Fair Trade on Jobs?
It's easy to see why offshore outsourcing makes U.S. businesses feel like kids in a candy store. Hourly labor costs run $25 to $40 for Indian technology workers, compared with $150 to $200 for U.S. contractors. Gartner's rule of thumb is that enterprises cut between 25 percent and 40 percent from project costs when using the offshore model.
Once U.S.-based companies turn to offshore outsourcing, it's rare for them to bring jobs back. United States Cold Storage Inc., a refrigerated storage company in Cherry Hill, N.J., for example, turned to Cognizant's offshore services in 1999 to help it upgrade from an outmoded IT infrastructure to a Web-enabled environment. At the time, its 11-person IT staff was running 30 separate IBM S/36 minicomputers and had no e-commerce or Web skills. And the company was having difficulty finding and retaining IT staff, said Director of Transportation Larry Alderfer. Cognizant, through its offices in India, helped USCS deploy a new Web-based transportation system that uses AS/400s, IBM's WebSphere application server and a Java interface. The systems are now the foundation of the company's e-USCold business-to-business site. In all, Cognizant took over 95 percent of USCS' development and support activities.
But that was 1999. This is now. Finding and retaining IT workers with all but the rarest skills is hardly an issue. Why, then, doesn't USCS reverse course and hire domestically?
"It's an ongoing debate," Alderfer said. "It's a great market to hire people in now. There's a lot of well-trained technical people now available, in all aspects, whether it's Web-based or traditional programming. But we still have the situation where we have to manage those people. With the outsourcing, we don't have all those headaches. We tell them the cost and when it's required, and they deliver when they're expected to."
http://www.eweek.com/article/0,3658,s=25210&a=26941,00.asp
Friday, June 07, 2002
Blogging Goes Legit, Sort Of
Next fall, a handful of students at the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism will convene weekly to learn about blogging from John Batelle, a co-founder of Wired magazine, and Paul Grabowicz, the school's new media program director.
Students will create a weblog devoted to copyright issues, from "deep-linking" to online music trading. They'll also debate whether blogs are "a sensible medium for doing journalism, and what does that mean?" said Grabowicz, who contributes to the Poynter Institute's online media blog.
The Berkeley class on blogging is the latest in a series of signs that the media establishment is starting to warm up to what was long seen as legitimate journalism's loud-mouthed kid sister.
For some in the mainstream press, … like the Boston Globe's Alex Beam, blogs are an "infinite echo chamber of self-regard," as he wrote in a recent column, "(a) medium where no thought goes unpublished, no long-out-of-print book goes unhawked, and no fellow 'blogger,' no matter how outré, goes unpraised."
Despite this, a number of schools, including USC's Annenberg School for Communication, will include blogging in their online journalism classes in the fall. And senior bloggers, like Dave Winer and Ken Layne, have recently given talks both Cal and Stanford.
Teachers at every level from elementary school to MBA are trying to bring blogs into their classrooms. They're finding the most success when they use the blog as a "classroom management tool" -- a way to broadcast homework assignments, keep parents informed, and provide links to research materials, said Sarah Lohnes, an educational technology specialist at Middlebury College in Vermont.
http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,52992,00.html
Next fall, a handful of students at the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism will convene weekly to learn about blogging from John Batelle, a co-founder of Wired magazine, and Paul Grabowicz, the school's new media program director.
Students will create a weblog devoted to copyright issues, from "deep-linking" to online music trading. They'll also debate whether blogs are "a sensible medium for doing journalism, and what does that mean?" said Grabowicz, who contributes to the Poynter Institute's online media blog.
The Berkeley class on blogging is the latest in a series of signs that the media establishment is starting to warm up to what was long seen as legitimate journalism's loud-mouthed kid sister.
For some in the mainstream press, … like the Boston Globe's Alex Beam, blogs are an "infinite echo chamber of self-regard," as he wrote in a recent column, "(a) medium where no thought goes unpublished, no long-out-of-print book goes unhawked, and no fellow 'blogger,' no matter how outré, goes unpraised."
Despite this, a number of schools, including USC's Annenberg School for Communication, will include blogging in their online journalism classes in the fall. And senior bloggers, like Dave Winer and Ken Layne, have recently given talks both Cal and Stanford.
Teachers at every level from elementary school to MBA are trying to bring blogs into their classrooms. They're finding the most success when they use the blog as a "classroom management tool" -- a way to broadcast homework assignments, keep parents informed, and provide links to research materials, said Sarah Lohnes, an educational technology specialist at Middlebury College in Vermont.
http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,52992,00.html
Weblogs
WEBLOGS
John Battelle, Paul Grabowicz
2 units
Weblogs are a new form of online publishing that have rapidly become a popular way of getting news and information on particular topics. Some are run by journalists, while others operate in competition with journalists. In this class students will create a Weblog to explore the subject of "intellectual property" - copyright issues, the battle over free music downloads and peer-to-peer networks, deep linking to Web sites, etc. News sources will be scanned each day for items of interest to the IP community, the top stories will be selected, and precise summaries of each story will be written, with a unique perspective and voice. The resulting Weblog column will be posted to the school's Web site and to an email list of interested subscribers. We'll also be bringing in experts in the Bay Area on intellectual property and copyright issues to become contributors to the Weblog.
Prerequisites: none
Class Times: One 2-hour session per week.
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/program/courses/weblogs/
WEBLOGS
John Battelle, Paul Grabowicz
2 units
Weblogs are a new form of online publishing that have rapidly become a popular way of getting news and information on particular topics. Some are run by journalists, while others operate in competition with journalists. In this class students will create a Weblog to explore the subject of "intellectual property" - copyright issues, the battle over free music downloads and peer-to-peer networks, deep linking to Web sites, etc. News sources will be scanned each day for items of interest to the IP community, the top stories will be selected, and precise summaries of each story will be written, with a unique perspective and voice. The resulting Weblog column will be posted to the school's Web site and to an email list of interested subscribers. We'll also be bringing in experts in the Bay Area on intellectual property and copyright issues to become contributors to the Weblog.
Prerequisites: none
Class Times: One 2-hour session per week.
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/program/courses/weblogs/
Cave or Community? Starting with Eric Raymond's groundbreaking work, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", open-source software (OSS) has commonly been regarded as work produced by a community of developers. Yet, given the nature of software programs, one also hears of developers with no lives that work very hard to achieve great product results. In this paper, I sought empirical evidence that would help us understand which is more common - the cave (i.e., lone producer) or the community. Based on a study of the top 100 mature products on Sourceforge, I find a few surprising things. First, most OSS programs are developed by individuals, rather than communities. The median number of developers in the 100 projects I looked at was 4 and the mode was 1 - numbers much lower than previous numbers reported for highly successful projects! Second, most OSS programs do not generate a lot of discussion. Third, products with more developers tend to be viewed and downloaded more often. Fourth, the number of developers associated with a project was positively correlated to the age of the project. Fifth, the larger the project, the smaller the percent of project administrators.
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_6/krishnamurthy/
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_6/krishnamurthy/
Thursday, June 06, 2002
New Tone, Old Goal As the capital wakes up almost daily to disclosures about intelligence warnings before Sept. 11, the White House has abruptly switched its strategy of mounting ferocious partisan assaults on Democrats to one of self-inoculation — admitting past mistakes and preparing for more bad news to come.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/06/politics/06ASSE.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/06/politics/06ASSE.html
A Defiant Arafat Emerges From Compound After Israeli Attack
The Israeli attack was a reprisal for a suicide car bombing attack on Wednesday on a bus by Islamic Jihad that killed 17 Israelis — mostly young soldiers on the way back to their bases — and it was swift and hard.
\
American officials were not notified in advance of tonight's attack, according to a number of diplomatic officials in the region. While it appeared of a pattern with Mr. Sharon's oft-rash endeavors throughout his military career, it also came at a low point for Mr. Arafat, bashed not only by Mr. Sharon, but by his own people for the failure of the Oslo pact and corruption in his administration.
The raid came as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, for decades Mr. Arafat's visceral foe, prepared to visit President George Bush next week, gaining the last word in the president's ear after the visit of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
Whole buildings were pancaked flat, including those belonging to mukhaberat, the intelligence apparatus, some barracks for various military or security services, a jail, and even the offices of the local governor, Abu Fares.
After the Israelis pulled out, Mr. Arafat emerged defiant, nearly carried by bodyguards over a pile of a wrecked car and bulldozed dirt and chunks of stones that were the entrance to his one-impressive headquarters, a British-mandate area police station, now a wreck.
"This will only increase the steadfastness of the Palestinian people," he said in a scrum of television and other journalists, in what has now become boilerplate. "I invite the international community to come and see what is fascism and blatant racism."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/06/international/middleeast/06CND-MIDE.html
The Israeli attack was a reprisal for a suicide car bombing attack on Wednesday on a bus by Islamic Jihad that killed 17 Israelis — mostly young soldiers on the way back to their bases — and it was swift and hard.
\
American officials were not notified in advance of tonight's attack, according to a number of diplomatic officials in the region. While it appeared of a pattern with Mr. Sharon's oft-rash endeavors throughout his military career, it also came at a low point for Mr. Arafat, bashed not only by Mr. Sharon, but by his own people for the failure of the Oslo pact and corruption in his administration.
The raid came as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, for decades Mr. Arafat's visceral foe, prepared to visit President George Bush next week, gaining the last word in the president's ear after the visit of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
Whole buildings were pancaked flat, including those belonging to mukhaberat, the intelligence apparatus, some barracks for various military or security services, a jail, and even the offices of the local governor, Abu Fares.
After the Israelis pulled out, Mr. Arafat emerged defiant, nearly carried by bodyguards over a pile of a wrecked car and bulldozed dirt and chunks of stones that were the entrance to his one-impressive headquarters, a British-mandate area police station, now a wreck.
"This will only increase the steadfastness of the Palestinian people," he said in a scrum of television and other journalists, in what has now become boilerplate. "I invite the international community to come and see what is fascism and blatant racism."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/06/international/middleeast/06CND-MIDE.html
Israel Attacks Arafat's Compound in Swift Response After a Bombing Kills 17
Israeli ground forces attacked Yasir Arafat's compound in Ramallah before dawn today, surrounding his offices with tanks, after 17 Israelis, including 13 soldiers, were killed in a Palestinian suicide attack on a bus in northern Israel.
As Israeli infantry advanced on the compound, Palestinian officials reported heavy machine-gun fire and at least six Palestinian casualties, including a member of the security forces who was killed by a gunshot to the head. They said that Mr. Arafat was unhurt but in danger.
An Israeli armored bulldozer had begun destroying the building housing Mr. Arafat's office, the officials said. But a few hours later, according to Reuters, military authorities said Israel began pulling its troops and armored vehicles out of Mr. Arafat's compound.
After the suicide bombing, early Wednesday, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's aides announced that he still planned to travel to Washington to meet on Monday with President Bush, but would delay his departure by a day, until Saturday. The raid on Mr. Arafat's headquarters threw into doubt the ability of President Bush's envoy, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, to accomplish much on his mission.
Israeli officials said Mr. Arafat was not the target of the raid.
Saeb Erekat, the Palestinians' chief negotiator, said he had spoken to Mr. Arafat by telephone. "President Arafat is a few meters away from the tanks," he said. "His life is in danger." But as the Israelis began their withdrawal, Palestinian officials said Mr. Arafat was unharmed.
As the fighting broke out, muffled explosions could be heard in Jerusalem, more than five miles south. "There is heavy exchange of fire," said Yasir Abed Rabbo, the Palestinian minister of information and culture.
Mr. Arafat's leadership group condemned the bombing and, in an unusual remark, said it had had no advance knowledge of the attack.
But Israel continued to hold Mr. Arafat personally responsible, demanding that he act immediately against Palestinian violence or else make room for a Palestinian leader who would do so.
The bus was packed with soldiers returning to duty. Parts of the bus and of its passengers were strewn across the road and into the surrounding brush as the bus careened into a ditch. The blaze blackened its skeletal remains, filling the air with a stench of burning flesh and rubber.
The attack Wednesday was similar to car bombings against Israeli forces in Lebanon by the Lebanese group Hezbollah, and it represented a shift in Palestinian tactics. Previously, bombers have boarded buses and blown themselves up among the passengers. But bus drivers have grown increasingly vigilant. An advertisement blown off the destroyed bus expressed thanks to bus drivers, along with security forces.
The bombing, which dented the pavement and hurled the remains of the bomber's car 50 yards, took place in front of a prison where many accused Palestinian militants are held by Israel. Green sheet metal torn from the bus lodged in the barbed wire atop the prison's fence.
The conflict has mooted strategic differences among Palestinian factions, which have raged in the open in the past when Mr. Arafat moved to quell militants' actions. Some diplomats here believe Mr. Arafat is no longer strong enough politically to rein in violence without political gains to show for it.
Nabil Aburdeineh, a senior aide to Mr. Arafat, called for deeper American involvement and a timetable for achieving a Palestinian state.
"This is the climate that can stop the attacks," he said. He said he was not seeking to excuse the violence.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/06/international/middleeast/06MIDE.html?pagewanted=all&position=top
Israeli ground forces attacked Yasir Arafat's compound in Ramallah before dawn today, surrounding his offices with tanks, after 17 Israelis, including 13 soldiers, were killed in a Palestinian suicide attack on a bus in northern Israel.
As Israeli infantry advanced on the compound, Palestinian officials reported heavy machine-gun fire and at least six Palestinian casualties, including a member of the security forces who was killed by a gunshot to the head. They said that Mr. Arafat was unhurt but in danger.
An Israeli armored bulldozer had begun destroying the building housing Mr. Arafat's office, the officials said. But a few hours later, according to Reuters, military authorities said Israel began pulling its troops and armored vehicles out of Mr. Arafat's compound.
After the suicide bombing, early Wednesday, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's aides announced that he still planned to travel to Washington to meet on Monday with President Bush, but would delay his departure by a day, until Saturday. The raid on Mr. Arafat's headquarters threw into doubt the ability of President Bush's envoy, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, to accomplish much on his mission.
Israeli officials said Mr. Arafat was not the target of the raid.
Saeb Erekat, the Palestinians' chief negotiator, said he had spoken to Mr. Arafat by telephone. "President Arafat is a few meters away from the tanks," he said. "His life is in danger." But as the Israelis began their withdrawal, Palestinian officials said Mr. Arafat was unharmed.
As the fighting broke out, muffled explosions could be heard in Jerusalem, more than five miles south. "There is heavy exchange of fire," said Yasir Abed Rabbo, the Palestinian minister of information and culture.
Mr. Arafat's leadership group condemned the bombing and, in an unusual remark, said it had had no advance knowledge of the attack.
But Israel continued to hold Mr. Arafat personally responsible, demanding that he act immediately against Palestinian violence or else make room for a Palestinian leader who would do so.
The bus was packed with soldiers returning to duty. Parts of the bus and of its passengers were strewn across the road and into the surrounding brush as the bus careened into a ditch. The blaze blackened its skeletal remains, filling the air with a stench of burning flesh and rubber.
The attack Wednesday was similar to car bombings against Israeli forces in Lebanon by the Lebanese group Hezbollah, and it represented a shift in Palestinian tactics. Previously, bombers have boarded buses and blown themselves up among the passengers. But bus drivers have grown increasingly vigilant. An advertisement blown off the destroyed bus expressed thanks to bus drivers, along with security forces.
The bombing, which dented the pavement and hurled the remains of the bomber's car 50 yards, took place in front of a prison where many accused Palestinian militants are held by Israel. Green sheet metal torn from the bus lodged in the barbed wire atop the prison's fence.
The conflict has mooted strategic differences among Palestinian factions, which have raged in the open in the past when Mr. Arafat moved to quell militants' actions. Some diplomats here believe Mr. Arafat is no longer strong enough politically to rein in violence without political gains to show for it.
Nabil Aburdeineh, a senior aide to Mr. Arafat, called for deeper American involvement and a timetable for achieving a Palestinian state.
"This is the climate that can stop the attacks," he said. He said he was not seeking to excuse the violence.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/06/international/middleeast/06MIDE.html?pagewanted=all&position=top
Militant's Claim that Arafat Can't End Attacks
If there is one thing that the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad does not fear, one of its leaders said today, it is the repressive force of Yasir Arafat and his Palestinian Authority.
"The Palestinian Authority is broken; its institutions are destroyed," the leader, Sheik Abdallah al-Shami, said calmly as he sat in the living room of his home here. "How can the Palestinian Authority assure the security of the Israelis when it cannot even protect its own people?"
On the other side of Israel, at Mr. Arafat's headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, some of his aides were insisting that if they confirmed Islamic Jihad's involvement in the deadly attack on an Israeli intercity bus this morning, they would begin rounding up its members.
In an interview today, Mr. Shami offered such confirmation proudly. Other Islamic Jihad officials later said one of their militants from the West Bank town of Jenin, Hamzi Samudi, had pulled alongside the bus with his car and detonated his bomb, killing 17 passengers and injuring dozens.
