Armory Show 2003

got up early today for a vernissage of the 2003 Armory Show. there were two piers worth of galleries. but thankfully almost, it was nowhere near as gigantic as the art basel show was in miami. we went through the first pier at an almost leisurely pace, and then from pangs of hunger, tried to force ourselves to really walk quickly through the second pier's exhibits. lots of great stuff up. saw a number of new frank thiel and naoya hatakeyama.

afterwards, headed down to chinatown and the brand new shanghai cafe (formerly Shanghai Gourmet / "shanghai xiao3 shi2"), recently relocated to 100 Mott just north of canal. the guotie and xiao long bao are really the best!!

Next Question: How to Stop Nuclear Blackmail

Next Question: How to Stop Nuclear Blackmail
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/weekinreview/09SANG.html

WASHINGTON — Imagine this scene in the Oval Office three weeks from now. At the daily intelligence briefing, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, opens with some highly unpleasant but hardly unexpected news. The North Koreans have started up their nuclear reprocessor, and will be churning out a bomb's worth of plutonium every month, until summer.

By the time President Bush cleans up in Iraq, Mr. Tenet would likely tell him, North Korea will probably produce enough bomb-grade material to produce five or six weapons that can be added to the one or two the C.I.A. believes the North probably produced in the early 1990's. That is enough, as one of Mr. Bush's top aides says, to "hide three, conduct an underground test of one and offer to sell the rest."

In fact, last month, Mr. Tenet and the deputy secretary of state, Richard L. Armitage, told Congress that North Korea might not even bother to turn all the plutonium it is likely to produce into warheads.

To achieve its objectives — getting Washington's undivided attention, diplomatic recognition and aid — all North Korea really has to do is hide a few nukes and leave Americans to wonder what they've got, and whether they are offering it to customers like Al Qaeda or Hamas. Call it the virtual nuclear deterrent.

To Mr. Bush's mind, this is why it makes sense to take on Iraq first — before it gets what North Korea already has. Yet if confronting Iraq is the first step in Mr. Bush's war on rogue states with nuclear ambitions, North Korea is the first in his war against nuclear blackmail. And those are very different campaigns.

In Iraq, Mr. Bush vowed to disarm the regime. Even if it takes a war, the big question is how to minimize the casualties, the backlash and the damage to American alliances. In North Korea, the question is whether the country can be disarmed at all, because the president's options range from bad to awful to incredibly dangerous.

Put another way, North Korea may be the far more challenging test of the notion that the United States right now has an opportunity to reorder the world so that it will never again face these kinds of threats.

Successfully facing down North Korea would send a message that the world will not tolerate nuclear blackmail. Failing to do so would send a very different message to rogue states — that if you don't want to be treated like Iraq, get your bomb before facing off against Washington.

"Kim Jong Il thinks that was Saddam's big mistake," said Gary Samore, an expert on nonproliferation in the Clinton administration who is now a scholar at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

So when Mr. Kim flips on that reprocessor, what are Mr. Bush's options?

The first is to ignore the issue — always a favorite choice in Washington. Few in the administration believe Mr. Kim will start a nuclear war, because he values survival. And as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said, "You can't eat plutonium."

True, but as Mr. Powell's own deputy pointed out to Congress, North Korea has sold just about everything it has ever developed, including ballistic missiles. No one knows just what a few baseball-sized lumps of plutonium would bring, but it would bring a lot — with plenty left over to perfect those missiles until they can reach Los Angeles. And the exports would be nearly impossible to stop: someone could just walk the plutonium over the Chinese border in an ox-cart, assuming that no starving North Koreans eat the ox first.

Ashton B. Carter, a Harvard scholar who worked on the now-failed 1994 nuclear freeze agreement with the North, points to another problem: If North Korea collapsed, there would be a scramble for the loose nuclear material. "The half-life of Plutonium-239 is 24,400 years," he said. "What is the half-life of the North Korean regime?"

Sooner or later, North Korea's neighbors would see its arsenal as a reason to rethink their own policies.

On Thursday, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld surprised the South Koreans by talking about pulling out most of the 37,000 American troops in the country, where they have been increasingly unwelcome. If that happened, could the United States dissuade South Korea, Taiwan and even Japan from seeking their own nuclear deterrents?

Then there is option No. 2: turning up the heat a notch on the North. This is where the administration is now focused, and it has compiled a list of ways to meet every escalation from North Korea with an escalation from Washington. The ideas range from cutting off the cash sent to North Korea by Koreans in Japan, to ending South Korean investment in the North, to sealing off aid and fuel from China, to intercepting outbound North Korean ships, particularly those bearing missiles.

Mr. Bush has warmed to this option because, in his words, it avoids "rewarding bad behavior." The North has said sanctions would mean war, but it could be bluffing. The administration's problem is that tightening the noose requires the help of North Korea's neighbors — as Mr. Bush said at his news conference Thursday. None of them wants to see a nuclear North Korea, he said. That is right, but those nations' interests are not America's.

The new South Korean government wants to steam ahead with investment, family exchanges and modest trade. Its interest is preventing a collapse of the North Korean regime, which the South would have to pay for. And one day, the South assumes, it will inherit all that is built in the North, perhaps including that nuclear arsenal.

The Chinese fear collapse, too, because even more starving refugees would cross their border than do now. And the Japanese are consumed with the fate of their nationals who were kidnapped by North Korean agents, a few of whom the North released last year.

To Mr. Bush, however, blackmail is blackmail, and so he refuses even to sit down and talk to the North Koreans. Talks, his aides say, would only lead to pressure for concessions — diplomatic recognition, an agreement to "freeze" rather than dismantle nuclear activity. The president refuses to go that route.

So it sent a chill through the air when Mr. Bush suggested last week, for the first time, that if his options "don't work diplomatically, they'll have to work militarily." The North Koreans denounced the statement, saying it proves that after Baghdad, they are next. The White House rushed out to say military options are not on the table now. But no one said the North Korean prediction of the post-Iraq future was wrong.

Iraq Crisis May Limit Hopes for U.N.

Iraq Crisis May Limit Hopes for U.N.
By FELICITY BARRINGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/international/middleeast/09NATI.html

UNITED NATIONS, March 8 — "Relevance" has become the buzzword of the Iraqi crisis. From the president on down, leading Bush administration officials have declared that if the United Nations, as it approaches the age of 58, cannot decide to make its authority felt on Iraq, it may as well resign itself to being a debating society, albeit one with a $1.45 billion annual budget.

Even ardent internationalists worry that the institution finds itself in a lose-lose situation — ridiculed as a puppet if American pressure forces a reluctant Security Council majority to support a war against Saddam Hussein, or reduced once more to a self-absorbed cipher if France, Russia and Germany lead the Security Council to thumb its nose at the world's superpower.

The Security Council's bitter split transfixes a wincing world.

But what has really imploded over the past decade are the hopes of those who believed that the United Nations would emerge from the ashes of the cold war as a mechanism for conflict control.

The current crisis, Edward C. Luck, a Columbia University professor of international and public affairs, believes, is the manifestation of a more fundamental struggle. "This is brutal because of that," he added. Referring to the feuding parties in the dispute, he said, "Everyone thinks they are setting a precedent for the future and aren't giving an inch."

For the French, the United Nations is a kind of global legislature that offers a level playing field to superpowers, plain old powers and all the rest of the world.

The Bush administration's vision blends a real, if limited, internationalism with the reflexive conservative distrust of government, particularly one in which presumptuous foreigners try to constrain the United States. President Bush went to the United Nations to challenge the institution to reclaim its power by backing him in the campaign to enforce United Nations' mandates. Otherwise, it would be doomed to irrelevance, he said.

This willingness to define the institution by its role in the current crisis seems perverse or myopic to some. "The United Nations is much, much larger than the Iraqi crisis," Secretary General Kofi Annan said on Tuesday.

But many of the foreign ministers speaking around the horseshoe table on Friday still intimated that the institution's future power would rise or fall directly as a consequence of Iraq.

Many scholars and former United Nations officials see that kind of debate as irrelevant. They question whether the United Nations, as it is constituted, can have anything more than an ad-hoc role when armed conflict looms.

In 1950, the United Nations sanctioned the Korean War; there was no Security Council veto because the Soviet Union was boycotting the institution. Close to 40 years of superpower stalemate, punctuated by vetoes, followed.

Then came Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The cold war was almost over, and the United Nations was reinvigorated. The United States assembled an international coalition, the Security Council gave its approval, and a war of a few weeks threw Iraq back to its old borders.

Resolutions were passed mandating Iraq's disarmament. The United States may have been the dominant actor, but the United Nations was a featured player.

That was before Rwanda, where 800,000 people were massacred as the world watched. It was before Bosnia, where United Nations peacekeepers were helpless to prevent Serbs from killing their Muslim neighbors.

The arc of hope for United Nations' effectiveness in maintaining peace had its one real high moment in Iraq in 1991. The low point may be in Iraq in 2003.

But Mr. Luck says the first President Bush's approach to the United Nations was not really different than his son's. "George H. W. Bush said he was only going to stay with the Security Council as long as he knew he was going to win," he said.

Of course, conflict control is but a part of what the organization does.

As James Hoge, the editor of Foreign Affairs, said: "Except for a brief post-cold-war period, the United Nations has been a service agency its entire life. The experiment, the brief experiment of a decade and half, in which it was there to curtail war, or to confine going to war within some loosely defined international parameters set by the Security Council, has failed."

But the fact that it is so often missing in action when it comes to war puts its most prominent defenders on the defensive.

For James S. Sutterlin, a former United Nations executive and the author of "The United Nations and the Maintenance of International Security," the question is not the institution's relevance, but its competence."The centrality of the Security Council was evident in its very failure," in Rwanda and Bosnia, he said. "There was the very serious problem that the central organization responsible for security couldn't do it."

For American conservatives, the past three months have been galvanizing. "The notion that the U.N. is really a problem," William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, said this week, "was a fringe notion until about three months ago. Now serious people, who are not unilateralists, are much more open to alternatives to the U.N."

Aides Say Bush Girds for War in Solitude, but Not in Doubt

Aides Say Bush Girds for War in Solitude, but Not in Doubt
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/politics/09BUSH.html

WASHINGTON, March 8 — It was another night at a White House nearly at war. The Atlantic alliance was splintering, some 250,000 American troops were within striking distance of Iraq and the pope had sent an envoy pleading for peace.

Upstairs the first lady was entertaining a group of friends for dinner; downstairs 100 reporters were waiting. President Bush, his face already made up for his first prime-time news conference in 18 months, turned to his chief of staff.

"He said, `Why don't you just leave me alone for a little bit?' " the chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., said in an interview on Friday. Mr. Card, taken aback, quickly left, he said, and the president quietly closed the door of his study.

For the next 10 minutes, the president of the United States, a man under inconceivable pressures, sat in solitude, undisturbed.

Moments later, Mr. Bush strode up to his lectern in the bright television glare, presenting himself in a nearly hourlong news conference on Thursday as a leader impervious to doubt.

At a time when the world is arguing about what the United States should do in Iraq, while even his own advisers are still debating options, Mr. Bush's aides say that he has come to realize that making the decision to go to war is the loneliest moment that presidents face.

Whether war is a last resort that has been thrust upon him, as he sometimes says, or whether it is his choice to wage it, no one can fill the space that he alone occupies — not his closest aides, not the great array of expert advisers, not his wife or even his father, who made a similar decision when he was president.

Presidents handle pressure differently — Richard M. Nixon retreated, Bill Clinton got on the phone in the middle of the night — but historians say that almost all display certitude in public and more uncertainty in private. Friends and advisers of Mr. Bush insist that this president, in contrast, is much the same in private as he is in public.

While Iraq weighs on him heavily, they say, a president who sees the world as a biblical struggle of good versus evil has never expressed any misgivings, or personal vulnerabilities, about going to war against Saddam Hussein.

"He's very determined, I would say," said Cardinal Pio Laghi, a Vatican peace emissary and longtime Bush family friend who last week hand-delivered a letter to Mr. Bush from Pope John Paul II asking the president to avoid an invasion of Iraq. "He was very friendly, he was very nice, he was very appreciative, but he didn't give me the idea that he was shaky."

The president's appearance of calm in the face of enormous international opposition to war in Iraq, aides say, is driven by two forces: Mr. Bush's unequivocal belief that Mr. Hussein is a grave threat to the United States, and his constant worry that there will be another Sept. 11 on his watch.

"He's worried about another attack every morning that he walks into the Oval Office," Mr. Card said. Mr. Bush's concern is in large part fueled by the first thing he reads every day, the "threat assessment," a compilation of what United States intelligence and law enforcement agencies pick up about potential terrorist activity. Some of it is reliable, much of it is not, but aides call it frightening. For the president it is a powerful motivating force.

"My job is to protect America, and that's exactly what I'm going to do," Mr. Bush said repeatedly at his news conference on Thursday. "People can ascribe all kinds of intentions. I swore to protect and defend the Constitution. That's what I swore to do. I put my hand on the Bible and took that oath."

