilla leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, a man with a long and mutually frustrating history with the CIA.
From 1997 onward, Massoud's Northern Alliance militia forces waged a brutal, existential war against the Taliban north of Kabul, often battling directly against bin Laden's Arab, Chechen and Pakistani volunteers. They knew bin Laden not only as a preacher, financier and terrorist planner, but sometimes as a military field commander who wandered near their battle lines.
There were serious doubts inside Clinton's cabinet about the history of drug trafficking and human rights violations among Massoud's Northern Alliance forces. But at the CIA, in the Counterterrorist Center, analysts and officers in the bin Laden unit knew one thing for certain: Massoud was the enemy of their enemy.
A deeper, more active, more lethal alliance with Massoud, these CIA officers argued, offered by far the best chance to capture or kill bin Laden before he struck again.
Staff writer Griff Witte contributed to this report.
NEXT: The CIA and Massoud.
? 2004 The Washington Post Company
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washingtonpost.com
Policy Disputes Over Hunt Paralyzed Clinton's Aides
By Steve Coll
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 22, 2004; Page A17
Between 1998 and 2000, the CIA and President Bill Clinton's national security team were caught up in paralyzing policy disputes as they secretly debated the legal permissions for covert operations against Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.
The debates left both White House counterterrorism analysts and CIA career operators frustrated and at times confused about what kinds of operations could be carried out, according to interviews with more than a dozen officials and lawyers who were directly involved.
There was little question that under U.S. law it was permissible to kill bin Laden and his top aides, at least after the evidence showed they were responsible for the attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. The ban on assassinations -- contained in a 1981 executive order by President Ronald Reagan -- did not apply to military targets, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel had previously ruled in classified opinions. Bin Laden's Tarnak Farm and other terrorist camps in Afghanistan were legitimate military targets under this definition, White House lawyers agreed.
Also, the assassination ban did not apply to attacks carried out in preemptive self-defense -- when it seemed likely that the target was planning to strike the United States. Clearly bin Laden qualified under this standard as well.
Clinton had demonstrated his willingness to kill bin Laden, without any pretense of seeking his arrest, when he ordered the cruise missile strikes on an eastern Afghan camp in August 1998, after the CIA obtained intelligence that bin Laden might be there for a meeting of al Qaeda leaders.
Yet the secret legal authorizations Clinton signed after this failed missile strike required the CIA to make a good faith effort to capture bin Laden for trial, not kill him outright.
Beginning in the summer of 1998, Clinton signed a series of top secret memos authorizing the CIA or its agents to use lethal force, if necessary, in an attempt to capture bin Laden and several top lieutenants and return them to the United States to face trial.
From Director George J. Tenet on down, the CIA's senior managers wanted the White House lawyers to be crystal clear about what was permissible in the field. They were conditioned by history -- the CIA assassination scandals of the 1970s, the Iran-contra affair of the 1980s -- to be cautious about legal permissions emanating from the White House. Earlier in his career, Tenet had served as staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee and director of intelligence issues at the White House, roles steeped in the Washington culture of oversight and careful legality.
Tenet and his senior CIA colleagues demanded that the White House lay out rules of engagement for capturing bin Laden in writing, and that they be signed by Clinton. Then, with such detailed authorizations in hand, every one of the CIA officers who handed a gun or a map to an Afghan agent could be assured that he or she was operating legally.
This was the role of the Memorandum of Notification, as it was called. It was typically seven or eight pages long, written in the form of a presidential decision memo. It began with a statement about how bin Laden and his aides had attacked the United States. The memo made clear the president was aware of the risks he was assuming as he sent the CIA into action.
Some of the most sensitive language concerned the specific authorization to use deadly force. Clinton's national security aides said they wanted to encourage the CIA to carry out an effective operation against bin Laden, not to burden the agency with constraints or doubts. Yet Clinton's aides did not want authorizations that could be interpreted by Afghan agents as an unrestricted license to kill. For one thing, the Justice Department signaled that it would oppose such language if it was proposed for Clinton's signature.
The compromise wording, in a succession of bin Laden-focused memos, always expressed some ambiguity about how and when deadly force could be used in an operation designed to take bin Laden into custody. Typical language, recalled one official involved, instructed the CIA to "apprehend with lethal force as authorized."
At the CIA, officers and supervisors agonized over these abstract phrases. They worried that if an operation in Afghanistan went badly, they would be accused of having acted outside the memo's scope. Over time, recriminations grew between the CIA and the White House.
It was common in Clinton's cabinet and among his National Security Council aides to see the CIA as much too cautious, paralyzed by fears of legal and political risks. At Langley, this criticism rankled. The CIA's senior managers believed officials at the White House wanted to have it both ways: They liked to blame the agency for its supposed lack of aggression, yet they sent over classified legal memos full of wiggle words.
Clinton's covert policy against bin Laden pursued two goals at the same time. He ordered submarines equipped with cruise missiles to patrol secretly under ocean waters off Pakistan in the hope that CIA spotters would one day identify bin Laden's location confidently enough to warrant a deadly missile strike.
But Clinton also authorized the CIA to carry out operations that legally required the agency's officers to plan in almost every instance to capture bin Laden alive and bring him to the United States to face trial.
This meant the CIA officers had to arrange in advance for detention facilities, extraction flights and other elaborate contingencies -- even if they expected that bin Laden would probably die in the arrest attempt. These requirements made operational planning much more cumbersome, the CIA officers contended.
In fashioning this sensitive policy in the midst of an impeachment crisis that lasted into early 1999, Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, struggled to forge a consensus within the White House national security team. Among other things, he had to keep on board a skeptical Attorney General Janet Reno and her Justice Department colleagues, who were deeply invested in law enforcement approaches to terrorism, according to senior officials involved.
As the months passed, Clinton signed new memos in which the language, while still ambiguous, made the use of lethal force by the CIA's Afghan agents more likely, according to officials involved. At first the CIA was permitted to use lethal force only in the course of a legitimate attempt to make an arrest. Later the memos allowed for a pure lethal attack if an arrest was not possible. Still, the CIA was required to plan all its agent missions with an arrest in mind.
Some CIA managers chafed at the White House instructions. The CIA received "no written word nor verbal order to conduct a lethal action" against bin Laden before Sept. 11, one official involved recalled. "The objective was to render this guy to law enforcement." In these operations, the CIA had to recruit agents "to grab [bin Laden] and bring him to a secure place where we can turn him over to the FBI. . . . If they had said 'lethal action' it would have been a whole different kettle of fish, and much easier."
Berger later recalled his frustration about this hidden debate. Referring to the military option in the two-track policy, he said at a 2002 congressional hearing: "It was no question, the cruise missiles were not trying to capture him. They were not law enforcement techniques."
The overriding trouble was, whether they arrested bin Laden or killed him, they first had to find him.
? 2004 The Washington Post Company
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>> OUR FRIENDS IN LATIN AMERICA...
Missing a Voice for the Americas
By Marcela Sanchez
Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, February 19, 2004; 10:34 PM
M. Delal Baer was one of those unusual individuals in this city who walked her talk, and did so perfectly in two languages and two distinct cultures. She understood Mexican idiosyncrasy better than most Americans and American peculiarities better than most Mexicans, and used her wit and enthusiasm to explain them both to anyone who didn't.
Her insight could also be her frustration -- she knew too well the events and personalities that kept the two nations apart. She channeled this frustration into her work as founder of the Mexico program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and as a frequent columnist and commentator for media both here and in Mexico. She became the ideal source for understanding the Bush-Fox era -- that is, until last week, when cancer took her life. Baer was only 51.
She was a proud Republican, yet not an apologist for the Bush administration. She had an eclectic group of friends --- Mexican, American, liberal, conservative. I was not among them, yet she always made me feel I could count on her attentive and respectful ear when we talked, usually after, of course, she shared the latest about her beloved adopted daughter from Mexico.
Delal was ever the optimist, seeing opportunities where others saw obstacles. And now that it is clearer that Latin America is not a priority for this White House, her departure seems even more untimely. While many are yelling and screaming because, they insist, this is the time for more, not less, engagement, Delal would probably see it differently, and not simply because of her Republican allegiance.
That was her style. Only a few months ago, she turned on its head the common complaint that this country treats Latin America as its "back yard.'' In an article written for the Mexican daily Reforma, she noted, with a fresh earnestness, that in U.S. popular culture the back yard is the "most intimate and dear place of the home ... I wish the United States and Mexico could be back yard friends!"
The day she died, Feb. 11, was the day Secretary of State Colin L. Powell dumped some unwanted but not surprising dirt in the hemispheric back yard by publicly acknowledging that the administration was proposing to cut U.S. aid to Latin America in 2005 to help provide more funds for "higher priorities ... of a more serious nature.''
There you have it, many said. Here was proof that Bush and his senior officials have been disingenuous about their intentions to change Washington's attitude toward its neighbors in Latin America. While others lamented in shock and dismay, I could almost hear Delal urging them not to waste their precious time. There are just too many new realities to deal with.
If Bush's focus on the war on terrorism and his re-election leaves the White House with less time for Latin America, she would be the first to challenge policymakers south of the border to use their time and efforts more wisely.
She might have encouraged Mexican legislators to shift their attention to Capitol Hill, for example. Why not spend time courting the likes of Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), considered by some as Powell's potential successor if Bush is re-elected? The senator had these words for the secretary of state last week: "Mexico's importance to our prosperity and security continues to be misunderstood and undervalued by policy-makers in both the executive and legislative branches."
And while some might approach Lugar and the rest of the Hill, why stop there? Latin American policy-makers should reach outside the Beltway and, in this critical election year, work with Latino leaders to address issues that concern them both. Immigration, money transfers and regional development need not be discussed only over dinner at Washington's finest restaurants. Mexican president Vicente Fox's past visits to the United States were a start. Latin American leaders must start tapping the power of 13 percent of the U.S. population if they expect to move their issues beyond electoral rhetoric.