Despite his nine previous arrests by Mr. Arafat's security forces, and eight others by the Israeli Army and security forces, Mr. Shami, a 45-year-old school teacher and Muslim cleric, said he was unperturbed.
"Every Palestinian is wanted by Israel," he said. "Does it make any sense that the Palestinian Authority would go out and arrest Palestinians on behalf of our enemy?"
The remarks underscored the difficulties that Mr. Arafat faces as he tries at once to overhaul his unwieldy security forces, meet international pressure to crack down on terrorists, govern more democratically, and satisfy Palestinian demands that he stand up to the Israeli government.
Palestinian militants — particularly members of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Mr. Arafat's Fatah movement — admit that their forces in the West Bank have been battered by the continuing Israeli military offensive there, which is now in its third month.
But terrorism experts, diplomats and others said that Mr. Arafat's security forces, too, are in considerable disarray, and that it may often prove simpler for groups to engineer new suicide attacks than for the Palestinian security forces to mount effective operations against them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/06/international/middleeast/06JIHA.html
If there is one thing that the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad does not fear, one of its leaders said today, it is the repressive force of Yasir Arafat and his Palestinian Authority.
"The Palestinian Authority is broken; its institutions are destroyed," the leader, Sheik Abdallah al-Shami, said calmly as he sat in the living room of his home here. "How can the Palestinian Authority assure the security of the Israelis when it cannot even protect its own people?"
On the other side of Israel, at Mr. Arafat's headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, some of his aides were insisting that if they confirmed Islamic Jihad's involvement in the deadly attack on an Israeli intercity bus this morning, they would begin rounding up its members.
In an interview today, Mr. Shami offered such confirmation proudly. Other Islamic Jihad officials later said one of their militants from the West Bank town of Jenin, Hamzi Samudi, had pulled alongside the bus with his car and detonated his bomb, killing 17 passengers and injuring dozens.
Despite his nine previous arrests by Mr. Arafat's security forces, and eight others by the Israeli Army and security forces, Mr. Shami, a 45-year-old school teacher and Muslim cleric, said he was unperturbed.
"Every Palestinian is wanted by Israel," he said. "Does it make any sense that the Palestinian Authority would go out and arrest Palestinians on behalf of our enemy?"
The remarks underscored the difficulties that Mr. Arafat faces as he tries at once to overhaul his unwieldy security forces, meet international pressure to crack down on terrorists, govern more democratically, and satisfy Palestinian demands that he stand up to the Israeli government.
Palestinian militants — particularly members of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Mr. Arafat's Fatah movement — admit that their forces in the West Bank have been battered by the continuing Israeli military offensive there, which is now in its third month.
But terrorism experts, diplomats and others said that Mr. Arafat's security forces, too, are in considerable disarray, and that it may often prove simpler for groups to engineer new suicide attacks than for the Palestinian security forces to mount effective operations against them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/06/international/middleeast/06JIHA.html
The Atlantic | June 2002 | The Culture of Martyrdom | Brooks
Before 1983 there were few suicide bombings. The Koran forbids the taking of one's own life, and this prohibition was still generally observed. But when the United States stationed Marines in Beirut, the leaders of the Islamic resistance movement Hizbollah began to discuss turning to this ultimate terrorist weapon. Religious authorities in Iran gave it their blessing, and a wave of suicide bombings began, starting with the attacks that killed about sixty U.S. embassy workers in April of 1983 and about 240 people in the Marine compound at the airport in October. The bombings proved so successful at driving the United States and, later, Israel out of Lebanon that most lingering religious concerns were set aside.
The tactic was introduced into Palestinian areas only gradually. In 1988 Fathi Shiqaqi, the founder of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, wrote a set of guidelines (aimed at countering religious objections to the truck bombings of the 1980s) for the use of explosives in individual bombings; nevertheless, he characterized operations calling for martyrdom as "exceptional." But by the mid-1990s the group Hamas was using suicide bombers as a way of derailing the Oslo peace process. The assassination of the master Palestinian bomb maker Yahya Ayyash, presumably by Israeli agents, in January of 1996, set off a series of suicide bombings in retaliation. Suicide bombings nonetheless remained relatively unusual until two years ago, after the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat walked out of the peace conference at Camp David—a conference at which Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, had offered to return to the Palestinians parts of Jerusalem and almost all of the West Bank.
Suicide bombing is a highly communitarian enterprise. According to Ariel Merari, the director of the Political Violence Research Center, at Tel Aviv University, and a leading expert on the phenomenon, in not one instance has a lone, crazed Palestinian gotten hold of a bomb and gone off to kill Israelis. Suicide bombings are initiated by tightly run organizations that recruit, indoctrinate, train, and reward the bombers. Those organizations do not seek depressed or mentally unstable people for their missions. From 1996 to 1999 the Pakistani journalist Nasra Hassan interviewed almost 250 people who were either recruiting and training bombers or preparing to go on a suicide mission themselves. "None of the suicide bombers—they ranged in age from eighteen to thirty-eight—conformed to the typical profile of the suicidal personality," Hassan wrote in The New Yorker. "None of them were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded, or depressed." The Palestinian bombers tend to be devout, but religious fanaticism does not explain their motivation. Nor does lack of opportunity, because they also tend to be well educated.
Often a bomber believes that a close friend or a member of his family has been killed by Israeli troops, and this is part of his motivation. According to most experts, though, the crucial factor informing the behavior of suicide bombers is loyalty to the group. Suicide bombers go through indoctrination processes similar to the ones that were used by the leaders of the Jim Jones and Solar Temple cults. The bombers are organized into small cells and given countless hours of intense and intimate spiritual training. They are instructed in the details of jihad, reminded of the need for revenge, and reassured about the rewards they can expect in the afterlife. They are told that their families will be guaranteed a place with God, and that there are also considerable rewards for their families in this life, including cash bonuses of several thousand dollars donated by the government of Iraq, some individual Saudis, and various groups sympathetic to the cause. Finally, the bombers are told that paradise lies just on the other side of the detonator, that death will feel like nothing more than a pinch.
It's hard to know how Israel, and the world, should respond to the rash of suicide bombings and to their embrace by the Palestinian people. To take any action that could be viewed as a concession would be to provoke further attacks, as the U.S. and Israeli withdrawals from Lebanon in the 1980s demonstrated. On the other hand, the Israeli raids on the refugee camps give the suicide bombers a propaganda victory. After Yasir Arafat walked out of the Camp David meetings, he became a pariah to most governments, for killing the peace process. Now, amid Israeli retaliation for the bombings, the global community rises to condemn Israel's actions.
Somehow conditions must be established that would allow the frenzy of suicide bombings to burn itself out. To begin with, the Palestinian and Israeli populations would have to be separated; contact between them inflames the passions that feed the attacks. That would mean shutting down the vast majority of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza and creating a buffer zone between the two populations. Palestinian life would then no longer be dominated by checkpoints and celebrations of martyrdom; it would be dominated by quotidian issues such as commerce, administration, and garbage collection.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/06/brooks.htm
Before 1983 there were few suicide bombings. The Koran forbids the taking of one's own life, and this prohibition was still generally observed. But when the United States stationed Marines in Beirut, the leaders of the Islamic resistance movement Hizbollah began to discuss turning to this ultimate terrorist weapon. Religious authorities in Iran gave it their blessing, and a wave of suicide bombings began, starting with the attacks that killed about sixty U.S. embassy workers in April of 1983 and about 240 people in the Marine compound at the airport in October. The bombings proved so successful at driving the United States and, later, Israel out of Lebanon that most lingering religious concerns were set aside.
The tactic was introduced into Palestinian areas only gradually. In 1988 Fathi Shiqaqi, the founder of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, wrote a set of guidelines (aimed at countering religious objections to the truck bombings of the 1980s) for the use of explosives in individual bombings; nevertheless, he characterized operations calling for martyrdom as "exceptional." But by the mid-1990s the group Hamas was using suicide bombers as a way of derailing the Oslo peace process. The assassination of the master Palestinian bomb maker Yahya Ayyash, presumably by Israeli agents, in January of 1996, set off a series of suicide bombings in retaliation. Suicide bombings nonetheless remained relatively unusual until two years ago, after the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat walked out of the peace conference at Camp David—a conference at which Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, had offered to return to the Palestinians parts of Jerusalem and almost all of the West Bank.
Suicide bombing is a highly communitarian enterprise. According to Ariel Merari, the director of the Political Violence Research Center, at Tel Aviv University, and a leading expert on the phenomenon, in not one instance has a lone, crazed Palestinian gotten hold of a bomb and gone off to kill Israelis. Suicide bombings are initiated by tightly run organizations that recruit, indoctrinate, train, and reward the bombers. Those organizations do not seek depressed or mentally unstable people for their missions. From 1996 to 1999 the Pakistani journalist Nasra Hassan interviewed almost 250 people who were either recruiting and training bombers or preparing to go on a suicide mission themselves. "None of the suicide bombers—they ranged in age from eighteen to thirty-eight—conformed to the typical profile of the suicidal personality," Hassan wrote in The New Yorker. "None of them were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded, or depressed." The Palestinian bombers tend to be devout, but religious fanaticism does not explain their motivation. Nor does lack of opportunity, because they also tend to be well educated.
Often a bomber believes that a close friend or a member of his family has been killed by Israeli troops, and this is part of his motivation. According to most experts, though, the crucial factor informing the behavior of suicide bombers is loyalty to the group. Suicide bombers go through indoctrination processes similar to the ones that were used by the leaders of the Jim Jones and Solar Temple cults. The bombers are organized into small cells and given countless hours of intense and intimate spiritual training. They are instructed in the details of jihad, reminded of the need for revenge, and reassured about the rewards they can expect in the afterlife. They are told that their families will be guaranteed a place with God, and that there are also considerable rewards for their families in this life, including cash bonuses of several thousand dollars donated by the government of Iraq, some individual Saudis, and various groups sympathetic to the cause. Finally, the bombers are told that paradise lies just on the other side of the detonator, that death will feel like nothing more than a pinch.
It's hard to know how Israel, and the world, should respond to the rash of suicide bombings and to their embrace by the Palestinian people. To take any action that could be viewed as a concession would be to provoke further attacks, as the U.S. and Israeli withdrawals from Lebanon in the 1980s demonstrated. On the other hand, the Israeli raids on the refugee camps give the suicide bombers a propaganda victory. After Yasir Arafat walked out of the Camp David meetings, he became a pariah to most governments, for killing the peace process. Now, amid Israeli retaliation for the bombings, the global community rises to condemn Israel's actions.
Somehow conditions must be established that would allow the frenzy of suicide bombings to burn itself out. To begin with, the Palestinian and Israeli populations would have to be separated; contact between them inflames the passions that feed the attacks. That would mean shutting down the vast majority of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza and creating a buffer zone between the two populations. Palestinian life would then no longer be dominated by checkpoints and celebrations of martyrdom; it would be dominated by quotidian issues such as commerce, administration, and garbage collection.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/06/brooks.htm
Atlantic Unbound | Fallows@large | 2002.04.12
Subject: Re: The weirdness of being awash in media - Part Two
On Bias. First of all, I'm not sure what to conclude from bestsellerdom—either Bernard Goldberg's or, for that matter, Michael Moore's, Goldberg's number-one displacer. The numbers are, by big media standards, puny. A few tens of thousands of book sales can get you onto the list—not much more than two percent of a Stephen King's sales, say; one-tenth of one percent of a mediocre movie's attendance; less than that of a so-so TV series' audience. Also, right-wingers are fiercely loyal—they give Fox a big baseline audience to grow from, and they buy their folks' books. (Lefties are much more fickle, and since lots of their own are in the book game, they tend to score free copies.) There are no left-wing dailies left standing--no equivalents of The Washington Times or the New York Post. Nor is there any left-wing equivalent of Richard Mellon Scaife or the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, ready to put lots of money where their far-right mouths are. Left-of-center foundations prefer to fund local and segmented projects.
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/fallows/jf2002-04-03/gitlin2.htm
Subject: Re: The weirdness of being awash in media - Part Two
On Bias. First of all, I'm not sure what to conclude from bestsellerdom—either Bernard Goldberg's or, for that matter, Michael Moore's, Goldberg's number-one displacer. The numbers are, by big media standards, puny. A few tens of thousands of book sales can get you onto the list—not much more than two percent of a Stephen King's sales, say; one-tenth of one percent of a mediocre movie's attendance; less than that of a so-so TV series' audience. Also, right-wingers are fiercely loyal—they give Fox a big baseline audience to grow from, and they buy their folks' books. (Lefties are much more fickle, and since lots of their own are in the book game, they tend to score free copies.) There are no left-wing dailies left standing--no equivalents of The Washington Times or the New York Post. Nor is there any left-wing equivalent of Richard Mellon Scaife or the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, ready to put lots of money where their far-right mouths are. Left-of-center foundations prefer to fund local and segmented projects.
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/fallows/jf2002-04-03/gitlin2.htm
Atlantic Unbound | Fallows@large | 2002.04.03
Subject: Re: The weirdness of being awash in media
We flatter ourselves when we conjure an "information society"—the term's a tribute our nervous system pays to our rationality. Even when we collect information, we feel—feel excited, sad, frightened, bored, tickled, masterful, all sorts of things. As image- and sound-consumers, we feel and aim to feel—shallowly, for the most part. Engineers and consumers alike who race toward the next wave of technologies are also juiced up by feeling (much as the decisions of technologists and investors have to be dressed up as rational calculations). Much as we fancy ourselves rational choosers—well, at least lots of academics and media professionals do—we spend much of our lives feeling ready to yield to the next feeling, each demanding little of us but that we sit at the ready, remote-control or Walkman in hand, finger poised at the radio scan button, looking for the next new thing, or at least the next next thing. Here is what links Fox and PBS, National Geographic and Maxim. Disposable feelings give alibis for social and political disengagement. Robert Putnam's argument on this score in Bowling Alone seems to me irrefutable, though obviously there are other factors involved.
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/fallows/jf2002-04-03/gitlin1.htm
Subject: Re: The weirdness of being awash in media
We flatter ourselves when we conjure an "information society"—the term's a tribute our nervous system pays to our rationality. Even when we collect information, we feel—feel excited, sad, frightened, bored, tickled, masterful, all sorts of things. As image- and sound-consumers, we feel and aim to feel—shallowly, for the most part. Engineers and consumers alike who race toward the next wave of technologies are also juiced up by feeling (much as the decisions of technologists and investors have to be dressed up as rational calculations). Much as we fancy ourselves rational choosers—well, at least lots of academics and media professionals do—we spend much of our lives feeling ready to yield to the next feeling, each demanding little of us but that we sit at the ready, remote-control or Walkman in hand, finger poised at the radio scan button, looking for the next new thing, or at least the next next thing. Here is what links Fox and PBS, National Geographic and Maxim. Disposable feelings give alibis for social and political disengagement. Robert Putnam's argument on this score in Bowling Alone seems to me irrefutable, though obviously there are other factors involved.
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/fallows/jf2002-04-03/gitlin1.htm
Wednesday, June 05, 2002
ZDNet: Tech Update: Security / Ex-cop: Police beat by old technology
Technology for law enforcement is elusive, expensive, and for the most part, non-existent. There are many issues. One of the biggest is connectivity. It is not like Hollywood would have you believe. On CSI, the officers know everything that a suspect is doing and can make positive identification with computers in an instant. Bah! Not even close! Remember the railroad killer? He traveled around using the rail lines and murdering as he went. No positive identification was made there, either. He was stopped at least three times by law enforcement after he was a murder suspect--but wasn't detained. Why? There was no way to positively identify the suspect. In fact, he was deported and then had to be extradited back into the United States to stand trial. Oops.
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2869134,00.html
Technology for law enforcement is elusive, expensive, and for the most part, non-existent. There are many issues. One of the biggest is connectivity. It is not like Hollywood would have you believe. On CSI, the officers know everything that a suspect is doing and can make positive identification with computers in an instant. Bah! Not even close! Remember the railroad killer? He traveled around using the rail lines and murdering as he went. No positive identification was made there, either. He was stopped at least three times by law enforcement after he was a murder suspect--but wasn't detained. Why? There was no way to positively identify the suspect. In fact, he was deported and then had to be extradited back into the United States to stand trial. Oops.
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2869134,00.html
Jihad and Veritas
Tomorrow Harvard's many communities will come together for the university's 351st commencement exercises. Yet it will be a campus divided, with the division made sharper when a university committee announced that my classmate and friend, Zayed Yasin, would deliver a commencement speech entitled, "Of Faith and Citizenship: My American Jihad."
That single emotive word — jihad — has driven our usually civil campus into a frenzy. Many of my classmates have fervently opposed the administration's choice of speaker, asking the university to have Mr. Yasin removed from the program because the terrorists of Sept. 11 justified their actions in the name of jihad, which they define as a holy war against infidels.