Mr. Bush is handling the pressures on him, aides say, by staying faithful to his orderly and reassuring White House life: exercise, a careful diet, prayer, no alcohol, a dutiful reading of his nighttime briefing books, early bedtimes, time with his wife. Mr. Bush relaxes, aides say, by watching ESPN over lunch on a tray brought up to his private dining room from the White House mess, or by poring over the sports pages. He still schedules an hour each day for exercise, typically now in the midafternoons.

Two weekends ago at Camp David, the president watched "Antwone Fisher," about an African-American orphan trying to put his life right after growing up in an abusive foster home. Mr. Bush, who frequently gets too restless to sit through an entire movie, watched the entire film.

People who have met with Mr. Bush have been struck by his tranquillity. "You would never have known that he was sitting on a powder keg," said Don Hewitt, the executive producer of "60 Minutes," who recently spent 15 minutes with Mr. Bush in the Oval Office. "He was amazingly calm and wanted to talk about Harry Truman and not Saddam Hussein."

Aides say that Mr. Bush's Christian faith, which led him to stop drinking in 1986, is a big factor. "My faith sustains me, because I pray daily," Mr. Bush said at his news conference on Thursday night, speaking plainly about a topic he usually avoids in public. "I pray for guidance and wisdom and strength."

In the United States, he said, "there are thousands of people who pray for me that I'll never see and be able to thank," and he added, "But it's a humbling experience to think that people I will never have met have lifted me and my family up in prayer."

One of the biggest changes in Mr. Bush's life in the last two weeks is a schedule suddenly free of domestic trips and many of the ceremonial duties of the office.

In the buildup to war, the president's aides have cleared blocks of his daily calendar to give him more time to think — or, more realistically, to get on the phone, as he did this week, to lobby nearly all of his 14 fellow heads of state in the United Nations Security Council, where there will soon be a showdown vote on a resolution that would effectively authorize an attack on Iraq.

The longest and most intense of those talks were with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, the president's closest ally, who faces more war opposition and risks to his political future than Mr. Bush. The two strategize on the latest vote count — the resolution needs 9 of 15 votes to pass, with no vetoes. So far the United States has only 4, including its own. There were at least two talks this week between Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush, aides said, lasting some 20 minutes each.

Mr. Bush also spoke this week with his father, who called to congratulate his son on his presentation at the news conference, aides said. The two men, who have both taken on Mr. Hussein, continue to speak all the time, aides say. Aides say they are almost never in the room during the phone calls.

In the march toward war, there has also been an occasional moment of humor. "While he was giving the State of the Union, he winked at me," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. "He sort of winked, a couple of times. And I winked back at him."

"Whether you agree with him or not," Mr. Schumer said, "one of Bush's strengths is that he goes with his instincts. And at a time like this, when the winds are swirling around in all different directions, a president is well served who has his own internal gyroscope."

Questioning Terror Suspects in a Dark and Surreal World

Questioning Terror Suspects in a Dark and Surreal World
By DON VAN NATTA Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/international/09DETA.html

[This article was reported by Raymond Bonner, Don Van Natta Jr. and Amy Waldman and written by Mr. Van Natta.]

CAIRO, March 8 — The capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed provides American authorities with their best opportunity yet to prevent attacks by Al Qaeda and track down Osama bin Laden. But the detention also presents a tactical and moral challenge when it comes to the interrogation techniques used to obtain vital information.

Senior American officials said physical torture would not be used against Mr. Mohammed, regarded as the operations chief of Al Qaeda and mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. They said his interrogation would rely on what they consider acceptable techniques like sleep and light deprivation and the temporary withholding of food, water, access to sunlight and medical attention.

American officials acknowledged that such techniques were recently applied as part of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, the highest-ranking Qaeda operative in custody until the capture of Mr. Mohammed. Painkillers were withheld from Mr. Zubaydah, who was shot several times during his capture in Pakistan.

But the urgency of obtaining information about potential attacks and the opaque nature of the way interrogations are carried out can blur the line between accepted and unaccepted actions, several American officials said.

Routine techniques include covering suspects' heads with black hoods for hours at a time and forcing them to stand or kneel in uncomfortable positions in extreme cold or heat, American and other officials familiar with interrogations said. Questioners may also feign friendship and respect to elicit information. In some cases, American officials said, women are used as interrogators to try to humiliate men unaccustomed to dealing with women in positions of authority.

Interrogations of important Qaeda operatives like Mr. Mohammed occur at isolated locations outside the jurisdiction of American law. Some places have been kept secret, but American officials acknowledged that the C.I.A. has interrogation centers at the United States air base at Bagram in Afghanistan and at a base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

Qaeda operatives, including Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a suspect in the planning of the Sept. 11 attacks, were initially taken to a secret C.I.A. installation in Thailand but have since been moved, American officials said.

Intelligence officials also acknowledged that some suspects had been turned over to security services in countries known to employ torture. There have also been isolated, if persistent, reports of beatings in some American-operated centers. American military officials in Afghanistan are investigating the deaths of two prisoners at Bagram in December.

American officials have guarded the interrogation results. But George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, said in December that suspects interrogated overseas had produced important information.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld have said that American techniques adhere to international accords that ban the use of torture and that "all appropriate measures" are employed in interrogations.

Rights advocates and lawyers for prisoners' rights have accused the United States of quietly embracing torture as an acceptable means of getting information in the global antiterrorism campaign. "They don't have a policy on torture," said Holly Burkhalter, the United States director of Physicians for Human Rights, one of five groups pressing the Pentagon for assurances detainees are not being tortured. "There is no specific policy that eschews torture."

Critics also assert that transferring Qaeda suspects to countries where torture is believed common — like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia — violates American law and the 1984 international convention against torture, which bans such transfers.

Some American and other officials subscribe to a view held by a number of outside experts, that physical coercion is largely ineffective. The officials say the most effective interrogation methods involve a mix of psychological disorientation, physical deprivation and ingratiating acts, all of which can take weeks or months.

"Pain alone will often make people numb and unresponsive," said Magnus Ranstorp, deputy director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews University in Scotland. "You have to engage people to get into their minds and learn what is there."

About 3,000 Qaeda and Taliban suspects have been detained since the fall of 2001. Some have since been freed. The largest known group, about 650, is being held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. American officials said the detainees at Guantánamo and similar military-run centers were not regarded as having valuable information.

Senior Qaeda members, however, are interrogated by specially trained C.I.A. officers and interpreters. F.B.I. agents submit questions but do not generally take part, American officials said.

Starving the Senses
Deprivation and Black Hoods

Omar al-Faruq, a confidant of Mr. bin Laden and one of Al Qaeda's senior operatives in Southeast Asia, was captured last June by Indonesian agents acting on a tip from the C.I.A. Agents familiar with the case said a black hood was dropped over his head and he was loaded onto a C.I.A. aircraft. When he arrived at his destination several hours later, the hood was removed. On the wall in front of him were the seals of the New York City Police and Fire Departments, a Western official said.

It was, said a former senior C.I.A. officer who took part in similar sessions, a mind game called false flag, intended to leave the captive disoriented, isolated and vulnerable. Sometimes the décor is faked to make it seem as though the suspect has been taken to a country with a reputation for brutal interrogation.

In this case, officials said, Mr. Faruq was in the C.I.A. interrogation center at the Bagram air base. American officials were convinced that he knew a lot about pending attacks and the Qaeda network in Southeast Asia, which Mr. bin Laden sent him to set up in 1998.

The details of the interrogation are unknown, though one intelligence official briefed on the sessions said Mr. Faruq initially provided useless scraps of information.

What is known is that the questioning was prolonged, extending day and night for weeks. It is likely, experts say, that the proceedings followed a pattern, with Mr. Faruq left naked most of the time, his hands and feet bound. While international law requires prisoners to be allowed eight hours' sleep a day, interrogators do not necessarily let them sleep for eight consecutive hours.

Mr. Faruq may also have been hooked up to sensors, then asked questions to which interrogators knew the answers, so they could gauge his truthfulness, officials said.

The Western intelligence official described Mr. Faruq's interrogation as "not quite torture, but about as close as you can get." The official said that over a three-month period, the suspect was fed very little, while being subjected to sleep and light deprivation, prolonged isolation and room temperatures that varied from 100 degrees to 10 degrees. In the end he began to cooperate.

Mr. Faruq began to tell of plans to drive explosives-laden trucks into American diplomatic centers. A day later, embassies in Indonesia and more than a dozen other countries in Southeast Asia were closed, officials said. He also provided detailed information about people involved in those operations and other plots, writing out lengthy descriptions. He held out longer than Mr. Zubaydah, who American officials said began to cooperate after two months of interrogation.

American intelligence knows a great deal about Mr. Mohammed, who has been sought since the mid-1990's. That knowledge, an expert said, can provide leverage. "The important thing is to construct the suspect's personal history and learn about the person before you interrogate them," a European counterterrorism official said. "Shock is a great technique. When we can show someone that we already know a lot about them, including intimate personal details, they are shocked and more likely to start talking."

The Centers
Details Emerge From the Shadows

The secret C.I.A. center at Bagram where Mr. Faruq probably remains is near the two-story detention center where lower-level suspects are being held. Both sites are off limits, even to most military personnel. The only descriptions of life inside have come from released detainees.

American officials at the base say that all detainees are treated according to international law and are held under humane conditions. Still, the Americans expressed reluctance to describe details of the conditions because, as Col. Roger King, spokesman for the American-led force in Afghanistan, put it: "Every detail we give you about how we run the facility provides information to the enemy about how to be more successful in resisting if captured."

But he did provide some information that both complemented and contradicted the descriptions given by former detainees.

In a typical prison, where punishment is the aim, routine governs life. At Bagram, where eliciting information is the goal, the opposite is true. Disorientation is a tool of interrogation and therefore a way of life.

To that end, the building — an unremarkable hangar — is lighted 24 hours a day, making sleep almost impossible, said Muhammad Shah, an Afghan farmer who was held there for 18 days.

Colonel King said it was legitimate to use lights, noise and vision restriction, and to alter, without warning, the time between meals, to blur a detainee's sense of time. He said sleep deprivation was "probably within the lexicon."

Prisoners are watched, moved and, according to some, manhandled by military police officials. Most detainees live on the hangar's bottom floor, a large area divided with wire mesh into group cells holding 8 to 10 prisoners each. Some are kept on the top floor in isolation cells.

Former detainees have given disparate accounts of their treatment, with the harshest tales, predictably, emerging from the isolation cells. Those who have probably been subjected to the most thorough interrogations, and the greatest duress, have probably not been released.

Colonel King said that an American military pathologist had determined that the deaths of two prisoners in December were homicides and that the circumstances were still under investigation.

Two former prisoners said they had been forced to stand with their hands chained to the ceiling and their feet shackled in the isolation cells.

One said he was kept naked except when he was taken to interrogation room or the bathroom.

Mr. Shah, who was never in an isolation cell, said neither his hands nor feet were ever tied, but he had seen prisoners with chains around their ankles.

Colonel King said that the building was heated and that the prisoners were fed a balanced diet under which most gained weight. Mr. Shah said he had received plentiful food — bread, biscuits, rice and meat — three times a day.

The center holds fewer than 100 people, so detainees are regularly released or transported elsewhere to make room for more. Most probably spend two to three months there, Colonel King said.

Mr. Shah said his interrogators used the threat of moving him to Guantánamo Bay to try to force cooperation, warning him conditions there would not be as pleasant.

Guantánamo Bay
Order Obscures Signs of Distress

At Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, American military officials said the population, now relatively steady at about 650, was sorted into varying categories of dangerousness, a change from the early days when prisoners were treated equally, each isolated in an individual cell.

This month the military command opened a new medium-security section called Camp Four where selected prisoners live in dormitory-style housing, congregate, shower regularly, play board games and are able to write more frequent letters to family members. About 20 prisoners moved in this week, and when construction is completed as many as 200 prisoners could be housed there.

"This is designed to house people who are deemed to be less of a security risk," said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a military spokesman at the base.

But underlying the superficial orderliness are signs of deep psychological distress among the population. There have been 20 reported suicide attempts involving the prisoners, an extraordinarily high number compared with other prison populations, said Dr. Terry Kupers, an Oakland psychiatrist who is an authority on mental health in prisons.

[Another suicide attempt took place on Friday, The Associated Press said today.]

Except for those who are recently promoted to Camp Four, the regime for most prisoners has been isolation in single cells. They are permitted out of the cells twice a week, for 15 minutes each time, to shower and exercise in the yard. They are not permitted to have physical contact with one another.

Lt. Cmdr. Barbara Burfeind, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said guards were trained to recognize signs of deep depression and had managed to prevent any suicides.

Foreign Soil
Many Definitions of 'Acceptable'

Far less is known about the conditions for the suspected Qaeda members who have been turned over to foreign governments, either after the United States finished with them or as part of the interrogation procedure. Even the numbers and locations are a mystery.

American and foreign intelligence officials have acknowledged that suspects have been sent to Jordan, Syria and Egypt. In addition, Moroccan intelligence officials have questioned suspects and shared information with their American counterparts.

In one case in Morocco, lawyers for three Saudis and seven Moroccans accused of plotting to blow up American and British ships in the Strait of Gibraltar last summer said their clients were tortured. Moroccan officials denied that physical torture was used but acknowledged using sleep and light deprivation and serial teams of interrogators until the suspects broke.