Delal would have seen the outrage over Powell's latest comments as little more than the "outdated and misplaced sensitivities" she felt had so consumed North-South dialogue. She would have much preferred to hear about the challenge that his words posed and the kind of action leaders were willing to take in the spirit of new thinking and real progress. And without a doubt, if no one called for such action, she would have.
Marcela Sanchez's e-mail address is desdewash@washpost.com.
? 2004 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive
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Se Acaba el Dinero y no se Toman Medidas Dr?sticas
Las pensiones, de camino al ba?l de los recuerdos
Una de cada tres personas en Am?rica Latina y el Caribe no dispone de una pensi?n o de alg?n tipo de ingreso que le permita vivir dignamente. En el hemisferio son pocos los casos de pa?ses con sistemas de jubilaci?n con coberturas mayores al 50 por ciento de la poblaci?n econ?micamente activa. Si no se toman medidas pronto, la pensi?n ser? un tema del que nunca hablar?n nuestros hijos.
Isidro L?pez
Tiempos del Mundo
Una tercera parte de las personas mayores de 65 a?os en el hemisferio no dispone de ning?n tipo de ingreso o pensi?n, seg?n expone un informe de la Organizaci?n de las Naciones Unidas (ONU) y de la Comisi?n Econ?mica para Am?rica Latina y el Caribe (Cepal).
El documento "Las personas mayores en Am?rica Latina y el Caribe", califica de desiguales y deficientes las condiciones de seguridad econ?mica de esta poblaci?n y agrega que en las ?reas urbanas dos de cada cinco adultos mayores disponen de ingresos provenientes de la seguridad social, mientras en las zonas rurales apenas uno de cada cinco.
Tambi?n establece que una proporci?n muy importante de esta poblaci?n es econ?micamente activa, contrariamente a lo que ocurre en los pa?ses desarrollados. El informe concluye que desde la mitad del siglo XX las tasas de participaci?n de los adultos mayores en la fuerza laboral disminuyeron en forma sostenida, caracter?stica que cambi? a partir de la d?cada de los 90 en la mayor?a de los pa?ses.
Esta tendencia a una mayor participaci?n en la fuerza laboral se explicar?a, seg?n la Cepal, por las reformas al sistema de pensiones, espec?ficamente el aumento de la edad para jubilar y la exigencia de mayor cantidad de a?os de cotizaci?n para acceder a la pensi?n.
El bajo monto de las pensiones o la necesidad de compensar ingresos familiares para enfrentar la ?poca de crisis son otros de los factores que inciden para que los adultos mayores busquen a toda costa permanecer activos econ?micamente. En este contexto, la actividad econ?mica de las personas mayores est? relacionada directamente con la cobertura de la seguridad social, decreciendo a medida que aumenta la proporci?n de los que acceden a una pensi?n.
"Por lo tanto, la alta participaci?n de los adultos mayores en la fuerza laboral no responder?a necesariamente a una opci?n voluntaria, sino m?s bien a la necesidad de garantizar un m?nimo de recursos necesarios para sobrevivir", afirma el estudio. En el caso de los pa?ses de menor desarrollo, las personas mayores se insertan en el sector de empleos informales, que no cuenta con pensi?n ni sistemas de salud, lo que los sigue haciendo altamente vulnerables.
De acuerdo con este estudio, las cifras sobre la cobertura actual de la seguridad social en la regi?n revela preocupantes insuficiencias. De diez pa?ses analizados, solo Uruguay y Chile alcanzan a proteger a m?s de un 50 por ciento de su poblaci?n activa, mientras que Argentina, Brasil, Colombia, Ecuador y Venezuela cubren al 30 por ciento de sus trabajadores, mientras en Bolivia Paraguay y Per? la cobertura no supera el 10 por ciento.
No exentos de cuestionamientos
La seguridad social y especialmente el pago de jubilaciones y pensiones es una cuesti?n de Estado en el Uruguay, naci?n con una arraigada tradici?n asistencialista y pionera en el continente en la atenci?n del bienestar de las generaciones de trabajadores jubilados. Este pa?s tiene una escasa poblaci?n y un alto porcentaje de adultos mayores. El presupuesto para atender estas obligaciones insume m?s de la mitad de los recursos totales del Estado y hace ya tres d?cadas que se ha transformado en una espada de Damocles para la sociedad uruguaya.
La poblaci?n econ?micamente activa ronda los 1.2 millones, en tanto son m?s de 700.000 los jubilados y pensionados. Hace cuatro d?cadas, la proporci?n entre activos y pasivos era de 4 a 1, tres veces superior a la de 2003, y entonces el sistema era floreciente y generoso.
Empero, la par?lisis econ?mica que afect? al Uruguay desde 1955 en adelante y el creciente d?ficit estatal, llevaron al saqueo oficial del sistema previsional. A ello se sum? la tendencia decreciente de la masa laboral, la evasi?n, el trabajo en negro y los bajos salarios de un pa?s en decadencia econ?mica. Luego de a?os de t?midos intentos del poder pol?tico por enfrentar el problema, en 1995 el Parlamento aprob? el sistema mixto de seguridad social, manteniendo el viejo r?gimen para los asalariados mayores de 40 a?os, obligando al resto a destinar parte de sus aportes a un fondo individual de ahorro que desde entonces est? a cargo de cuatro administradoras privadas, obligadas a garantizar la seguridad de esos ahorros y cierto porcentaje de rentabilidad. A fines de 2003, eran unos 635.000 los afiliados al sistema de jubilaci?n privado (sistema Afap), de ellos un 52 por ciento eran cotizantes habituales que promediaban un ahorro mensual de cerca de 17 d?lares.
Tras ocho a?os de vigencia, el sistema mixto aplicado en Uruguay est? superando - con mucha incertidumbre desde junio 2002- el tremendo golpe que signific? la crisis financiera y bancaria de ese a?o y la situaci?n de insolvencia del gobierno. Por prescripci?n de la ley 16.713, el 57 por ciento de los fondos de ahorro previsional estaba invertido en t?tulos de deuda del gobierno.
En los ?ltimos dos a?os, la rentabilidad real de los ahorros previsionales cay? en t?rminos de d?lar por la desvalorizaci?n de los t?tulos y otros instrumentos de deuda estatal. La recesi?n, la ca?da del empleo y la baja en el n?mero de cotizantes tambi?n afectaron sensiblemente al fondo de ahorro previsional (FAP).
Entre junio y diciembre de 2002 su valor cay? de 1.050 millones de d?lares a 750 millones de d?lares. Sin embargo, el fin de la larga recesi?n econ?mica y la tibia reactivaci?n de la econom?a del segundo semestre de 2003 acrecentaron el n?mero de afiliados cotizantes y aumentaron sensiblemente el monto total del FAP.
A fines de diciembre, el presidente del Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID), Enrique Iglesias, transmiti? en Montevideo a dirigentes de los partidos pol?ticos Colorado y Blanco - que se han alternado en el poder desde la fundaci?n del Estado uruguayo- su "preocupaci?n por los planteos reformistas" del sistema Afap que se comenzaron a esbozar el a?o pasado, pues la reforma previsional aplicada en Uruguay "ha sido un avance y un paso adelante que no debe ser modificado". Desde su instauraci?n, el sistema de jubilaci?n privada fue objetado por sectores de la izquierda pol?tica.
El movimiento obrero sindicalizado, a trav?s del Equipo de Representaci?n de los Trabajadores (ERT) ha sido el m?s serio cuestionador del sistema. Enrique Murro, dirigente obrero, se ha transformado en estratega y l?der de una alternativa concreta al sistema actual. La propuesta alternativa presentada por el sindicalismo en 1999 surgi? del ERT.
En el seminario regional de la Organizaci?n Internacional del Trabajo (OIT) realizado en Sao Paulo, Brasil, en septiembre pasado, el informe de Murro concluye que hay posibilidades reales "de realizar (en el sistema de seguridad social Afap) reformas imprescindibles para lograr la justicia social".
Por otra parte, desde su origen hubo dos corrientes te?ricas sobre las prioridades del sistema. Una, monopolizaba el destino del ahorro como seguro intocable; la otra, adem?s, considera que el FAP puede ser factor de desarrollo y servir como capital de inversi?n para el pa?s.
Con prudencia, el gobierno de Jorge Batlle ha impulsado en los ?ltimos meses la utilizaci?n parcial de los recursos de algunas administradoras para financiar fondos de inversi?n de apoyo a la producci?n lechera y arrocera. Ahora, con posibilidades ciertas de ser gobierno, la coalici?n Frente Amplio que candidatea por cuarta vez a Tabar? V?zquez, debate sin acuerdos a la vista, f?rmulas de reforma del sistema que van desde la "nacionalizaci?n" de los recursos del FAP hasta la regulaci?n de las ganancias de las administradoras privadas.
Reformas y contradicciones
Despu?s de pr?cticamente nueve a?os en la agenda del Congreso, el gobierno del presidente brasile?o, Luiz In?cio Lula da Silva, consigui? con la aprobaci?n de la reforma del sistema de pensiones, una de las principales victorias del primer a?o de su mandato.
Esto le signific? un desgaste pol?tico y la memoria de que el primer presidente sindicalista de la historia latinoamericana fue quien consigui? la aprobaci?n de una reforma considerada injusta por los trabajadores. "El sistema (de pensiones) est? quebrado; alguien ten?a que tener el coraje de cambiarlo", dijo Lula antes de la votaci?n.
Durante los meses de las votaciones, el mandatario enfrent? protestas que reunieron en dos oportunidades a m?s de 50 mil personas frente al Palacio de Gobierno, marchas y una huelga general indeterminada de empleados p?blicos. Los jueces por su parte, amenazaron con la primera huelga de la historia del Poder Judicial, y negociaron hasta el ?ltimo minuto sus privilegios.
