Investor's Business Daily (12/27/01) editorializes that "A senior U.S. official, according to The Washington Times on Dec. 21, 'said that a week after the terrorist attack, the ruling Taliban and the al-Qaida fighters embedded among them received shipment of Chinese-made SA-7 missiles.'

"Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld notes that American soldiers 'seem to have captured a good deal of Chinese ammunition.' American soldiers have found much of it in 'the caves of Tora Bora,' reported the Times...Rumsfeld says some Chinese have even been found fighting alongside the Taliban. ...

"This is the same nation that denied it was selling nuclear technology to Pakistan in the 1990s, even as shipments were being seized. The same nation that denied it was spying on America's nuclear weapons labs. That denied it was giving illegal campaign contributions in the U.S.

"Make no mistake about it: China is a terrorist power, as threatening to America's future as any ragtag collection of terrorists in the Middle East. The war on terrorism should not become a wall behind which evil regimes not directly responsible for Sept. 11 can hide.

"China's pledges of 'cooperation' in this war are as meaningless as Joseph Stalin's conciliatory words at Yalta...A deep anti-Western animus resides in the totalitarian ideology of China, making it a natural ally with anti-American Islamic powers. Radical Islam and Chinese communism are kindred spirits in many respects. ...

"Nevertheless, many members of the Western elite are as indulgent toward China as they once were toward the Soviet Union. Many would like to normalize China's abusive regime, and the war on terrorism has given them a pretext to advance this agenda, as they point to China's faux support for America after Sept. 11."

"FBI agents in the United States probing relatives of Saudi-born terror suspect Osama Bin Laden before September 11 were told to back off soon after George W Bush became president, the BBC has reported. The BBC’s Newsnight current affairs programme on Tuesday said that Bush at one point had a number of connections with Saudi Arabia’s prominent Bin Laden family.

"Newsnight said Bush made his first million 20 years ago with an oil company partly funded by the chief US representative of Salem Bin Laden, Osama’s brother. Bush also received fees as director of a subsidiary of Carlyle Corporation, a little-known private company which in just a few years since its founding has become one of America’s biggest defence contractors, and his father, George Bush Sr, is also a paid advisor, the programme said.

Paul Sperry writes (WorldNetDaily.com, 11/9/01) that "A leading airport-security firm under fire for hiring foreigners was pressured by the federal government two-and-a-half years ago to rehire Arab non-citizens.

"The Justice Department, in the wake of the Sept. 11 hijackings, is investigating the same company for failing to properly screen its guards.

"Airport security experts say the EEOC settlement - which also mandates Muslim-sensitivity training for all Argenbright employees - goes a long way toward explaining why 87 percent of the checkpoint screeners at Dulles are not U.S. citizens. All seven Muslim complainants worked as Dulles screeners at the time.

" ‘If I were Argenbright and being investigated, I’d tell them, "you want to sue us? Go talk to the damn EEOC. They’re the ones who forced these people on us," ’ said Steve Elson, a former Federal Aviation Administration airport-security inspector. …

"Four of the seven Muslim workers are from Sudan, a country on the State Department’s terrorist blacklist. One is from Egypt, and another is from Afghanistan.

"The Muslims contended they were fired by Argenbright for refusing to take off their head scarves while screening passengers. They said covering their heads is required by the Koran. …

Marc Morano writes that "A charity fund established to help victims of the Sept. 11^th attacks made a grant of $171,000 to a group defending eight individuals being held in connection with the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D..C.

"According to Rene, the September 11th fund announced on October 3 the $171,000 grant to the Legal Aid Society was ostensibly to ‘provide emergency civil legal assistance to low-income attack victims.’

"The wily Russians achieved this victory through their proxy Afghan force, the Northern Alliance. Moscow, which has sustained the Alliance since 1990, re-armed it after 11 Sept with new tanks, armored vehicles, artillery, helicopters, and trucks. The Alliance’s two military leaders, Gen Rashid Dostam and Gen Muhammed Fahim, were stalwarts of the old communist regime with close links to KGB.

"Putin put Chief of the Russian General Staff, Col. Gen. Viktor Kvashnin, and the deputy director of KGB, in charge of the Alliance. During the Balkan fighting in 1999, the hard-charging Kvashnin outfoxed the US by seizing Prishtina’s airfield, thus assuring a permanent Russian role in Kosovo.

"Now, he’s done it again. To the fury of Washington and Islamabad, in a coup de main, Kvashnin rushed the Northern Alliance into Kabul, in direct contravention of Bush’s dictates. …

"America’s ouster of the Taliban regime meant Pakistan lost its former influence over Afghanistan and is now cut off from Central Asia’s resources. So long as the Alliance holds power, the US is equally denied access to the much coveted Caspian Basin. Caucasus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kirgizstan, Azerbaijan, and Chechnya contain the world’s most recently discovered major oil and gas deposits.

"Central Asia’s oil and gas producers are landlocked. Their energy wealth must be exported through long pipelines. Competition over potential pipeline routes has become the 21^st Century’s geopolitical equivalent of the great power race to build strategic railroads, a rivalry that helped spark World War I.