"I am allowed to use all means in my possession," a senior Moroccan intelligence official said. "You have to fight all his resistance at all levels and show him that he is wrong, that his ideology is wrong and is not connected to religion. We break them, yes."

In Cairo, leaders of several human rights organizations and attorneys who represent prisoners said torture by the Egyptian government's internal security force had become routine. They also said they believed that the United States had sent a handful of Qaeda suspects to Egypt for harsh interrogations and torture by Egyptian officials.

"In the past, the United States harshly criticized Egypt when there was human rights violations, but now, for America, it is security first — security, before human rights," said Muhammad Zarei, a lawyer who had been director of the Cairo-based Human Rights Center for the Assistance of Prisoners.

Egyptian officials denied that any Qaeda members or terror suspects had been moved to Egypt. An Egyptian government spokesman, Nabil Osman, blamed rogue officers for abuses and said there was no systematic policy of torture.

"Any terrorist will claim torture — that's the easiest thing," Mr. Osman said. "Claims of torture are universal. Human rights organizations make their living on these claims. Their job is not to talk about the human rights of the victim but of the human rights of the terrorist or those in jail."

Mr. Osman declined to say whether Egypt had assisted with interrogations of Qaeda suspects at the request of the Americans. He would say only that both governments had cooperated in sharing information about terrorists and potential terrorist activities.

"We are providing them with a wealth of information," he said.

He said many of Egypt's antiterrorism initiatives, like military tribunals, had been imitated by the Untied States. "We set the model," he said, "for combating terrorism."

a week of happiness

saturday, my girlfriend arrived after almost 24 hours of travelling from the other side of the world. amazingly, she wasn't too tired, so after settling in we went to the black tie aphrodite party at the NYAC where she got her first taste of the NYC uptown scene. after a late night and a few parties and clubs, we woke up late sunday, had brunch in chinatown, and spent the day walking through the downtown neighborhoods.

monday, we got up early to see the statue of liberty and spent a large part of the day standing out in the bitter cold in line, and on the ferry to ellis island. this was my first time ever, and i was born and raised here! monday evening went to the Met for the premiere of the Met's new production of Gounod's Faust, one of my favorite operas. it was ok, but not great. and not as good as the last time around (their 1999? production). i guess i should stick to going after a few performances have ironed out some of the minor issues that can be so distracting (like keeping everyone synchronized and together, little acting quirks, etc.). nevertheless, overall, the performance was still not bad. gounod is always just so good. and the chocolate souffles at the Met's mezzanine restaurant are still *the best* in NYC i think.

tuesday we spend a lazy day going up and down Madison and Fifth avenues. went to the empire state building as the sun was going down, and the view was just so beautiful. again, it was my first time ever at yet another tourist spot. but it was definitely pretty cool. maybe i'll have to go back more often when friends visit, or hunt out other tourist spots.

wednesday, got up early, drove to boston, and gave a little mini tour through harvard, mit, and the back bay. although the return trip was fast and uneventful, driving to boston was so tiring in a thick fog and heavy rain. so rather than driving to DC as we were planning to do, we returned the car early and decided to take the bus the next day.

thursday, we woke up really early to catch the 8am bus to Washington DC, but after we got to chinatown and had sat on the bus for awhile, we were told that the bus wasn't going to leave until 11am. so instead we went to have some dim sum and then took a nice walk back to my place, just as it started to snow. after, as the snow started to get heavy and really come down, we spent a lazy day watching movies, eating, and doing little things around the house, thinking that we'd get up early again to go to DC the next day. but after a series of conversations with my girlfriend's office later that evening, we realized that she would have to return the next day to take care of some new things that had come up. oh, to not have to work!

so today, we woke up early to go to the airport instead. i hadn't ever been to terminal one at JFK until last week, so i was again amazed at how new and cool the place looked. usually, i fly on american owned airlines, and their terminals are mostly falling apart with age. but terminal one was just as nice as many other new foreign airports. if only she didn't have to leave so soon. sigh...

The Worst-Case Scenario Arrives

The Worst-Case Scenario Arrives
NYT Editorial
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/06/opinion/06THU1.html

With yesterday's barely veiled French and Russian threat to veto a war resolution, the United Nations Security Council appears to be rapidly approaching a crippling deadlock over Iraq. That would be the worst of all possible outcomes. It would lift the diplomatic pressure on Iraq to disarm and sever the few remaining restraints that have kept the Bush administration from going to war with its motley ad hoc coalition of allies.

The rupture in the Security Council is not just another bump in the road in the showdown with Iraq. It could lead to a serious, possibly fatal, breakdown in the system of collective security that was fashioned in the waning days of World War II, a system that finally seemed to be reaching its potential in the years since the end of the cold war. Whatever comes of the conflict with Iraq, the world will have lost before any fighting begins if the Security Council is ruined as a mechanism for unified international action.

The first casualty is likely to be the effort to use coercive diplomacy to disarm Iraq. The unity of the Security Council last November in backing Resolution 1441 without a dissenting vote, combined with the movement of American forces to the Persian Gulf region, changed the equation with Iraq. Though Saddam Hussein is far from full disarmament, he has given ground in recent months by permitting the return of arms inspectors after a four-year absence and, more recently, by beginning to destroy illegal missiles. With more time and an escalation of pressure, Mr. Hussein might yet buckle.

Given that, it is not surprising that the French and Russians are opposed to a resolution that the United States would certainly take as permission to launch an immediate attack. But the French helped create the current either-or standoff with their intransigence earlier on. After uniting with other nations behind Resolution 1441, the French sank into a position of intransigent opposition that made the current impasse almost inevitable.

With the loss of unity, the hawks in Washington will now be pushing hard to bypass further discussion at the Security Council and move directly to combat. Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will see the impasse as a vindication of their arguments last summer that working with the U.N. would lead only to a diplomatic stalemate and further delay in disarming Iraq.

We see it differently. The French and the Russians are not the only ones who brought us to this point. Mr. Bush and his team laid the groundwork for this mess with their arrogant handling of other nations and dismissive attitude toward international accords. Though they mended their ways to some extent after Sept. 11, and initially tried to work through the Security Council on Iraq, the White House's obvious intention to go to war undermined that effort.

There may be a few days more for diplomacy to play out on Iraq, but it is already clear that the great powers on the Security Council, particularly the United States and France, have brought the United Nations to the brink of just the kind of paralysis and powerlessness that they warned would be so damaging to the world.

The Long Bomb

The Long Bomb
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/02/opinion/02FRIE.html

Watching this Iraq story unfold, all I can say is this: If this were not about my own country, my own kids and my own planet, I'd pop some popcorn, pull up a chair and pay good money just to see how this drama unfolds. Because what you are about to see is the greatest shake of the dice any president has voluntarily engaged in since Harry Truman dropped the bomb on Japan. Vietnam was a huge risk, but it evolved incrementally. And threatening a nuclear war with the Soviets over the Cuban missile crisis was a huge shake of the dice by President John Kennedy, but it was a gamble that was imposed on him, not one he initiated.

A U.S. invasion to disarm Iraq, oust Saddam Hussein and rebuild a decent Iraqi state would be the mother of all presidential gambles. Anyone who thinks President Bush is doing this for political reasons is nuts. You could do this only if you really believed in it, because Mr. Bush is betting his whole presidency on this war of choice.

And don't believe the polls. I've been to nearly 20 states recently, and I've found that 95 percent of the country wants to see Iraq dealt with without a war. But President Bush is a man on a mission. He has been convinced by a tiny group of advisers that throwing "The Long Bomb" — attempting to transform the most dangerous Arab state — is a geopolitical game-changer. It could help nudge the whole Arab-Muslim world onto a more progressive track, something that coaxing simply will not do anymore. It's something that can only be accomplished by building a different model in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world. No, you don't see this every day. This is really bold.

And that leads to my dilemma. I have a mixed marriage. My wife opposes this war, but something in Mr. Bush's audacious shake of the dice appeals to me. He summed it up well in his speech last week: "A liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region by bringing hope and progress into the lives of millions. America's interest in security and America's belief in liberty both lead in the same direction — to a free and peaceful Iraq."

My dilemma is that while I believe in such a bold project, I fear that Mr. Bush has failed to create a context for his boldness to succeed, a context that could maximize support for his vision — support vital to seeing it through. He and his team are the only people who would ever have conceived this project, but they may be the worst people to implement it. The only place they've been bold is in their military preparations (which have at least gotten Saddam to begin disarming).

What do I mean? I mean that if taking out Saddam and rebuilding Iraq had been my goal from the minute I took office (as it was for the Bush team), I would not have angered all of Europe by trashing the Kyoto global warming treaty without offering an alternative. I would not have alienated the entire Russian national security elite by telling the Russians that we were ripping up the ABM treaty and that they would just have to get used to it. (You're now seeing their revenge.) I would not have proposed one radical tax cut on top of another on the eve of a huge, costly nation-building marathon abroad.

I would, though, have rallied the nation for real energy conservation and initiated a Manhattan Project for alternative energies so I would not find myself with $2.25-per-gallon gasoline on the eve of this war — because OPEC capacity is nearly tapped out. I would have told the Palestinians that until they stop suicide bombing and get a more serious leadership, we're not dealing with them, but I would also have told the Israelis that every new or expanded settlement they built would cost them $100 million in U.S. aid. And I would have told the Arabs: "While we'll deal with the Iraqi threat, we have no imperial designs on your countries. We are not on a crusade — but we will not sit idle if you tolerate extremists in your midst who imperil our democracy."

No, had Mr. Bush done all these things it would not have changed everything with France, Russia and the Arabs — or my wife. But I am convinced that it would have helped generate more support to increase our staying power in Iraq and the odds that we could pull this off.

So here's how I feel: I feel as if the president is presenting us with a beautiful carved mahogany table — a big, bold, gutsy vision. But if you look underneath, you discover that this table has only one leg. His bold vision on Iraq is not supported by boldness in other areas. And so I am terribly worried that Mr. Bush has told us the right thing to do, but won't be able to do it right.

Pakistanis Say Suspect Described Recent Meeting With bin Laden

Pakistanis Say Suspect Described Recent Meeting With bin Laden
By RAYMOND BONNER with DAVID JOHNSTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/06/international/asia/06OSAM.html

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, March 5 — Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan as recently as last month and met there with his chief operational lieutenant, Pakistani security officials said today.

The officials said material seized on Saturday during the arrest of the lieutenant, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, showed that Mr. Mohammed met with Mr. bin Laden sometime in February, possibly in Rawalpindi, the city adjacent to Islamabad where Mr. Mohammed was discovered on Saturday.

"There is now no doubt that he is alive and well," a senior Pakistani government official said of Mr. bin Laden in an interview. "We have documents that show he is alive and in this region."

Officials in Washington said today that they knew of no specific information that would show the two men had recently met. But they saw a meeting between the terrorist leader and his main lieutenant as plausible and said it would suggest not only that Mr. bin Laden remained in charge of the terror organization but also that planning was under way for a major attack.

Mr. bin Laden has eluded a worldwide manhunt for more than a year. American authorities have been uncertain of his location since the American bombing of his hideout in Tora Bora, a mountainous region of Afghanistan, in late 2001 — though he is believed to have escaped the attack. American intelligence officials have ascribed two recently released audiotapes to Mr. bin Laden, but firm proof of his survival has remained elusive.

The senior Pakistani official said the information that Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Mohammed met in February came from documents, CD-ROM's and a computer discovered at the time of Mr. Mohammed's arrest.

In a separate interview, a second Pakistani official said that Mr. Mohammed had told his captors during the raid of meeting with Mr. bin Laden a month ago at a site that Mr. Mohammed refused to specify.

"Praise be to Allah, our sheik is alive," the official quoted Mr. Mohammed as saying. "I met him only one month ago."

In the past, Mr. bin Laden's subordinates have sought him out for meetings in which they obtained his approval of terrorist actions and were given a personal statement of support — especially in "martyrdom operations," in which his followers were likely to die.

Mr. Mohammed was arrested with Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, who Western intelligence officials say helped arrange the financing for the Sept. 11 plot. They are in American hands at an undisclosed location outside Pakistan, officials said. American authorities have sought to detain senior leaders of Al Qaeda outside the United States as enemy combatants, a status that denies them access to American criminal courts.

Since Mr. Mohammed's arrest, American officials have said he may shed light on Mr. bin Laden's whereabouts as well as on impending Qaeda attacks worldwide.

Today they confirmed that information about Mr. bin Laden was found in the material seized during the arrest. So far, they said, it is not clear how much the information will help in finding him.

The officials also said Mr. Mohammed had begun to cooperate with his captors, although it was not clear whether he had given up any significant information about Mr. bin Laden, other Qaeda leaders or terror strikes being planned inside the United States or elsewhere.

Officials are hoping that the items found at the house in Rawalpindi will help provide information on those subjects. Material seized in the raid have been shipped in boxes to Washington, where investigators are poring over it. Experts consulting in the case include translators, computer specialists, fingerprint examiners and other scientific analysts.

Among the items sent to Washington were cellphones and address books with the names, addresses and phone numbers of people inside the United States and overseas who are now being urgently sought by the F.B.I. and the security services of other countries, according to Americans familiar with the material.