Para ganar, el gobierno realiz? concesiones y la reforma qued? menos ambiciosa, pero cumple a?n su rol de contener el gigantesco d?ficit generado en las cuentas del estado por el sistema de pensiones. Las votaciones fueron negociadas hasta el ?ltimo momento y en varias oportunidades Lula tuvo que ponerse al frente para evitar una derrota.
La reforma aprobada aument? el l?mite de jubilaci?n de los jueces de 75 por ciento a 85,5 por ciento del sueldo m?s alto (cerca de 5.000 d?lares) y aument? el nivel de excepci?n de contribuci?n para los jubilados, una de las novedades de la reforma. El l?mite de jubilaci?n con excepci?n de los jueces y parlamentarios ser? de alrededor de 827 d?lares.
Para recibir un valor mayor ser? necesario participar de fondos complementarios, que ser?n creados este a?o. La reforma aumenta los a?os de trabajo para los empleados p?blicos de 30 a 35 a?os de servicio para los hombres y de 25 a 30 para las mujeres. Los futuros jubilados no podr?n retirarse ganando lo mismo que recib?an cuando trabajaban.
En Brasil, donde el sistema es mixto, el Gobierno no consigui?, sin embargo, que los empleados p?blicos tuvieran las mismas concesiones dadas a los trabajadores de empresas privadas, que reciben bastante menos que los estatales. A partir de ahora pasa a haber l?mites objetivos, combatiendo una distorsi?n que durante mucho tiempo indign? a toda la sociedad, la existencia de super-jubilaciones y super-salarios, seg?n afirm? el ministro de Seguridad Social, Ricardo Berzoini, uno de los m?s elogiados por el presidente, pero el m?s desgastado frente a la opini?n p?blica, tanto que fue transferido a fines de enero de ese ministerio al de Trabajo, para evitar m?s cr?ticas. "La reforma fue hecha para desviar recursos que hoy van al Tesoro Nacional, con garant?a plena, en direcci?n a los fondos privados que, si son mal administrados, ser?n la alegr?a de las bolsas de valores y la tristeza de los jubilados del ma?ana", afirm? Jolimar Correia Pinto, presidente de la Asociaci?n de los Servidores Jubilados del Congreso.
Pero as? como algunos privilegios fueron cortados, muchos tambi?n acabaron pagando el pato por el abuso de algunos, ya que la reforma moviliz? a la clase media a buscar amparo en sistemas privados. La reforma le cost? al oficialista Partido de los Trabajadores (PT) la expulsi?n de dos diputados y de Helo?sa Helena, una senadora de gran popularidad que vot? contra ?sta y la reforma fiscal. El gran conflicto interno del Gobierno fue que justamente Lula y el PT fueron los principales opositores contra esta reforma durante los ocho a?os de gesti?n de Fernando Henrique Cardoso, pero ante el d?ficit que encontraron al llegar al poder fueron obligados a darle su benepl?cito. La aprobaci?n era tambi?n una de las condiciones impuestas al Gobierno por el Fondo Monetario Internacional (FMI) cuando concedi? al Brasil en 2002 un pr?stamo de 30.000 millones de d?lares. Con su implementaci?n, el Gobierno podr? pedir la renovaci?n del acuerdo a fin de a?o, en al caso de que sea necesario.
Preocupante inequidad
En la mayor parte de los pa?ses del hemisferio la cobertura previsional es deficiente. Por ejemplo, en Paraguay tan solo 350.000 personas integran el sistema de jubilaciones, de una poblaci?n econ?micamente activa de 2.500.000 personas. Esto representa apenas el 14 por ciento, que genera un estado de indefensi?n para la mayor?a de los habitantes del pa?s, que en el futuro no tendr?n posibilidades de enfrentar la vida con ingresos asegurados v?a jubilaci?n.
El d?ficit se acent?a en las ?reas rurales, pues menos del dos por ciento de la poblaci?n integra alg?n sistema de cobertura.
El Instituto de Previsi?n Social (IPS), que cuenta con una n?mina de asegurados del orden de 170.000 trabajadores, registra una alta tasa de jubilados con ?nfimas asignaciones: Alrededor de 3.000 personas reciben menos de 24 d?lares mensuales, debido a que no fueron ajustadas sus asignaciones desde que se jubilaron. Pero ah? no termina todo, pues si se busca un poco, se encuentran personas que perciben hasta menos de un d?lar.
La situaci?n no muestra se?ales de mejor?a. Las elevadas tasas de desempleo y la ya alta de ocupaci?n informal que sigue en franco crecimiento, no presentan perspectivas de reversi?n a esta escasa cobertura previsional.
El acceso de los trajabadores informales a una cobertura previsional es una de las m?s acuciantes necesidades. Existen f?rmulas que pueden ser aplicadas, como establecer un determinado monto a ser abonado por los obreros en esta situaci?n, a fin de que puedan contar tanto con determinados servicios m?dicos como a los haberes jubilatorios, luego de ciertos a?os de aporte. Una iniciativa al respecto hab?a sido dise?ada durante gestiones anteriores del IPS.
El Fondo Monetario Internacional (FMI) dej? entre sus mensajes durante la reciente visita de Shigemitsu Sugisaki, subdirector gerente de este organismo, que Paraguay debe implementar una reforma de la seguridad social. El debate debe darse a fin de encontrar f?rmulas para mejorar tanto la cobertura como la calidad de las prestaciones, pues la simple aplicaci?n de modelos for?neos, que difieren mucho de la estructura paraguaya, pueden ser contraproducentes para la d?bil organizaci?n previsional existente.
Existen varias propuestas con relaci?n a la cobertura previsional. Mientras algunos sectores, en especial empresariales, pretenden una modificaci?n tendiente a liberar el sistema y fomentar la participaci?n privada, otros sectores, como el de los gremios de trabajadores, insisten en que la reforma debe ser de gesti?n antes que de modelo. El caso es que las figuras de jubilaci?n privada pr?cticamente est?n ausentes en el pa?s, con excepci?n de dos entidades que realizan este tipo de actividades, pero que son a?n muy restringidas en cuanto a n?mero de cotizantes. Adem?s, no existe una normativa espec?fica que regule esta actividad.
En Per? el panorama ya provoc? importantes pol?micas, y es que el diez por ciento del Presupuesto Nacional se utiliza en pagar las pensiones del uno por ciento de la poblaci?n. Es por esto que en este pa?s andino, el sin?nimo de jubilado es: cobro de insulsas pensiones o de peque?os aguinaldos navide?os.
La Oficina Nacional de Pensiones es atrozmente burocr?tica. Los problemas end?micos del jubilado son los m?seros pagos, retrasados cronogramas de cobros y largas colas para retirar su mensualidad. Hace algunos a?os, una de las decisiones que mayores elogios produjo en los pensionistas fue cuando el entonces Seguro Social descentraliz? la atenci?n de la entrega de boletas en las oficinas de cada entidad donde trabaj? el jubilado, as? como que su cobro se hiciera en las diferentes agencias bancarias, gracias a un acuerdo efectuado con dicho organismo estatal.
Hasta hace un tiempo, las pensiones se cobraban en el Centro C?vico de Lima, instituci?n que era pr?cticamente un hormiguero. Hoy algunos jubilados siguen recurriendo al sistema tradicional, se levantan antes de que salga el sol y hacen una larga cola por unas tres horas, pues -a pesar de no estar obligados- les gusta reencontrarse cada fin de mes con sus viejas amistades y se distraen en relaciones p?blicas. Sin embargo, el clamor general de los jubilados es que el sistema de pago deber?a ser como en Espa?a, Uruguay o Estados Unidos, donde las pensiones se les remite con su respectivo cheque a su domicilio, y m?s a?n, que dicho valor es endosable para que parientes cercanos al titular hagan efectivo el monto pensionado. Adem?s, el asegurado puede escoger entre el sistema p?blico y privado.
El Sistema Nacional de Pensiones - creado en 1973- es un r?gimen abierto en donde el Estado fija una pensi?n m?nima (119 d?lares) y una m?xima (247 d?lares). El fondo es intangible desde el a?o 1996. En la actualidad, existen aproximadamente 847.000 aportantes y 382.927 pensionistas. Los requisitos para optar por una pensi?n de jubilaci?n en el r?gimen general es tener 65 a?os para los hombres y 60 a?os para mujeres, haber aportado por 20 a?os con el 13 por ciento del salario. La jubilaci?n o invalidez es un derecho propio para acceder a la pensi?n vitalicia y la viudez u orfandad es un derecho derivado.
El Primer Ministro Carlos Ferrero Costa justific? el hecho de que el 10 por ciento del Presupuesto Nacional se dedique a pagar pensiones al uno por ciento de la poblaci?n. "Debido al aumento de la esperanza de vida y al consecuente envejecimiento de la poblaci?n, en casi todos los pa?ses del mundo, los sistemas de seguridad social atraviesan una ca?da vertiginosa. El Per? no ha sido la excepci?n a esta regla. El sistema sobrevive ?nicamente gracias al subsidio otorgado por el Tesoro P?blico -es decir por la plata de todos los peruanos- que alcanza el 83 por ciento del total de los pagos que se efect?an por pensiones", argument?.
"Existe una notoria inequidad entre los sistemas p?blicos vigentes. Mientras el Sistema Nacional de Pensiones (Ley 19.990) tiene una pensi?n m?xima de 247 d?lares mensuales, los jubilados de la Ley 20.530, reciben un promedio de 365 d?lares, aunque pueden llegar hasta 8.645 d?lares. Los 388 mil pensionistas sujetos a la Ley 19.990 cuestan 805 millones de d?lares, mientras que la de los 295 mil pensionistas de la Ley 20530 cuestan 1.322 millones de d?lares. Descontando el desembolso correspondiente a las planillas de los pensionistas de las empresas p?blicas y organismos aut?nomos, se concluye que en promedio, el Estado gast? m?s del doble de dinero para cubrir la pensi?n de un pensionista de la Ley 20.530 que la de uno de la Ley 19990, y no obstante que los de la 19990 son bastante m?s numerosos", se?al?.