"Russia, the world’s second largest oil exporter, wants Central Asian resources to be transported across its territory. Iran, also an oil producer, wants the energy pipelines to debouche at its ports, the shortest route. …

Michael Gordon and David Sanger write (New York Times, 11/2/01, p. 1) that "President Bush will decide in the next few days how deeply to slash America’s nuclear arsenal as part of a new understanding with Russia on missile defense and strategic nuclear arms, officials said today. …

"A leading option under consideration, according to senior administration officials, is to reduce the American nuclear force to a range of around 1,800 to 2,250 warheads, from current levels above 6,000. …

"White House officials confirmed today that Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, has made a series of calls around Capitol Hill in hopes of arranging a quick vote on revoking the main economic sanction against Russia remaining from the cold war. …

"[F]ew in the administration are now talking about withdrawing from the ABM treaty any time soon, despite Mr. Bush’s oft-repeated claim that the treaty is outdated and dangerous. …

"President Bill Clinton and President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia agreed that their goal should be to cut the number of warheads on each side to 2,000 to 2,500 under a proposed Start III accord.

"The Bush administration may go somewhat lower. The primary option under review is to set a range for the United States at around 1,800 to 2,250 warheads, officials said.

"But the United States Strategic Command, which oversees the nuclear arsenal, is resisting deep cuts and says the country needs to maintain an arsenal at the high end of that band, officials said.

Another "element of the administration’s package to encourage an agreement with Mr. Putin is a new position on defensive systems. Instead of abandoning the ABM treaty, as many conservatives have advocated, the Bush administration now appears to be proposing a phased approach.

"The 1993 START II agreement calls for cuts to 3,000-3,500 warheads, but START II is effectively a dead letter…. The START limits are meaningless anyway, since Russia’s nuclear arsenal is aging and most of it will be retired in the next decade. Moscow wants to go down to 1,500 warheads because its economy cannot sustain a larger force. …

"The Joint Chiefs have been reluctant to go lower than 2,000-2,500, in the belief that nuclear weapons are needed to deter adversaries from threatening the use of weapons of mass destruction as a way of preventing the United States from taking actions that are in its national interest. …

"To allow the safe reduction of the huge arsenal of old nuclear weapons, two things are needed. One is to design a few new low-yield nuclear weapons using the most advanced technologies to make them smaller, simpler, more accurate, able to penetrate deep underground, and safer. This probably will require a few underground nuclear tests to assure they work as intended, which shows the wisdom of Congress in refusing Bill Clinton’s pressure to accept the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Peter Baker writes (Washington Post, 11/14/01, p. A6) that "Ten years ago this fall, President George Bush broke with military orthodoxy by announcing historic deep unilateral cuts in nuclear arms and was rewarded a week later when the Soviet Union matched him.

" ‘Bush finally came up with a formula to push us out of the dead end we’d gotten into at the end of the Clinton administration,’ said Rose Gottemoeller, a former Clinton administration official. ‘We’re breaking what had been an effective sound barrier in the arms control world, which is the 2,000 number. That had always been the holy grail – if you go below 2,000 [the theory went] you’ll lose the strategic triad.’

"Bush’s approach to the new strategic relationship has its roots in his father’s actions a decade ago when the senior Bush announced he would unilaterally withdraw almost all U.S. tactical weapons from Europe and Asia, halt development of two new strategic weapons and take off alert status Minuteman II ballistic missiles scheduled to be dismantled under START I. …

Congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex.) points out that "The sober reality is that on September 11^th millions of foreigners abroad were better protected by American armed forces than were our own citizens at home. In fact, on that fateful morning we had tens of thousands of soldiers and billions of dollars in weapons deployed worldwide – all standing by helplessly while our citizens were savagely attacked in New York and Washington.

An anti-missile interceptor and an intercontinental missile with a mock nuclear warhead "were to be tracked by an Aegis radar system aboard a Navy ship. At the same time, another system based at Vandenberg, called a Multiple Object Tracking Radar, was to track the ICBM. Though the firing of the two missiles would not abrogate the ABM Treaty, the use of the two radar systems to monitor the action and collect valuable research data could be deemed a violation.

"[T]he treaty and subsequent protocols between the United States and the Soviet Union ban the tracking of ballistic missiles and anti-missile interceptors by sea-based radars or other radar systems not initially designed for this purpose. The accords also bar radar like the system at Vandenberg from tracking a long-range missile unless the system is located at a designated anti-ballistic missile test range.

"A second exercise would have used the Aegis radar to track the launch of a Titan 2 space rocket as it carries an Air Force weather satellite into space. This would provide further information about the performance of that sea-based radar against a long-range missile.

"Both exercises, part of an ongoing series in the missile defense program, would have involved using the existing radars in a new fashion to gather data about potential missile interceptors. By incorporating the radars in the missile defense development program, defense officials had been hoping to expand the information generated by the tests.

" ‘When we put together the testing program earlier this year, we were instructed to put together the best plan we could, without regard to the treaty,’ said a senior officer involved in the program. ‘So we crafted a plan that would get the most data out of the tests.’