Mr. Yasin, however, will be talking about a different jihad — one known to Muslims, but often lost in political discourse. In the Koran, jihad refers to the internal struggle with oneself to do what is right and does not entail violence. It is a universal ideal; Mr. Yasin is calling it by its Arabic name and asks his fellow graduates to apply this principle to their new lives.
Still, it would be terribly näive not to recognize the semantic tension here. A virtuous religious word has been perversely used by the likes of Osama bin Laden and his followers and now conjures up images of planes crashing into buildings. Some say that because jihad now means such drastically different things to different people, we should avoid such a divisive theme at a celebratory event.
But if we were to deny Mr. Yasin his use of the word, we would lose an opportunity to right some of the wrongs we have committed since Sept. 11. In the aftermath of the horrific attacks, our nation became a less tolerant place. Suddenly racial profiling of Muslims, Arabs and South Asians became a good idea; detaining immigrants without due process became a necessary evil; and Islam became the ideology of our enemies. Harvard, a bastion of liberal thinking, was not immune to this wave of anger. Columns vilifying Islam and Muslims appeared in the Harvard student newspaper, and many of my classmates callously referred to Islam as a violent religion.
Jihad http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/05/opinion/05HASA.html
Tomorrow Harvard's many communities will come together for the university's 351st commencement exercises. Yet it will be a campus divided, with the division made sharper when a university committee announced that my classmate and friend, Zayed Yasin, would deliver a commencement speech entitled, "Of Faith and Citizenship: My American Jihad."
That single emotive word — jihad — has driven our usually civil campus into a frenzy. Many of my classmates have fervently opposed the administration's choice of speaker, asking the university to have Mr. Yasin removed from the program because the terrorists of Sept. 11 justified their actions in the name of jihad, which they define as a holy war against infidels.
Mr. Yasin, however, will be talking about a different jihad — one known to Muslims, but often lost in political discourse. In the Koran, jihad refers to the internal struggle with oneself to do what is right and does not entail violence. It is a universal ideal; Mr. Yasin is calling it by its Arabic name and asks his fellow graduates to apply this principle to their new lives.
Still, it would be terribly näive not to recognize the semantic tension here. A virtuous religious word has been perversely used by the likes of Osama bin Laden and his followers and now conjures up images of planes crashing into buildings. Some say that because jihad now means such drastically different things to different people, we should avoid such a divisive theme at a celebratory event.
But if we were to deny Mr. Yasin his use of the word, we would lose an opportunity to right some of the wrongs we have committed since Sept. 11. In the aftermath of the horrific attacks, our nation became a less tolerant place. Suddenly racial profiling of Muslims, Arabs and South Asians became a good idea; detaining immigrants without due process became a necessary evil; and Islam became the ideology of our enemies. Harvard, a bastion of liberal thinking, was not immune to this wave of anger. Columns vilifying Islam and Muslims appeared in the Harvard student newspaper, and many of my classmates callously referred to Islam as a violent religion.
Jihad http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/05/opinion/05HASA.html
After Latest Bombing, Israelis Want Arafat Stripped of Powers
The blast came on the 35th anniversary of the start of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which resulted in Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and it came a day after George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, met with Mr. Arafat in a bid to persuade him to reform his security agencies and crack down on violence.
The extremist group Islamic Jihad, an opponent of any peace treaty that preserves a Jewish state here, claimed responsibility for the bombing, which also injured dozens of people.
Palestinian terrorists, committed to continuing the conflict with Israel, have repeatedly greeted high-level peace initiatives by the Bush administration with bursts of violence.
After today's bombing, right-wing ministers in Mr. Sharon's government called for Israeli forces to fully reoccupy the West Bank.
Megiddo, a strategic crossroads bloodied for 4,000 years by battles among Egyptians, Israelites, Greeks, Crusaders and others, gave rise to the concept of Armageddon, some archeologists say.
The stretch of road passing through this junction skirts the West Bank and a few Israeli Arab villages, and it has been the scene of several previous attacks. Mickey Harel, the driver of the bus, who escaped by jumping at a window, said he had had three previous brushes with terrorist violence.
Today's suicide bombing was the sixth suicide attack in Israel since a large-scale military offensive in the West Bank in April, which Mr. Sharon said was intended to uproot the "terrorist infrastructure" in Palestinian cities and refugee camps. After a lull in attacks during and immediately following the offensive, they have now resumed, continuing even as Israeli troops have been conducting daily raids into Palestinian cities and villages to carry out arrests and uncover explosives.
After Latest Bombing, Israelis Want Arafat Stripped of Powers
The blast came on the 35th anniversary of the start of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which resulted in Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and it came a day after George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, met with Mr. Arafat in a bid to persuade him to reform his security agencies and crack down on violence.
The extremist group Islamic Jihad, an opponent of any peace treaty that preserves a Jewish state here, claimed responsibility for the bombing, which also injured dozens of people.
Palestinian terrorists, committed to continuing the conflict with Israel, have repeatedly greeted high-level peace initiatives by the Bush administration with bursts of violence.
After today's bombing, right-wing ministers in Mr. Sharon's government called for Israeli forces to fully reoccupy the West Bank.
Megiddo, a strategic crossroads bloodied for 4,000 years by battles among Egyptians, Israelites, Greeks, Crusaders and others, gave rise to the concept of Armageddon, some archeologists say.
The stretch of road passing through this junction skirts the West Bank and a few Israeli Arab villages, and it has been the scene of several previous attacks. Mickey Harel, the driver of the bus, who escaped by jumping at a window, said he had had three previous brushes with terrorist violence.
Today's suicide bombing was the sixth suicide attack in Israel since a large-scale military offensive in the West Bank in April, which Mr. Sharon said was intended to uproot the "terrorist infrastructure" in Palestinian cities and refugee camps. After a lull in attacks during and immediately following the offensive, they have now resumed, continuing even as Israeli troops have been conducting daily raids into Palestinian cities and villages to carry out arrests and uncover explosives.
After Latest Bombing, Israelis Want Arafat Stripped of Powers
CNEWA - Christian Emigration from Middle East - Part I - Palestine
According to a report by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, one of Israel’s most serious areas of discrimination is toward the state’s Arab citizens. For example, only 10 percent of the funds budgeted for helping youth in distress is earmarked for Arab youths, although they constitute about 22 percent of this population. The report also finds that residents of East Jerusalem are systematically denied building permits; homes built without permits are destroyed.
In addition to discrimination against its own Arab citizens, the state of Israel controls the supplies of water and electricity allotted to the West Bank and Gaza. Although the Palestinian Authority is responsible for direct management, Israeli authorities have the ability to constrain or divert supplies at any time. The water and sanitation situation in the West Bank has worsened considerably in the past year.
According to Oxfam GB’s Emergency Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Program, the Bethlehem area has been the most affected of all areas occupied by the Israeli Defense Force in terms of sanitation and water. The city relies on supplies originating in Israel. As a result, roughly 90 percent of the Bethlehem population has had its water supply cut for temporary periods. Household reservoirs have been damaged by stray gunfire and Israeli bulldozers have broken water pipes in many locations throughout the Bethlehem area. It is estimated that more than 50,000 people have been negatively affected.
In the West Bank there is also a severe lack of opportunity for recreational and community activities, a condition which contributes, in part, to emigration decisions. To date, very few public facilities or organized community activities exist. For example, public parks, sporting opportunities and cultural gatherings are extremely rare. The need for these extracurricular activities for Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza and particularly for youth cannot be underestimated. Such opportunities would provide a crucial outlet for recreation, creative expression and development in a society where such opportunities are rare and where political conflict threatens psychological health. Boredom and frustration, too, are a result of confined lives – these factors also contribute to higher emigration among the Christian community and the Palestinian population as a whole.
http://www.cnewa.org/news-christemigrat-part1.htm
According to a report by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, one of Israel’s most serious areas of discrimination is toward the state’s Arab citizens. For example, only 10 percent of the funds budgeted for helping youth in distress is earmarked for Arab youths, although they constitute about 22 percent of this population. The report also finds that residents of East Jerusalem are systematically denied building permits; homes built without permits are destroyed.
In addition to discrimination against its own Arab citizens, the state of Israel controls the supplies of water and electricity allotted to the West Bank and Gaza. Although the Palestinian Authority is responsible for direct management, Israeli authorities have the ability to constrain or divert supplies at any time. The water and sanitation situation in the West Bank has worsened considerably in the past year.
According to Oxfam GB’s Emergency Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Program, the Bethlehem area has been the most affected of all areas occupied by the Israeli Defense Force in terms of sanitation and water. The city relies on supplies originating in Israel. As a result, roughly 90 percent of the Bethlehem population has had its water supply cut for temporary periods. Household reservoirs have been damaged by stray gunfire and Israeli bulldozers have broken water pipes in many locations throughout the Bethlehem area. It is estimated that more than 50,000 people have been negatively affected.
In the West Bank there is also a severe lack of opportunity for recreational and community activities, a condition which contributes, in part, to emigration decisions. To date, very few public facilities or organized community activities exist. For example, public parks, sporting opportunities and cultural gatherings are extremely rare. The need for these extracurricular activities for Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza and particularly for youth cannot be underestimated. Such opportunities would provide a crucial outlet for recreation, creative expression and development in a society where such opportunities are rare and where political conflict threatens psychological health. Boredom and frustration, too, are a result of confined lives – these factors also contribute to higher emigration among the Christian community and the Palestinian population as a whole.
http://www.cnewa.org/news-christemigrat-part1.htm
Harper's Magazine: A Gaza Diary, p. 1 of 14
In Beit Agron I run into familiar Israeli press officials. They are efficient: our press cards are ready in minutes. They welcome me back. They ask about New York. They hand out cell-phone numbers and tell us to call if we need assistance. Joe and I get up to leave, but we are blocked at the door by a man in his early sixties wearing a gray leisure suit. His name is Yusuf Samir, and he is a reporter for the Israeli Arabic service. He tells us that he was kidnapped recently in the West Bank by Palestinian gunmen and held for several weeks.
"The Palestinians are animals," he says. "They are less than human. They are savage beasts. Israel is a land of love. People in Israel love one another. But the Palestinians do not love. They hate. They should be destroyed. We should put fire to them. We should take back Beit Jala, Bethlehem, take back all the land and get rid of them."
The Israeli press officers are beaming.
"He is a great man, a poet," one says as we leave. "He is a man of peace."
http://www.harpers.org/online/gaza_diary/?pg=1
In Beit Agron I run into familiar Israeli press officials. They are efficient: our press cards are ready in minutes. They welcome me back. They ask about New York. They hand out cell-phone numbers and tell us to call if we need assistance. Joe and I get up to leave, but we are blocked at the door by a man in his early sixties wearing a gray leisure suit. His name is Yusuf Samir, and he is a reporter for the Israeli Arabic service. He tells us that he was kidnapped recently in the West Bank by Palestinian gunmen and held for several weeks.
"The Palestinians are animals," he says. "They are less than human. They are savage beasts. Israel is a land of love. People in Israel love one another. But the Palestinians do not love. They hate. They should be destroyed. We should put fire to them. We should take back Beit Jala, Bethlehem, take back all the land and get rid of them."
The Israeli press officers are beaming.
"He is a great man, a poet," one says as we leave. "He is a man of peace."
http://www.harpers.org/online/gaza_diary/?pg=1
Tuesday, June 04, 2002
Arafat Presents Palestinian Security Plan to Tenet
The Palestinian leader appointed a 73-year-old general to head the new security array, but Israel said the proposed changes are largely cosmetic because Arafat, who has done little to rein in militants in the past, remains in charge. Some Palestinians also were skeptical, because the reform would still leave six different security branches.
The plan presented to Tenet calls for cutting in half the number of Palestinian security services. After restructuring, there would police, border guards, internal security and external security, military intelligence and Arafat's personal guard unit.
Israel was skeptical. ``Reforms that have no substantial change in strategy and policy are ... worthless,'' said Raanan Gissin, a Sharon adviser. Israel accuses Arafat of doing little to stop attacks or actually encouraging militants.
Palestinian officials said the new security chief is to be Maj. Gen. Ahmed Razak Yehiyeh, who was the commander of the Palestine Liberation Army before Arafat and his leadership returned to Gaza in 1994 and set up the Palestinian Authority. The PLA operated in Lebanon and other Arab countries as the military wing of Arafat's PLO.
Since 1994, Yehiyeh has not had a field command. Instead, he has been in charge of the Palestinian delegation in a joint council with Israel, designed to deal with security problems, a body that has met only rarely in recent years.
Yehiyeh's appointment was seen as a slap in the face to several current commanders, especially Dahlan, the powerful Gaza chief, who was hoping to take overall command. Some Palestinians said Arafat's appointment of the elderly general was a way of maintaining control himself.
Haider Abdel Shafi, a veteran Palestinian opposition figure and anti-corruption crusader, said the appointment ``disturbs me very much.''
In the West Bank, Israeli troops raided several Palestinian areas in search of suspected Palestinian militants. In one confrontation, a 16-year-old Palestinian was shot and killed by soldiers dispersing stone throwers, doctors said.
Near Nablus, Israeli soldiers opened fire at an armored vehicle carrying two photographers from the Reuters news agency. No one was hurt, but the vehicle was slightly damaged. The photographers said the vehicle was clearly marked as a press car. The Israeli military told Reuters it would check the incident, but the vehicle was apparently in a closed military zone.
Sharon reluctantly approved building a fence 65 miles long between part of the West Bank and Israel's narrowest sections, blocking the way from Palestinian towns on the unmarked line and Israeli cities a few miles away.
The cities, including Netanya and Hadera, have been frequent targets of Palestinian bombers, and residents have been pressuring their government to block access.
The fence is to run 68 miles from a point northeast of Tel Aviv to southeast of Haifa, a stretch of country parallel to the Mediterranean Sea. At some points, Israel's narrow coastal strip is only nine miles wide.
Gissin said work on the fence has begun. He said it would be a combination of different types of obstacles.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Palestinians.html
The Palestinian leader appointed a 73-year-old general to head the new security array, but Israel said the proposed changes are largely cosmetic because Arafat, who has done little to rein in militants in the past, remains in charge. Some Palestinians also were skeptical, because the reform would still leave six different security branches.
The plan presented to Tenet calls for cutting in half the number of Palestinian security services. After restructuring, there would police, border guards, internal security and external security, military intelligence and Arafat's personal guard unit.
Israel was skeptical. ``Reforms that have no substantial change in strategy and policy are ... worthless,'' said Raanan Gissin, a Sharon adviser. Israel accuses Arafat of doing little to stop attacks or actually encouraging militants.
Palestinian officials said the new security chief is to be Maj. Gen. Ahmed Razak Yehiyeh, who was the commander of the Palestine Liberation Army before Arafat and his leadership returned to Gaza in 1994 and set up the Palestinian Authority. The PLA operated in Lebanon and other Arab countries as the military wing of Arafat's PLO.
Since 1994, Yehiyeh has not had a field command. Instead, he has been in charge of the Palestinian delegation in a joint council with Israel, designed to deal with security problems, a body that has met only rarely in recent years.
Yehiyeh's appointment was seen as a slap in the face to several current commanders, especially Dahlan, the powerful Gaza chief, who was hoping to take overall command. Some Palestinians said Arafat's appointment of the elderly general was a way of maintaining control himself.
Haider Abdel Shafi, a veteran Palestinian opposition figure and anti-corruption crusader, said the appointment ``disturbs me very much.''
In the West Bank, Israeli troops raided several Palestinian areas in search of suspected Palestinian militants. In one confrontation, a 16-year-old Palestinian was shot and killed by soldiers dispersing stone throwers, doctors said.
Near Nablus, Israeli soldiers opened fire at an armored vehicle carrying two photographers from the Reuters news agency. No one was hurt, but the vehicle was slightly damaged. The photographers said the vehicle was clearly marked as a press car. The Israeli military told Reuters it would check the incident, but the vehicle was apparently in a closed military zone.
Sharon reluctantly approved building a fence 65 miles long between part of the West Bank and Israel's narrowest sections, blocking the way from Palestinian towns on the unmarked line and Israeli cities a few miles away.
The cities, including Netanya and Hadera, have been frequent targets of Palestinian bombers, and residents have been pressuring their government to block access.
The fence is to run 68 miles from a point northeast of Tel Aviv to southeast of Haifa, a stretch of country parallel to the Mediterranean Sea. At some points, Israel's narrow coastal strip is only nine miles wide.
Gissin said work on the fence has begun. He said it would be a combination of different types of obstacles.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Palestinians.html
Court Orders Militant Freed; Palestinian Leaders Balk
Late tonight, a statement issued on behalf of what was described as the Palestinian leadership said that while the leaders respected the court decision on Mr. Saadat, they would not carry it out in the current conditions, because "the spokesman for Sharon threatened to execute him."
A member of the Palestinian leadership said the leaders intended to keep Mr. Saadat in jail because "we are concerned about his safety."