Las empresas privadas de pensiones en el Per? son cuatro: Integra, AFP Horizonte, Uni?n Vida y Profuturo. El sistema funciona como una cuenta personal llamada Cuenta Individual de Capitalizaci?n (CIC), es decir que el ?nico due?o del fondo es el aportante. El sistema fue creado para contribuir al desarrollo y fortalecimiento del sistema de previsi?n social en el ?rea de pensiones, a trav?s de empresas privadas. La instituci?n encargada de fiscalizar y controlar a la Administraci?n de Fondos Privados (AFP) es la Superintendencia de Banca y Seguros (SBS).
Al igual que el sistema nacional de pensiones, hay una pensi?n de jubilaci?n, invalidez, gastos de sepelio y sobrevivencia, el cual otorga una pensi?n a los beneficiarios del afiliado fallecido intempestivamente. Sin embargo, debido a las pobres pensiones que otorga el Estado peruano a los asegurados, es m?s beneficioso optar por una AFP. El tema de la inequidad en el monto de las pensiones es tambi?n tema de debate en Centroam?rica. En Nicaragua, mientras un grupo reducido de altos funcionarios del Estado, incluido el presidente Enrique Bola?os, y el l?der de la oposici?n sandinista, el ex presidente Daniel Ortega, se beneficiaban mensualmente con jugosas pensiones equivalentes a los diez mil d?lares, la gran mayor?a de nicarag?enses mayores de 60 a?os ya jubilados, reciben del Estado una miserable pensi?n que dif?cilmente supera los cincuenta d?lares al mes, una suma que apenas sirve para la sobrevivencia.
Las angustias de los jubilados no se circunscriben a los malabares que tienen que hacer para ajustar el dinero recibido en calidad de pensi?n a las necesidades de alimentaci?n y gastos perif?ricos, sino que se inician desde que llega el d?a para recibir el cheque enviado por el Gobierno, ya que para hacerlo efectivo deben hacer largas filas en uno de los seis bancos comerciales que existen en Nicaragua, a riesgo de que al salir de la sede bancaria aparezca un delincuente y los deje sin nada.
El salario promedio en Nicaragua alcanza unos 210 d?lares, aunque los 65 mil trabajadores de la educaci?n y la salud, que representan un 70 por ciento de los empleados p?blicos, ganan mensualmente un salario equivalente a 70 d?lares. La pensi?n promedio que reciben maestros y trabajadores de la salud, entre m?dicos y enfermeras, una vez jubilados, es de apenas 67 d?lares.
En Nicaragua, alguien se jubila con 60 a?os de edad y al menos 14 a?os de haber cotizado como m?nimo al Instituto Nicarag?ense de Seguridad Social (Inss). Una regla que desde hace dos a?os se intenta cambiar en perjuicio de los cotizantes nicarag?enses.
Existe una moci?n para pasar a 62 a?os la edad de jubilarse en Nicaragua, y tener cotizado 25 a?os. El asunto es que, de acuerdo con datos del Programa de Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo (Pnud), la esperanza de vida de los nicarag?enses es una de las m?s bajas de Centroam?rica. Se calcula que para el a?o 2002 la esperanza de vida en Nicaragua era de 68 a?os, mientras que en Costa Rica alcanzaba los 76 a?os.
Al finalizar el a?o 2001, el estatal Instituto Nicarag?ense de Seguridad Social (Inss) ten?a 72.000 pensionados, por viudez, orfandad y vejez.
En Nicaragua, la ley establece como m?ximo el equivalente a 1.500 d?lares la pensi?n mensual que puede recibir un beneficiado por la seguridad social. Este a?o empezar? a funcionar un sistema privado de pensi?n, cuando a junio pr?ximo inicien operaciones dos Administradoras de Fondos de Pensiones (AFP), que administrar?n las pensiones de unos 250.000 nicarag?enses menores de 43 a?os de edad, que forman parte de la poblaci?n laboral activa.
En Costa Rica, mientras tanto, se analiza una reforma que pretende reducir la inequidad en el acceso al r?gimen de pensiones, pues apenas cubre a menos de la mitad de la fuerza de trabajo.
Seg?n expone el documento Estado de la Naci?n, adem?s de significar en s? mismo un problema de equidad, junto con el creciente envejecimiento de la poblaci?n y el manejo espec?fico de los fondos de reserva, se torna en una amenaza a la supervivencia de los reg?menes existentes. Es por este motivo que la Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social (Ccss) har? este a?o la reforma a su sistema de pensiones de Invalidez, Vejez y Muerte (IVM). Seg?n trascendi?, los cambios contemplar?an la edad de retiro (hoy en 65 a?os), el n?mero de cuotas y el perfil de beneficios. Un estudio de la Ccss, sostiene que para el 2010 ya ser?n incontrolables los problemas entre los ingresos cuotas y los egresos del sistema.
Para el IVM cotizan unos 800.000 trabajadores en todo el pa?s. Ante los cambios en la expectativa de vida de la poblaci?n, actualmente hay 7 trabajadores activos por cada pensionado. Esa relaci?n se reducir? a 3 en el 2040. Si no se toman las medidas pertinentes ahora, tales como aumentar las cotizaciones, se considera que los j?venes de hoy, no podr?n disfrutar de una vejez tranquila.
Tras echar un vistazo a algunos pa?ses de la regi?n, es evidente que los niveles de cobertura de los sistemas de pensiones se han estancado o disminuido, no atendi?ndose el principal problema de Am?rica Latina.
Por tanto, la prestaci?n futura de pensi?n o jubilaci?n no solo es impredecible, sino adem?s insegura, al tiempo que los costos individuales y los fiscales son alt?simos. Los reg?menes privados son adem?s sustancialmente contradictorios con las nuevas formas de informalidad y precariedad, sumadas al creciente desempleo.u
Colaboraron en esta investigaci?n F?lix Carreras (Uruguay), Alexandra Farf?n (Colombia), Ver?nica Goyzueta (Brasil), Vicente P?ez (Paraguay), Daniel Brousek (Per?) y Jos? Antonio Pastor (Costa Rica). Tambi?n se utiliz? material de la agencia EFE.
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Vivir con poco
Andr?s Gonz?lez es un nicarag?ense de 78 a?os de edad que cotiz? durante 25 a?os en las diversas empresas para las que trabaj?, sobre todo de la construcci?n, tanto privadas como del sector p?blico. Lleg? a alcanzar un salario promedio de unos 2.300 c?rdobas (unos 150 d?lares al tipo de cambio actual), pero cuando calific? para recibir la pensi?n, hace ya diez a?os, su sorpresa fue enorme, pues el primero, el segundo y muchos otros cheques que comenz? a recibir apenas llegaban a los 300 c?rdobas (unos veinte d?lares).
Diez a?os despu?s, gracias a presiones, jornadas de protestas y hasta penosas huelgas de hambres de miles de jubilados, Andr?s como muchos otros perjudicados lograron una revalorizaci?n de sus pensiones. Hoy recibe un cheque de 1.100 c?rdobas (unos 75 d?lares). Aun con ese incremento, Gonz?lez debe hacer "malabares" para resolver sus necesidades de cada mes, como pagar los servicios de agua potable, energ?a el?ctrica, alcantarillado, comprar la alimentaci?n de ?l y su esposa, as? como la atenci?n m?dica que requiere debido a su edad.
"La pensi?n que recibo se va en la comida, en el pago de la luz y el agua", exclam? el anciano al relatar parte de su historia. El costo de los servicios b?sicos, principalmente el de la energ?a el?ctrica, en este pa?s son altos, y constantemente los jubilados, que no obtienen ning?n beneficio adicional del Estado, reclaman alteraciones en las facturas de cobro por esos servicios. "Cotic? 40 a?os y desde que estoy jubilado, hace cinco a?os, apenas recibido un cheque por 1.140 c?rdobas que comienzo a gastar desde que tengo que pagar el taxi para ir a retirarlo", dijo por su parte H?ctor Bonilla Zeled?n, de 66 a?os de edad.
Cont? que durante su vida laboral lleg? a ganar un sueldo mensual equivalente a los 5.000 c?rdobas (unos 335 d?lares), pero que al final de ese per?odo, su ingreso salarial disminuy?, lo que incidi? en el valor de su pensi?n.
"Lo que recibo no me da para vivir dignamente el resto de mi vida, tengo que estar atenido a la ayuda que recibo de mis hijos", agreg? este jubilado cuya historia es similar a la de los otros miles de nicarag?enses que despu?s de cotizar por muchos a?os la pensi?n que reciben no les alcanza para nada.
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El retiro en la casa del T?o Sam
Casto Ocando
Especial para Tiempos del Mundo
MIAMI. La llamada etapa dorada del retiro, que permit?a a una gran mayor?a de los jubilados disfrutar de sus ?ltimos a?os de vida con la garant?a de unos suficientes fondos de retiro, est? sufriendo un cambio dram?tico en Estados Unidos, revelaron estudios recientes.
Seg?n una investigaci?n patrocinada por la Asociaci?n Americana de Personas Retiradas (AARP), durante el 2003 cerca del 40 por ciento de las personas entre 50 y 70 a?os dijeron que continuar?n trabajando luego del retiro, esto por razones econ?micas, o bien porque no pueden mantenerse con el dinero que reciben de la seguridad social, o porque no pueden pagarse costosos tratamientos de salud que no son cubiertos por el Medicare. Al mismo tiempo, la oficina del Censo report? en el tercer trimestre del 2003 un incremento del n?mero de abuelos que act?an como responsables primarios de sus nietos, una cifra que se ubic? en 2.4 millones de ancianos en el pa?s, mientras que un total de 4.5 millones son el sost?n de su propio hogar. A pesar de que el sistema de seguridad social concentra el mayor m?sculo financiero del pa?s, los expertos advierten que podr?a entrar en un estado de quiebra para el a?o 2017 si no se toman correctivos ahora, con impredecibles consecuencias para la econom?a de Estados Unidos y por ende, para el sistema econ?mico mundial.