Steven Mufson analyzes the decision (Washington Post, 10/26/01, p. A4) saying that "yesterday’s postponement of three missile defense tests provides the latest evidence that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 have changed the administration’s priorities. It is now putting a premium on good relations with Russia while coming up with a strategy over how to proceed with missile defenses and reduce the two countries’ nuclear arsenals. …

Jon Dougherty reports (WorldNetDaily.com, 10/30/01) that "Last week, President Bush signed into law new powers sought by Attorney General John Ashcroft and the Justice Department that will allow federal law-enforcement agencies to ‘wiretap’ the entire Internet. Under the USA Patriot Act of 2001, law-enforcement agencies can also, in ‘rare instances,’ search a person’s home without informing that homeowner for up to 90 days – the so-called ‘sneak-and-peek’ provision – as well as implant a hidden ‘key logger’ device on that suspect’s computer, allowing law-enforcement officials to capture passwords and monitor every keystroke of a suspect’s computer. …"

"Though liberal Democrats are often associated with wide expansions of the size and scope of the federal government, Utley said Republican administrations are guilty of ‘many of the most egregious taking away of constitutional freedoms. …’

" ‘RICO and the seizure laws – whereby police can confiscate cars, boats, even homes without due process and keep the money for their own departments,’ were products of GOP administrations, he said. …

Nicholas Kralev and Betsy Pisik write (Washington Times, 9/27/01, p. A17) that " ‘At the moment, notwithstanding all of the coalition building we have been doing, President Bush retains the authority to take whatever actions he believes are appropriate in accordance with the needs for self-defense of the United States and of the American people,’ Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told reporters.

"Military sources in Dushanbe and Bishbek, capitals of Tajikistan and Kyrgizstan respectively, report at least 15 Chinese fighting men on the side of the Taliban, were killed in last week’s U.S. bombing over [Kandahar] and in a separate incident on the ground, according to the DEBKA intelligence news service.

"This report was confirmed, reports DEBKA, by Pakistani sources in Peshawar, who discovered the Chinese presence alongside the Taliban from their own intelligence reports on the death of the commander of Arab Afghan troops in Jalalabad. That commander was Basir al Masri, a senior aide to Osama bin Laden and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad chief, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

"Al Masri appears to have been caught by an American bombardment, just as he was leaving [Kandahar] for Jalalabad after meeting Taliban leaders. Those leaders warned him as he left that U.S. Special Forces units were operating in the southern and western outskirts of the town. Because they thought the size of his bodyguard insufficient, they offered a detail of their own men to see him safely past the danger zone. Among that armed escort were five Chinese fighters. A Special Forces unit waylaid the group and detonated explosive charges, one of which hit Abu Basir’s vehicle and a second the escort vehicles. Most of the escort was killed, including three of the Chinese guards. The next day, their bodies were carried into Kandahar.

"The Chinese-bin Laden relationship goes back some years. The British daily, Guardian, carried a report Saturday by John Hooper in Milan, claiming that three years ago, China paid bin Laden several million dollars for unexploded American cruise missiles left over from the U.S. attack on his bases. Hooper quotes an alleged senior al-Qaida agent in Europe, whose account is contained in the transcript of a secretly taped conversation between two bin Laden adherents." WorldNetDaily.com, 10/22/01

Phyllis Schlafly prescribes practical action against terrorism:

"• We must immediately close our borders to all illegal aliens and deport those who are in the United States, including the millions who are illegally in this country on expired visas. It is a default of duty that our government hasn’t made this a regular practice, and there is no time to delay in starting now. …

"• We must increase the Border Patrol to any extent necessary to keep guards on duty 24 hours a day at all crossing points and provide military backup as needed. The Constitution, Article IV, Section 4, states: ‘The United States…shall protect each of the States against invasion.’

"• We must completely overhaul visa procedures to require full disclosure about the applicant’s identity, employment, destination, health, travel plans and U.S. guarantors.

"• We should require all legal aliens to carry an ID card with fingerprints, report their residence and travels, and enter the information on a database to track their travels in this country and flag the date of their visa expiration.

"• No visas of any kind should be issued to countries of suspected terrorists or countries that refuse to repudiate terrorists, and the State Department, which is responsible for the lax issuance of visas, must be monitored. Our government should keep a database of all illegal aliens who are deported and make them ineligible for reentry.

"• We should put a moratorium on the granting of all student and worker visas until a system is in place to track the aliens in this country and assure that they report to the educational institution or corporation claimed as the reason for entry.

"• We should forbid colleges and universities that receive federal funding from giving free tuition, student loans or in-state tuition rates to aliens. We have too many American students who need this type of assistance.

"• All airport security personnel, as well as pilots, should be required to be U.S. citizens.

"• The safety instructions given to flight crews to be passive and cooperative with hijackers should be rescinded immediately and replaced with instructions and training in how to overpower and outmaneuver hijackers.

"• The mug shots of the 22 most wanted terrorists, plus the 19 hijackers, all fit an identifiable profile. The airlines should be given legal immunity for refusing to board anyone they think may pose a danger.