Much more material was found in the raid than authorities have been willing to acknowledge in public. American officials said that even though the processing of documents had just begun, they were optimistic that it would lead to the disruption of terror plots and help in the capture of other Qaeda leaders.

It has long been suspected that Mr. bin Laden is hiding in the rugged tribal regions that straddle the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Washington today, officials said they had no reason to think otherwise. But according to authorities and political analysts in Pakistan, the raid in Rawalpindi increased the likelihood that Mr. bin Laden might have found it easier to conceal himself there or in another Pakistani city.

Another senior Qaeda member, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, was captured in September in a shootout in Karachi in southern Pakistan. American authorities said recently that they had narrowly missed capturing Mr. Mohammed at the time.

In the interviews today, the Pakistani security officials said that Mr. bin Laden had almost certainly moved since Mr. Mohammed's arrest. Regardless of whether the two men met, it seems likely that Mr. bin Laden would have been spurred into action by the arrest of such a close aide.

"We believe that he has changed his hideout and moved away," said the senior government official. "He keeps shifting. He surely knows that Khalid has been captured and will avoid moving to places he knew about."

It is those very migrations, Pakistani and American officials have said, that may increase the chances of capturing Mr. bin Laden. These officials view Mr. Mohammed's arrest as reinvigorating the search.

A significant detail emerged today about events leading to the Rawalpindi raid. The senior Pakistani official suggested that Mr. Mohammed was betrayed by someone inside Al Qaeda. The American government's offer of $25 million for information leading to his capture may have helped.

"I'm not going to tell you how we captured him," the official said, "but Khalid knows who did him in."

In recent months, Pakistani and American intelligence agents had picked up clues that Mr. Mohammed was planning a new attack on the United States from somewhere in Pakistan. As recently as Feb. 13, the Pakistani police narrowly missed arresting him when they raided an apartment in Quetta, a city in the southwestern province of Baluchistan that is home to many Qaeda sympathizers.

The Quetta raid yielded clues to his final location, a house in an upper-middle-class district of Rawalpindi. He was taken into custody with Mr. Hawsawi and a Pakistani man, Abdel Qadoos.

The material found in the raid provided insights into how Al Qaeda uses a complex system of couriers and e-mail to communicate and to contain damage in the event someone is arrested, the Pakistani authorities said.

Information obtained during the arrest also indicated that another senior Qaeda member, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had returned to Pakistan in recent weeks, Pakistani officials said. Mr. Zawahiri, an Egyptian-born surgeon, was believed to have fled Afghanistan in October or November 2001. The officials offered no explanation for why he had returned.

Raid on Feb. 13 Smoothed Way In Qaeda Arrest

Raid on Feb. 13 Smoothed Way In Qaeda Arrest
By DAVID JOHNSTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/04/international/asia/04HUNT.html

WASHINGTON, March 3 — For months, Pakistani and American intelligence had picked up clues that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was in Pakistan organizing what he hoped would be a spectacular new attack, officials of both countries said. On Feb. 13, when Pakistani authorities raided an apartment in Quetta, they got the break they needed.

They had hoped to find Mr. Mohammed, but he had fled the apartment, eluding the authorities, as he had on numerous occasions. Instead, they found and arrested Muhammad Abdel Rahman, a son of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric who in 1995 was convicted along with 10 followers for conspiring to blow up the United Nations headquarters and other New York buildings, bridges and tunnels — as an extension of the first World Trade Center attack in 1993.

Under interrogation, Mr. Rahman told police that Mr. Mohammed had also lived at the address. Information from Mr. Rahman and a fresh trail of cellphone messages and other clues allowed the authorities to follow Mr. Mohammed's trail from Quetta. They quickly tracked him to Rawalpindi, where he was captured without incident in the predawn hours of Saturday.

Today, intelligence officials expressed optimism, but not certainty, that Mr. Mohammed's arrest would breathe life into the search for Osama bin Laden. Some officials said they suspected that Mr. Mohammed knew the whereabouts of Mr. bin Laden, who is thought to be alive and in hiding, possibly in the wildly remote region encompassing parts of the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"Could he help us find bin Laden?" said one intelligence official, referring to Mr. Mohammed. "Sure, if he wants to."

Michael Chertoff, head of the Justice Department's criminal division, called the arrest "a landmark victory" in the campaign against terrorism.

The smooth precision of the endgame in the hunt for Mr. Mohammed, one of the most anxiously sought of all leaders of Al Qaeda, contrasts sharply with the uneven trajectory of the worldwide manhunt for Mr. bin Laden and his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Since September 2001, the pair has successfully eluded efforts by the United States and more than 100 countries to bring them to justice.

The capture of Mr. Mohammed was accomplished without bloodshed, unlike the shootouts that resulted in the capture of other top Qaeda lieutenants, Abu Zubaydah and Ramzi bin al-Shibh.

The arrests in Rawalpindi also yielded another significant figure in the Qaeda network, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, who investigators have said provided cash to Mohamed Atta for the 19 hijackers through bank accounts in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Shortly before the hijackings, Mr. Atta sent Mr. Hawsawi unspent funds that the hijackers did not need.

Mr. Mohammed's arrest has already resulted in a spike in communications traffic among Islamic militants, officials said, that has been monitored by American eavesdropping agencies. The officials said they hoped those conversations would yield fresh hints to the whereabouts of other top Qaeda suspects, possibly including Mr. bin Laden.

Moreover, the officials said that if Mr. Mohammed could be forced to cooperate with intelligence agencies, he could provide them with the details of Al Qaeda's recruitment plans, financing methods and, most importantly, its current operational plans in the United States and elsewhere.

In addition, several officials said they were still evaluating the evidence seized during Mr. Mohammed's arrest, including cellphones, computers, discs and documents, which authorities hope could lead to more arrests of Qaeda lieutenants who reported to Mr. Mohammed as well as clues about the whereabouts of the upper echelon of Al Qaeda's hierarchy.

"You've got two things to work with in a case like this," said one senior counterterrorism official. "You've got what's in his mind and what they found on the floor. Many of these guys are pack rats, and in that event he should be one of those people who is very helpful."

Even as details of the arrest continued to trickle out, senior Bush administration officials triumphantly declared that the arrest had badly damaged the bin Laden terror network.

"The truth be told, I was ecstatic when we got the son of a gun," Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said at a meeting with reporters.

But Mr. Ridge warned that Al Qaeda remained a potent terror force capable of striking inside the United States through lieutenants of Mr. bin Laden's who remain at large.

"We cannot overestimate his importance to the Al Qaeda terrorist organization," he said, referring to Mr. Mohammed. "But we shouldn't underestimate the continuing abilities that he has helped develop around the world."

Mr. Ridge said Mr. Mohammed had been trying to activate a terror plot against a target inside the United States, a plan that contributed significantly to the government's decision last month to rachet up the terrorist threat alert level from yellow to orange, a status that has since been rescinded. Mr. Ridge called it "a significant terrorist plot," but would not discuss any details.

"There was one plot line that we were able to connect with him that related to a potential terrorist attack during the time that this whole thing was being discussed," Mr. Ridge said. Asked if the attack was planned for the United States, Mr. Ridge replied simply, "Yes."

The plot to which Mr. Ridge appeared to be referring, officials said, involved newly received intelligence indicating that Mr. Mohammed was trying to set in motion a large-scale attack against an unspecified target in the United States, perhaps involving fuel trucks, gas stations and bridges. Mr. Mohammed had considered trying to attack such targets before Sept. 11.

Intelligence analysts, who played an important role in the decision to raise the threat level, coupled that information with another, older report provided by a senior Qaeda detainee, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a close associate of Mr. Mohammed's who also played a significant role in the planning for the trade center hijackings.

Mr. bin al-Shbih, the officials said, told the authorities that in 2001 Mr. Mohammed had discussed using fuel tanker trucks to blow up gas stations and that he had talked about destroying suspension bridges in New York City. That plan was abandoned, but the analysts linked the 2001 plot with more recent threats to conclude that Mr. Mohammed was bent on striking again in Manhattan.

Today, officials described Mr. Mohammed as an anti-American extremist who has been on the run from American authorities since the mid-1990's. He was first sought in connection with a 1995 plot, based in the Philippines, to blow up American airliners over the Pacific Ocean.

Since then he has repeatedly avoided capture, often narrowly eluding American intelligence agencies. Sometimes, he seemed to live openly and even flamboyantly, visiting nightclubs and staying in world-class hotels.

Some investigators believed he might be taunting them, allowing his pursuers brief glimpses of his whereabouts before dropping out of sight. He moved continuously to avoid detection, communicated frequently with ever-present cellphones and through a network of intermediaries who carried messages to and from other Qaeda leaders.

Besides eluding authorities in Quetta, Mr. Mohammed narrowly escaped capture last September, when Mr. bin al-Shibh was arrested after a shootout in Karachi. Mr. Mohammed had been in hiding with Mr. bin al-Shibh, and Mr. Mohammed's two young sons were taken into captivity after the shootout. Some officials said the fate of his sons might be used as leverage to try to pry information from him, although a senior American intelligence official said children would not be brought into the interrogation process.

His sometimes frantic level of activity and wide circle of associates seemed to define Mr. Mohammed as one of Al Qaeda's most important operations leaders, but those very qualities appeared to have contributed to his undoing. Today, several officials suggested that investigators were able to focus precisely on Mr. Mohammed's movements through his cellphone communications and by tips from one or more of his associates, including some under arrest in Pakistan on terrorism charges.

He had advanced technical knowledge about secret communications. When a correspondent for the Arabic-language television network Al Jazeera went to interview him last fall, Mr. Mohammed quickly dismantled the correspondent's cellphone so that their whereabouts could not be traced.

The Screaming Eagles Fly to the Gulf

The Screaming Eagles Fly to the Gulf
By JIM DWYER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/04/international/middleeast/04AIRB.html

CAMP NEW JERSEY, Kuwait, March 1 — In their desert camouflage uniforms of light beige and brown, the soldiers on the Fort Campbell airfield were clothed for weather in the Persian Gulf, not the cold, damp night air of a Kentucky winter. A thick coat of fog had dropped onto the Army base. For an instant as they filed in a long, single line onto their jet, the soldiers formed silhouettes against the murky glow of fog-shrouded runway lights.

It was near midnight on Thursday, and the 101st Airborne Division — the Screaming Eagles — was beginning its flight from Kentucky to the deserts of Kuwait, a distance of some 7,000 miles.

For even one person such a trip would be a giant leap. For the 19,000 soldiers of the 101st, it is an industrial-strength operation that began on Wednesday and was expected to continue through Tuesday.

A reporter from The New York Times traveled with one planeload of soldiers from the 101st, providing, in effect, an ant's view of the anthill, a glimpse of the capacity for war and an informal tote of the human costs that go along with threatening to wage it.

As part of the United States buildup for a possible invasion of Iraq, some 200,000 American soldiers are in the Persian Gulf region. In an armed conflict, military planners expect that soldiers from the 101st will be among those leading the ground campaign to seize Baghdad. The 101st can attack from the air and drop troops into position by helicopter.

Right now, however, the troops appear to be arriving well in advance of any action since most of their equipment, including 250 or so helicopters, is still at sea and not expected to arrive for several days. Then everything must be unpacked from 1,900 cargo containers. The helicopters, for instance, were shrink-wrapped in plastic for the voyage.

The soldiers who might wage war from those helicopters had their own travel needs, including an extra pair of socks at the commissary, a last-minute wedding by an accommodating judge or chaplain and vaccinations administered in a hangar just before boarding the jet.

On the flight that left late Thursday night, more than a few were watching the clock: one compensation for going to a war zone is that up to $5,339 a month in pay becomes tax-free. If the soldiers arrived before the calendar turned from February to March, all of their February earnings would be tax-exempt.

They know, however, that the Army cannot be rushed, a lesson that was taught again and again over the next 47 hours. "It's not like going to Nashville and getting on the plane," said Lt. Col. James Larsen, the deputy operations officer for the 101st.

Hour 1: 'Chalk 19' Is Formed

At 1 p.m. Thursday the soldiers finish their goodbyes to family and friends. Although they are hours from departure, they will be sequestered until they board the plane. During earlier troop deployments — including the war in 1991 that drove the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait — many families stayed with the soldiers until the final minutes, adding a ragged emotional edge to the leave-taking because the departure times dragged on for hours past the schedule. Now once the families are gone, the soldiers draw the weapons — M-4 carbines for everyone, sidearms and Berber knives for some — that they will carry until they come home.

Then they pile their duffle bags and rucksacks in a parking lot. Their gear is loaded onto a truck with "Chalk 19" marked on the back in white chalk. For mass deployments, the 101st moves in cohorts of soldiers and gear, each one given a chalk number, which will fill an airplane. Each chalk moves through stages: goodbye to the family, pick-up of weapons, loading of baggage onto the chalked truck, holding-time in a cafeteria, paperwork, inoculations. They are carried through those stages by buses.

Sgt. Henry DeGrace boards a bus and gazes down the line of seats, then yells: "I see some soft hats that have to go." As they deploy for combat, the soldiers are expected to be in their combat uniforms. That means Kevlar helmets must be worn. It also means that weapons are carried onto the buses and planes.