The P.F.L.P. claimed responsibility for the killing of Mr. Zeevi, a far-right leader. The group said it was in retaliation for the assassination of Mr. Saadat's predecessor, Abu Ali Mustapha, who was killed by a rocket through his office window.
The Palestinian Authority's high court, sitting in Gaza, ordered the release of Mr. Saadat, one of six Palestinians who are under the watch of American and British monitors in a Palestinian prison in Jericho, under the agreement brokered by American and other international officials that freed Mr. Arafat from his compound in Ramallah after a five-week Israeli siege. There was, the court said, no evidence against Mr. Saadat, who was never formally charged with the crime.
Besides Mr. Saadat, four of the other prisoners in Jericho are P.F.L.P militants who were hastily convicted in an impromptu Palestinian court in Mr. Arafat's besieged compound for the shooting of the tourism minister. The fifth is Fuad Shobaki, a top Palestinian financial official implicated in the shipment of 50 tons of weapons aboard the freighter Karine A that was intercepted by Israel in January.
In Nablus, Israeli troops were in the fourth day of what seemed a second reoccupation, searching houses and shops for fugitives and bomb factories. Swaths of Arab land were confiscated by the army throughout the West Bank for protective barriers and fences. With the new fences, as with the ditch in Bethlehem at least five feet wide and deep topped with a pyramid of barbed wire, Israelis said they were "wrapping Jerusalem."
[Early on Tuesday, Israeli tanks and troops entered the West Bank city of Jenin and then withdrew about an hour later, Reuters reported, citing Palestinian officials and the Israeli military. The Israelis said the move was based on reports of the whereabouts of militants that turned out to be incorrect.]
On a ridgeline today in the southeastern part of Jerusalem conquered by Israel in 1967, a backhoe that had been digging through the night was giving way to the construction of fences. They will protect a multimillion-dollar Jewish development of hundreds of homes and a luxury hotel, which will sit on top of the old Arab village of Jabel Mukaber.
The sudden onset of construction — a neighborhood to Jews, a settlement to Arabs — touched two sensitive nerves. It continued both the expansion after 1967 of Jewish areas of Jerusalem into what had been Arab villages, making any final settlement of the dispute over Jerusalem more complex, as well as the overall expansion of Jewish settlements. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, the settler population (not including East Jerusalem) right after the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1993 was about 100,000. At the end of 2000 it was more than 190,000.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/04/international/middleeast/04MIDE.html
Late tonight, a statement issued on behalf of what was described as the Palestinian leadership said that while the leaders respected the court decision on Mr. Saadat, they would not carry it out in the current conditions, because "the spokesman for Sharon threatened to execute him."
A member of the Palestinian leadership said the leaders intended to keep Mr. Saadat in jail because "we are concerned about his safety."
The P.F.L.P. claimed responsibility for the killing of Mr. Zeevi, a far-right leader. The group said it was in retaliation for the assassination of Mr. Saadat's predecessor, Abu Ali Mustapha, who was killed by a rocket through his office window.
The Palestinian Authority's high court, sitting in Gaza, ordered the release of Mr. Saadat, one of six Palestinians who are under the watch of American and British monitors in a Palestinian prison in Jericho, under the agreement brokered by American and other international officials that freed Mr. Arafat from his compound in Ramallah after a five-week Israeli siege. There was, the court said, no evidence against Mr. Saadat, who was never formally charged with the crime.
Besides Mr. Saadat, four of the other prisoners in Jericho are P.F.L.P militants who were hastily convicted in an impromptu Palestinian court in Mr. Arafat's besieged compound for the shooting of the tourism minister. The fifth is Fuad Shobaki, a top Palestinian financial official implicated in the shipment of 50 tons of weapons aboard the freighter Karine A that was intercepted by Israel in January.
In Nablus, Israeli troops were in the fourth day of what seemed a second reoccupation, searching houses and shops for fugitives and bomb factories. Swaths of Arab land were confiscated by the army throughout the West Bank for protective barriers and fences. With the new fences, as with the ditch in Bethlehem at least five feet wide and deep topped with a pyramid of barbed wire, Israelis said they were "wrapping Jerusalem."
[Early on Tuesday, Israeli tanks and troops entered the West Bank city of Jenin and then withdrew about an hour later, Reuters reported, citing Palestinian officials and the Israeli military. The Israelis said the move was based on reports of the whereabouts of militants that turned out to be incorrect.]
On a ridgeline today in the southeastern part of Jerusalem conquered by Israel in 1967, a backhoe that had been digging through the night was giving way to the construction of fences. They will protect a multimillion-dollar Jewish development of hundreds of homes and a luxury hotel, which will sit on top of the old Arab village of Jabel Mukaber.
The sudden onset of construction — a neighborhood to Jews, a settlement to Arabs — touched two sensitive nerves. It continued both the expansion after 1967 of Jewish areas of Jerusalem into what had been Arab villages, making any final settlement of the dispute over Jerusalem more complex, as well as the overall expansion of Jewish settlements. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, the settler population (not including East Jerusalem) right after the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1993 was about 100,000. At the end of 2000 it was more than 190,000.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/04/international/middleeast/04MIDE.html
Mubarak to Press Bush on Palestinian Statehood
He said he was even prepared to follow in the footsteps of Anwar el-Sadat and travel to Israel, but not while killing continued and only if it would help clinch a deal. Otherwise, he said, "I am going to be insulted from here to here," gesturing from head to toes with his hand.
"I think to declare a state just theoretically like this and then to sit and negotiate what would be the borders, what about Jerusalem — I think it may work," Mr. Mubarak said. On the other hand, declaring a state on a fraction of the Palestinian lands seized by Israel in 1967 would only perpetuate tensions and lead to more "terror and violence," he said.
Speaking in English on Sunday at the presidential palace, which was ringed by tight security in a city flowering under the summer red of acacia trees, Mr. Mubarak said his proposals would be far more detailed than those outlined by Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.
That proposal was adopted by nations attending an Arab summit meeting in Beirut in March; it called for Israel to withdraw from all lands seized in the 1967 war in exchange for full normalization of relations with all Arab nations.
His proposal differs from others in that it would confer statehood on all Palestinian lands recognized by the United Nations before — not after — many difficult issues of exact boundaries, refugees, the division of Jerusalem and the dismantling of Israeli settlements are addressed.
The Egyptian president suggested that the proposal would give the Palestinians hope of achieving a state, a hope he indicated had recently been dashed by the actions of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel.
"This may be one of the proposals which will lead the two parties to sit and negotiate," he said. "Our intention is to lower the tension, and any idea which lessens the tension and violence, I support it, but it should be on a fair basis."
"To leave the problem of the Middle East to Arafat and Sharon alone, you will get nowhere," he said. "It should be a heavyweight country like the United States that should try to interfere, try to listen to this and that and in the end make the two parties make a conclusion."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/04/international/middleeast/04EGYP.html?pagewanted=all&position=top
He said he was even prepared to follow in the footsteps of Anwar el-Sadat and travel to Israel, but not while killing continued and only if it would help clinch a deal. Otherwise, he said, "I am going to be insulted from here to here," gesturing from head to toes with his hand.
"I think to declare a state just theoretically like this and then to sit and negotiate what would be the borders, what about Jerusalem — I think it may work," Mr. Mubarak said. On the other hand, declaring a state on a fraction of the Palestinian lands seized by Israel in 1967 would only perpetuate tensions and lead to more "terror and violence," he said.
Speaking in English on Sunday at the presidential palace, which was ringed by tight security in a city flowering under the summer red of acacia trees, Mr. Mubarak said his proposals would be far more detailed than those outlined by Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.
That proposal was adopted by nations attending an Arab summit meeting in Beirut in March; it called for Israel to withdraw from all lands seized in the 1967 war in exchange for full normalization of relations with all Arab nations.
His proposal differs from others in that it would confer statehood on all Palestinian lands recognized by the United Nations before — not after — many difficult issues of exact boundaries, refugees, the division of Jerusalem and the dismantling of Israeli settlements are addressed.
The Egyptian president suggested that the proposal would give the Palestinians hope of achieving a state, a hope he indicated had recently been dashed by the actions of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel.
"This may be one of the proposals which will lead the two parties to sit and negotiate," he said. "Our intention is to lower the tension, and any idea which lessens the tension and violence, I support it, but it should be on a fair basis."
"To leave the problem of the Middle East to Arafat and Sharon alone, you will get nowhere," he said. "It should be a heavyweight country like the United States that should try to interfere, try to listen to this and that and in the end make the two parties make a conclusion."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/04/international/middleeast/04EGYP.html?pagewanted=all&position=top
Rifts Plentiful as 9/11 Inquiry Begins
Early on Sept. 11, Senator Bob Graham and Representative Porter J. Goss were having a quiet breakfast meeting in the Capitol with the chief of Pakistani intelligence, Lt. Gen. Mehmood Ahmed. Mr. Graham and Mr. Goss, the chairmen of the two Congressional intelligence committees, were quizzing their guest about Osama bin Laden and other issues when an aide to Mr. Goss rushed in with a note.
A plane had just hit the World Trade Center. Mr. Goss furiously scribbled a reply, asking his aide to find out more. A few moments later, the aide came back with another note — a second plane had crashed into the trade center. "We're out of here," Mr. Goss announced.
Mr. Graham, a Florida Democrat, and Mr. Goss, a Florida Republican, have been immersed in the attacks ever since. On Tuesday, they begin joint oversight hearings to examine the painful subject of a colossal intelligence failure and who in the government knew what before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
A C.I.A. official said today that the agency had found proof — e-mail messages from January 2000 — that at least some F.B.I. officials had been told what the agency knew at the time about the two men.
But other officials said the agency failed to share with the bureau more significant information it learned later, including that the two men had visited the United States, one of them showing multiple entry stamps on his Saudi passport. Moreover, the C.I.A. did not tell the F.B.I. in December 2000 or January 2001 that the two men were linked to suspects in the attack on the Navy destroyer Cole.
Congressional critics of the two agencies — most notably Senator Richard C. Shelby, the Alabama Republican who is the party's ranking member on the Senate intelligence panel — chafe at the Graham-Goss alliance and yearn for a more freewheeling and aggressive investigation than the two Florida lawmakers seem likely to conduct.
"There are a lot of people on Capitol Hill who know that the American people want us to do a responsible, adult job in looking into this," Mr. Goss said in a recent interview. "I think that is the mood that has prevailed now. We have members from both sides thanking us for avoiding the partisan mines."
But their reticence has left a political vacuum, one others are stepping into. The staff of the joint committee has, for example, already conducted private interviews with Ms. Rowley.
Senator Tom Daschle, the majority leader, and other Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, are still pushing for an independent commission to conduct a separate investigation of Sept. 11, apparently out of a fear that the joint committee will not be aggressive enough.
Of course, Mr. Goss's belief in the gravity of the Sept. 11 review has not halted the typical Washington cycle of leak and counterleak. Today, the C.I.A. responded to the charges that it had waited too long to notify the F.B.I. about the two hijackers by disclosing that it had found e-mail traffic between C.I.A. and F.B.I. employees showing that the bureau was notified that a man named Khalid al-Midhar was about to attend a meeting in Malaysia.
The C.I.A. passed along Mr. Midhar's name and Saudi passport number to an F.B.I. official, according to agency records. In a Jan. 6, 2000, e-mail message between a C.I.A. employee and an F.B.I. official working for the counterterrorism center at C.I.A. headquarters, the C.I.A. employee noted that the bureau already had the information about Mr. Midhar.
"It wouldn't surprise me, however, if different people continue to ask you for updates, not having gotten the word that the F.B.I. already has the facts," the e-mail message said, according to the C.I.A.
A C.I.A. official said such correspondence about Mr. Midhar showed that "to say we held out information on him is wrong."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/04/politics/04INQU.html
Early on Sept. 11, Senator Bob Graham and Representative Porter J. Goss were having a quiet breakfast meeting in the Capitol with the chief of Pakistani intelligence, Lt. Gen. Mehmood Ahmed. Mr. Graham and Mr. Goss, the chairmen of the two Congressional intelligence committees, were quizzing their guest about Osama bin Laden and other issues when an aide to Mr. Goss rushed in with a note.
A plane had just hit the World Trade Center. Mr. Goss furiously scribbled a reply, asking his aide to find out more. A few moments later, the aide came back with another note — a second plane had crashed into the trade center. "We're out of here," Mr. Goss announced.
Mr. Graham, a Florida Democrat, and Mr. Goss, a Florida Republican, have been immersed in the attacks ever since. On Tuesday, they begin joint oversight hearings to examine the painful subject of a colossal intelligence failure and who in the government knew what before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
A C.I.A. official said today that the agency had found proof — e-mail messages from January 2000 — that at least some F.B.I. officials had been told what the agency knew at the time about the two men.
But other officials said the agency failed to share with the bureau more significant information it learned later, including that the two men had visited the United States, one of them showing multiple entry stamps on his Saudi passport. Moreover, the C.I.A. did not tell the F.B.I. in December 2000 or January 2001 that the two men were linked to suspects in the attack on the Navy destroyer Cole.
Congressional critics of the two agencies — most notably Senator Richard C. Shelby, the Alabama Republican who is the party's ranking member on the Senate intelligence panel — chafe at the Graham-Goss alliance and yearn for a more freewheeling and aggressive investigation than the two Florida lawmakers seem likely to conduct.
"There are a lot of people on Capitol Hill who know that the American people want us to do a responsible, adult job in looking into this," Mr. Goss said in a recent interview. "I think that is the mood that has prevailed now. We have members from both sides thanking us for avoiding the partisan mines."
But their reticence has left a political vacuum, one others are stepping into. The staff of the joint committee has, for example, already conducted private interviews with Ms. Rowley.
Senator Tom Daschle, the majority leader, and other Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, are still pushing for an independent commission to conduct a separate investigation of Sept. 11, apparently out of a fear that the joint committee will not be aggressive enough.
Of course, Mr. Goss's belief in the gravity of the Sept. 11 review has not halted the typical Washington cycle of leak and counterleak. Today, the C.I.A. responded to the charges that it had waited too long to notify the F.B.I. about the two hijackers by disclosing that it had found e-mail traffic between C.I.A. and F.B.I. employees showing that the bureau was notified that a man named Khalid al-Midhar was about to attend a meeting in Malaysia.
The C.I.A. passed along Mr. Midhar's name and Saudi passport number to an F.B.I. official, according to agency records. In a Jan. 6, 2000, e-mail message between a C.I.A. employee and an F.B.I. official working for the counterterrorism center at C.I.A. headquarters, the C.I.A. employee noted that the bureau already had the information about Mr. Midhar.
"It wouldn't surprise me, however, if different people continue to ask you for updates, not having gotten the word that the F.B.I. already has the facts," the e-mail message said, according to the C.I.A.
A C.I.A. official said such correspondence about Mr. Midhar showed that "to say we held out information on him is wrong."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/04/politics/04INQU.html
Egypt Warned U.S. of a Qaeda Plot, Mubarak Asserts
Egyptian intelligence warned American officials about a week before Sept. 11 that Osama bin Laden's network was in the advance stages of executing a significant operation against an American target, President Hosni Mubarak said in an interview on Sunday.
Using a secret agent they had recruited who was in close contact with the bin Laden organization, Mr. Mubarak said, his intelligence chiefs tried unsuccessfully to halt the operation.
Mr. Mubarak said his intelligence officials had no indication what the target would be and had no idea of the magnitude of the coming attack.
"We didn't know that such a thing could take place," he said, referring to the Sept. 11 attacks. "We thought it was an embassy, an airplane, something, the usual thing."
But, he added, to discover after the event that the terrorists were going to take airplanes and destroy buildings, "that is unbelievable."
Still, Mr. Mubarak's disclosure represents the first time a foreign leader has said that an intelligence service had penetrated Mr. bin Laden's network, Al Qaeda, to the extent that discussions about specific operations — and whether they could be halted or postponed — were under way.
Mr. Mubarak did not say whether he knew how American counterterrorism officials had reacted to the Egyptian warning, which a senior United States intelligence official denied was received. But Mr. Mubarak said he believed that security at the United States Embassy in Cairo was tightened in early September as a result of the warning.
"We informed them about everything," he said, referring to American intelligence officials.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/04/national/04WARN.html
Egyptian intelligence warned American officials about a week before Sept. 11 that Osama bin Laden's network was in the advance stages of executing a significant operation against an American target, President Hosni Mubarak said in an interview on Sunday.
Using a secret agent they had recruited who was in close contact with the bin Laden organization, Mr. Mubarak said, his intelligence chiefs tried unsuccessfully to halt the operation.
Mr. Mubarak said his intelligence officials had no indication what the target would be and had no idea of the magnitude of the coming attack.
"We didn't know that such a thing could take place," he said, referring to the Sept. 11 attacks. "We thought it was an embassy, an airplane, something, the usual thing."
But, he added, to discover after the event that the terrorists were going to take airplanes and destroy buildings, "that is unbelievable."