"• States should repeal laws that allow illegal aliens to get driver’s licenses and the states that are currently toying with this bad idea should deep-six it. Driver’s licenses should be issued only to citizens and legal residents who can pass the driver’s test in English.

"• We should put a moratorium on all immigration for at least a year. We certainly should not admit any refugees from the current conflict as there is no way to know the good guys from the potential bad guys.

"• We should review naturalizations of the past five years to detect fraud or criminal records as a basis for revocation of citizenship. Revoke the citizenship of any naturalized citizen who violates the oath to renounce allegiance to another country by asserting dual citizenship or holding public office in a foreign country.

"• We should not use terrorism as an excuse to promote measures that simply increase the power and budget of Big Government or place more controls over the actions of law-abiding Americans. The law must make a clear distinction between citizens and aliens.

"A lot changed on September 11. The 245(i) provision may still pass – it’s pretty popular among politicians because there’s a specific constituency for it – but there won’t be any more talk about a broad amnesty for illegal aliens. (Opponents probably wouldn’t hesitate to point out that one of the men responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing became a legal resident because of the last amnesty, in 1986.)

"This is in some ways a dicey proposition: More hoops at the Canadian border will cause longer lines at the Windsor Tunnel, which will hurt commerce. Yet it might also be possible to accommodate frequent travelers with something like the speed-pass lanes on toll roads. …

"Congress will definitely want to improve federal supervision of the roughly half-million people who are in the U.S. on student visas. It’s not clear whether the hijackers had such visas, though it’s reasonable to assume that at least a few of them obtained vocational-training permits called ‘M visas’ that would have allowed them to enroll at aviation academies. In 1996, Congress passed a law that would have allowed instant access to information on student visa holders – but now, five years later, the program still hasn’t been fully implemented because of opposition from universities and foreign-student organizations. Congress should demand that it move online rapidly – surely before the current 2003 deadline – so that the government can keep better tabs not only on who attends flight school but also who switches majors from literature to nuclear engineering.

Sam Francis points out (The Wanderer, 10/11/01, p. 5) that "It is all very well for public leaders to assure us that most Arab Americans and Muslims are loyal and law-abiding. There’s [no] doubt that’s true. It’s also true that most Arabs and Muslims outside America are not terrorists. But the larger truth that Americans need to grasp is that by allowing a vast subculture of non-Western immigrants to emerge within our own society, we have permitted the creation of an alternative social structure in which terrorists can move virtually undetected. …

"The claim of the open-borders lobby – that non-Americans and non-Westerners can immigrate to this country and overnight become part of our nation and our civilization simply by assenting to a ‘creed,’ an ‘idea,’ or a ‘proposition’ – has now been shattered. …

New Republic publisher Martin Peretz writes (The New York Post, 10/10/01, p. 44) that "when the president traveled to the Massachusetts Avenue Islamic Center in Washington last week, he could not find a group of prominent Muslims to accompany him who were not in some way compromised. Bush stood beside Nihad Awan, a longtime apologist for Islamic terrorism.

"One of the Muslim leaders the president invited to the White House on Sept. 26 was Salam Al-Marayati, who had already suggested that Israel was behind the Sept. 11 bloodletting. (He had previously defended the 1983 bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks, which took 241 American lives, as a ‘a military operation.’) Also present was Omar Ahmed of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which is believed to have close ties to American front groups for Middle Eastern terror cells.

Arnaud de Borchgrave, Washington Times editor-at-large and United Press International president, reports that "Rogue states like Iraq and Libya can’t hold a candle to Saudi Arabia when it comes to the radicalization of Islam. The controlled Saudi media doesn’t mention that at least 10 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudis. Nor are Saudi subjects told that their kingdom has been the principal source of funding for the Taliban regime since 1996.

"By ignoring royal excesses and the total lack of democratic processes, as well as a dubious level of cooperation with the FBI in tracking Saudi connections to transnational terrorism, the United States kept the oil flowing, along with Saudi billions into U.S. Treasury bonds and U.S. arms purchases.

Toby Westerman writes (WorldNetDaily.com, 10/17/01) that "Lord David Russell-Johnston, President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, stated that Europe will not permit the transfer of suspected terrorists to the U.S. if they face the death penalty. Russell-Johnston informed Deutsche Welle that ‘the Council of Europe will only allow the extradition of terrorists if the U.S. indicates that it will not execute them.’ "

Joe Sobran urges (The Wanderer, 10/11/01, p. 5): "Let’s take a good, hard look at ourselves. What have we become? If this were still the basically Christian country it was in 1950, I doubt that the Muslim world would find us loathsome. But that America was a far cry from today’s America; that America would have been nauseated by today’s America. … Does any sane man think that Muslims can regard what liberals call ‘progress’ – the apotheosis of abortion, sodomy, and sexual ‘freedom’ – as anything but spiritual degeneration? Maybe the fact that they call us ‘the Great Satan’ means that they don’t hate us because they think we are ‘good.’ …

"Three factors have now changed the situation radically, and for the worse. Europe has abandoned Christianity and adopted contraception; huge numbers of Muslims are moving in; and the Muslims are reproducing. If these trends continue, by the end of this century, two emblematically Catholic countries – Spain and Italy – will have Muslim majorities.

Congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex.) has introduced legislation which would allow the Bush administration to hire personnel in the private sector to hunt down and capture Osama bin Laden and other terrorists. "Mr. Paul says the Constitution gives Congress the power to issue ‘letters of marque and reprisal when a precise declaration of war is impossible due to the vagueness of the enemy.’ … The second measure Mr. Paul introduced [October 11], the ‘Air Piracy Reprisal and Capture Act,’ would make that change in definition. …

" ‘While it is true that the Declaration of Paris of 1854 abolished privateering, the United States did not subscribe to that declaration,’ on the grounds that relying solely on large armies and navies for her defense ‘would threaten her national prosperity and endanger the civil liberties of her people.’ …

Peter Finn writes from Milan (Washington Post, 10/20/01, p. A17) that "Chinese nationals visited Osama bin Laden terrorist camps in Afghanistan after a U.S. cruise missile attack there in 1998 and paid for the right to study and remove unexploded missiles, according to a conversation between two alleged veterans of the camps that was secretly taped by Italian police.

" ‘From every part of the world, businessmen who hate Americans have come to study the strategy of American missiles,’ said Lased Ben Heni, 31, a Libyan who was arrested in Munich this month on an Italian warrant. ‘In particular, businessmen have come from China. [Bin Laden] works a great deal with China. He’s got good relations with them.’ …

"Aerospace technology has been a major point of friction between China and the United States. In 1999, a congressional committee accused China of stealing U.S. technology related to jet fighter guidance systems and missile technology. The United States has also pressed China to limit its missile exports. …

"The events of the last five weeks have made it critical for Mr. Bush to develop ties with China that more closely resemble the ‘strategic partnership’ envisaged by President Clinton and once openly disdained by President Bush [says The New York Times "reporter"].

"All talk of strategic competition has been omitted from Mr. Bush’s comments, officials say, and his aides have quietly sanded away all the hard edges from the message he will deliver to his Chinese hosts in his visit, starting on Thursday.

"The Chinese want to redefine terrorism to provide a further justification for their crackdown on Muslim Uighur separatists and Tibetan independence supporters – people who might have been known in Mr. Bush’s Washington, until a few weeks ago, as dissidents."

According to Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), "During the 1970s energy crisis, America was 36 percent dependent on foreign oil. Today we are 56 percent dependent, and by 2010, we are headed for well over 60 percent. For the military, it now takes eight times as much oil to meet the needs of each U.S. soldier as it did during World War II…. The time to act is now – not for some immediate quick fix, but for the long-term security of America in the years and decades ahead." (Washington Times, 10/2/01, p. A17)

"The U.S. has enough ‘money-laundering’ laws on the books to seize terrorists’ bank accounts. Yet, new anti-terrorism initiatives are working their way through Congress. Surreptitiously, these initiatives are advancing ‘tax harmonization’ and extra-territorial tax enforcement agendas of the European Community and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

"For example, a money-laundering bill in the House gives the Treasury unchecked powers to make subjective determinations of money-laundering. Among the criteria are ‘whether a jurisdiction offers special tax advantages’ and ‘the volume of transactions relative to the size of the economy.’

"Give these criteria a minute’s thought. A ‘special tax advantage’ is a tax rate lower than average, or the absence of an income tax or a capital gains tax. By definition, all ‘tax havens’ offer special tax advantages. Under the criteria of the House bill, the U.S. Treasury can determine all tax havens to be ‘primary money laundering jurisdictions.’

"A jurisdiction can have a high volume of financial transactions for reasons of history, location, presence of financial talent, cost and tax advantages and financial privacy. To make a determination of money-laundering on the basis of volume of financial transactions is inane. What is really needed is a good horse-whipping of the bill’s sponsors on the steps of the Capitol.

"The RICO racketeering laws, allegedly passed for the purpose of freezing Mafia assets, have been used by the Justice Department to force law firms to settle on its terms and by spouses in divorce cases. The asset forfeiture laws allegedly targeted the assets of drug lords but are applied to 70-year-old grandmothers whose grandchildren are alleged to have brought drugs into the house.

"The vast majority of indictments that will follow from new surveillance powers will not be of terrorists. The powers will be used to force plea bargains from ordinary citizens who unknowingly commit technical violations of bureaucratic regulations.

"A decade ago, the Rehnquist Court ruled that prosecutors have no judicially enforceable duty to present grand juries with exculpatory evidence that favors the defendant. This police state ruling gave prosecutors the power to frame people by presenting statements out of context. The new surveillance powers will greatly increase this abuse. … Criminals can easily falsify National Identity cards. The cards will serve as just another way of keeping track of law-abiding citizens."

"For example, the investigators found that a shipment of 192 Stinger missiles was left temporarily in a civilian storage area without the knowledge of either the military or the contractor who shipped the weapons. ...