"El sistema de seguridad social es el programa de gasto p?blico m?s grande del mundo, con ingresos anuales de aproximadamente 400.000 millones de d?lares, casi un cuarto del presupuesto fiscal norteamericano y m?s grande que el Producto General Bruto (PGB) nominal de Rusia", sostiene el profesor Jos? Pi?era, ex ministro de Trabajo y Previsi?n Social en Chile y co-presidente del Proyecto para la Privatizaci?n de la Seguridad Social del Cato Institute, en Washington. Seg?n Pi?era, "la falla fatal del sistema es que actualmente el gobierno federal no invierte ning?n porcentaje de los fondos para pago de beneficios futuros.
En su lugar, gasta cada centavo que recibe en los pensionados actuales y en otros programas gubernamentales. A partir del 2017 los desembolsos del sistema empezar?n a exceder los ingresos, y los pol?ticos se ver?n forzados a escoger entre diferentes opciones desagradables: aumentar los impuestos, incrementar la deuda, o reducir los beneficios de los pensionados".
La dram?tica realidad de la jubilaci?n est? tocando a miles de ancianos hispanos, que cada d?a deben salir a la calle a procurarse el sustento en labores tan variadas como dependientes de tiendas, ayudantes en supermercados y vendedores ambulantes en las esquinas m?s concurridas de las ciudades, aunque tambi?n est? afectando a profesionales calificados que luego de largos a?os de trabajo, no cuentan con suficiente dinero para retirarse c?modamente y seguir siendo el principal sustento familiar.
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Lo que un d?a fue
Carlos Alberto Becerril
Tiempos del Mundo
M?XICO. Hasta hace 30 a?os, alcanzar una pensi?n justa y honorable al final de la vida productiva en M?xico era, m?s que una posibilidad, un derecho alcanzado y disfrutado. El Instituto Nacional del Seguro Social, (Imss) organismo asistencial emanado de la Revoluci?n Mexicana, ofrec?a adem?s de la llamada seguridad social, como es el servicio m?dico y acceso a diferentes mecanismos de beneficios sociales, un sistema de pensi?n que permit?a a los trabajadores afiliados al Instituto recibir ?ntegro su sueldo al retirarse.
Si bien los salarios en M?xico jam?s han sido lo suficientemente buenos, hasta mediados de los a?os setenta, en t?rminos generales, permit?an el sostenimiento de una familia en estratos muy cercanos a la clase media, sobre todo en trabajos formales que contaban con todas las prerrogativas legales.
Los ?ltimos treinta a?os han sido desastrosos para los sistemas de pensiones en M?xico, las recurrentes crisis econ?micas han hecho mella en aquellos que despu?s de toda una vida de trabajo, reciben menos que una limosna para sobrevivir. La causa: devaluaciones y un olvido que hace que la tercera edad est? a la expensa de aquellos que a?n mantienen una actividad econ?mica.
Tal es el caso del se?or Juan Reza, bur?crata que inici? sus actividades en la Secretar?a de Salubridad y Asistencia hace ya m?s de 70 a?os. Durante su carrera lleg? a ser jefe de oficina, un puesto menor pero que le permit?a solventar las necesidades de su esposa y de sus tres hijos, y que le permiti? costear una carrera profesional a dos de ellos.
Hace 27 a?os opt? por el retiro, alcanzando una jubilaci?n completa despu?s de 35 a?os de servicios, cuando en aquel entonces su jubilaci?n alcanzaba la suma aproximada de 1.500 d?lares mensuales, suma suficiente para esperar una vejez sin apremios. Sin embargo, apenas se jubil?, se enfrent? a la primera devaluaci?n en el a?o de 1975 y en un s?lo mes vio que su pensi?n se reduc?a a menos de la mitad.
El tiempo pas? y en tanto las enfermedades de la vejez se incrementaban, el salario se desvanec?a.
Los a?os ochenta, con su proceso inflacionario y devaluatorio, establecieron que finalmente la pensi?n se erosionara y su jubilaci?n alcanzara su nivel m?nimo de menos de 70 d?lares al mes, cantidad que se ha mantenido hasta la fecha.
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Venezuela on the edge
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040220-100115-8581r.htm
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is showing signs of desperation as the country's National Election Committee reviews signatures calling for a recall vote. In his attempt to prevent a potential recall, Mr. Chavez is resorting to an old strongman's ploy: Cry treason. It is looking increasingly unlikely, though, that Mr. Chavez will be able to counter the gathering support for rule of law.
Much of Venezuela is watching nervously as the National Election Committee reviews the signatures. Two members of the opposition, Timoteo Zambrano and Mauel Cova (part of a formal negotiating process with the government that cleared the way for the recall petition), traveled to the United States recently and met with editors at The Washington Times. Messrs. Zambrano and Cova charged that the Chavez government had tried to block monitors from the Organization of American States (OAS) from observing part of the review and had tried to invalidate signatures on bogus pretenses.
They also claimed that the OAS held firm against these government moves, maintaining it would not certify the review process if their team wasn't guaranteed observation of the committee's review. A recent statement by the OAS alludes to some of the claims made by the opposition: "During the observation of this process, the OAS and the Carter Center have detected technical and administrative defects ... Problems have been noted during the physical verification of signature collection forms, and during the initial days of the work of the second-level review Technical Committee, which was overwhelmed by the large volume of problem signature forms sent to it." The OAS attributed these "defects" to "the novel nature and complexity of the process." The OAS is being too diplomatic. Clearly, the Chavez government didn't want the world to see them trying to fix the election.
Mr. Chavez has a lot to be nervous about. The OAS has been a tenacious observer. Brazil's left-leaning president, Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva, who has enormous clout in the region, has called on Mr. Chavez to respect the decisions of the electoral committee. And Amnesty International has called Mr. Chavez to account for railing against the pro-democratic efforts of NGOs and human rights groups.
The Chavez government had accused some NGOs and human rights groups of committing "treason" for having received some funding from U.S. agencies.
The electoral committee has set a Feb. 28 deadline for deciding whether the required 2.4 million Venezuelans petitioned for a recall vote. Feb. 28 will, therefore, be a watershed date for the country. Mr. Chavez would be wise to acknowledge how closely he is being watched and respect the decision of the electoral committee. Regardless of the outcome, that decision must be the final word on the current political standoff.
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>> KUMBAYA ANYONE?
Do Borders Matter To President Bush?
Posted Feb. 20, 2004
By Kelly Patricia O Meara
Some critics insist that the prospect of cheap labor is one of the driving forces behind the president?s immigration-reform policy.
It is no secret that tens of thousands of jobs in the software sector are being shipped to India, nor are many unaware that millions of manufacturing jobs, once filled by America's blue-collar middle class, have been moved to Communist China where desperate people are willing to work for substandard wages. What may not be understood is that 2.5 million Americans have lost their jobs since 2001, and nearly 400,000 ran out of their federal unemployment benefits in January of this year alone. Indeed the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average salary for U.S. workers has fallen from $44,570 to $35,410 since 2001, with nearly 5 million Americans working at part-time employment to make ends meet.
This bleak picture is wholly out of line with the reported "recovery" touted by Alan Greenspan, the top money man at the Federal Reserve. Despite what has been described as a jobless recovery, President George W. Bush last month proposed a more lenient immigration policy in an effort to "create a system that is fairer, more consistent and more compassionate."
The president appears to be responding to upbeat data provided by his top economic advisor, N. Gregory Manikow, who recently announced that outsourcing American jobs overseas is actually good for the nation's economy. Manikow assured, "I know there will be jobs in the future," and in fact has predicted 2.6 million new payroll jobs by the end of 2004. Not everyone agrees with that upbeat assessment of the nation's job market.
And the new immigration reform, say critics on both the left and right, invites mass immigration to the United States to "match willing foreign workers with willing U.S. employers when no Americans can be found to fill the jobs."
According to the fact sheet provided by the White House, "the Federal Government [will] offer temporary-worker status to undocumented men and women now employed in the United States and those in foreign countries who have been offered employment here." While the president's proposal has been short on specifics, the idea is that U.S. employers first must consider Americans for these jobs, the program will prevent exploitation of undocumented workers, and the process will become an incentive for temporary workers to return to their countries of origin when their temporary status expires.
In other words, the estimated 8 million to 12 million undocumented aliens now illegally residing in the United States, and the untold millions of other "willing employees" who may be granted temporary status in the United States, will, after making a living wage, return voluntarily to the countries from which they fled because they could not make ends meet there. Critics of the proposal quote the president's father, who was fond of saying in other contexts, "It doesn't seem prudent."
Certainly not if recent experience is any guide. Although the president asserts that this reform does not include amnesty, the same claim was made for the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). The sweeping IRCA legislation was touted under President Ronald Reagan as a bill to end illegal immigration, to help control illegal immigration by implementing employer sanctions, to increase border patrols and to remove the stigma associated with being a fugitive alien. But the linchpin of IRCA was that aliens who could prove that they had been living illegally in the United States continuously since Jan. 1, 1982, were grandfathered into the system and given amnesty and the right to become permanent residents.
Not only did the IRCA legislation fail to "control illegal immigration" but, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the population of illegal aliens increased further when family members of the recently legalized alien group (2.8 million were granted permanent-resident status under IRCA) illegally joined their breadwinners in the United States. The 2000 census indicated that between 500,000 and 700,000 illegal aliens were settling in the United States every year, and the INS estimated in January 2000 that 7 million illegal aliens were living in the United States. Given that this is well above the numbers estimated before the 1986 IRCA legislation, it seems clear to critics that amnesty is no deterrent to illegal immigration.
Worse, say cultural conservatives, are problems cited in a 1997 report from the National Research Council (NRC), part of the private, nonprofit institutions known as the National Academies that provide science-, technology- and health-policy advice under a congressional charter. According to this study, "the educational-attainment levels of post-1965 immigrants have steadily declined. Foreign-born workers, on average, earn less than native-born workers and the earnings gap similarly has widened over the years. Those from Latin America [including Mexico] presently account for over half of the entire foreign-born population of the nation and they earn the lowest wages."