Still, Mr. Mubarak's disclosure represents the first time a foreign leader has said that an intelligence service had penetrated Mr. bin Laden's network, Al Qaeda, to the extent that discussions about specific operations — and whether they could be halted or postponed — were under way.
Mr. Mubarak did not say whether he knew how American counterterrorism officials had reacted to the Egyptian warning, which a senior United States intelligence official denied was received. But Mr. Mubarak said he believed that security at the United States Embassy in Cairo was tightened in early September as a result of the warning.
"We informed them about everything," he said, referring to American intelligence officials.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/04/national/04WARN.html
Excerpts From Interview With Egyptian President
We knew that something was going to happen against the U.S., and we informed the U.S.
We informed the United States about that [warning] but we didn't know that such a thing could take place. We thought it was an embassy, an airplane, something, the usual thing, but to realize they were going to take airplanes and destroy [buildings], that is unbelievable. We didn't realize that what happened on Sept. 11 could happen in this way at all. Nobody would ever think of that, not even in the U.S. . . . But we knew that something was going to happen. We have good contact with the intelligence continuously, and I think there was some activity in which some element would bring the information and we started to use them, to tell them, "can you stop this, or delay this now, the time is not suitable," trying to give ourselves time to realize what may take place. I think this man, this agent, phoned the group of bin Laden, I don't remember who it was. He told them, "No, no, no, it's difficult to stop it." It was one week before. Because the wheels were going on, we couldn't stop it. One week or four days, a very short time. The wheels going on. All the information has been given to them [the United States]. That is why you were making tight security on the embassy. Even if you were intelligent, you couldn't imagine they were going to do such a thing.
Something is going to happen in the U.S. . . . to the United States, maybe inside the U.S., maybe in airplane, maybe in embassies. We couldn't know. We tried to know where, but this information we didn't reach.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/04/national/04MTEX.html
We knew that something was going to happen against the U.S., and we informed the U.S.
We informed the United States about that [warning] but we didn't know that such a thing could take place. We thought it was an embassy, an airplane, something, the usual thing, but to realize they were going to take airplanes and destroy [buildings], that is unbelievable. We didn't realize that what happened on Sept. 11 could happen in this way at all. Nobody would ever think of that, not even in the U.S. . . . But we knew that something was going to happen. We have good contact with the intelligence continuously, and I think there was some activity in which some element would bring the information and we started to use them, to tell them, "can you stop this, or delay this now, the time is not suitable," trying to give ourselves time to realize what may take place. I think this man, this agent, phoned the group of bin Laden, I don't remember who it was. He told them, "No, no, no, it's difficult to stop it." It was one week before. Because the wheels were going on, we couldn't stop it. One week or four days, a very short time. The wheels going on. All the information has been given to them [the United States]. That is why you were making tight security on the embassy. Even if you were intelligent, you couldn't imagine they were going to do such a thing.
Something is going to happen in the U.S. . . . to the United States, maybe inside the U.S., maybe in airplane, maybe in embassies. We couldn't know. We tried to know where, but this information we didn't reach.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/04/national/04MTEX.html
Monday, June 03, 2002
Privacy Is Common Issue Online
Although 70 percent of online consumers say they are worried about online privacy, the study found, just 40 percent read Web site privacy statements, and 82 percent would give personal information to new shopping sites in exchange for a chance to win $100 in a sweepstakes.
The business attitudes toward online privacy are slightly more difficult to quantify, but Rob Leathern, who wrote the Jupiter report, said that most companies budgeted less than $40,000 annually for online privacy initiatives.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/03/technology/03ECOM.html
Although 70 percent of online consumers say they are worried about online privacy, the study found, just 40 percent read Web site privacy statements, and 82 percent would give personal information to new shopping sites in exchange for a chance to win $100 in a sweepstakes.
The business attitudes toward online privacy are slightly more difficult to quantify, but Rob Leathern, who wrote the Jupiter report, said that most companies budgeted less than $40,000 annually for online privacy initiatives.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/03/technology/03ECOM.html
Military Raids Are Best Path to Security, Israelis Say
With Israeli troops regularly invading Palestinian areas, the notion of cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian security forces, a foundation of the 1993 Oslo accords, has all but been abandoned. But it is precisely such cooperation that Mr. Tenet will try to revive through a consolidation of the Palestinian security agencies intended to make them more effective in blocking violence against Israel.
But there were few signs of conciliation on the ground, where Israeli forces continued their search-and-arrest operation in Nablus.
In the Balata refugee camp, on the southern outskirts of the city, Palestinians reported that Israeli troops blew up the family home of Mahmoud Titi, the local commander of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, who was killed last month by Israeli tank shells. The army said the house held a large explosives lab that contained chemicals, hundreds of pipe bombs, a dozen gas-canister bombs and an antitank charge. The Aksa Martyrs Brigades have claimed responsibility for several suicide bombings and shooting attacks in Israel.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/03/international/middleeast/03ISRA.html
With Israeli troops regularly invading Palestinian areas, the notion of cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian security forces, a foundation of the 1993 Oslo accords, has all but been abandoned. But it is precisely such cooperation that Mr. Tenet will try to revive through a consolidation of the Palestinian security agencies intended to make them more effective in blocking violence against Israel.
But there were few signs of conciliation on the ground, where Israeli forces continued their search-and-arrest operation in Nablus.
In the Balata refugee camp, on the southern outskirts of the city, Palestinians reported that Israeli troops blew up the family home of Mahmoud Titi, the local commander of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, who was killed last month by Israeli tank shells. The army said the house held a large explosives lab that contained chemicals, hundreds of pipe bombs, a dozen gas-canister bombs and an antitank charge. The Aksa Martyrs Brigades have claimed responsibility for several suicide bombings and shooting attacks in Israel.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/03/international/middleeast/03ISRA.html
Palestinian Court Orders Release of Militant Wanted by Israel
In a statement, the cabinet said it respected the decision by the High Court of Justice but said the ruling to release Mr. Sa'adat "cannot be implemented under these circumstances because of Israeli threats." From Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on down, Israeli officials had swiftly warned that no good would befall Mr. Sa'adt if he were set free.
The Israelis accuse him of ordering the murder of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi, an advocate of "transfer" or expulsion of Arabs, gunned down in an East Jerusalem hotel in retaliation for the assassination of Mr. Sa'adat's predecessor, Abu Ali Mustapha, by a rocket to his head through his office window. The shooting was claimed by the P.F.L.P. But, sitting in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority's High Court ordered the release of Mr. Sa'adat, who was actually never formally charged. He is one of six Palestinians watched by American and British monitors in a Palestinian prison in Jericho under the agreement brokered by American and international officials that freed Mr. Arafat after five weeks. There was, the court said, no evidence.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/03/international/middleeast/03CND-ISRAEL.html
In a statement, the cabinet said it respected the decision by the High Court of Justice but said the ruling to release Mr. Sa'adat "cannot be implemented under these circumstances because of Israeli threats." From Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on down, Israeli officials had swiftly warned that no good would befall Mr. Sa'adt if he were set free.
The Israelis accuse him of ordering the murder of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi, an advocate of "transfer" or expulsion of Arabs, gunned down in an East Jerusalem hotel in retaliation for the assassination of Mr. Sa'adat's predecessor, Abu Ali Mustapha, by a rocket to his head through his office window. The shooting was claimed by the P.F.L.P. But, sitting in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority's High Court ordered the release of Mr. Sa'adat, who was actually never formally charged. He is one of six Palestinians watched by American and British monitors in a Palestinian prison in Jericho under the agreement brokered by American and international officials that freed Mr. Arafat after five weeks. There was, the court said, no evidence.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/03/international/middleeast/03CND-ISRAEL.html
Study Shows Building Prisons Did Not Prevent Repeat Crimes
The report found that 67 percent of inmates released from state prisons in 1994 committed at least one serious new crime within three years. That is 5 percent higher than among inmates released in 1983.
Criminologists generally agree that the prison-building binge of the last 25 years, in which the number of Americans incarcerated quadrupled to almost two million, has helped reduce the crime rate simply by keeping criminals off the streets. There has been more debate about whether longer sentences and the increase in the number of prisoners have also helped to deter people from committing crimes. The new report, some crime experts say, suggests that the answer is no.
"The main thing this report shows is that our experiment with building lots more prisons as a deterrent to crime has not worked," said Joan Petersilia, a professor of criminology at the University of California at Irvine and an expert on parole.
A likely reason for the increase in recidivism, Professor Petersilia said, is that state governments, to save money and to be seen as tough on crime, cut back on rehabilitation programs, like drug treatment, vocational education and classes to prepare prisoners for life at home.
Only about 15 percent of state prison inmates are enrolled in academic or rehabilitation classes, she said.
The report indicates that the first year after an inmate is released is critical to his or her success in returning to civilian life. For example, the study found that two-thirds of the inmates who were rearrested were rearrested within 12 months of their release.
In addition, the report found that the number of times prisoners had been arrested was the best predictor of whether they would commit more crimes after being released and how quickly they would return to their criminal ways.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/03/national/03CRIM.html
The report found that 67 percent of inmates released from state prisons in 1994 committed at least one serious new crime within three years. That is 5 percent higher than among inmates released in 1983.
Criminologists generally agree that the prison-building binge of the last 25 years, in which the number of Americans incarcerated quadrupled to almost two million, has helped reduce the crime rate simply by keeping criminals off the streets. There has been more debate about whether longer sentences and the increase in the number of prisoners have also helped to deter people from committing crimes. The new report, some crime experts say, suggests that the answer is no.
"The main thing this report shows is that our experiment with building lots more prisons as a deterrent to crime has not worked," said Joan Petersilia, a professor of criminology at the University of California at Irvine and an expert on parole.
A likely reason for the increase in recidivism, Professor Petersilia said, is that state governments, to save money and to be seen as tough on crime, cut back on rehabilitation programs, like drug treatment, vocational education and classes to prepare prisoners for life at home.
Only about 15 percent of state prison inmates are enrolled in academic or rehabilitation classes, she said.
The report indicates that the first year after an inmate is released is critical to his or her success in returning to civilian life. For example, the study found that two-thirds of the inmates who were rearrested were rearrested within 12 months of their release.
In addition, the report found that the number of times prisoners had been arrested was the best predictor of whether they would commit more crimes after being released and how quickly they would return to their criminal ways.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/03/national/03CRIM.html
The Search Engine Report, June 3, 2002, Number 67
In This Issue
Search Engine Strategies Arrives In Sydney, Coming To California
LookSmart Hit With Potential Class Action Lawsuit Over Submission Program
LookSmart Aims To Mend Fences
RealNames To Close After Losing Microsoft
Google Tops In "Search Hours" Ratings
-- (full story online, link provided)
Search Engine Resources
SearchDay Articles
List Info (Subscribing/Unsubscribing)
http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/current.html
In This Issue
Search Engine Strategies Arrives In Sydney, Coming To California
LookSmart Hit With Potential Class Action Lawsuit Over Submission Program
LookSmart Aims To Mend Fences
RealNames To Close After Losing Microsoft
Google Tops In "Search Hours" Ratings
-- (full story online, link provided)
Search Engine Resources
SearchDay Articles
List Info (Subscribing/Unsubscribing)
http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/current.html
Free (and nearly free) tools for project management
Without the right tools, managing a project is a time-consuming task that can easily become disorganized and unwieldy. What’s worse, if you’re in charge of designing a solution and running the team, but you’re not an official project manager, or if your company doesn’t see the value of such a position, you may not have the funds to get the tools you need.
http://builder.com.com/article.jhtml?id=u00420020529dol01.htm&fromtm=e601-1
Without the right tools, managing a project is a time-consuming task that can easily become disorganized and unwieldy. What’s worse, if you’re in charge of designing a solution and running the team, but you’re not an official project manager, or if your company doesn’t see the value of such a position, you may not have the funds to get the tools you need.
http://builder.com.com/article.jhtml?id=u00420020529dol01.htm&fromtm=e601-1
Sunday, June 02, 2002
Two Conservatives Tell Bush They Oppose Plan for Police
The two conservatives, David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, and Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, wrote President Bush on Friday to complain that the plan under review by Attorney General John Ashcroft would set a dangerous precedent by empowering local jurisdictions to enforce many federal laws.
"If local police are to enforce our immigration laws, will they soon be required to seek out and apprehend those who violate our environmental laws, or the Americans with Disabilities Act as well?" the letter said.
The letter was also signed by Raymond L. Flynn, a former ambassador to the Vatican who now leads the Catholic Alliance, a national Roman Catholic political organization.
A White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said that aides had not seen the letter and that it was premature to speculate on the outcome of the Justice Department proposal.
If adopted, the proposal would allow local police officers to make arrests for civil violations of immigration law, like overstaying visas.
A 1996 opinion by the office of legal counsel at the Justice Department precluded local officers from tracking down illegal immigrants, and a draft memorandum last November by the same office supported that conclusion. Federal agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service typically handle such cases.
Many police departments have voiced concern that the Justice Department proposal would jeopardize their relations with immigrants, who would be less willing to report crimes.
In their letter to Mr. Bush, Mr. Keene, Mr. Norquist and Mr. Flynn wrote that the proposal would strain already overburdened police departments and create unnecessary policies.
"This is not just bad policy, it is not really needed," they said. "Mechanisms already exist to foster federal-local cooperation in this area."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/politics/02ENFO.html
The two conservatives, David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, and Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, wrote President Bush on Friday to complain that the plan under review by Attorney General John Ashcroft would set a dangerous precedent by empowering local jurisdictions to enforce many federal laws.
"If local police are to enforce our immigration laws, will they soon be required to seek out and apprehend those who violate our environmental laws, or the Americans with Disabilities Act as well?" the letter said.
The letter was also signed by Raymond L. Flynn, a former ambassador to the Vatican who now leads the Catholic Alliance, a national Roman Catholic political organization.
A White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said that aides had not seen the letter and that it was premature to speculate on the outcome of the Justice Department proposal.
If adopted, the proposal would allow local police officers to make arrests for civil violations of immigration law, like overstaying visas.
A 1996 opinion by the office of legal counsel at the Justice Department precluded local officers from tracking down illegal immigrants, and a draft memorandum last November by the same office supported that conclusion. Federal agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service typically handle such cases.
Many police departments have voiced concern that the Justice Department proposal would jeopardize their relations with immigrants, who would be less willing to report crimes.
In their letter to Mr. Bush, Mr. Keene, Mr. Norquist and Mr. Flynn wrote that the proposal would strain already overburdened police departments and create unnecessary policies.
"This is not just bad policy, it is not really needed," they said. "Mechanisms already exist to foster federal-local cooperation in this area."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/politics/02ENFO.html
Geneva Voters to Take a Practice Run for Internet Elections
E-democracy will get its first real test on the European continent as 16,000 university students in Geneva use the Internet to vote on whether to legalize abortion and on other issues on this Sunday's ballot.
As part of their direct democracy, the Swiss routinely vote as many as four times a year to decide a variety of social and political questions. However, decreasing voter turnout, locally and nationwide, prompted officials to start an electronic voting project last year to put voting methods in tune with technology.
"This is the first time we've tried this in a real situation," said Sonia Lardi, a spokeswoman for the online project. If the pilot works without any major technical glitches, officials hope to hold Europe's first binding vote over the Internet early next year.
The votes being cast electronically in the Geneva trial this weekend will not be included in the official tally.
Hewlett-Packard, whose European headquarters is in Geneva, provided a computer network server for the online voting trial, in which 16,000 students were allowed to vote over a two-week period that ended on Saturday. The results of the trial, Mr. Hensler said, will be announced in the next 10 days.
The students were issued special voting cards with unique PIN codes to prevent electoral fraud. Then, after students went to their voting sites — their own computers or computers at cybercafes, for example — they called up the program's Web site, which displayed an electronic copy of the conventional voting sheet.
Students then registered their voting-card code numbers, each good for one use only, and the date, Mr. Hensler explained. If the computer recognized it as a valid number, the student could vote and then complete the process by verifying personal data, like birth dates.
The entire process was monitored by two different Swiss firms under contract to the trial project.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/international/europe/02SWIS.html
E-democracy will get its first real test on the European continent as 16,000 university students in Geneva use the Internet to vote on whether to legalize abortion and on other issues on this Sunday's ballot.
As part of their direct democracy, the Swiss routinely vote as many as four times a year to decide a variety of social and political questions. However, decreasing voter turnout, locally and nationwide, prompted officials to start an electronic voting project last year to put voting methods in tune with technology.
"This is the first time we've tried this in a real situation," said Sonia Lardi, a spokeswoman for the online project. If the pilot works without any major technical glitches, officials hope to hold Europe's first binding vote over the Internet early next year.
The votes being cast electronically in the Geneva trial this weekend will not be included in the official tally.
Hewlett-Packard, whose European headquarters is in Geneva, provided a computer network server for the online voting trial, in which 16,000 students were allowed to vote over a two-week period that ended on Saturday. The results of the trial, Mr. Hensler said, will be announced in the next 10 days.