After the groups are formed, the bus rolls across a scale, followed by the truck with Chalk 19's baggage; the military calculates that each passenger represents 400 pounds of blood, sweat and gear. "Anybody been lying about their weight, we're going to find out right now," Sergeant DeGrace yells.

Hour 5: Paperwork, Prayers and Other Precautions

In a hangar soldiers swipe their identification cards through a digital reader; that puts them on the passenger manifest. They stand in lines to sign wills and forms granting power of attorney, to get shots they might have missed earlier and to update any paperwork to include new family members.

Scores of soldiers, perhaps hundreds, were married in the days before their deployment, Colonel Larsen said.

None of those weddings were performed by Maj. Len Kircher, a United Methodist chaplain flying with Chalk 19. "I don't do spur-of-the-moment jobs," he said.

Major Kircher developed his thinking during an earlier assignment at Fort Benning, Ga.

"I put up a sign in my office that said, `I don't marry privates, and I don't marry teenagers,' " he said. "When I was down at Fort Benning, you'd have these 19-year-old privates wanting to marry some disenfranchised 17-year-old they just met at the Columbus Mall." The teenagers are too young, he said, and the privates are too poor.

He was astounded by the flood of babies being born at Fort Campbell's community hospital, observing that it was not a boom inspired by the potential war. But he offered a prediction: "I can guarantee that when we come back, nine months from now there will be a lot more babies."

Hour 9: Food, No Water

The troops move from the hangar to another holding area. Along the way a detail opens crates of "Meals Ready to Eat," packaged food that lasts for years and includes a magnesium chip that will heat up the entree by adding a tablespoon of water. The soldiers are told to take three of these, plus some bottled water. It turns out that the water will come in handy for more than one reason: the plane chartered for Chalk 19 has lost its water supply in the lavatories.

As soon as that announcement is finished, a lengthy line forms outside the lone bathroom in the hangar.

It is not hard to find anxiety over the trip: the crisis with Iraq could end without a war, an outcome that most of the soldiers would welcome. But few have any desire for a long period of squatting inside tents in the desert, killing time during a prolonged diplomatic standoff. Specialist Charles Robbins, 23, of Knoxville, Tenn., said his wife, Emily, is four and a half months' pregnant with their first child, and he was not happy at the prospect of being away for the birth. But he did not resent being assigned to Iraq, even though he was not long back from Afghanistan.

"I feel this is our job; this is our duty," Specialist Robbins said.

"They can do it without me," interjected Specialist Jeff Wilkinson, 21, of Nacogdoches, Tex. He was on the verge of finishing his four-year enlistment and was ready to go to college when he learned that he was going to Kuwait. "It's called an involuntary extension."

Standing next to him, Sgt. Andrew Batovsky said he too resented having his enlistment extended. Sergeant Batovsky, 24, of Liverpool, N.Y., had entered the service when he was 18 and served in Afghanistan. "I was all set for community college," Sergeant Batovsky said. "Then they came out with this order."

Specialist Eric Budet, 28, from Springfield Gardens in Queens, N.Y., said he had been to Kosovo and the military life agreed with him. "I'm definitely going to re-enlist," he said.

Hour 11: 50 Planes

There are two ways to look at the 101st's deployment to Kuwait from Kentucky. On the one hand, it took 11 hours to go the first mile, basically across Fort Campbell from the baggage collection point to the airfield. On the other hand, inside of 24 hours the 101st division loaded 18 chartered airplanes with soldiers and sent them across the world.

Under an arrangement with the airline industry, the government can requisition commercial passenger jets for military purposes, paying the airlines for the use and a standard crew. Over the five-day deployment of the 101st, 50 separate aircraft will be used to bring the troops to the gulf region, Colonel Larsen said.

Chalk 19 was traveling on a World Airways MD-11 jet that had only economy-class seats, 10 across. Because of the plumbing difficulty, the 101st loaded cases of water into the overhead containers, causing much of the carry-on baggage to end up between the legs of the passengers. For that and other reasons, people on board could not wait for the trip to end.

At Hour 18 when the plane stops for refueling at an Air Force base in Frankfurt, Capt. Tito Villanueva glances at his watch and sees that they are running short of time to reach Kuwait airspace for the February deadline that would mean the month of tax-free pay.

"We're going to be pushing it," Captain Villanueva said with a smile. "We may have to take over the plane and accelerate it. Maybe we should lighten the load — leave a few people behind."

"I am all about that," one soldier called out.

Before anyone can leave the plane in Frankfurt, Sergeant DeGrace tells the soldiers to leave their weapons behind. A team will stay to guard them. The soldiers who were recently given the smallpox inoculation are warned that if they are changing bandages, they must throw them only into a black-and-yellow container outside the gate.

Hour 27: Did Anyone Tell You Why You Are Here?

At the airport in Kuwait City, the passengers on the Chalk 19 flight are told to leave the plane, swipe their identification cards at a portable reader held by other soldiers in a sport utility vehicle and then immediately board a bus. They are not to stand outside talking or smoking.

The sense of menace had grown an hour earlier as the plane approached the airport. The cabin crew had turned off all the lights and had told soldiers sitting by the windows to pull down the shades so the jet could land in near darkness. The pilot tried to point out rows of oil wells on one side of the plane with controlled fires coming from their crowns, but it was too late to see them since the shades had already been pulled down.

One of the senior officers called back to Fort Campbell to report that Chalk 19 had arrived in Kuwait airspace on Feb. 28 at 11:30 p.m. No one argued the point.

A military briefer boarded and said the terrorist threat was high. He explained security precautions for traveling off base.

The buses dropped Chalk 19 at a holding tent the length of a football field, and several other soldiers gave briefings.

"Did anyone tell you the reason you are here?" one said.

"To kill," someone called out.

"War," another person shouted.

"Force protection," the briefer said, reminding the soldiers that they had to be ready to protect themselves to carry out their mission.

Hour 47: Camp New Jersey

The baggage followed the convoy of buses in two trucks to Camp New Jersey, the primitive camp where most of Chalk 19 will be stationed. They had nothing to see but the endless sand. They had little running water. So far, there was no telling how long they would sit and wait. Another military unit had just cleared out of Camp New Jersey before the 101st arrived; they moved deeper into the desert.

Sergeant DeGrace, the leader of Chalk 19, had brought his troops from Kentucky to the desert. "What a beautiful country," he declared to no one in particular. "I can see why we're here."

Hundreds of duffle bags and rucksacks were stacked on the ground. As the soldiers picked through them, the wind picked up, and dust rose in smoggy brown sheets, which whipped across men and women, bags and buses. The tents shuddered and held. Two soldiers moved across the horizon, silhouetted just as they had been 47 hours earlier, when they climbed into the jet in the damp fog of the Kentucky night.

In two grinding days across 7,000 miles, the foggy dew had been swapped for a hazy dust. The sense of place and perspective vanished. As the soldiers bent into the wind, in a world turned inside out, it was not possible to say if they were coming or going; only that they had arrived as promised.

N.A.S.D. Accuses Former Credit Suisse Banker of Misdeeds

N.A.S.D. Accuses Former Credit Suisse Banker of Misdeeds
By REUTERS
Filed at 3:28 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-financial-nasd-quattrone.html

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wall Street industry watchdog NASD on Thursday accused former investment banking star Frank Quattrone of violations during his tenure at Credit Suisse First Boston that were designed to win lucrative banking business.

The complaints filed by NASD, formerly known as the National Association of Securities Dealers, could move Quattrone one step closer to a lifetime ban from the securities industry.

``Obviously, he's in a lot of trouble,'' said Howard Schiffman, a former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement official who is now a securities lawyer at Dickstein, Shapiro, Morin & Oshinsky LLP. ``You wouldn't want to be his lawyer.''

NASD said in a statement that its complaints accuse Quattrone of having engaged in ``spinning,'' a practice of awarding shares to the personal accounts of executives who are in a position to assign investment banking business, as well as ``creating and overseeing a flawed organizational structure that undermined research analyst objectivity.''

Wall Street banks have come under sharp scrutiny over the last year by government regulators and lawmakers on allegations that the banks issued biased research and awarded shares in hot IPOs to win business from their investment banking clients.

``The NASD charges are completely without merit and represent an unprecedented attempt to take punitive action against an individual for conduct that was legal at the time and widespread throughout the industry,'' said Quattrone's lawyer Howard Heiss, in a statement.

In 1999, when the dot-com craze was in full force, CSFB managed more U.S. IPOs than any other firm, the NASD noted. In 2000, investment banking generated $3.68 billion in revenue, the agency said.

``If these allegations are true, the likelihood that he's going to be able to continue in the business is very low,'' Schiffman said.

DOCUMENT DESTRUCTION

The NASD said it also accused Quattrone of failing to cooperate in its investigation into whether he encouraged CSFB Tech Group employees to destroy documents after he was notified of NASD and federal investigations.

The 47-year-old former investment banking star told staff in an e-mail to ``clean up'' files during a Dec. 2000 investigation, a copy of the document obtained by Reuters shows, and he now faces criminal charges for having done so.

Quattrone resigned from CSFB under pressure on Tuesday in part because he failed to appear before NASD investigators late last week. He received no immediate compensation or severance package in connection with his exit.

Quattrone built CSFB's global technology group into one of the most lucrative stock underwriters on Wall Street in the late 1990s, taking public companies such as Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN.O) and VA Linux Systems Inc., now VA Software Corp. (LNUX.O).

New York-based CSFB, a unit of Switzerland's Credit Suisse Group Inc. (CSGZN.VX) (CSR.N), joined 11 other investment banks in a landmark $1.5 billion settlement with state and federal regulators aimed at curbing potential stock research and IPO allocation abuses.

CSFB paid one of the highest fine amounts -- $150 million -- as part of the settlement, which is still being finalized with states, the NASD and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The NASD said Quattrone received more than $200 million in compensation between Aug. 1998 and the end of 2001. The agency cited various problematic practices at CSFB's tech-banking group and said Quattrone violated NASD rules.

``CSFB's Legal and Compliance department thoroughly reviewed and approved the allocation practices that are the subject of the NASD complaint,'' Quattrone's lawyer said in his statement.

``Recent investigations into conflicts of interest on Wall Street have shown that in too many cases in the past, investors' interests were compromised for greater investment banking revenues,'' Mary Schapiro, NASD's vice chairman and president of regulatory policy and oversight, said in a statement.

Under NASD rules, Quattrone can file a response to the complaints and request a hearing before an NASD disciplinary panel. NASD said possible remedies include a fine, censure, suspension or ban from the securities industry, as well as disgorgement of gains associated with the violations and payment of restitution.

A hearing before NASD officials is expected, according to Quattrone's lawyer.

Credit Suisse Banker Quits Amid Inquiries

Credit Suisse Banker Quits Amid Inquiries
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/05/business/05WALL.html

Frank P. Quattrone, the highflying investment banker who handled hot stock offerings like Cisco Systems and Amazon.com during the technology boom, resigned from Credit Suisse First Boston yesterday after refusing to cooperate with an investigation into his banking practices.

Mr. Quattrone is the subject of an NASD investigation, and on the advice of his lawyers, he has declined to provide additional testimony to regulators in that office. According to Credit Suisse officials, Mr. Quattrone violated bank policy by choosing not to cooperate with the investigation.

Mr. Quattrone, who earned as much as $100 million annually in his peak years, and the firm have agreed to work out such issues as his severance pay and his accumulation of company stock later, pending a resolution of the civil and criminal inquiries. Credit Suisse will continue to pay his considerable legal expenses under terms of his contract.

Mr. Quattrone, who had been on administrative leave, is also the subject of two criminal investigations: one being conducted by New York state prosecutors and the other by the United States attorney's office in Manhattan.

Prosecutors and regulators now describe Mr. Quattrone's suspected infractions as symbolic of the excesses that inflated and then burst the Nasdaq bubble in the late 1990's.

From his base in Credit Suisse's offices in Palo Alto, Calif., Mr. Quattrone blurred the barriers between the disparate businesses of a Wall Street bank.

Nominally an investment banker in charge of bringing hot technology companies public, he also held sway over a research department, ensuring that companies he took public received positive coverage, the prosecutors now suggest, pointing to various e-mail messages. Regulators say that Mr. Quattrone guided the distribution of public offerings of new stocks to favored clients, a practice known as spinning. Investigators are also trying to determine whether he impeded a federal inquiry in December 2000, when he endorsed a colleague's suggestion that bankers clean up their files.

Mr. Quattrone's presence had become a burden for John J. Mack, Credit Suisse's chief executive, who has struggled to differentiate his staff of team players from the casino-like banking mentality that prevailed under the former chief executive, Allen Wheat. Just over a year ago, Mr. Mack added Mr. Quattrone to the firm's executive committee — a surprise to many who saw Mr. Quattrone's legal baggage and Mr. Mack's reform effort as contradictory.

Now, after a global settlement between investment banks and regulators has been reached in principle and the details are imminent, Credit Suisse is looking to wipe its decks clean. Mr. Mack's chief legal adviser is Gary G. Lynch, a former enforcement official at the Securities and Exchange Commission, who also spearheaded the commission's investigation of Michael R. Milken, the 1980's-era junk bond innovator. Together, they have been taking aggressive steps to distance their bank from Mr. Quattrone.