The NRC found no evidence "of discriminatory wages being paid to immigrants; rather, it found that immigrant workers are paid less than native-born workers because, in fact, they are less skilled and less educated. Post-1965 immigrants are disproportionately increasing the segment of the nation's labor supply that has the lowest human-capital endowments. In the process, they are suppressing the wages of all workers in the lowest skill sector of the labor market."
Then there is a report by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization devoted to researching policy issues of the economic, social, demographic, fiscal and other impacts of immigration in the United States. It says that, based on estimates from the National Academy of Sciences using age and education at arrival, "the lifetime fiscal impact (taxes paid minus services used) for the average adult Mexican immigrant is a negative $55,200." The CIS report further says that, "even after welfare reform, an estimated 34 percent of households headed by legal Mexican immigrants, and 25 percent headed by illegal Mexican immigrants, used at least one major welfare program, in contrast to 15 percent of native households. Mexican immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years, almost all of whom are legal residents, still have double the welfare-use rate of natives."
Little wonder that Mexican President Vicente Fox sees legal status for millions of uneducated and undocumented workers who have immigrated illegally to the United States as a "very important step forward" for his country. Critics wonder what Fox means by "important step forward." Does it mean, they ask, that the burden of creating jobs for these lawbreakers has been lifted, or that he's pleased U.S. taxpayers will lighten his load of providing basic services for large numbers of Mexican citizens? Others on both the left and right are asking how President Bush's immigration proposal can be good for American taxpayers when Fox so openly cheers the exportation of his unemployed to the United States.
But apparently U.S. taxpayers are wearying of pocketbook compassion. A recent CNN-USA Today poll found that 55 percent oppose the president's immigration plan, that by a 2-1 margin those polled said immigrants harm the economy by driving down wages, and that 74 percent said "No" when asked if it should be easier for illegal immigrants to become citizens.
White House spokesmen are quick to point out that, in point of fact, President Bush didn't use the word "amnesty." The problem is that his proposal allows for an extension of the temporary-work permit (the length of which apparently will be determined at a later date) and he has said that these "willing workers" will be provided the right to apply for permanent residence. So inquiring minds want to know whether, if this is not an amnesty, how the president intends to get tens of millions of people to return to their countries of origin after their visas expire (whenever that is), since the whole point of his proposal supposedly is to deal with the problem that 8 million to 12 million illegal aliens now in the United States apparently won't leave.
Furthermore, say critics, Americans may wonder what happens if each of these "willing workers" becomes legalized through the temporary-worker program. And even if each pays into state and federal tax systems and the nonexistent Social Security trust fund, the financial shortfalls from the subsidies paid to them could be huge? What incentives do the so-called temporary workers actually have to leave?
Naturally, there are many questions that ought to be considered by lawmakers; but already there are some in Congress who say they've seen this kind of compassionate legislation before and the consequences aren't pretty. Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) tells Insight that "I would have respected the president more if he had said, 'Hey, let's just scrap this idea of borders and nation-states. We're all just one big continent and, you know, we'll all just join hands and sing the first verse of 'Kumbaya.'"
According to Tancredo, "If the president's proposal is accepted, then the 8 [million] to 12 million will be able to apply for their families to come to the U.S., and then we're talking about 25 [million] to 30 million people. Once here, they are entitled to medical care, K-12 education, and more housing and roads will have to be built and the infrastructure developed. This is all for people who maybe make minimum wage. The truth is that in a free society with any degree of unemployment, especially 8 [million] to 12 million people minimum, there is no such thing as a job that no American will take. There is only a job no American will take for the amount of money the employer is willing to pay."
Tancredo continues, "If you can restrict the supply of this sort of labor, which we do by controlling the border, we could at least eliminate the downward pressure on wages that now exists as a result of the fact that we've got 8 [million] to 12 million people who are here illegally looking for any job they can get for any amount of money they can get. So when the president says, 'I want to match the willing workers with the willing employers,' I hope he's just kidding because there are billions of people [in this world] who are willing to undercut American workers right now." Opponents are deeply angry. "For the sake of cheap labor," Tancredo says, "the president is willing actually to open the floodgate. I would have been more impressed if the president had said, 'I think the truth of the matter, from where I stand, is the United States is no longer a country defined by borders. We are just a place on a continent, the source of a great deal of consumer activity, creating huge markets for the world, and borders simply impede the flow of people, goods and services and we ought to get rid of them.' They don't have the guts to say it but that is where they want to go. That is the essence of the 'willing-worker/willing-employer' analogy."
What is more, Republican Tancredo and his counterparts among Democrats in the labor unions are deeply suspicious of the motives of those advocating the program. "This proposal and the ensuing legislation aren't going to stop illegal entry, and I don't think the administration thinks so either," Tancredo says. "A great deal of pressure has been put on the president to do something in response to requests from Mexico and other countries. Since you can't get the whole enchilada, they go for this measure that will give amnesty to the millions and millions who already are here, and then they say they'll tighten up the borders. That's been said before. Well, we're never going to tighten up the borders and we're never going to enforce our immigration laws because the administration and the Congress do not believe in border enforcement or border security, and they certainly do not believe in internal enforcement of immigration law. It's pretty much a case of 'Gosh, they're here. What the heck? Let's face reality - the law isn't working.' That's nonsense. There's nothing wrong with the immigration laws. What isn't working is the desire to enforce the laws."
Dan Stein, director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a national, nonprofit, public-interest organization that supports immigration reform, tells Insight that "the president's proposal is unrealistic, lacks basic credibility and is insulting to the intelligence of anyone who has studied this problem for any length of time."
According to Stein, "This proposal feeds into the basic instincts of Democrats, who say, 'Our policy is come on in and, if you get here, we'll fight to let you stay.' The proposal seems like a surrender to a reality of our own making, which is that by letting aliens disregard the law we're being forced to accommodate their unwillingness to play by the rules, and that leaves us to absorb all costs and impacts. But it is a utopian mind that neglects the reality that we only need to create jobs which have enough value added to contribute to the system more than we pay out to support people. We're being told that the borders don't matter except in the context of the claims that these aliens can make on U.S. taxpayers. You couldn't have a completely free hemispheric labor market unless all countries were at economic parity and had parity in their social-benefit systems. Are we going to try to reach equilibrium with Brazil or El Salvador in terms of labor-market conditions? Ultimately, it means we're no longer a nation. The sovereignty of our borders is going to be subordinated to some trade organization that monitors the Free Trade of the Americas Agreement. This creates a job fair for the whole world."
"What I'm hoping," explains Stein, "is that the thing that saves us is Mexican irredentism - that their own self-respect and desire for autonomy and good old-fashioned nationalism will prevent them from signing any agreement that is really reciprocal. What they want is to have Mexican citizens working here and sending money home - dual nationality. What they don't want is for U.S. citizens to be going down to Mexico and treating it like it is an extension of the U.S. But there doesn't seem to be any need to worry because there is no reciprocity south of the border, no mutuality of obligation in this proposal. We're not getting anything from Mexico in exchange for the president's proposal. The only countries that you can walk into like the U.S. are countries that by definition don't have the kind of benefits we have. For a capitalist system to survive and enjoy the support of its workers there has to be a basic belief in a fair shake somewhere along the line - some fundamental belief that the system is there for their benefit. We are destroying the idea of a stable middle class as an element of our society. What we've got now is this elite consensus that we're ready to go back to 1905 labor conditions so that we become two societies. One society that will do 'American's work,' which involves sitting in an office, and then there's the 'other people's work' - miserable work at low pay. There will be an increasing distance between the two as if we occupy two different worlds - like going back to the antebellum South."
Glen Spencer, who heads the American Border Patrol, is a retired economist and longtime activist against illegal immigration. He tells Insight he isn't surprised by the president's proposal. "I'm stunned," says Spencer, "but not surprised. I caught a glimpse of where the president was going when three years ago he was quoted as saying that he wanted to make migration safe and orderly. Well, at the time, legal immigration already was safe and orderly, so the only thing he could have meant was illegal immigration. This is a disaster."
Spencer continues: "Bill King, the former chief U.S. Border Patrol agent and the person who ran the 1986 amnesty program, tells me that the president's proposal is going to be a general amnesty, and with family unification it will cover half of Mexico. In other words, what the president is proposing is that we have a kind of one-way merger with Mexico. That is, Mexicans can become U.S. citizens, but U.S. citizens cannot become Mexicans. So they'll have dual citizenship and the right to own property in Mexico, but Americans cannot. The U.S. gets nothing out of the proposal. We can't work in Mexico like they can here, they certainly don't have the benefits we have here, and if you do get a work permit it is very limited. There should be no discussion about worker programs and new immigration policies until the president can ensure that the borders will be controlled. Without control of the borders this new proposal means nothing, and the president has reason to know it."
Guillermo Meneses is a spokesman for the AFL-CIO, which represents 13 million union members worldwide. He tells Insight that his organization "opposes the president's guest-worker program. We are for the legalization of undocumented workers who have been here for a number of years and through their hard work and dedication have paid taxes and have family members who are U.S. citizens. The issue is that the guest-worker programs give the employers the upper hand. If I'm an employer and I know you're working for me, and if you stop working for me you have to go back to your country of origin, this opens itself up to abuses."
In other words, the AFL-CIO supports an outright amnesty bill for the 8 million to 12 million illegal aliens currently residing in the United States, a potentially organizable labor force. This also is the position of U.S.-based Mexican political groups. For instance, the National Council of La Raza, a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan, tax-exempt organization that says it was established to reduce poverty and discrimination and to improve life opportunities for Hispanic Americans, says it believes "a new guest-worker program is not a real solution to our immigration problems and that it would actually be harmful to immigrants." Furthermore, La Raza believes that illegal "immigrants should have a choice to return home or to stay permanently in the U.S."