The students were issued special voting cards with unique PIN codes to prevent electoral fraud. Then, after students went to their voting sites — their own computers or computers at cybercafes, for example — they called up the program's Web site, which displayed an electronic copy of the conventional voting sheet.
Students then registered their voting-card code numbers, each good for one use only, and the date, Mr. Hensler explained. If the computer recognized it as a valid number, the student could vote and then complete the process by verifying personal data, like birth dates.
The entire process was monitored by two different Swiss firms under contract to the trial project.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/international/europe/02SWIS.html
Downturn and Shift in Population Feed Boom in White-Collar Crime
Even as the rate of murder, robbery, assault and other types of violent and property crimes has declined or flattened in the last decade, there has been a marked increase in accounting and corporate infractions, fraud in health care, government procurement and bankruptcy, identity theft, illegal corporate espionage and intellectual property piracy, federal and state officials say.
With increasing frequency, white-collar corruption seems to be the crime of choice of the baby boom generation.
A week does not go by without news of investigations of blue-chip and start-up companies, the most prominent recently include Adelphia, Enron, Global Crossing, Kmart, Qwest Communications International, Schering-Plough, WorldCom and Xerox. Many of those companies' accounting firms are also facing intense scrutiny, perhaps most notably Arthur Andersen, which is in the middle of a criminal trial in Houston.
Corporate corruption cases are inevitable during the trough of the boom-bust economic cycle, when disgruntled investors and company whistle-blowers work with prosecutors and the support of an outraged public to unveil the excesses of market euphoria. The phenomenon last occurred during the savings and loan crisis a decade ago, but it also happened after a wave of corporate scandals in the 1970's, and to a lesser extent during the Great Depression.
But this wave is different. Some statistics indicate that these fraud cases were actually on the rise during the boom cycle, and criminal law experts say that the nature and types of these crimes differ significantly from those of earlier periods.
And while the sociology of crime is imprecise, experts attribute that changing nature of crime to demographic shifts and economic forces.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/business/02CRIM.html?todaysheadlines
Even as the rate of murder, robbery, assault and other types of violent and property crimes has declined or flattened in the last decade, there has been a marked increase in accounting and corporate infractions, fraud in health care, government procurement and bankruptcy, identity theft, illegal corporate espionage and intellectual property piracy, federal and state officials say.
With increasing frequency, white-collar corruption seems to be the crime of choice of the baby boom generation.
A week does not go by without news of investigations of blue-chip and start-up companies, the most prominent recently include Adelphia, Enron, Global Crossing, Kmart, Qwest Communications International, Schering-Plough, WorldCom and Xerox. Many of those companies' accounting firms are also facing intense scrutiny, perhaps most notably Arthur Andersen, which is in the middle of a criminal trial in Houston.
Corporate corruption cases are inevitable during the trough of the boom-bust economic cycle, when disgruntled investors and company whistle-blowers work with prosecutors and the support of an outraged public to unveil the excesses of market euphoria. The phenomenon last occurred during the savings and loan crisis a decade ago, but it also happened after a wave of corporate scandals in the 1970's, and to a lesser extent during the Great Depression.
But this wave is different. Some statistics indicate that these fraud cases were actually on the rise during the boom cycle, and criminal law experts say that the nature and types of these crimes differ significantly from those of earlier periods.
And while the sociology of crime is imprecise, experts attribute that changing nature of crime to demographic shifts and economic forces.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/business/02CRIM.html?todaysheadlines
Arafat Said to Offer Cabinet Posts to Hamas Members
Yasser Arafat has offered Cabinet posts to Hamas and other militant groups involved in suicide attacks against Israelis as part of a government reshuffle he plans to announce in coming days, Palestinians said Sunday.
While three other radical groups have turned down the Palestinian leader's offer, saying they don't want to belong to a government that's willing to negotiate with Israel, Hamas is still weighing the proposal, the group said.
It would mark the first time in his eight years as chairman of the Palestinian Authority that Arafat formally brought Hamas into government -- a move likely to be strongly opposed by Israel and the United States, which both regard Hamas as a terrorist group.
``We are still consulting with our colleagues inside and outside the homeland and our final response will be declared before the end of this week,'' Hamas spokesman Ismail Hania said of Arafat's proposal.
After 20 months of Mideast fighting that has left Palestinian institutions and their economy in shambles, Arafat has come under strong pressure to restructure the Palestinian government. But his definition of reform is likely to differ sharply from what his critics, including the United States and Israel, hope to see.
``The question is whether the Palestinians are taking this seriously,'' said Danny Seaman, an Israeli government spokesman. Referring to an alliance with Hamas, Seaman said, ``If this is the direction that Arafat takes, he shouldn't be surprised at the attitude that Israel takes in response.''
In negotiations with leading Palestinian factions over the past few weeks, Arafat has been looking at reducing his current 32-member Cabinet to 18 or 19 posts, and bringing in a number of new faces, aides say. The Cabinet has to date had limited power, generally falling in line with decisions by Arafat.
``President Arafat is conducting serious and intensive consultations with Palestinian factions and academics in order to establish a new government,'' said Ahmed Qureia, the speaker of parliament. ``We hope the Palestinian Authority will declare the new government very soon.''
During more than three decades as the Palestinian leader, Arafat has always preferred to rule by consensus and is again looking to bring other factions into the government, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
In Israel, a Hamas-Arafat alliance would be interpreted as an indication that the Palestinians are determined to continue the violent conflict.
However, from Arafat's perspective, having radical groups inside the government could also make them easier to control. It was not clear whether Arafat was making compliance with his call for an end to suicide attacks a condition of Hamas entering the government.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Palestinians.html
Yasser Arafat has offered Cabinet posts to Hamas and other militant groups involved in suicide attacks against Israelis as part of a government reshuffle he plans to announce in coming days, Palestinians said Sunday.
While three other radical groups have turned down the Palestinian leader's offer, saying they don't want to belong to a government that's willing to negotiate with Israel, Hamas is still weighing the proposal, the group said.
It would mark the first time in his eight years as chairman of the Palestinian Authority that Arafat formally brought Hamas into government -- a move likely to be strongly opposed by Israel and the United States, which both regard Hamas as a terrorist group.
``We are still consulting with our colleagues inside and outside the homeland and our final response will be declared before the end of this week,'' Hamas spokesman Ismail Hania said of Arafat's proposal.
After 20 months of Mideast fighting that has left Palestinian institutions and their economy in shambles, Arafat has come under strong pressure to restructure the Palestinian government. But his definition of reform is likely to differ sharply from what his critics, including the United States and Israel, hope to see.
``The question is whether the Palestinians are taking this seriously,'' said Danny Seaman, an Israeli government spokesman. Referring to an alliance with Hamas, Seaman said, ``If this is the direction that Arafat takes, he shouldn't be surprised at the attitude that Israel takes in response.''
In negotiations with leading Palestinian factions over the past few weeks, Arafat has been looking at reducing his current 32-member Cabinet to 18 or 19 posts, and bringing in a number of new faces, aides say. The Cabinet has to date had limited power, generally falling in line with decisions by Arafat.
``President Arafat is conducting serious and intensive consultations with Palestinian factions and academics in order to establish a new government,'' said Ahmed Qureia, the speaker of parliament. ``We hope the Palestinian Authority will declare the new government very soon.''
During more than three decades as the Palestinian leader, Arafat has always preferred to rule by consensus and is again looking to bring other factions into the government, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
In Israel, a Hamas-Arafat alliance would be interpreted as an indication that the Palestinians are determined to continue the violent conflict.
However, from Arafat's perspective, having radical groups inside the government could also make them easier to control. It was not clear whether Arafat was making compliance with his call for an end to suicide attacks a condition of Hamas entering the government.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Palestinians.html
Key Palestinian Security Posts Becoming Harder to Fill
…Yasir Arafat is preparing to combine his multiple security forces, cutting the number of overlapping agencies and installing new leadership, diplomats here say.
But the pressure for Palestinian reform may be having unintended consequences. Some top officials whom Israelis regard as possible successors to Mr. Arafat are shying away from the security jobs, fearing that such posts could make them appear to be doing the Israelis' bidding.
Mr. Arafat and his top aides are scrambling to address, or at least to appear to address, rising Palestinian and international demands for reform. With the Bush administration emphasizing security changes over democratic ones, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, is expected to arrive here this weekend to oversee a shake-up of the dozen or so Palestinian security forces, from military intelligence in the West Bank to naval police in Gaza.
Palestinian reformers say that Israeli demands for change will only interfere with their efforts, making them look like servants of Israel's interests rather than the interests of Palestinians.
For the same reason, running an enhanced Palestinian security agency is not quite the political springboard it might seem to be. With no political progress on the horizon and Palestinians strongly favoring the conflict with Israel, "the job of cleaning up the security services and going after Hamas is not exactly a job with a great political future," said one Western diplomat, referring to an Islamic militant group.
Israel has all but erased negotiated boundaries between territory controlled by its forces and territory controlled by Palestinian security. It has stopped calling some of its raids into Palestinian-controlled territory "incursions" and begun referring to them as "patrols," a word suggesting not invasion but routine police work.
Early today, Israeli troops again raided the Dheisheh refugee camp inside Bethlehem, arresting one man before withdrawing, the army said. Israeli troops continued to operate in the Balata refugee camp in Nablus, where they have detained more than 100 men for questioning and arrested about 30 since Friday, the army said.
Israel has taken other significant security measures, including tightening its blockades of Palestinian areas. This week, Israeli forces dug a trench more than 5 feet deep and 5 feet wide through the olive groves surrounding much of Bethlehem. Beside the trench, coils of shiny barbed wire are stacked another six feet high, and a dirt road has been bulldozed outside the new fence.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/international/middleeast/02MIDE.html
…Yasir Arafat is preparing to combine his multiple security forces, cutting the number of overlapping agencies and installing new leadership, diplomats here say.
But the pressure for Palestinian reform may be having unintended consequences. Some top officials whom Israelis regard as possible successors to Mr. Arafat are shying away from the security jobs, fearing that such posts could make them appear to be doing the Israelis' bidding.
Mr. Arafat and his top aides are scrambling to address, or at least to appear to address, rising Palestinian and international demands for reform. With the Bush administration emphasizing security changes over democratic ones, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, is expected to arrive here this weekend to oversee a shake-up of the dozen or so Palestinian security forces, from military intelligence in the West Bank to naval police in Gaza.
Palestinian reformers say that Israeli demands for change will only interfere with their efforts, making them look like servants of Israel's interests rather than the interests of Palestinians.
For the same reason, running an enhanced Palestinian security agency is not quite the political springboard it might seem to be. With no political progress on the horizon and Palestinians strongly favoring the conflict with Israel, "the job of cleaning up the security services and going after Hamas is not exactly a job with a great political future," said one Western diplomat, referring to an Islamic militant group.
Israel has all but erased negotiated boundaries between territory controlled by its forces and territory controlled by Palestinian security. It has stopped calling some of its raids into Palestinian-controlled territory "incursions" and begun referring to them as "patrols," a word suggesting not invasion but routine police work.
Early today, Israeli troops again raided the Dheisheh refugee camp inside Bethlehem, arresting one man before withdrawing, the army said. Israeli troops continued to operate in the Balata refugee camp in Nablus, where they have detained more than 100 men for questioning and arrested about 30 since Friday, the army said.
Israel has taken other significant security measures, including tightening its blockades of Palestinian areas. This week, Israeli forces dug a trench more than 5 feet deep and 5 feet wide through the olive groves surrounding much of Bethlehem. Beside the trench, coils of shiny barbed wire are stacked another six feet high, and a dirt road has been bulldozed outside the new fence.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/international/middleeast/02MIDE.html
Ulster Leaders Give Pep Talk to 2 Sides in the Mideast
A group of Israeli and Palestinian politicians have met for unusual talks in the English Midlands, joined by figures who negotiated Northern Ireland's breakthrough peace accord of 1998.
"We are able to meet here because it is impossible to meet back home with the siege and the checkpoints," said Yasir Abed Rabbo, the Palestinian minister of information and culture. "London has become closer to Ramallah for us than Israel is."
Yossi Beilin, former Israeli justice minister and advocate of the peace process between Palestinians and Israelis that began in Oslo, saw parallels between the Middle East and Northern Ireland. He said he thought progress in the Middle East had been stalled by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's insistence on an end to violence before any talks could begin.
In Northern Ireland, he said, the peace process moved forward only once the precondition of full disarmament was removed. "It tells me, beware of preconditions," he said. "You can become their slaves."
Much of the conversation at the two days of talks, which were sponsored by the newspaper The Guardian, centered on how the progress in Northern Ireland might inform the stalemated process in the Middle East. But the Israelis attending were not representatives of the Sharon government, or in a position to negotiate with authority.
Still, the participants saw merit in resuming contacts. "The clear message for the Israeli public from the Irish experience and the experience we've had here after many years of talking to each other, and many months of not talking to each other, is that there is a Palestinian partner and a Palestinian peace camp," said Avraham Burg, speaker of the Parliament. "I hope the Palestinians will realize there is an Israeli peace partner and an Israeli peace camp."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/international/middleeast/02IREL.html
A group of Israeli and Palestinian politicians have met for unusual talks in the English Midlands, joined by figures who negotiated Northern Ireland's breakthrough peace accord of 1998.
"We are able to meet here because it is impossible to meet back home with the siege and the checkpoints," said Yasir Abed Rabbo, the Palestinian minister of information and culture. "London has become closer to Ramallah for us than Israel is."
Yossi Beilin, former Israeli justice minister and advocate of the peace process between Palestinians and Israelis that began in Oslo, saw parallels between the Middle East and Northern Ireland. He said he thought progress in the Middle East had been stalled by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's insistence on an end to violence before any talks could begin.
In Northern Ireland, he said, the peace process moved forward only once the precondition of full disarmament was removed. "It tells me, beware of preconditions," he said. "You can become their slaves."
Much of the conversation at the two days of talks, which were sponsored by the newspaper The Guardian, centered on how the progress in Northern Ireland might inform the stalemated process in the Middle East. But the Israelis attending were not representatives of the Sharon government, or in a position to negotiate with authority.
Still, the participants saw merit in resuming contacts. "The clear message for the Israeli public from the Irish experience and the experience we've had here after many years of talking to each other, and many months of not talking to each other, is that there is a Palestinian partner and a Palestinian peace camp," said Avraham Burg, speaker of the Parliament. "I hope the Palestinians will realize there is an Israeli peace partner and an Israeli peace camp."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/international/middleeast/02IREL.html
U.S. Web Browsers Continue a Global Turn
It was not surprising that many Americans took a greater interest in foreign affairs after the attacks on the United States last September. But what does surprise foreign policy experts is that an eagerness to comprehend the world remains high nearly nine months later.
Several leading foreign policy organizations say their Web sites are getting several million hits a month, up substantially from the period before Sept. 11, and polling organizations say they are finding strong support for greater international cooperation on major issues.
"People are still searching for some answers to some big questions," said Marshall Bouton, president of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, an independent organization with about 6,500 members. The council, with one-third of its members under 40 years old and its membership drawn from a broad spectrum of backgrounds, will publish a survey of American opinions on foreign affairs this summer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/international/02NATI.html
It was not surprising that many Americans took a greater interest in foreign affairs after the attacks on the United States last September. But what does surprise foreign policy experts is that an eagerness to comprehend the world remains high nearly nine months later.
Several leading foreign policy organizations say their Web sites are getting several million hits a month, up substantially from the period before Sept. 11, and polling organizations say they are finding strong support for greater international cooperation on major issues.
"People are still searching for some answers to some big questions," said Marshall Bouton, president of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, an independent organization with about 6,500 members. The council, with one-third of its members under 40 years old and its membership drawn from a broad spectrum of backgrounds, will publish a survey of American opinions on foreign affairs this summer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/international/02NATI.html
Israel Keeps Grip on Nablus; July Talks Date Raised
The army maintained its grip on Nablus and the adjacent Balata refugee camp -- both bastions of Palestinian militants -- on the third day of a sweep the Israeli government said was aimed at thwarting more suicide bombings in its cities.
Israel waged a six-week military offensive against militant bombers across the West Bank that ended on May 10 with claims of success, but attacks resumed two weeks later and troops have raided Palestinian towns repeatedly since.
The raids, coupled with tightened closures and ad hoc curfews, have all but wiped out boundaries between territory under Palestinian self-rule and that occupied by Israel, negotiated under interim peace deals during the 1990s.
The Palestinian Authority says such conditions will make it difficult to carry out democratic reforms and rein in security organs linked to violence -- conditions set by Israel for reviving talks on a final peace envisaging a Palestinian state.
Israeli police said troops in Nablus had also arrested eight foreigners -- seven of them international peace activists supporting Palestinians -- and a journalist identified as Jordanian by the Israeli human rights group Gush Shalom.