The Credit Suisse Group, parent of Credit Suisse First Boston, recently set aside $600 million against future legal claims, and like other Wall Street firms, it is steeling itself for a barrage of class-action lawsuits when regulators release the results of their investigation. By cutting Mr. Quattrone loose ahead of the release of the findings, Mr. Mack and Mr. Lynch are hoping that the brunt of the class-action suits will be directed at Mr. Quattrone and his still deep pockets, lawyers involved in the investigation say.

Mr. Quattrone was one of the first investment bankers to set up shop in California, doing so in the early 1980's. Starting at Morgan Stanley, where he reported to Mr. Mack, and continuing at Deutsche Bank and then Credit Suisse, he operated an office far from the New York headquarters.

Mr. Quattrone — who cultivates a brushy black mustache and at times wears garish sweaters — did more than take companies public. He, his family and his many clients and friends made early-stage investments in technology companies and booked handsome profits when these companies started trading. The vast number of technology stocks he underwrote are trading at prices far below their levels when they were brought public.

Some have compared Mr. Quattrone more to Mr. Milken than to recent fallen stars on Wall Street like Henry Blodget, Merrill Lynch's Internet stock analyst, and Jack B. Grubman, Salomon Smith Barney's telecommunications stock analyst.

Just as Mr. Milken became something of an evangelist for small, high-growth companies in need of leverage in the 1980's, Mr. Quattrone helped technology and Internet companies looking to cash in on the 1990's craze for technology stocks. Like Mr. Milken, Mr. Quattrone demanded a big chunk of his company's profits.

And just as Mr. Milken remained a hero for many of the growth companies he financed, Mr. Quattrone still has the support of many of his friends in Silicon Valley.

"Would I work with Frank again? I would," said C. Richard Kramlich, a general partner at New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm. "I've been in business with Frank since the mid-80's. I think you are innocent until proven guilty."

Despite sundry inquiries that date back to June 2000, no definitive legal action has been brought against Mr. Quattrone. Eliot Spitzer, the New York State attorney general, has been investigating Mr. Quattrone on broad accusations involving fraud since the fall of 2001. Federal prosecutors are focusing on obstruction of justice possibilities.

Mr. Quattrone's legal team, which includes three law firms and two public relations agencies, has held its own. His lawyers contend that there are no legal grounds for fraud suspicions and that Mr. Quattrone was following Credit Suisse policies when he endorsed the file-purging initiative. Cleaning out old files is a standard practice, but once a federal investigation has begun, nothing related to the matter is to be destroyed.

Lawyers involved in the investigations say that prosecutors and regulators have, in recent months, been focusing their efforts on the narrower charge of obstruction of justice.

"Obstruction of justice charges are easier cases to prove," said Robert G. Heim of Meyers & Heim, a former lawyer for the S.E.C. "The case would be far less complex and wouldn't involve digging through research reports and I.P.O.'s. It's what federal prosecutors did with Arthur Andersen as opposed to accusing them of accounting fraud."

Chinese Legislature Meets to Appoint Leaders

Chinese Legislature Meets to Appoint Leaders
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/05/international/asia/05CHIN.html

BEIJING, Wednesday, March 5 — China's annual legislative session opened today, with personalities eclipsing policies for now as the country moved to formalize its first sweeping leadership transition in a decade. At the end of the session of the National People's Congress, in two weeks, a new group of men will officially rule China, led by the incoming president, Hu Jintao.

This morning the outgoing prime minister, Zhu Rongji, opened the Congress with a report praising China's economic progress and future plans,

But it is the behind-the-scenes dance of power between Mr. Hu, 60, and the man he will replace, Jiang Zemin, 76, that will determine this fast-changing country's future.

Although Mr. Jiang is giving up his presidential duties, his broad power base assures that he will remain a potent unofficial policy maker for many years. He is also expected to retain his post as chairman of the powerful Central Military Commission.

China faces a host of public policy challenges, including thorny diplomatic issues with the Koreas and Taiwan, a restructuring of its banks and plans to create a social welfare system that will care for its peasants and urban poor. But as Mr. Hu juggles these problems, his first challenge in each case will be negotiating the approval of Mr. Jiang, who may have different priorities.

"Hu Jintao is the nominal leader, but Jiang Zemin is the effective power," said Kang Xiaoguang, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. "That may create dangers in the future, especially in times of crises, although it is not a danger right now."

Friction between the old and new leaders is almost certain to crop up in the next two to three years, academics here say, because of China's percolating social problems. There is rising discontent in the cities and the countryside among the poor, who have not shared in China's economic advances.

Mr. Hu, who has already promised that his administration will focus on the needs of the "disadvantaged," will have the task of creating jobs and developing a social welfare system. But that could well create a drag on what has until now been China's top priority, economic development.

"I think the relationship between Hu and Jiang is in some ways like that of a father and son, where the father gives the son a certain independence but there is also dominance," said a senior editor at a Communist Party newspaper who spoke on condition of anonymity. "But conflicts will appear, because to survive, Hu must make his mark with policy breakthroughs that may harm Jiang's policies and interests."

For four months, Mr. Hu has been tentatively testing that relationship in speeches quietly defining the initiatives and leadership style that will mark his tenure. The first step of the leadership transition occurred in November, when Mr. Jiang handed over to Mr. Hu his post as general secretary of the Communist Party.

Domestically, Mr. Hu has set himself apart by highlighting the needs of farmers and laid-off workers, as well as re-energizing the fight against official corruption.

He has made dozens of speeches on topics from press liberalization to the need for constitutional reforms — earning respect in particular from liberal intellectuals — although very few of these have been covered in the government-controlled press.

But there are clearly many areas that President Jiang will not cede for now to the new administration, particularly foreign policy and the military. In his retirement speech when he left the party leadership, Mr. Jiang said he hoped that policies involving the United States and Taiwan would "continue as before."

He also declared that there should be no attempt to reassess government decisions concerning certain sensitive issues: the 1989 military crackdown on pro-democracy student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square and the suppression of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which was banned in 1999.

"On internal issues Hu and the new team have taken over more quickly and efficiently than anyone expected," said a Western diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity. "But in foreign policy, military and security issues, Jiang seems to be in charge."

Mr. Hu has established a new down-to-earth leadership style, refusing to take part in the ribbon cuttings that were standard fare for many years. While Mr. Jiang was wont to be photographed at economic summit meetings and on visits to high-technology development zones, Mr. Hu has been seen talking to herders in snowy Mongolia or trudging through a farmer's muddy field.

In closed meetings he has criticized the news media for wasting time covering leaders' visits and demanded that newspapers include more news.

So far, Mr. Jiang has allowed Mr. Hu the freedom to make such tentative moves, even when they make more conservative officials nervous. Still, just last week the Propaganda Department sent newspapers a message not to "misunderstand and distort the meaning of Hu's statements" about the press, the newspaper editor said.

Slow, stuttering transfers of power, often lasting years, are the rule in Chinese politics, where presidents gain their authority from within the government and Communist Party, not by popular vote.

Mr Hu does not not yet have the network of allies to take on the gregarious Mr. Jiang, although he has already moved rapidly to appoint like-minded officials in the provinces.

But many members of the new leadership team that will work with Mr. Hu are fiercely loyal to his predecessor. Wen Jiabao, due to become the new prime minister; Huang Ju, Mr. Wen's first deputy; and Zeng Qinghong, the next vice president, are all longtime allies of Mr. Jiang.

Even as a lame duck, Mr. Jiang remains so influential that he has been able to continue promoting a former Beijing party secretary, Jia Qinglin, despite Mr. Jia's family ties to huge corruption scandals in Xiamen, the busy southeastern port once known as Amoy.

Mr. Jia became the head of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, a government advisory body, this week despite the private objections of many delegates.

So far there has been little outward sign of conflict, and Mr. Hu has repeatedly stated his loyalty to his political father. For example, he has defended Mr. Jiang's decision to retain his title as chairman of the Central Military Commission. And, diplomats say, he has shown little interest in having a voice in foreign policy.

"Maybe Hu Jintao isn't unhappy to let Jiang Zemin play the foreign policy role, because things like Iraq and North Korea present very difficult quandaries for China," a Chinese expert on the Communist Party said. "It helps take the pressure off Hu. If the Americans invade Iraq, after all it was Jiang who claimed to have a special relationship with Bush."

So far Mr. Hu has in many ways proved a deft politician, creating a populist image while continuing to nurture the needs of the economy. Kang Xiaoguang said, "The new leadership has used a series of acts and policies to show its concern for disadvantaged groups in society, but at the same time it is allowing capitalists" into the party in unprecedented numbers.

But many Chinese academics say concrete policies to help the poor will have to follow the speeches, with workers' strikes and protests becoming more numerous month by month.

"He doesn't have five years to grow into the job," said one newspaper columnist who spoke on condition of anonymity. "He has only a couple of years to act."

Online Newspaper Shakes Up Korean Politics

Online Newspaper Shakes Up Korean Politics
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/06/international/asia/06SEOU.html

SEOUL, South Korea — For years, people will be debating what made this country go from conservative to liberal, from gerontocracy to youth culture and from staunchly pro-American to a deeply ambivalent ally — all seemingly overnight.

For most here, the change is symbolized by the election in December of Roh Moo Hyun, a reformist lawyer with a disarmingly unfussy style who at 56 is youthful by South Korean political standards. But for many observers, the most important agent of change has been the Internet.

By some measures, South Korea is the most wired country in the world, with broadband connections in nearly 70 percent of households. In the last year, as the elections were approaching, more and more people were getting their information and political analysis from spunky news services on the Internet instead of from the country's overwhelmingly conservative newspapers.

Most influential by far has been a feisty three-year-old startup with the unusual name of OhmyNews. Around election time the free online news service was registering 20 million page views per day.

Although things have cooled down a bit, even these days the service averages about 14 million visits daily, in a country of only about 40 million people.

The online newspaper, which began with only four employees, started as a glimmer in the eye of Oh Yeon Ho, now 38, a lifelong journalistic rabble rouser who wrote for underground progressive magazines during the long years of dictatorship here.

Its name, OhmyNews, a play on the expression "Oh my God!" which entered the Korean language by way of a comedian who popularized it around the time the online service was founded in 2000.

Although the staff has grown to 41, from the beginning the electronic newspaper's unusual concept has been to rely mostly on contributions from ordinary readers all over the country, who send dispatches about everything from local happenings and personal musings to national politics.

Only 20 percent of the paper each day is written by staff journalists. So far, a computer check shows, there have been more than 10,000 other bylines.

The newspaper deals with questions of objectivity and accuracy by grading articles according to their content. Those that are presented as straight news are fact-checked by editors. Writers are paid small amounts, which vary according to how the stories are ranked, using forestry terminology, from "kindling" to "rare species."

"My goal was to say farewell to 20th-century Korean journalism, with the concept that every citizen is a reporter," said Mr. Oh, a wiry, intense man whose mobile phone never stops ringing — and who insists his name has no connection with the newspaper's.

"The professional news culture has eroded our journalism," he said, "and I have always wanted to revitalize it. Since I had no money, I decided to use the Internet, which has made this guerrilla strategy possible."

The kind of immediacy this brand of journalism can bring to a story was brought home again in late January by the dispatches of a firefighter from the central city of Taegu, who sent gripping accounts of the subway arson disaster there, which killed nearly 200 people.

More pertinent to the impact OhmyNews has had on the country's political culture were reports the service ran last summer after two schoolgirls were crushed to death by a United States Army armored vehicle on patrol.

OhmyNews's reports of the incident were widely seen as forcing the hand of the mainstream media to pay attention to a story that conservative tradition here suggests they might have been inclined to ignore.

The rest is, as they say, history: a series of demonstrations against the Army presence here snowballed in the fall and winter, becoming a huge national movement that many see as having propelled the candidacy of Mr. Roh.

The new president was, until then, a relative unknown and third in a field of three major candidates. If no one else caught on to this link, Mr. Roh appears to have. After his election, he granted OhmyNews the first interview he gave to any Korean news organization.

For Mr. Oh, the story of the American military accident had echoes of one of his first big scoops, a story he wrote as a little-known freelance journalist in 1994 on the No Gun Ri incident, a reported massacre of South Korean refugees by United States military forces who opened fire on them at a railroad trestle in the summer of 1950, during the Korean War.

The South Korean press made almost no mention of his reports after he broke the story, but five years later The Associated Press wrote about the incident, winning a Pulitzer Prize for its subsequent investigation with American Army veterans.

"Once the American media picked up the story, our mainstream newspapers wrote about No Gun Ri as if it was a fresh incident," Mr. Oh said. "This made me realize that we have a real imbalance in our media, 80 percent conservative and 20 percent liberal, and it needed to be corrected. My goal is 50-50."

After he broke the No Gun Ri story, Mr. Oh went away to school in the United States, earning a master's degree at the conservative, explicitly Christian Regent University in Virginia Beach, Va., whose president is the evangelist pastor Pat Robertson. It might have seemed like an unlikely choice, but Mr. Oh said it was deliberate.