"But the security in the trucking system is woefully inadequate, the Congressional report said. Under the military contract, trucking companies are allowed to leave trucks loaded with weapons in commercial carrier terminals, which the accounting office found have few safeguards to keep deadly weapons away from intruders and are often near residential areas. ...

"There are 31 such carrier terminals in 17 states, the report says. The terminals are used when a shipment is moved from a short-haul truck to a long-haul truck, or when a military munitions depot refuses to accept delivery of the explosives because it is a weekend or holiday.

"In examining the security of those terminals, the Congressional investigators found that they had been allowed full access to missiles and rockets by doing little more than flashing bogus credentials that appeared to be from the Defense Department.

"Almost every level of security was inadequate, the report concluded. Gates protecting dangerous material were kept unlocked, it said, and none had alarms to detect intrusion.

"In one instance, investigators found that officials at a site that stored Hawk surface-to-air missiles routinely left open a garage door.

"At some sites, the investigators were allowed access to the bills of lading for each trailer, giving them information about which trucks contained explosive and dangerous cargo.

"At the five sites where the accounting office personnel gained access, a full military arsenal was accessible. According to the report, investigators found one long-range cruise missile, 11 surface-to-air missiles, 5 anti-tank rockets, 72 bombs, 14,000 rounds for [cannons] and howitzers, and other ammunition and explosives. ...

Stephen Kinzer writes from Lansing, Michigan (New York Times, 10/6/01, p. B1) that "the government program aimed at vaccinating all American soldiers against anthrax is at a standstill.

"Although anthrax is said to be difficult to produce and spread in large doses, an enemy that managed to do so could inflict considerable damage. A 1993 government study found that spraying just 220 pounds of aerosol anthrax over Washington could kill up to three million people.

"The Soviet Union was known to have experimented with military uses of anthrax, as have about 10 other countries, including North Korea and Iraq. …

"The vaccine BioPort wants to produce involves six shots over 18 months. Critics have called this approach impractical and unreliable, urging BioPort researchers to concentrate on developing a new one. …

"Even if the company passes its next Food and Drug Administration inspection and is allowed to resume production, the first several million doses will be assigned for military use.

"With the US administration anxious to keep Russia on board its global coalition against terrorism, several European diplomats said Washington would not push Mr. Putin to comply with a treaty aimed at reducing the levels of conventional weapons in 30 countries, ranging from Canada and Europe to the new republics of the former Soviet Union.

"The independence of Georgia, to the south, and Moldova, to the west, could be undermined, especially as Georgia depends on Russia for its gas supplies. Turkey, a key Nato ally with close ties to the region, is also concerned. Without compliance with CFE, Turkey sees Russia entrenching itself in a region where it could control vital gas and electricity supplies to Ankara. …

"Moscow is now also violating the CFE2 treaty, they note. Under its terms, Russia undertook to withdraw its remaining forces from Georgia and Moldova. By last July, the deadline set for disbanding its military base of Gudauta, northern Georgia, Moscow was still entrenched. …

According to A.M. Rosenthal, former executive editor of The New York Times (Washington Times, 10/8/01, p. A21), the abstention of the U.S. during the U.N. Security Council vote to lift economic sanctions on the Sudan "allowed the United States to duck the shame of pending U.S. legislation that would have permitted the Sudan to trade freely in oil – its most valuable product. The crimes of the Sudan and its coup-installed government are so numerous it would take a library to list them – slavery, government-arranged famine directed at the opposition, murders of Christians, no civil rights to speak or think of.

Serge Schmemann writes from the United Nations (New York Times, 10/7/01, p. A14) that "Syria, a country on the State Department’s list of those that sponsor terrorism, is expected to win one of the 10 rotating seats on the Security Council next week with no resistance from the United States. …

"Five of the seats on the Security Council are held by the veto-wielding permanent members: the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain. The other 10 are filled for two-year terms by a vote of the General Assembly, and are distributed by geographical regions. …

"The FBI reports that at least 15 of the 19 hijackers entered the United States on business or tourist visas. Their entry might have been halted had a computerized screening system of border crossers been in operation. Under the system, foreign criminals, terrorists, and violators of visa laws would have been instantly detected. The system was mandated by Congress after suspected Palestinian terrorists, who had been issued visas without background checks, were arrested in New York in 1996 with bomb-making equipment.

"But the system wasn’t in operation. Because of action by one of the chief open-borders advocates, former Sen. (now Energy Secretary) Spencer Abraham, the screening system was never established. Abraham, an advocate of virtually unrestricted immigration, claimed it would cause traffic congestion at the Mexican border!

"Other terrorists seem to have entered on visas that were legal enough but to have overstayed them after the visas expired. Virtually nothing is done today to apprehend or control aliens whose visas have expired; they constitute a vast subterranean subculture within American society. …

According to Linda Chavez (Washington Times, 10/4/01, p. A18), "Most of the terrorists who attacked on Sept. 11 entered the United States with valid temporary or student visas, just as millions of foreign visitors do each year. But once they passed immigration control at their port of entry, the terrorists could disappear, unmonitored, into American society. In 1996, Congress passed legislation requiring that all U.S. entries and exits be recorded, but the law was shelved last year. It’s time to reactivate and enhance it.