A police spokesman said deportation of the activists had begun, while the newsman's case would be handled separately.
Palestinian sources said six students, including four women, were detained in an overnight army raid on the dormitories of al-Najar University in Nablus. Israel Radio quoted military sources as saying two of the women were plotting suicide bombings and that one had an explosives belt.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-mideast.html
The army maintained its grip on Nablus and the adjacent Balata refugee camp -- both bastions of Palestinian militants -- on the third day of a sweep the Israeli government said was aimed at thwarting more suicide bombings in its cities.
Israel waged a six-week military offensive against militant bombers across the West Bank that ended on May 10 with claims of success, but attacks resumed two weeks later and troops have raided Palestinian towns repeatedly since.
The raids, coupled with tightened closures and ad hoc curfews, have all but wiped out boundaries between territory under Palestinian self-rule and that occupied by Israel, negotiated under interim peace deals during the 1990s.
The Palestinian Authority says such conditions will make it difficult to carry out democratic reforms and rein in security organs linked to violence -- conditions set by Israel for reviving talks on a final peace envisaging a Palestinian state.
Israeli police said troops in Nablus had also arrested eight foreigners -- seven of them international peace activists supporting Palestinians -- and a journalist identified as Jordanian by the Israeli human rights group Gush Shalom.
A police spokesman said deportation of the activists had begun, while the newsman's case would be handled separately.
Palestinian sources said six students, including four women, were detained in an overnight army raid on the dormitories of al-Najar University in Nablus. Israel Radio quoted military sources as saying two of the women were plotting suicide bombings and that one had an explosives belt.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-mideast.html
Israel Says Land Seizures Defensive
The Israeli army is quietly taking over West Bank land privately owned by Palestinians in what it says is a temporary move to protect its citizens from militants. But Palestinians -- mindful that similar tactics were once used to establish Jewish settlements -- fear they will never get their land back.
According to Israeli military documents, copies of which were obtained by The Associated Press, some of the land seized is in areas where officials want to build a fortified fence to keep Palestinian militants from entering Israel. Other documents indicate Israel is trying to create buffers between Jewish enclaves and Palestinian towns deep within the West Bank -- including this town of Salfit, which is surrounded by 17 large and small settlements.
Critics say the scattered and in some cases sizable seizures could carve up the West Bank in a way that would make it difficult for the Palestinians to create a viable state on land Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast War.
The Israeli army says the seizures are necessary to counter suicide bombers. ``There is a military need to command some areas for security reasons in order to control and observe areas where threats emanate from,'' said Lt. Col. Olivier Rafowicz, a military spokesman. ``This is not annexation of territory.''
Khalil Tufakji, the Palestinian Authority's chief cartographer, has mapped out recent seizures that include long, narrow strips of land along the invisible line dividing Israel from the West Bank.
West of Jenin, the Palestinian city that has produced more than 20 suicide bombers, another 27 square miles of land was taken. South of the Palestinian town of Tulkarem, 3 square miles was taken.
The two patches, both close to the border with Israel, constitute just over 1 percent of the entire West Bank.
Aside from the buffer areas, some confiscations have recently occurred deeper inside the West Bank, according to copies of documents provided to AP by Palestinian officials and lawyers and authenticated by the Israeli army.
Such is the case in Salfit in the central West Bank where Mohamed Salim Alkim's 15 acres were seized and his olive groves and apple orchards uprooted by bulldozers.
The town, ringed by 17 Jewish settlements, is suspected to be the home of Palestinian militants who target settlers. Recently, the Israeli army said it discovered a bomb-making factory here.
As a result, Salfit has been hit by missiles, tank shelling, gunbattles, house demolitions and arrests.
All its access roads have been sealed by the military. Soldiers, tanks and bulldozers encircle the area.
So to get to where his fields once were, the 66-year-old Alkim, whose face and hands have been weathered by the Middle Eastern sun and years of physical work, walks on foot for several hundred yards across a stretch of biblical land dotted with wild flowers and shrub.
Standing on a breezy hilltop, Alkim points to the commanding Jewish settlement of Ariel where suburban homes sprung up next to Salfit 25 years ago. Ariel is expanding, Salfit's acreage is shrinking. There is no relationship between the two communities -- just animosity
In 1967, Israel captured the West Bank and began building Jewish settlements there. Today, some 200,000 settlers live in communities built on territory claimed by Palestinians.
Alkim, 66, wants his property back -- he wants to leave it to his 12 children. But he doesn't think Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat will be able to get it for him. ``The only way is by force,'' he said.
Salfit may look empty and worthless, but under the rocky, untamed surroundings lies a treasure in this thirsty land -- water. Salfit, which means 'Basket of Grapes,' is situated near several aquifers that, according to Palestinian lore, have been a source of contention since 800 A.D.
Manal Hazan, of the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, is trying to help Salfit reclaim its land. So far, the army has responded favorably to a written appeal to freeze construction of a road on the seized land.
``To a certain degree this was a success, but I don't think the farmers will get their land back. It's true the orders have expiration dates but they are always renewed,'' she said.
Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian official in charge of local governments, said more than a dozen mayors and village elders have received land seizure notices from the army in recent months.
The AP obtained several letters, some dated as recently as April, and signed by Israel's military commander in the West Bank.
In some cases the one-page letters, written in Hebrew -- which most Arabs cannot read -- were posted at village entrances. They begin: ``By the authority vested in me as the Israeli army commander of Judea and Samaria, and as I believe it is a military necessity given the special security circumstances now prevailing in the area, I hereby order the following: ... .''
The letters include the number of plots and the period -- ranging from one to four years -- they will remain seized.
In one letter, dated April 24, the army said it was taking a swath of land around Faron, Taibeh, al Ras and Kafr Sur -- four West Bank villages close to Israel -- that amounted to 4.74 miles by 56-66 feet. In a second letter, dated the same day, the army said it would be taking another tract of 1.35 miles by 56 feet from Faron.
``We have stacks of these letters,'' Erekat said. ``They're taking land around Jenin, Salfit, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron and the Jordan Valley.'' He accused Israel of ``racing to implement unilateral policies.''
Researchers say the current seizures are reminiscent of the method Israel used to get land for settlements until the Supreme Court ordered it to halt the practice in 1979.
``After '79, Israel continued from time to time to take land for military purposes in order to build bypass roads, army bases or checkpoints, but not for settlements,'' said Yehezkel Lein, a researcher with the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem which documents land confiscations.
Since the latest Palestinian uprising began, he said, the army has had to build checkpoints to enforce their closure of towns and villages, and the settlers ``need bypass roads for their bypass roads.''
Landowners can challenge an order in a military court and the letters also say property holders ``are eligible to request information on compensation and user fees.''
But practically no one does.
On the Net:
www.salfeet.org
www.idf.il
www.acri.org.il
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Palestinian-Losing-Land.html
The Israeli army is quietly taking over West Bank land privately owned by Palestinians in what it says is a temporary move to protect its citizens from militants. But Palestinians -- mindful that similar tactics were once used to establish Jewish settlements -- fear they will never get their land back.
According to Israeli military documents, copies of which were obtained by The Associated Press, some of the land seized is in areas where officials want to build a fortified fence to keep Palestinian militants from entering Israel. Other documents indicate Israel is trying to create buffers between Jewish enclaves and Palestinian towns deep within the West Bank -- including this town of Salfit, which is surrounded by 17 large and small settlements.
Critics say the scattered and in some cases sizable seizures could carve up the West Bank in a way that would make it difficult for the Palestinians to create a viable state on land Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast War.
The Israeli army says the seizures are necessary to counter suicide bombers. ``There is a military need to command some areas for security reasons in order to control and observe areas where threats emanate from,'' said Lt. Col. Olivier Rafowicz, a military spokesman. ``This is not annexation of territory.''
Khalil Tufakji, the Palestinian Authority's chief cartographer, has mapped out recent seizures that include long, narrow strips of land along the invisible line dividing Israel from the West Bank.
West of Jenin, the Palestinian city that has produced more than 20 suicide bombers, another 27 square miles of land was taken. South of the Palestinian town of Tulkarem, 3 square miles was taken.
The two patches, both close to the border with Israel, constitute just over 1 percent of the entire West Bank.
Aside from the buffer areas, some confiscations have recently occurred deeper inside the West Bank, according to copies of documents provided to AP by Palestinian officials and lawyers and authenticated by the Israeli army.
Such is the case in Salfit in the central West Bank where Mohamed Salim Alkim's 15 acres were seized and his olive groves and apple orchards uprooted by bulldozers.
The town, ringed by 17 Jewish settlements, is suspected to be the home of Palestinian militants who target settlers. Recently, the Israeli army said it discovered a bomb-making factory here.
As a result, Salfit has been hit by missiles, tank shelling, gunbattles, house demolitions and arrests.
All its access roads have been sealed by the military. Soldiers, tanks and bulldozers encircle the area.
So to get to where his fields once were, the 66-year-old Alkim, whose face and hands have been weathered by the Middle Eastern sun and years of physical work, walks on foot for several hundred yards across a stretch of biblical land dotted with wild flowers and shrub.
Standing on a breezy hilltop, Alkim points to the commanding Jewish settlement of Ariel where suburban homes sprung up next to Salfit 25 years ago. Ariel is expanding, Salfit's acreage is shrinking. There is no relationship between the two communities -- just animosity
In 1967, Israel captured the West Bank and began building Jewish settlements there. Today, some 200,000 settlers live in communities built on territory claimed by Palestinians.
Alkim, 66, wants his property back -- he wants to leave it to his 12 children. But he doesn't think Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat will be able to get it for him. ``The only way is by force,'' he said.
Salfit may look empty and worthless, but under the rocky, untamed surroundings lies a treasure in this thirsty land -- water. Salfit, which means 'Basket of Grapes,' is situated near several aquifers that, according to Palestinian lore, have been a source of contention since 800 A.D.
Manal Hazan, of the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, is trying to help Salfit reclaim its land. So far, the army has responded favorably to a written appeal to freeze construction of a road on the seized land.
``To a certain degree this was a success, but I don't think the farmers will get their land back. It's true the orders have expiration dates but they are always renewed,'' she said.
Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian official in charge of local governments, said more than a dozen mayors and village elders have received land seizure notices from the army in recent months.
The AP obtained several letters, some dated as recently as April, and signed by Israel's military commander in the West Bank.
In some cases the one-page letters, written in Hebrew -- which most Arabs cannot read -- were posted at village entrances. They begin: ``By the authority vested in me as the Israeli army commander of Judea and Samaria, and as I believe it is a military necessity given the special security circumstances now prevailing in the area, I hereby order the following: ... .''
The letters include the number of plots and the period -- ranging from one to four years -- they will remain seized.
In one letter, dated April 24, the army said it was taking a swath of land around Faron, Taibeh, al Ras and Kafr Sur -- four West Bank villages close to Israel -- that amounted to 4.74 miles by 56-66 feet. In a second letter, dated the same day, the army said it would be taking another tract of 1.35 miles by 56 feet from Faron.
``We have stacks of these letters,'' Erekat said. ``They're taking land around Jenin, Salfit, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron and the Jordan Valley.'' He accused Israel of ``racing to implement unilateral policies.''
Researchers say the current seizures are reminiscent of the method Israel used to get land for settlements until the Supreme Court ordered it to halt the practice in 1979.
``After '79, Israel continued from time to time to take land for military purposes in order to build bypass roads, army bases or checkpoints, but not for settlements,'' said Yehezkel Lein, a researcher with the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem which documents land confiscations.
Since the latest Palestinian uprising began, he said, the army has had to build checkpoints to enforce their closure of towns and villages, and the settlers ``need bypass roads for their bypass roads.''
Landowners can challenge an order in a military court and the letters also say property holders ``are eligible to request information on compensation and user fees.''
But practically no one does.
On the Net:
www.salfeet.org
www.idf.il
www.acri.org.il
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Palestinian-Losing-Land.html
SettlementsThe intensity of settlements in Salfeet Governorate shows that this area suffers more than any other Palestinian areas. 17 Israeli settlements were built on our confiscated lands with 40.000 settlers. In this governorate we find the biggest West Bank settlement called Ariel constructed on the lands of Salfeet, Kefel Hareth, Marda. This settlement is considered by the Israelis as the Capital of Sameria. The Barqan Settlement built in our governorate on the lands of the villages of Broqeen and Hareth is the biggest industrial settlement.
The objective of this policy is to Israelite the area and annex it to Israel. In addition, many national roads were implemented dividing this governorate and confiscating more of its lands. The Israeli occupational policy in this governorate caused miserable life: many people lost their land, which supported them economically. The Palestinian towns are being stock by the settlements and seem like dispersed isolated cantons. This is one of the Israeli objectives of settlements: stop and freeze the growth of the Palestinian people by keeping them in the bottom of the bottle.
In order to supply those settlements with different services, the Israelis have excavated four main artesian water wells in our confiscated land; confiscating our water and preventing us from excavating wells for our own leaving the Palestinian towns without water.
In addition , those settlements causes the major environmental pollution threatening both people and nature; the settlements sewage water, solid waste and the factories chemical remainings are being left in our fields passing from our towns contaminating our lives.
http://www.salfeet.org/settlements.htm
The objective of this policy is to Israelite the area and annex it to Israel. In addition, many national roads were implemented dividing this governorate and confiscating more of its lands. The Israeli occupational policy in this governorate caused miserable life: many people lost their land, which supported them economically. The Palestinian towns are being stock by the settlements and seem like dispersed isolated cantons. This is one of the Israeli objectives of settlements: stop and freeze the growth of the Palestinian people by keeping them in the bottom of the bottle.
In order to supply those settlements with different services, the Israelis have excavated four main artesian water wells in our confiscated land; confiscating our water and preventing us from excavating wells for our own leaving the Palestinian towns without water.
In addition , those settlements causes the major environmental pollution threatening both people and nature; the settlements sewage water, solid waste and the factories chemical remainings are being left in our fields passing from our towns contaminating our lives.
http://www.salfeet.org/settlements.htm
Saturday, June 01, 2002
Lost in Translation at the F.B.I.
Less than a week after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I responded to the F.B.I.'s calls for Arabic translators. I know of a half-dozen other Middle Eastern studies graduates who also applied — Ph.D.s who, like me, are proficient in one or more Arabic dialects, as well as in Modern Standard Arabic. Ultimately — dismayed by what seemed to us the agency's flawed understanding of what proficiency in Arabic means — none of us pursued our candidacies.
I applied less than a week after Sept. 11 but wasn't called for the four-and-a-half hour translation test until January. It wasn't until February that I sat for a four-hour interview and polygraph test. The F.B.I. was then to begin a six- to eight-month background check. At the earliest, I might have started translating more than a year after I applied.
The slow pace, however, wasn't the most unsettling characteristic of the process. There was something more worrisome: The F.B.I.'s Arabic translation test simply does not measure all the language skills needed for intelligence gathering focused on Arabic speakers.
The Arabic-language test — copyrighted in 1994 by the Defense Language Institute, according to the back of my exam booklet — was solely in Modern Standard Arabic, the Arabic most frequently studied at American universities. This is the form used for official speeches and in the news media in Arab countries — but almost never in conversation. It differs substantially from the spoken varieties of Arabic in vocabulary, syntax and idioms — enough so that a non-native speaker who learned only Modern Standard Arabic would not be able to understand Arabic speakers talking to one another.
The regional dialects also differ from one another — varying considerably from one end of the Arabic-speaking world (in Morocco) to the other (in Oman). The dialects are, for some Arabic speakers, mutually unintelligible. (Once, I mistakenly gave a Cairo taxi driver directions in Moroccan Arabic, and he responded: "Ich spreche kein Deutsch.")
These varieties of Arabic are the language of the market, the home and the street for the world's 200 million Arabic speakers. Yet no colloquial Arabic, in any dialect, appeared anywhere on the F.B.I.'s Arabic translation test, which included a listening-comprehension section.
During my post-exam interview, I tried to offer some feedback about the test's failure to measure skills in everyday spoken Arabic, but the interviewer brusquely moved on to his next question. Nor was there a chance for me to name the two Arabic dialects in which I am proficient. The interview is scripted; there is no room for unscripted interaction. All the other Middle East studies applicants with whom I spoke said they, too, noticed the test's shortcoming but couldn't find an opening to comment on it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/01/opinion/01PORT.html
Less than a week after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I responded to the F.B.I.'s calls for Arabic translators. I know of a half-dozen other Middle Eastern studies graduates who also applied — Ph.D.s who, like me, are proficient in one or more Arabic dialects, as well as in Modern Standard Arabic. Ultimately — dismayed by what seemed to us the agency's flawed understanding of what proficiency in Arabic means — none of us pursued our candidacies.
I applied less than a week after Sept. 11 but wasn't called for the four-and-a-half hour translation test until January. It wasn't until February that I sat for a four-hour interview and polygraph test. The F.B.I. was then to begin a six- to eight-month background check. At the earliest, I might have started translating more than a year after I applied.