"Pat Robertson and I are very different in temperament and ideology, but we are very similar in strategy," said Mr. Oh, who became what he calls a serious Christian during his stay in the United States. "They are very right-wing and wanted to overthrow what they saw as a liberal media establishment. I wanted to overthrow a right-wing media establishment, and I learned a lot from them."

Although OhmyNews pays its staff less than reporters earn at the top South Korean newspapers, morale appears to very high. "Wherever I go, people ask me, `What about the pay?' " said Son Byung Kwan, 31, a reporter who helped break the story about the American soldiers' accident. "I took a 30 percent pay cut to work here, but things couldn't be better. My company is so famous that I have become well known, and best of all, my stories have real impact."

Air Force Inquiry Finds 54 Cases of Rape or Assault

Air Force Inquiry Finds 54 Cases of Rape or Assault
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 5:06 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Academy-Investigation.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Air Force has identified 54 cases of rape or sexual assault in its investigation into impropriety at the Air Force Academy and there are likely many more cadets who will not come forward, Air Force Secretary James Roche said Thursday.

``The part that is the saddest thing ... whatever we see, whatever the number is, 25, 50, there are probably a hundred more that we do not see,'' Roche said during a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. It wasn't immediately clear when the assaults occurred.

``We're learning enough to realize that change must occur -- change in the climate, change in how we manage'' the academy, Roche said.

Roche said cases are being identified that will be the top priority for follow-up by the Defense Department's inspector general, focusing efforts on cases ``where the person who placed the accusation felt the system let them down.''

Roche also said Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John P. Jumper was traveling to the Air Force Academy Thursday to meet with cadets. Jumper planned to remind cadets that they have a duty to report anything they might know about any alleged assaults, he said.

Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., said he believes the situation at the academy is worse than the 1991 Tailhook Scandal -- when dozens of women complained they were groped or assaulted by drunken pilots at a Navy booster group's convention -- because the system has failed the cadets in this case.

``The entire support and legal system at the academy appears to have failed,'' Allard said. ``We really do need to instill confidence in the system so victims know when they report rape they know the rape itself will not jeopardize their career.''

Meanwhile, Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., has accused the academy's top commanders of mishandling rape allegations and said they should be removed. But a spokesman for Roche and Chief of Staff Gen. John P. Jumper issued a statement refusing to blame the academy's top brass.

``We believe this regrettable situation has resulted from a climate at the academy that has evolved over time,'' Lt. Col. Chester Curtis said. ``We will not make a scapegoat of anyone nor offer pre-emptive judgments on any issue, but will ensure justice is served on all levels.''

In the last 10 years, there have been two cadets charged with rape. One was acquitted, the other pleaded guilty at a court martial and was sentenced to seven months in jail. In other cases, administrative action was taken because there was not enough evidence to prosecute, Roche said.

Allard had criticized Air Force investigators for leaving Colorado without talking with 10 current cadets who have said they were raped. He also said he was unhappy the investigators did not consult a civilian rape crisis center whose counselors say they have heard from 22 cadets in the past 15 years who reported being assaulted.

Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the committee, told the heads of each branch of the military that they have a responsibility to examine their service academies to make sure the same thing is not happening there.

Bus and Subway Fares Hiked to $2

Bus and Subway Fares Hiked to $2
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:50 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-MTA-Fares.html

NEW YORK (AP) -- City bus and subway fares will jump by 50 cents to $2 this spring under a decision Thursday that will affect more than 7 million daily commuters on the nation's largest mass transit system.

The increase, the first since November 1995, will take effect May 4.

The fare hike will put New York on par with Philadelphia, with its $2 base cash fare for subways. A ride in New York will be more expensive than one in Chicago ($1.50), Atlanta ($1.75), San Francisco (soon to be $1.25) or Boston ($1).

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority said it needs the money to deal with an estimated $952 million deficit over the next two years.

``We can't do everything that everybody wants,'' MTA Chairman Peter Kalikow said during a public hearing. ``It's impossible.''

After the vote, a crowd chanted at board members, ``Shame on you! Shame on you!''

``As you've heard, again and again, New Yorkers are outraged,'' Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz told the board. ``It makes absolutely no sense to even consider a fare increase.''

The board also boosted tolls on its bridges and tunnels, including the Triborough Bridge and the Queens Midtown and Brooklyn-Battery tunnels, by 50 cents to $4. Fares will also rise 25 percent on the Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road commuter lines May 1.

The board also decided to close 62 part-time token booths and phase out subway tokens, which were created in 1953 when fares rose from 10 cents to 15 cents and turnstiles were unable to accept two coins at once.

The token has been remodeled several times, but is now overshadowed by the popular Metrocards. Getting rid of the tokens saves the agency $6 million.

^------

On the Net:

Metropolitan Transportation Authority: http://www.mta.nyc.ny.us/index.html

Straphangers Campaign: http://www.straphangers.org

There Go the Neighborhoods: Rich and Poor, Side by Side

There Go the Neighborhoods: Rich and Poor, Side by Side
By JANNY SCOTT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/05/nyregion/05LIVI.html

The intricate geography of income difference in New York City is something Chastity Davis absorbed early, growing up in the 1980's in a tenement apartment in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, on a block of mostly brick row houses flanked by public housing projects at either end.

At the neighborhood elementary school, Ms. Davis's friends were from the projects. But her mother bused her to Bay Ridge for junior high, hoping she might run with a better crowd. As for the children of the homeowners on the block, they did not go to public school at all.

"I knew they were there, but I never felt I had any reason to want to play with them," Ms. Davis, 28, recalled recently. "Even as a young child, there's a sense that you sort of stay with the people that you're most comfortable with — people in the same income bracket or gender or ethnicity or class."

A defining characteristic of New York City is its economic diversity, the juxtaposition of people of disparate circumstances in limited space. The gap between top and bottom is greater in New York than in most cities in the country, and people at the extremes often live closer together.

In the 1990's the disparity in many neighborhoods became more pronounced, census data show. As the economy boomed, income inequality grew. And as the population swelled and real estate prices soared and crime waned, the affluent pushed deeper into neighborhoods they had once shunned.

Now the city has dozens of census tracts — clusters of just a few thousand people — in which the average household income in the top fifth of the income spectrum is at least 24 times the average in the bottom fifth, according to an analysis of census data done for The New York Times. In 15 of those tracts, the average at the top is at least 40 times that at the bottom.

The analysis, by Andrew A. Beveridge, a professor of sociology at Queens College, identified the top 30 tracts with the biggest income disparity. Seventeen are in Brooklyn, seven are in Manhattan and four are in Queens. The Bronx and Staten Island have one each.

They range from Ms. Davis's neighborhood, where two public housing projects bookend a gentrifying corridor of brownstones and row houses, to an area along the beach in Brooklyn where West End Avenue appears to be a stark line of demarcation between the serene old-immigrant opulence of Manhattan Beach and the teeming new-immigrant enclave of Brighton Beach.

They also include tracts in Jamaica and St. Albans in Queens, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, in East Harlem and in Chelsea, where one tract encompasses everything from new luxury apartment houses and full-floor condominium lofts to small, decaying apartment buildings.

The city is etched with boundaries and borderlands that appear on no maps, areas where income groups intersect, overlap, collide, coexist — along lines drawn and redrawn by quirks of history, differences in housing stock, patterns of immigration and the economy's perpetual rise and fall.

For some, the juxtapositions are a virtue, one of the city's fascinations; for others, they are a source of resentment and guilt. And despite New York's economic diversity, many say that meaningful contact across income lines in their neighborhoods is the exception, not the rule.

"The only contact that takes place for me and my wife is in the school," said Pablo Aviles, 39, a payroll worker for the Department of Education who lives in a public housing complex in Boerum Hill. "We've made friends with people who are on the other end of the income bracket; we've been to their homes and attended parties. There are PTA meetings. That's pretty much it."

William Kornblum, a professor of sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, said: "It's always an empirical question, to what extent propinquity matters to people. Because one of the outstanding features of life in a densely populated city such as ours is that you can live for a long time next to people and not necessarily have anything to do with them."

There are many reasons that income difference is more visible in New York City than elsewhere. Manhattan has the third-most-extreme income disparity of all counties in the United States, while the Bronx, Brooklyn and Staten Island are all in the top 50. (The two counties that top Manhattan are Kalawao County, Hawaii, where the census counted just 132 households, and San Francisco County.)

Density dictates proximity: if sprawl is the suburban response to inequality, it is not an option in New York, where many lower income people have been protected from displacement. The city's housing market has stronger controls than many, including rent laws, and more than 10 percent of all rental units are in the hands of the city's Housing Authority.

The affluent have their own protection. David J. Halle, a sociologist at the University of California at Los Angeles who lives in New York City, says the rich never abandoned New York the way they did other cities. He credits Wall Street, public transportation, the city's cultural institutions and the laws governing the co-op apartment system, which he calls "more gated than a gated community."

"What you have in New York City is a critical mass of well-to-do people," he said. "You don't have that in Los Angeles. It doesn't make sense for someone rich in Los Angeles to plonk themselves down in the middle. They definitely wouldn't feel comfortable with it. I think in many parts of the country they wouldn't. New York's a bit unusual."

On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where the palatial town houses and co-ops of Carnegie Hill bump up against the tenements and public housing projects of East Harlem, there is a census tract just north of East 96th Street where the average income in the top fifth of the spectrum is $561,762, and the average in the bottom fifth is $11,634.

In one tract in Chelsea, the top and bottom averages are $370,713 and $8,844, census data show. In Boerum Hill, Bay Ridge and Bedford-Stuyvesant, the averages are lower but the gap is wide. At the western end of Manhattan Beach near the border of Brighton Beach, the average at the top is $415,388 and at the bottom, $6,868.

"In an odd sort of way, they're both one neighborhood and starkly divided," said Annelise Orleck, who grew up in both communities, is now a historian at Dartmouth and has written about the area. "Manhattan Beach people consider Brighton Beach their neighborhood; they use the boardwalk, they shop there. But there's definitely a sharp divide."

To the east of West End Avenue, large single-family houses line hushed suburban-style streets with Anglophile names like Coleridge, Dover and Exeter where S.U.V.'s and BMW's are parked. To the west, Brighton Beach is packed with modest row houses, apartment buildings, dilapidated bungalows and frame houses, many of them subdivided, with an occasional sign: "Se Renta Cuarto"(Room for Rent).

In some parts of Brighton Beach, as many as three of four residents were born abroad; the bulk of them are from Russia and Ukraine but many are from Mexico, Pakistan and China. In Manhattan Beach, nearly two-thirds of the residents were born in the United States. Professionals predominate; most Manhattan Beach adults have college degrees.

History and housing stock help explain the differences.

Manhattan Beach was developed after 1907, on the heels of the heyday of the Manhattan Beach Hotel, which had attracted an elite clientele, including Henry Ford. In Brighton Beach, an apartment building boom in the 1920's turned the neighborhood into what Professor Orleck calls "the yuppie neighborhood of the moment," but the stock market crash in 1929 cut that short.

Brighton Beach residents, politically active during the Depression, boasted that no one would be turned out of their homes for failing to pay rent, Professor Orleck said. As a result, "whatever the 1920's version of yuppie buildings was became places where you had several generations of families crowding together in apartments."

"I don't think it ever recovered its earlier position from that moment," she said. "Indeed, you have people writing in the 1930's that Brighton went from being this upscale neighborhood to a slum in a few years."

Boerum Hill was a working-class community when Chastity Davis was young. Professionals had begun moving in as early as the late 70's and restoring run-down houses. Young families followed a decade later. Bodegas and thrift stores on Smith Street have given way to bistros. More and more newcomers now send their children to the neighborhood elementary school, P.S. 38.

Some oldtime P.S. 38 parents bristled at the influx at first, Mr. Aviles said. But the school has benefited from the new arrivals' energy and resources, he said. Parents helped land a $300,000 grant for a computer lab and arranged for the transformation of the schoolyard into a playground. They organized "enrichment clubs" specializing in areas like music and art.

Mr. Aviles admits he had been reluctant to invite some of his eldest son's classmates to the family's apartment in the Gowanus Houses, one of the two housing projects in the area. Anticipating their "negative thoughts," he said, "we tried to beat around the bush and get them not to come." But they came. Now he says he no longer worries about what people think.

Mary-Powel Thomas, a former magazine editor who moved from the Upper West Side nine years ago because she and her husband could afford to buy a house in Boerum Hill, said she too sometimes feels "a twinge of embarrassment about living situations."

It was "just luck," she said, that both her and her husband's families could afford to pay for their college education, so they graduated with no debt, and that her grandfather had left her stock that the couple sold to finance the down payment on their house. "I feel like, O.K., yeah, we both had jobs and worked hard and paid our bills, but that was part of the situation we were born into as well," said Ms. Thomas, the president of the PTA at P.S. 38. "There are plenty of people who work just as hard and pay their bills and are just as responsible, yet didn't have the head start we had."

And what does one do with that embarrassment? "Not a lot," she said frankly. "One sends one's children to public schools and does what one can to improve them."

Ms. Davis, who considers herself and her husband "approaching middle income but not there yet," would also like to buy a house in Boerum Hill. But she often doubts that will happen, and she is constantly aware of income differences. For example, she notices that she is treated differently in stores and other places depending on whether she is in jeans or dressed for her job as a recruiting assistant at J. P. Morgan.