"Anyone who has traveled outside the United States knows that other countries are not nearly so blasé when it comes to foreign travelers. When you check into a hotel in most countries abroad, you’re asked to relinquish your passport temporarily so that local or national authorities can be notified of your presence. If you move hotels or travel to another city, you go through the same process in each place. But once a foreign visitor passes immigration control in the United States, he or she is free to travel where he or she chooses without any monitoring. Our only line of defense has been to require employers to check employees’ eligibility to work once they are hired and to maintain their own records, which are never submitted to any government authority.

"Congress should immediately enact legislation requiring all aliens in the United States to register with the government once a year and to notify the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) whenever they change their address. We used to require aliens to register at a U.S. post office each January but abandoned the requirement in the 1980s. Coupled with a tracking system to monitor entries and exits from the United States, such a system could provide law enforcement with an important tool in the fight against terrorism – but only if it is properly implemented and integrated. …

"No commercial driver’s license or pilot’s license should be issued without proof of U.S. citizenship or a security check to ensure that noncitizens are in the country legally and not on any law enforcement watch lists. …

Georgie Anne Geyer writes (Washington Times, 9/28/01, p. A22) that "It has now been revealed that one major reason four of the hijackers were able to move around this country with such apparent ease in the weeks before the Pentagon crash was the fact that they had valid Virginia driver’s licenses. How very curious.

"As it turns out, they were not American citizens. They didn’t even live in Virginia. But our generally sloppy bureaucrats and avid pro-immigration multiculturalists have been busy-busy making this a country ‘open’ to everyone. They had put through a law in Virginia that allows people to get driver’s licenses without providing passports or leases to verify their identity and residence.

"And Virginia is ‘strict.’ In such states as California, you don’t have to speak English, and driving tests are given in multiple languages, although the traffic signs are not. Virginia state officials say they will change these rules. It’s a little late, of course. They weren’t about to change them in August, when an Arlington notary public was convicted of immigration fraud for helping thousands of out-of-state illegal immigrants obtain those same Virginia driver’s licenses that facilitated the terrorists."

DON’T SHOOT DOWN DOMESTIC AIRCRAFT – LET U.S. PILOTS CARRY WEAPONS

"The gun-control lobby prefers hijacked airliners to any role for self-protection. But why weren’t pilots issued stun guns or pulse-wave Myotrons? The latter gadget is the size of a small cell phone and makes the slightest flight attendant more powerful than the largest ruffian. A 1-second jolt incapacitates the attacker without doing him permanent damage."

DO NON-ENGLISH SPEAKING ALIENS PROVIDE GENUINE AIRPORT SECURITY?

LESSONS OF 9/11
September 15, 2001

1.     Our only safety is in the Lord. If God withdraws His hand of protection, no human precaution can save us from impending disaster.

2.     We must pray that God will be merciful, and we must ourselves repent and rid ourselves of conduct and beliefs which are offensive to God.

3.     We are still paying the price for Jimmy Carter's destruction of human intelligence capabilities at the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1970's and bad decisions by Bill Clinton in the 1990's. It takes decades to build the kinds of relationships which enable us to penetrate the immediate circles of those committed to our destruction. Even if we were doing everything possible today, it could well be many years before we are able in advance to know as well as needed the particular intentions of terrorists determined to destroy us.

4.     Several Presidential administration, after having promised to take decisive action against terrorists, failed to comprehensively and thoroughly do so. Think how many thousands of lives would have been saved if Osama bin Laden and his ilk had been taken out during the Clinton Administration.

5.     The events of September 11 were not, as high officials have suggested, an attack on freedom and democracy, rather, they were a manifestation of Islamic fanaticism. Unconstitutional interventionism on the part of the government of the United States, over many decades, has made America a target of hostility in many places all over the world. U.S. participation in U.N. interventions in the Balkans and our effort to play "power broker" in the Middle East have exacted a price.

6.     The Executive Order prohibiting assassination should be revoked by President Bush. It is never moral to make innocent non-combatants a primary target. It would have been much more just, for example, for the U.S. military, to have assassinated Suddam Hussein and his immediate cohorts than to have placed at risk the Iraqi civilian population, U.S. military personnel, or even politically disengaged Iraqi soldiers.

7.     Even if it is conclusively determined that Osama bin Laden is primarily responsible for the murderous attacks which our nation suffered, we must remember that, to some degree at least, he is merely the glove on the hand of regimes which regard us as their enemy. Action must be taken against every one of those regimes which have facilitated assaults on America.

8.     In addition to being unconstitutional, foreign aid is ineffective and counterproductive. How chilling it was to read of Egyptians, for example, dancing in the streets, rejoicing in America's calamity, at a time when U.S. taxpayers annually provide their government with some $2 billion of foreign aid.