The slow pace, however, wasn't the most unsettling characteristic of the process. There was something more worrisome: The F.B.I.'s Arabic translation test simply does not measure all the language skills needed for intelligence gathering focused on Arabic speakers.
The Arabic-language test — copyrighted in 1994 by the Defense Language Institute, according to the back of my exam booklet — was solely in Modern Standard Arabic, the Arabic most frequently studied at American universities. This is the form used for official speeches and in the news media in Arab countries — but almost never in conversation. It differs substantially from the spoken varieties of Arabic in vocabulary, syntax and idioms — enough so that a non-native speaker who learned only Modern Standard Arabic would not be able to understand Arabic speakers talking to one another.
The regional dialects also differ from one another — varying considerably from one end of the Arabic-speaking world (in Morocco) to the other (in Oman). The dialects are, for some Arabic speakers, mutually unintelligible. (Once, I mistakenly gave a Cairo taxi driver directions in Moroccan Arabic, and he responded: "Ich spreche kein Deutsch.")
These varieties of Arabic are the language of the market, the home and the street for the world's 200 million Arabic speakers. Yet no colloquial Arabic, in any dialect, appeared anywhere on the F.B.I.'s Arabic translation test, which included a listening-comprehension section.
During my post-exam interview, I tried to offer some feedback about the test's failure to measure skills in everyday spoken Arabic, but the interviewer brusquely moved on to his next question. Nor was there a chance for me to name the two Arabic dialects in which I am proficient. The interview is scripted; there is no room for unscripted interaction. All the other Middle East studies applicants with whom I spoke said they, too, noticed the test's shortcoming but couldn't find an opening to comment on it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/01/opinion/01PORT.html
Court Overturns Law Mandating Internet Filters for Public Libraries
In a powerfully worded but sometimes wistful opinion, Chief Judge Edward R. Becker of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, wrote that the three-judge panel hearing the case was "sympathetic" to the government's goal of using technology to protect children from the worst of the Internet.
But, he wrote in the 195-page opinion, "Ultimately this outcome, devoutly to be wished, is not available in this less than best of all possible worlds."
The law at issue, the Children's Internet Protection Act of 2001, was Congress's third effort since 1996 to shield children from pornography carried over the Internet. As with the two earlier versions, this one ran afoul of constitutional protections.
The act required schools and libraries to install a "technology protection measure," like Internet filters, to prevent access to child pornography and materials considered obscene or "harmful to minors." Libraries and schools that did not comply would lose federal subsidies for financing Internet access
The law included provisions for a special three-judge panel to hear any legal challenges to it. Along with Chief Judge Becker, Judges John P. Fullam and Harvey Bartle III of Federal District Court served on the panel. Judge Becker was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, Judge Bartle was appointed by President George H. W. Bush, and Judge Fullam was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
The decision comes a month before a Congressionally imposed deadline for libraries to install filters or lose the federal Internet financing.
The appellate court's decision addressed only the provisions of the law affecting libraries; schools are still subject to the law's provisions.
The libraries and other plaintiffs presented numerous examples of legitimate sites that had been erroneously blocked by the four most popular filtering programs. The three-judge panel mentioned many of those blocking errors in its opinion, including sites covering topics in education, medicine, politics and religion.
Other sites the filters blocked, the panel noted, included the Knights of Columbus Council 4828 in Fallon, Nev.; a site for Tenzin Palmo, a Buddhist nun; a site that promotes federalism in Uganda; and the Lesbian and Gay Havurah of the Jewish Community Center of Long Beach, Calif.
The panel called filters "blunt instruments" because of their propensity to overblock legitimate sites and underblock objectionable sites.
"We find that it is currently impossible, given the Internet's size, rate of growth, rate of change and architecture, and given the state of the art of automated classification systems, to develop a filter that neither underblocks nor overblocks a substantial amount of speech," the opinion stated.
The panel said that libraries could use less restrictive alternatives to filters, like setting policies on what users could view on the Internet, or offering parents filters for when their children use computers.
The government had argued that the filtering software was effective enough to block most of the objectionable material, and that the law did not require a perfect performance. Government lawyers also contended that libraries restrict all manner of materials in the normal course of buying books.
But the court ruled that mandating filters in a public forum like a library subjects the restrictions to a high degree of scrutiny under the First Amendment — far more than that which should apply to a library's budget-based purchasing decisions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/01/national/01LIBR.html?todaysheadlines
In a powerfully worded but sometimes wistful opinion, Chief Judge Edward R. Becker of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, wrote that the three-judge panel hearing the case was "sympathetic" to the government's goal of using technology to protect children from the worst of the Internet.
But, he wrote in the 195-page opinion, "Ultimately this outcome, devoutly to be wished, is not available in this less than best of all possible worlds."
The law at issue, the Children's Internet Protection Act of 2001, was Congress's third effort since 1996 to shield children from pornography carried over the Internet. As with the two earlier versions, this one ran afoul of constitutional protections.
The act required schools and libraries to install a "technology protection measure," like Internet filters, to prevent access to child pornography and materials considered obscene or "harmful to minors." Libraries and schools that did not comply would lose federal subsidies for financing Internet access
The law included provisions for a special three-judge panel to hear any legal challenges to it. Along with Chief Judge Becker, Judges John P. Fullam and Harvey Bartle III of Federal District Court served on the panel. Judge Becker was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, Judge Bartle was appointed by President George H. W. Bush, and Judge Fullam was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
The decision comes a month before a Congressionally imposed deadline for libraries to install filters or lose the federal Internet financing.
The appellate court's decision addressed only the provisions of the law affecting libraries; schools are still subject to the law's provisions.
The libraries and other plaintiffs presented numerous examples of legitimate sites that had been erroneously blocked by the four most popular filtering programs. The three-judge panel mentioned many of those blocking errors in its opinion, including sites covering topics in education, medicine, politics and religion.
Other sites the filters blocked, the panel noted, included the Knights of Columbus Council 4828 in Fallon, Nev.; a site for Tenzin Palmo, a Buddhist nun; a site that promotes federalism in Uganda; and the Lesbian and Gay Havurah of the Jewish Community Center of Long Beach, Calif.
The panel called filters "blunt instruments" because of their propensity to overblock legitimate sites and underblock objectionable sites.
"We find that it is currently impossible, given the Internet's size, rate of growth, rate of change and architecture, and given the state of the art of automated classification systems, to develop a filter that neither underblocks nor overblocks a substantial amount of speech," the opinion stated.
The panel said that libraries could use less restrictive alternatives to filters, like setting policies on what users could view on the Internet, or offering parents filters for when their children use computers.
The government had argued that the filtering software was effective enough to block most of the objectionable material, and that the law did not require a perfect performance. Government lawyers also contended that libraries restrict all manner of materials in the normal course of buying books.
But the court ruled that mandating filters in a public forum like a library subjects the restrictions to a high degree of scrutiny under the First Amendment — far more than that which should apply to a library's budget-based purchasing decisions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/01/national/01LIBR.html?todaysheadlines
Wary of Risk, Slow to Adapt, F.B.I. Stumbles in Terror War
The problems have been apparent for years. In 1999, the chief of the F.B.I.'s counterterrorism unit, Dale Watson, concluded that too few agents around the country were working to thwart terrorism. In March 2000, he convened a meeting at headquarters of the agents in charge of all 56 field offices. Some agents called the meeting "Terrorism 101" or "Terrorism for Dummies."
Mr. Watson and other senior officials were startled to learn how little some bureau offices around the country, operating independently of headquarters, had done to investigate terrorism.
Even after the meeting, in the months before Sept. 11, senior agents at headquarters were reduced to repeatedly cajoling the special agents in charge of the field offices to work harder on counterterrorism inquiries. They even threatened to withhold managers' raises and bonuses if they did not pay more attention to the problem.
The F.B.I.'s current state — so unready, so unprepared and so unable to assess the accumulating warning signs of the hijackings — is the result of years of neglect by the successors to J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the agency for 48 years. Each missed repeated opportunities to change a law enforcement agency that many critics believe was better suited to catching criminals of the Bonnie and Clyde era than trying to prevent crimes plotted by Osama bin Laden's terror network.
Current and former F.B.I. agents have long believed that one of the bureau's great weaknesses is its failure to properly analyze the immense amount of information that it collects, and to share it among its field offices. That, too, must change, former agents say.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/national/02FBI.html?pagewanted=all&position=top
The problems have been apparent for years. In 1999, the chief of the F.B.I.'s counterterrorism unit, Dale Watson, concluded that too few agents around the country were working to thwart terrorism. In March 2000, he convened a meeting at headquarters of the agents in charge of all 56 field offices. Some agents called the meeting "Terrorism 101" or "Terrorism for Dummies."
Mr. Watson and other senior officials were startled to learn how little some bureau offices around the country, operating independently of headquarters, had done to investigate terrorism.
Even after the meeting, in the months before Sept. 11, senior agents at headquarters were reduced to repeatedly cajoling the special agents in charge of the field offices to work harder on counterterrorism inquiries. They even threatened to withhold managers' raises and bonuses if they did not pay more attention to the problem.
The F.B.I.'s current state — so unready, so unprepared and so unable to assess the accumulating warning signs of the hijackings — is the result of years of neglect by the successors to J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the agency for 48 years. Each missed repeated opportunities to change a law enforcement agency that many critics believe was better suited to catching criminals of the Bonnie and Clyde era than trying to prevent crimes plotted by Osama bin Laden's terror network.
Current and former F.B.I. agents have long believed that one of the bureau's great weaknesses is its failure to properly analyze the immense amount of information that it collects, and to share it among its field offices. That, too, must change, former agents say.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/national/02FBI.html?pagewanted=all&position=top
F.B.I. Was Warned It Could Not Meet Terrorism Threat
A top secret report warned top officials of the F.B.I. in the months before Sept. 11 that the bureau faced significant terrorist threats from Middle Eastern groups like Al Qaeda but lacked enough resources to meet the threat, senior government officials said.
The internal assessment, one of the bureau's most closely held documents, found virtually every major F.B.I. field office undermanned in evaluating and dealing with the threat posed by groups like Al Qaeda, the officials said.
The document, called the Director's Report on Terrorism, provided detailed recommendations and proposed spending increases to address the problem, officials who have seen it said.
Despite this assessment, the bureau failed to win an increase in the Justice Department spending request submitted shortly before the Sept. 11 attacks. On Sept. 10, Attorney General John Ashcroft rejected a proposed $58 million increase in financing for the bureau's counterterrorism programs. But a Justice Department official said today that the director's report was not provided to Mr. Ashcroft's budget staff.
Even as the director's report was describing how the bureau lacked the ability to respond adequately to the wide array of significant terrorist threats facing the nation, bureau officials missed clues from at least two of its field offices about the possibility of a terrorist attack on the United States, a failure that led this week to the announcement of a sweeping overhaul of the bureau's mission by its director, Robert S. Mueller III.
…the report did provide an accounting of the abilities of each F.B.I. field office in the country to deal with the overall terrorist threat. It graded the ability of each office to deal with overall terrorist threats, and also looked ahead to try to determine how much more would be required over the next five years. Based on a color-coded system, with red meaning that a field office was unable to counter the terrorist threat in its region, most of the major F.B.I. field offices were listed as red, officials said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/01/national/01INQU.html?todaysheadlines
A top secret report warned top officials of the F.B.I. in the months before Sept. 11 that the bureau faced significant terrorist threats from Middle Eastern groups like Al Qaeda but lacked enough resources to meet the threat, senior government officials said.
The internal assessment, one of the bureau's most closely held documents, found virtually every major F.B.I. field office undermanned in evaluating and dealing with the threat posed by groups like Al Qaeda, the officials said.
The document, called the Director's Report on Terrorism, provided detailed recommendations and proposed spending increases to address the problem, officials who have seen it said.
Despite this assessment, the bureau failed to win an increase in the Justice Department spending request submitted shortly before the Sept. 11 attacks. On Sept. 10, Attorney General John Ashcroft rejected a proposed $58 million increase in financing for the bureau's counterterrorism programs. But a Justice Department official said today that the director's report was not provided to Mr. Ashcroft's budget staff.
Even as the director's report was describing how the bureau lacked the ability to respond adequately to the wide array of significant terrorist threats facing the nation, bureau officials missed clues from at least two of its field offices about the possibility of a terrorist attack on the United States, a failure that led this week to the announcement of a sweeping overhaul of the bureau's mission by its director, Robert S. Mueller III.
…the report did provide an accounting of the abilities of each F.B.I. field office in the country to deal with the overall terrorist threat. It graded the ability of each office to deal with overall terrorist threats, and also looked ahead to try to determine how much more would be required over the next five years. Based on a color-coded system, with red meaning that a field office was unable to counter the terrorist threat in its region, most of the major F.B.I. field offices were listed as red, officials said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/01/national/01INQU.html?todaysheadlines
News: Google is the real winner in its own contest
Just weeks after inviting the public into its labs to try out experimental technologies, Google on Friday announced the winner of a $10,000 contest that brought in a small fortune in programming contributions.
The winner of Google's first programming contest is Daniel Egnor, a New York programmer whose entry is designed to let searchers find Web pages within a designated geographical area.
While Egnor, an employee of a New York investment bank he would not name, walks away from the contest with $10,000, Google may be the real winner, reserving for itself a "worldwide, perpetual, fully paid-up, nonexclusive license to make, sell or use the technology related thereto, including but not limited to the software, algorithms, techniques, concepts, etc., associated with the entry."
Those broad rights apply not only to Egnor's winning entry, but to all the losing ones as well.
Honorable mentions include a variety of search technologies having to do with grouping semantic concepts, reducing Google's bias against newly authored pages, helping hyperlinks stay connected when their target moves, giving preference to pages containing every query term entered, and compressing index files.
In April, Google released its application programming interfaces, letting developers tap into Google's 2 billion-document repository.
This month the search site opened its research and development labs, inviting commentary from the public.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-929902.html
Just weeks after inviting the public into its labs to try out experimental technologies, Google on Friday announced the winner of a $10,000 contest that brought in a small fortune in programming contributions.
The winner of Google's first programming contest is Daniel Egnor, a New York programmer whose entry is designed to let searchers find Web pages within a designated geographical area.
While Egnor, an employee of a New York investment bank he would not name, walks away from the contest with $10,000, Google may be the real winner, reserving for itself a "worldwide, perpetual, fully paid-up, nonexclusive license to make, sell or use the technology related thereto, including but not limited to the software, algorithms, techniques, concepts, etc., associated with the entry."
Those broad rights apply not only to Egnor's winning entry, but to all the losing ones as well.
Honorable mentions include a variety of search technologies having to do with grouping semantic concepts, reducing Google's bias against newly authored pages, helping hyperlinks stay connected when their target moves, giving preference to pages containing every query term entered, and compressing index files.
In April, Google released its application programming interfaces, letting developers tap into Google's 2 billion-document repository.
This month the search site opened its research and development labs, inviting commentary from the public.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-929902.html
News: Study: Open source poses security risks
A conservative U.S. think tank suggests in an upcoming report that open-source software is inherently less secure than proprietary software, and warns governments against relying on it for national security.
The white paper, Opening the Open Source Debate, from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (ADTI) will suggest that open source opens the gates to hackers and terrorists.
"Terrorists trying to hack or disrupt U.S. computer networks might find it easier if the federal government attempts to switch to 'open source' as some groups propose," ADTI said in a statement released ahead of the report.
Open-source software is freely available for distribution and modification, as long as the modified software is itself available under open-source terms. The Linux operating system is the best-known example of open source, having become popular in the Web server market because of its stability and low cost.
Many researchers have also suggested that since a large community contributes to and scrutinizes open-source code, security holes are less likely to occur than in proprietary software, and can be caught and fixed more quickly.
The ADTI white paper, to be released next week, will take the opposite line, outlining "how open source might facilitate efforts to disrupt or sabotage electronic commerce, air traffic control or even sensitive surveillance systems," …
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-929669.html
A conservative U.S. think tank suggests in an upcoming report that open-source software is inherently less secure than proprietary software, and warns governments against relying on it for national security.
The white paper, Opening the Open Source Debate, from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (ADTI) will suggest that open source opens the gates to hackers and terrorists.
"Terrorists trying to hack or disrupt U.S. computer networks might find it easier if the federal government attempts to switch to 'open source' as some groups propose," ADTI said in a statement released ahead of the report.
Open-source software is freely available for distribution and modification, as long as the modified software is itself available under open-source terms. The Linux operating system is the best-known example of open source, having become popular in the Web server market because of its stability and low cost.
Many researchers have also suggested that since a large community contributes to and scrutinizes open-source code, security holes are less likely to occur than in proprietary software, and can be caught and fixed more quickly.
The ADTI white paper, to be released next week, will take the opposite line, outlining "how open source might facilitate efforts to disrupt or sabotage electronic commerce, air traffic control or even sensitive surveillance systems," …
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-929669.html
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