If Democrats in Congress have their way and continue to oppose every well-publicized administration proposal in this election year, the president's immigration proposal likely will find its way to oblivion. Certainly there are many Republicans who are not at all pleased with the Bush scheme and tell Insight they mean to oppose it come hell or high water. The trouble with depending upon a coalition of Democratic partisanship and Republican conservatism, say critics of the scheme, is that the usual internationalists already are poisoning the well. According to Tancredo, "What worries me is that Senate Minority Leader Thomas Daschle [D-S.D.] and Nebraska [Republican] Sen. Chuck Hagel already have introduced their own amnesty bill and it is 10 times worse than what the president proposed. I think the Democrats' bill basically says, 'Oly, oly, oxen free!'"
Kelly Patricia O'Meara is an investigative reporter for Insight.
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>> KUMBAYA 2...
Investigative Report
Cracks in System Open to Terrorists
Posted Feb. 17, 2004
By Timothy W. Maier
Some analysts say the real problem with the airline security system is that it?s too predictable and therefore easy for terrorists to penetrate.
Imagine if the world's most notorious fugitive, Osama bin Laden, attempted to board an airliner in the United States. Suppose he were clean-shaven, sporting short hair, wearing a pin-striped business suit and looked like so many other travelers that no suspicions were raised. How far might he get? If he used aliases such as names of family members he would be nabbed instantly and whisked away for questioning. That's because many of his relatives are on the FBI's secret "no-fly list," according to intelligence sources.
But suppose he boldly decided to use his own name. Would he be cleared to fly? Insight recently learned that scenario was tested at a U.S. airport in the South during January. The result was troubling: America's most-wanted fugitive is cleared to fly. According to airline-security documents obtained by this magazine, the name Osama bin Laden was punched into the computer by an airline official and, remarkably, that name was cleared at the security checkpoint all passengers must pass through before being issued a boarding pass.
The realization that Osama bin Laden made the cut sent shivers down the spines of airline-security officials who discovered the system gap. "When the most-wanted man in modern history is not included on the list of possible terrorists there are some serious deficiencies in the system which need to be addressed," says an airport-security official familiar with the test. In fact, Insight has learned from law-enforcement sources that at least two other names of known terrorists cleared security checkpoints when officials punched them into the computer.
As shocking as these revelations may seem, airline-security experts and privacy-advocate groups say they are not surprised. Kathleen Sweet, author of Aviation and Airport Security: Terrorism and Safety Concerns, tells Insight the incident confirms the vulnerability of the current system. "It often fails to detect terrorists until they have boarded the plane," and by then it might be too late, Sweet warns. As she points out, "We have computers talking to each other but not necessarily in a timely manner."
When Transportation Security Administration (TSA) spokesman Mark Hatfield was asked why bin Laden's name did not set off alarms, he grew silent. Obviously uncomfortable, he at last said the airlines that employ Computer-Assisted Passenger Screening (CAPS), a software program designed to flag suspicious travelers, don't use it, well, consistently. "It is almost 10 years since CAPS began, and there is just not a great deal of consistency between the airlines," he says. "It is possible for some airlines to flag some passengers while other airlines may end up clearing them to fly." The real-time data aren't even sent to the ticket agent, which means a name recently flagged may not show up in the airline system until it's too late. Pressed to comment specifically on bin Laden's name being cleared to fly, Hatfield refused to attempt an explanation unless told how and by whom the terrorist's name was entered.
Hatfield simply acknowledges there are systematic flaws in the system and says that's why TSA proposed in January to build an upgraded version called Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II (CAPPS II). The proposed system would transmit real-time data with no delays and be run by TSA rather than the airlines.
The first CAPS program was the brainchild of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, better known as the "Gore Commission," because the former vice president chaired the panel. Its report directed the federal government to "consider aviation security as a national-security issue" and President Bill Clinton dumped $100 million into such efforts, helping to launch the first CAPS program in 1998, three years before 9/11.
Details of the software were kept under close wraps by the federal government, which feared the slightest release of information could help terrorists defeat the system. But in the last five years information about CAPS slowly has emerged through disclosures in congressional hearings, investigative reports and release of hundreds of pages of related documents during civil suits filed by angry passengers who claimed they unjustly were targeted. An even more revealing look at the Gore system was presented in a study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). According to the study, CAPS profiles and provides risk-assessment analysis by matching a would-be traveler's itinerary with data from historical records pertaining to known terrorist activities. Information under scrutiny might include a person's address, how and when they paid for the ticket, how many times they have traveled abroad, names of traveling companions, destination, rental-car transaction and whether the passenger bought a one-way or round-trip ticket.
Once the profile is created it remains in the CAPS software, which is accessible from every airline check-in counter in the nation. As soon as a passenger checks in, the ticket agent immediately enters the traveler's name into the CAPS console. The passenger's travel itinerary then is linked to government databases that scour the information to see if it matches the terrorist profile. Thereupon a "threat index" is assigned to identify the potential risk the passenger poses to the flight.
The CAPS system separates suspicious passengers into two groups: Passengers who "fit the profile" become "selectees" and are subjected to heightened security measures, while those deemed too high a security risk are denied a boarding pass. The FBI keeps the "selectees" list secret, but passengers easily can find out if they have triggered an alert because the ticket agent will stamp their boarding passes with a huge "S" that tips airport screeners to do a more extensive search.
On the surface more scrutiny may seem to ensure more security, but the MIT study concluded that CAPPS II actually will weaken airline security by making the screening process overly predictable. MIT warned that the system easily can be penetrated by terrorists who send test subjects into the airport to identify what will get a passenger flagged - something intelligence experts believe the 9/11 terrorists did months in advance.
Daniel Biran, assistant managing director at Citigate Global Intelligence & Security (CGIS), an international business-intelligence and security firm, says the central problem with U.S. airline security is that it is predictable. "Unpredictability creates real problems for terrorists," he says. For CAPPS II to be effective, he emphasizes that it must go "beyond data mining and look at human behavior." Biran notes that simply relying on watch lists would not have caught the 9/11 terrorists because "none interacted with the watch list."
Who goes onto these secret lists is of great interest to terrorists but also has been a sore point among passengers who claim the Bush administration may be targeting those critical of administration policies and intelligence operations. While both the TSA and FBI insist they don't target groups based on political orientation but focus on suspicious traveling patterns and names of suspected terrorists, this does not explain why some repeatedly have had problems boarding planes. Consider just a few examples:
Barbara Olshansky, assistant director for the liberal Center for Constitutional Rights, was ordered to drop her pants in front of other travelers for a strip search in 2002. She consistently has had problems getting cleared to fly, and the group is in the midst of litigation about this.
Doug Stuber, who ran Ralph Nadar's presidential Green Party campaign in North Carolina in 2000, was flagged and questioned by the U.S. Secret Service about his politics prior to attempting to board a flight to Germany for business in 2002. During the discussion Stuber screamed out, "George Bush is as dumb as a rock," which prompted officers to bring in the Secret Service for further interrogation. Stuber was barred from taking any flight that day and missed his business trip.
Two American antiwar protesters, Rebecca Gordon and Jan Adams, who copublish the San Francisco-based War Times, were stopped at ATA airlines in 2002 after the computer spat out their names as being on the FBI's no-fly list. Airline officials later claimed this was a "mistake" and that the names should not have been so listed. Gordon and Adams eventually were cleared to fly after they were questioned and the ticket agent placed a large "S" on their ticket stubs for additional scrutiny during the baggage-check phase.
Virgine Lawinger, a nun in Milwaukee who is an activist with Peace Action, was stopped with about 20 of her students in 2002 from boarding a plane to Washington, where they had hoped to lobby against U.S. military aid to the Colombian government.
But it's not always those on the left who are being scrutinized. An Insight re-porter ran into difficulty recently at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, where he was taken aside and questioned by law-enforcement officials. The writer, who has been highly critical of intelligence failures in both the Bush and Clinton administrations, thought he might be on the list in order to show that TSA is not profiling by ethnicity. He missed his flight but was put on another. His ticket stub was stamped with a prominent "S," an indication that he is on the selectee list.
The Insight man wants to know how he and other loyal Americans can get off the no-fly list. But TSA won't say because currently there is no procedure for this. Under CAPPS II there is to be an om-budsman system through which passengers can appeal inappropriate scrutiny. For the moment, says a security official, "You do have a better chance of getting off the no-fly list than the selectee list," but how even this may be done remains a mystery.
The barring from flights of U.S. citizens has prompted lawsuits, of course, led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, which claims about 200 Arab men have been detained illegally, with at least five being pulled off planes, because of their ethnicity. The ACLU also has filed a series of lawsuits against the Justice Department to determine what criteria are being used by the FBI to put someone on the no-fly list. So far it has received about 100 pages of nonresponsive "answers" and redacted information concerning the list.
Documents released in the lawsuits consist of e-mails, letters and correspondence to congressmen from U.S. citizens trying to remove themselves from the list and complaining of an invasive system that has resulted in missed flights and uncomfortable searches. The complaints filed include those of a 71-year-old English teacher, a municipal worker who encountered a National Guardsman aiming an M-16 rifle at him when he refused to stand on one leg because he was recovering from a leg injury and a woman who shares the same name as an Australian man 20 years her junior who is suspected of being a terrorist. The government records indicate TSA has been receiving about 11,000 complaints a year, though how many of those come from good citizens who needlessly have been detained or arrested remains unknown because, according to TSA, "there is no pressing need" to collect such information. Airline-security analyst Sweet says she would like to see the lists made public with names, details and photographs, as with FBI most-wanted lists. But TSA says that would tip off the terrorists.
TSA officials insist the new screening system, CAPPS II, will eliminate most of the bumbling and mistakes because it will be more accurate while fulfilling the agency's mission "to ensure freedom of movement." But the new proposed system has set off a firestorm of criticism among privacy groups which charge that TSA appears more interested in regulating people's movements than guarding the U.S. border and maintaining homeland security. Prompted by public concern, the General Accounting Office released a preliminary report showing the system had failed again and again.