9.     President Bush, in his brief Oval Office remarks on September 11, unfortunately failed to mobilize the nation behind the need for extraordinary additional expenditures on our own national security. In the same vein, we should stop misdirecting our scarce defense dollars on the placement of 72,000 U.S. troops in Western Europe and on the countless resources we have unwisely assigned to Kofi Annan and his New World Order armies of intervention.

10. .    Life will never be the same again in America. It is amazing that, thus far, we have been free of nuclear explosions on our territory, the poisoning of our water supply, or the spreading of disease in the context of chemical and biological warfare. If you prepared for a Y2K emergency, the preparations then taken may serve you well on future occasions.

11. .    It is essential that, as we deal with the fact that we are at war with an invisible foe, we not surrender the Constitutional boundaries, principles, and liberties with which we have been blessed.

12. .    We must repudiate the Bush Administration's notion that we need permission from the U.N. or consultations with NATO to defend the United States of America.
    
    Howard Phillips

U.N. AND NATO CLAIM AUTHORITY TO PROVIDE INTERNATIONAL LEGAL BASIS UNDER U.N. CHARTER FOR U.S. RESPONSE AGAINST TERRORISTS

    "In unprecedented developments, the Unitd Nations and NATO have moved to provide the international legal basis for a U.S. response to the terrorist attack on American soil. Acting U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. James Cunningham called the terrorist attack an assault on U.N. 'values' and thanked the U.N. Security Council, including Communist China and Russia, notorious supporters of terrorist regimes, for their 'support' after it passed a resolution authorizing a response.

    "The U.N. General Assembly also passed a resolution denouncing the attack. 'Together, we've demonstrated - here today in the historic hall of the General Assembly - that we are united and strong in the face of teror,' Cunningham said to a group that includes Iraq, Sudan, Iran, Libya, and Cuba and the PLO. U.N. Boss Kofi Annan said, 'All nations of the world must work together to identify the perpetrators and bring them to justice.' NATO said it regards the attack on the U.S. as an attack on NATO and that NATO will respond under the authority of the U.N. Charter." Cliff Kincaid, America's Survival, Inc

THE WORST IS YET TO COME - - - PREVENTIVE STEPS MUST BE TAKEN URGENTLY

    Mark Helprin writes in The Wall Street Journal (9/12/01) that "[T]oday's enemy, thought he is not morally developed enough to comprehend the difference between civilians and combatants, is neither faceless nor without a place in which we can address him...Our problem is not his anonymity but that we have refused the precise warnings, delivered over more than a decade, of those who understood the nature of what was coming- - -and of what is yet to come which will undoubtedly be worse.

TENS OF MILLIONS COULD BE KILLED BY SUCCESSFUL CBW OR NUCLEAR TERRORISM

    "The first salvos of any war are seldom the most destructive. Consider that in this recent outrage the damage was done by the combined explosive power of three crashed civilian airliners. As the initial shock wears off it will be obvious that this was a demonstration shot intended to extract political concessions and surrender a call to fix our attention on the prospect of a nuclear detonation or a chemical or biological attack both of which would exceed what happened yesterday by several orders of magnitude.''

DELIVER MORE THAN WE PROMISE

    "It will get worse, but appeasement will make it no better. That we have promised retaliation for decades and then always drawn back hoping that we could get through if we simply did not provoke the enemy is appeasement, and it must be quite clear by now even to those who perpetually appease that appeasement simply does not work...Above all, we must make no promise of retaliation that is not honored; in this we have erred too many times....

LAND FORCES ARE STILL NEEDED

    "Let this spectacular act of terrorism be the decisive repudiation of the mistaken assumptions that conventional warfare is a thing of the past, that there is a safe window in which we can cut force structure while investing in the revolution in military affairs, that bases and infrastructure abroad have become unnecessary, that the day of the infantryman is dead, and, most importantly, that slighting military expenditure and preparedness is anything but an invitation to death and defeat.

    "Short of a major rebuilding, we cannot now inflict upon Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden the great and instantaneous shock with which they should be afflicted. That requires not surgical strikes by aircraft based in the United States, but expeditionary forces with extravagant basing and equipment. It requires not 10 aircraft carrier battle groups but, to do it right and when and where needed, 20. It requires not only all the infantry divisions, transport, and air wings that we have needlessly given up in the last decade, but many more. It requires special operations forces not of 35,000, but of 100,000.

ISLAMIC FANATICS ARE AT WAR WITH US - - - WITH ALL AMERICANS THEIR TARGETS

    "For the challenge is asymmetrical. Terrorist camps must be razed and destroyed, and their reconstitution continually repressed. Intelligence gathering of all types must be greatly augmented, for by its nature it can never be sufficient to the task, so we must build it and spend upon it until it hurts. The nuclear weapons programs, depots, and infrastructure...must in a most un-Albrightian phrase, be destroyed...Security and civil defense at home and at American facilities overseas must be strengthened to the point where we are able to fight with due diligence in this war that has been brought to us now so vividly by an alien civilization that seeks our destruction.
    "The course of such a war will bring us greater suffering than it has brought to date...if, as we have so many times before, we rise to the occasion, we will not enjoy merely the illusions of safety, victory, and honor, but those things themselves."