In the meantime, privacy advocates fear TSA will be building a more extensive dossier on travelers by collecting and sharing personal data with law-enforcement and intelligence agencies that could result in more names on more lists and more headaches for passengers. When TSA announced in the Federal Register in January that its CAPPS II program would involve building an Aviation Security Screening Records (ASSR) database, it attracted about 14,000 public comments in less than a month, which Hatfield says "have been not always cheers and applause."
The database would link together information from the airlines on their passengers, to include such personal data as credit reports, credit-card purchases, FBI files, arrest reports, job history, telephone logs and motor-vehicle records. In the past much of this information could not be collected by the government without a search warrant and probable cause. Access to some of this data would require changes in privacy laws. While some critics believe CAPPS II is dead in the water, and at least two airlines reportedly have backed out of field tests because of a public backlash, Hatfield insists a preliminary test of the system will begin this summer and full implementation may come before the end of the year.
Once these data are collected, CAPPS II would use a formula to assess the potential security risk presented by each passenger. Some reports suggested that each would be assigned a color, such as green for "okay," yellow for "more screening" or red for "no fly," but Hatfield insists there is no color system. Instead, he says, passengers will be separated into three categories - primary screening, which all passengers must undergo; selectee screening for further evaluation; and the no-fly list. He assures Insight that no personal data would be leaked into the wrong hands.
It's simply a matter of trusting the federal government, you see, something that does not sit well with those concerned about an increase in identity theft and privacy abuse. Lisa Dean, director of the Center for Technology Policy at the Free Congress Foundation, warns that TSA promises the personal data will not be misused and will be given out only to those with a "need to know," but she says it fails to tell the public that TSA reserves the right to give out this information to anyone it deems appropriate. "We have lost control," she says. "The information collected on us puts our identity up for grabs."
In fact, concern has grown as a result of recent reports indicating that JetBlue and Northwest airlines may have provided federal contractors with personal data on millions of passengers without their consent during a test trial of a security-software system. Hatfield maintains the system being tested was not CAPPS II but involved other agencies and other projects. He insists TSA is listening carefully to public concern and it already has made sweeping changes such as reporting only warrant information involving violent crimes to law-enforcement authorities instead of providing all outstanding-warrant in-formation.
Air Transport Association (ATA) spokesman Doug Wills says his group, which represents about 20 major airlines, supports implementation of CAPPS II because "the old system is not sufficient to do what we need to do." However, he says, ATA remains concerned about possible privacy abuse. "We want to know who gets access to the data and, if the federal government discloses the information, we want to know how it is being used and for what purpose," he says. "What does your Visa card or credit rating have to do with identity verification? We don't think that's necessary."
Similarly, Airline Pilot Association (APA) spokesman John Mazor says his association supports CAPPS II but favors eliminating the credit-report data and providing security cards to pilots and transportation workers who have undergone extensive FBI background checks. The pilots are frustrated about their own screening, he says. Robert Cox, a senior airline captain with a major U.S. airline and a former special-projects officer for the national-security committee of the APA, filed this comment about CAPPS II last month to the Federal Register:
"I served in the Army as a paratrooper and with Special Forces, and I am one hell of a patriotic SOB. I take extreme issue with anyone who insinuates otherwise, and unfortunately it happens to me three to four times a day. Several of my comrades have been arrested because they too take extreme issue with the insinuation that they are, or have criminal intent (by virtue of searching for explosives in my shoes, or removing my nail clippers after a thorough search of my bag), and yet are turned loose to fly 250 passengers from the cockpit of a commercial airliner not 25 yards from the screening point. And while I can't say this at the screening point, I can here: I have a crash ax in the cockpit that is FAR more dangerous than my nail clippers. Another interesting item: I have the control wheel. Is anyone else missing the logic here?"
Enough is enough, and when political correctness gets into the equation tempers flare. Former congressman John Cooksey (R-La.) said recently on a radio show, "Someone who comes in with a diaper on his head, and a fan belt wrapped around the diaper, needs to be pulled over." While critics were quick to suggest that a diaper should be put in Cooksey's mouth until he learns to be politically correct, Rachel Ehrenfeld, director of the New York-based American Center for Democracy and author of Narco-Terrorism, Evil Money, and the forthcoming Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed and How to Stop It, says she is tired of political correctness getting ahead of good sense. She says Israeli airlines don't walk the PC line, but they have the best airline security in the world. Ehrenfeld warns that the 1997 decision of the Clinton Justice Department never to use race, religion, national origin or ethnicity as a screening factor is a grave mistake.
According to Ehrenfeld, security agents should pay special attention to passengers born in countries including Syria, Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Yemen, Morocco, Pakistan, Indonesia and the Philippines - all countries that had and/or continue to have terrorists in training. "We should even ask them their religion," she says, although discrimination laws would need to be changed to allow that. "I don't care about political correctness. I don't want to blow up in midair."
The screening of airline personnel, from baggage checkers to those preparing food, also falls short of what is needed, Ehrenfeld says. For example, she notes 35 percent of the 1.5 billion pieces of airline baggage trigger a false alarm, but the follow-up on these electronic warnings rests strictly with the screener. If 30,000 of the 55,000 screeners hired recently have not even been given a background check, and with at least 50 security agents at New York's JFK International Airport now known to have passed background checks that did not reveal their criminal record, Ehrenfeld wonders, how reliable is the service we are getting from TSA?
Meanwhile, a traveler selected by CAPS for special screening recently was forced to drink a mysterious liquid found on his possession after failing to persuade authorities he was conducting a science experiment with pond water. The way airline-security officials reacted, you'd think they had busted Osama bin Laden instead of a 7-year-old boy. But of course the real Osama is cleared to fly.
Timothy W. Maier is a writer for Insight.
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'Dark Energy' Backs Idea Einstein Junked
By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 21, 2004; Page A02
Astronomers announced yesterday they had found strong new evidence that a theory Albert Einstein proposed but later discarded may have been right after all, providing crucial new clues to the fundamental nature and eventual fate of the cosmos.
A detailed analysis of light from ancient exploding stars has yielded powerful support for the idea that recently discovered "dark energy" that pervades the universe might be what Einstein originally dubbed the "cosmological constant." If confirmed, the findings support theories that the cosmos will continue its slow expansion toward nothingness instead of violently ripping apart or collapsing, astronomers said.
The results were hailed as pivotal new data that will help answer the most pressing and profound questions about the universe, such as what makes up most of the void and what eventually will happen to it.
"I think it's incredible," said John Bahcall of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. "What it is that currently drives the expansion of the universe -- that's the burning question today."
Martin J. Rees, a cosmologist at the University of Cambridge in England, said: "It's an important step toward getting a consistent picture of how our universe is expanding. It's corroborating the rather surprising picture that this dark energy pervades all of empty space."
Astronomers startled the scientific world in 1998 when they announced that they had discovered that most of the universe consists of a previously unknown force they dubbed "dark energy," which was causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate. The existence of the energy was later confirmed, but its nature remained a mystery, prompting a flurry of research to discern its identity and develop theories to explain it.
"Dark energy and the nature of dark energy is probably the biggest problem that physics is facing today," said Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who helped conduct the new research. "Imagine that we know that a large fraction of the surface of the Earth is covered with water. Imagine if we didn't know what it was that is covering the surface of the Earth. That's the situation that we are in."
The two main theories are that dark energy is the same as or similar to the "cosmological constant" that Einstein proposed -- but later discarded as his "greatest blunder" -- in 1917 to balance the universe against the force of gravity. The leading alternative theory was that it is akin to a weaker version of the rapid expansion that occurred right after the Big Bang, a force field dubbed "quintessence."
One of the key implications of understanding more about dark energy is that it would shed light on what will eventually become of the universe.
"The universe could continue the expansion as it is occurring now. The distances between galaxies will increase, but the galaxies will remain intact," Livio said. "But if the expansion began to get very accelerated, we could get what we call a Big Rip. Galaxies will get torn apart. Stars will get torn apart, and even we will get torn apart. The alternative is the universe could collapse on itself and end up on a Big Crunch."
In the new work, led by Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute, researchers used the orbiting Hubble telescope to measure various properties of light emitted by 16 exploding stars, known as supernovas. Because the stars are at various distances from Earth, they yield information about what was happening at different points in the past. The supernovas included six of the seven most distant supernovas ever studied, dating two-thirds of the way back to the Big Bang.
"This is sort of like a time machine," Riess said in a telephone interview. "By finding them at different distances, we can look at different times in the universe and we can ask how fast the universe was expanding then. It's like looking at tree rings to get a glimpse back in history."
In a paper to be published in the Astrophysical Journal, the researchers concluded that the strength of dark energy was consistent with Einstein's predicted cosmological constant, and that it appeared fairly consistent over time, also as Einstein had theorized. The researchers said they were now twice as confident as they were before that dark energy is consistent with Einstein's idea.
"It looks like Einstein may turn out to have been right, after all," Riess said.
Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the University of Chicago, called the findings profound because they will help guide theorists trying to explain the fundamental structure and evolution of the universe. "It's really a confidence-booster for the simplest possible explanation," Carroll said.
Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University said the findings help narrow the possible theoretical explanations for dark energy, but until more is known about the mysterious force, it remains impossible to predict the fate of the universe with certainty.
"Until we know what dark energy is, no measurement can determine the future absolutely," he said.
Riess and Livio agreed but said that based on what is currently known, the data support the idea that the cosmos will continue expanding very slowly outward for at least the next 30 billion years.
"Our measurement of dark energy indicates that the universe appears to be filled with a semi-permanent dark energy and is not changing enough to cause a cosmic doomsday," Riess told reporters during a briefing.
Cambridge's Rees agreed.
"The simplest assumption is that the universe will become ever darker, and ever emptier, as the galaxies recede from us," Rees said. "And in the very far future, there will be nothing in evidence. Everything will have disappeared beyond the horizon."
? 2004 The Washington Post Company
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