"There's no question that there is a sense of resentment," she said. "Everyone is walking around subconsciously thinking the same things. I don't think anybody would disagree with what I'm saying. People who haven't faced that kind of experience would like to say it's not like that. But you always get the sense in the back of your head that things would be different if you looked a certain way or had a certain amount of money."

Police Dept. Indictments Rattle San Francisco

Police Dept. Indictments Rattle San Francisco
By DEAN E. MURPHY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/05/national/05CHIE.html

SAN FRANCISCO, March 4 — The police chief was on medical disability today, apparently suffering from high blood pressure, and no one knows when he might return to work.

The Police Department was being run by a little-known deputy chief, Heather J. Fong, whose rise to the top was so unforeseen that the personnel office scrambled to pull together biographical information on her.

Ten members of the department —including the chief, Prentice E. Sanders; the assistant chief; and two deputy chiefs — pleaded not guilty today in Superior Court to criminal charges ranging from conspiring to obstruct justice to felony assault.

"I am innocent," Chief Sanders, dressed in full uniform, declared in a packed courtroom.

All in all, it was the kind of whirlwind day San Franciscans have come to expect — however apprehensively and abashedly — as the biggest police scandal in the city's modern history has played itself out as public drama, personal tragedy and political saga.

"The city is pretty much in shambles," said Peter Keane, dean of the Golden Gate University School of Law, who worked for 20 years in the San Francisco public defender's office. "The city hasn't yet figured out how to deal with all that is happening, and it is going to be a while before it does."

Over the past three and a half months, the case of three off-duty police officers accused of beating up two men late one night in November has escalated from the near-absurd (according to one version, the men were assaulted for their take-out food) to accusations of a paternal cover-up (one of the accused officers is the son of the assistant police chief) to a nasty political war among some of the city's most powerful politicians.

Mayor Willie L. Brown Jr., who appointed Chief Sanders last July, has suggested the grand jury indictments were an attempt by his political enemies to ruin his legacy during his final year on the job. It was only a matter of hours after the charges became public that some of Mr. Brown's adversaries, and hopeful successors, began pointing accusing fingers and jockeying for political advantage.

"This is a black eye for the mayor," said Supervisor Tom Ammiano, a candidate in the November mayoral election .

The district attorney, Terence Hallinan, who has a history of strained relations with Mr. Brown and the Police Department, has praised the members of the grand jury as courageous defenders of democracy. Mr. Hallinan, who characterizes himself as "America's most progressive district attorney," strongly suggested that Mr. Brown back off.

"There is nothing political about this case," Mr. Hallinan said.

As community leaders have chosen sides, some have accused the district attorney's office of racism because Chief Sanders is the city's first black police chief, while others have popped Champagne bottles celebrating that the Police Department seemed to have been caught red-handed breaking the law, no matter the color of the man in charge.

All the while, the criticism, unwelcome scrutiny and news media frenzy have sapped the morale of many rank-and-file officers.

"The mood is sad," said Sgt. Inspector Lea Militello, who leads a gay and lesbian police officers group. "It is very difficult for everyone right now."

The turmoil, which would be unsettling at any time, has created an additional sense of worry because of the possibility of war with Iraq, the threat of terrorist attacks that could follow and the perception that the department's most experienced officers would not be managing the crisis.

Many here say they have felt especially vulnerable since Sept. 11, 2001, because some of the city's landmarks, most notably the Golden Gate Bridge, have been mentioned by the Bush administration as possible targets.

The naming of Chief Fong as stand-in for Chief Sanders and the formal suspension of the indicted officers were seen by many here as a big step in easing those fears. The moves at least ended some of the uncertainty about who was in charge of the 2,300-officer department, although the mayor's office would not say how long Chief Fong would serve.

"The situation was righted by the proper decisions of the command structure to step aside," said Art Agnos, a former mayor. "And I think that has brought a strong measure of stability to the department and confidence to the public that there will not be any shenanigans going on as this drama unfolds in the courts for what could be the rest of the year."

But Chief Fong, who has worked for the department since 1977, remained largely a public mystery. Most notably, she was among the three deputy police chiefs who were not implicated in the accusations of a cover-up of the November street fight that resulted in the conspiracy indictments against Chief Sanders, Assistant Chief Alex Fagan Sr., two deputy chiefs and three other ranking officers.

Chief Fong, whose title now is acting assistant chief, has been so guarded about her private life that officials in the department's personnel office said today that they would not make available even the most basic information about her 25-year career until they had received her permission.

A news conference was scheduled for this afternoon, during which some biographical information was to be released and Chief Fong was to make an appearance. But it was abruptly canceled. "We don't know why," said a police spokesman, Dewayne Tully, who later released three paragraphs of biographical information.

According to the biography, Chief Fong was born and grew up in San Francisco and held a variety of posts in the department, including child abuse investigator, grant writer, station watch commander and training officer, before being named a deputy chief of the field operations bureau nearly three years ago. She currently oversees the department's administration bureau.

On Monday night, Chief Fong made a brief public appearance at the police headquarters after spending the better part of two hours writing a short statement. After reading it aloud, she refused to take questions from reporters.

"I want to assure everyone that the men and women of the San Francisco Police Department are on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week," she said. "They are out there in the streets. They are out there in the field, ensuring that the citizens of San Francisco are safe and public safety is always at the highest level."

Sgt. Carl Tennenbaum, who was patrolling the streets today in the city's North Beach neighborhood, where Chief Fong grew up and worked for many years, described the new acting assistant chief as hard working, low key and capable of steering clear of many of the internal politics of the department.

"She is pretty serious, but not humorless," said Sergeant Tennenbaum, who first met Chief Fong at the police academy, where she had been an instructor. "Right now it is really good she is in charge. It will give us a little stability."

But Charles D. Weisselberg, a law professor at the University of California said Chief Fong faced the unenviable job of trying to lead the department while working in the shadow of a police chief who is under criminal indictment but who might return to his post at any time.

With the publicized hostility between the department's top management and the district attorney's office, Professor Weisselberg said Chief Fong also had the difficult assignment of trying to mend relations so that police officers and prosecutors could cooperate fully on criminal cases.

"The new leadership will have to work extra hard to implement their own orders because many police may expect that the new leaders are there on a temporary basis only," the professor said. "They'll be expecting the other people to come back."

Another complication for Chief Fong is that the indictments have focused attention anew on some of the department's shortcomings, including incidents of brutality and complaints about its inability to hunt down criminals.

Last year, for example, The San Francisco Chronicle published a series of articles showing that from 1996 to 2000 the department had the worst record in solving violent crimes among police agencies in the country's largest 20 cities.

Even with the big obstacles ahead, Mr. Agnos, the former mayor, said the police department, and the city as a whole, seemed to be on the mend.

"We are used to earthquakes out here," he said. "Nobody likes it, but we can deal with the shock."

For Elderly, Fear of Falling Is a Risk in Itself

For Elderly, Fear of Falling Is a Risk in Itself
By N. R. KLEINFIELD
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/05/nyregion/05FALL.html

Who wanted to start? Ideas, anyone? What might make you fall?

As suggestions came flying back, two occupational therapy students scribbled them furiously on a board. Throw rugs. Wet floors. Cracked sidewalks. Ice. Toys. Steps. Ladders. Shoes. Poor circulation. Lightheadedness. The list grew beyond the borders of the easel.

Debra Mlotek, one of the student interns from Columbia University, said: "So there are a lot of risk factors. Things in our environment. Things happening in our body."

Then she introduced an unmentioned force into the mix: fear of falling, a phenomenon now interpreted as a significant risk factor of its own for the elderly.

Shira Dworetsky, the other student, said: "I think it's very important that we all talk about it. Talk about that fear."

One grim-faced woman in the audience cleared her throat: "Yes, you develop an awful fear. You don't know when it's going to happen. It starts affecting you emotionally, mentally and everything else. Eventually you get paranoid. You're afraid to do anything. So I'm living with this terrible fear of walking. If you stay home, you go crazy. If you go out, you're in fear. Where's your life?"

Nods all around. The subject was dear to the small but intent audience, 13 elderly people seated in a circle at the Riverdale Senior Center in the Bronx. There might have been more, but hard-fought bridge games at nearby tables proved powerful competition.

Of the nagging, minute-by-minute worries of old age, none seems to eclipse the fear of falling. Every mundane act — taking a bath, scrubbing the floor, shopping for groceries — appears fraught with peril. If you go down, what then? A bruise? A fracture? Or could this be the big one, the one that sends you to the nursing home with no return passage?

Falling has long been considered an inevitable byproduct of later life, an unwelcome companion to white hair and bifocals. Studies suggest that a third of people 65 or older fall each year. Health professionals, however, increasingly are recognizing that falls are not a normal part of aging and that many falls do not need to happen. In recent years, particular attention has been paid to the fear of falling.

And so more clinicians are urging elderly people to talk about that fear as well as to take precautions that might muffle it. Hence balance courses. Hence fall videos. Hence products like dressing sticks, elongated shoehorns, underpants with hip padding.

Hence this seminar.

They were meeting in the Green Room. Afterward, the area was reserved for an exercise class. Made sense. Deal with fear of falling and then exercise to strengthen the muscles and reduce the risk of falling.

The two students, Ms. Mlotek and Ms. Dworetsky, were doing fieldwork as part of their graduate course "Prevention and Rehabilitation With Older Adults," taught by Patricia A. Miller, an occupational therapist and assistant professor of occupational therapy at Columbia. In the last few years she has dispatched students to senior centers and adult day care centers, and one of the more popular subjects they address is fall prevention.

Ms. Miller talks about the inactivity cycle. People are scared of falling, so they stop doing things. Some all but withdraw from life, prematurely imposing immobility on themselves. As they do less, their physical condition deteriorates, making them more susceptible to falling. What they fear becomes more likely.

Jonathan Howland, a professor of social and behavioral science at Boston University's School of Public Health who studies the fear of falling, says that inactivity often leads to depression. That can require medication, which can make someone more liable to fall. It can lead to drinking, which can make someone more liable to fall. It can lead to medication combined with drinking, which can really make someone more liable to fall.

Studies indicate that 30 to 50 percent of elderly people fear falling. Mr. Howland said that research he engaged in found that fear of falling exceeded other commonplace anxieties like fear of being robbed in the street, fear of forgetting an appointment and fear of financial problems.

Stimulus for this primal fear is everywhere. The elderly not only fall themselves. In their world, they are witnesses to a montage of friends falling, neighbors falling, strangers falling — last week, yesterday, 10 minutes ago.

Flora Cherot, in her 70's, lives alone in the Bronx, and had a fall two years ago. Walked into her apartment, no warning, no nothing, and she was on the floor, sliding seven or eight feet from the door. It took her a half-hour to right herself. Nothing was broken, but the soreness persisted for months. The moment is etched in her memory.

"In a senior center I used to go to, I'd see people coming in with their arms in casts, wrists broken, legs bandaged," she said. "A neighbor lady fell out of the bed several times lately. A man in my building fell and broke his hip and was in rehab for several months. He was back a couple of days and fell getting into bed and broke the other hip. He still isn't back. You hear those things, and they make you think."

Nancy Newman, 93, who lives in the same building, has had knee surgery and suffered four fractured ribs as a result of falls. She keeps going, her personal concern muted by other discomforts. "Actually my worst fear is going to the dentist," she said.

With an aging population, treating the fear is an intensifying issue. It involves lifestyle and life itself. An estimated 10,000 people 65 and older die each year from injuries related to falls. And it involves money, in the ever-deepening well of health-care spending. The entire cost of falls is hard to calculate, but health care professionals agree it is in the tens of billions of dollars a year, and rising.

Dr. Mary Tinetti, a professor of medicine and public health at the Yale University School of Medicine and an expert on falling and the elderly, feels much progress has been made in investigating the subject, but believes that falling still doesn't get broad enough respect from many health care professionals. "They need to try to prevent falls in the way that they try to prevent heart attacks and strokes," she said.

She emphasizes conditioning the person rather than modifying the home by eliminating scatter rugs and adding handrails, for example, though she supports these measures.

Mr. Howland said that people needed to learn about the trade-off between the risk of immobility and the risk of mobility, and then find the right balance for themselves.

Ruth Schaefer, 89, took in the Riverdale seminar, and for good reason. She admitted to poor balance, to more falls than she could easily tote up. She has twice fractured a hip.

"I fear falling," she said. "You betcha. I'm always worried about it. My husband is dead five years. We had the car and he was always holding my hand and all that nonsense. Now it's just me and my feet."

She has cut back on using them. "I don't go out as much as I used to," she said. "I don't walk that much. I'm afraid of getting hurt. I try not to think about a nursing home, but it's there."

She is exceptionally attentive to the wind. "I think the wind is the biggest factor for someone who's old," she said. Before she ventures out, Ms. Schaefer listens to the radio to catch the wind speed. "Anything over 15 miles per hour, I don't move," she said. "I'm not very happy even with 15. I like it about 10. Then it's not too bad."

She was asked about padded underwear. It is a product — pads attached to underwear to protect the hips if you go down — that a lot of health professionals endorse. A French company makes some frilly ones. "I wouldn't do that," she said. "I've got no clothes to wear over something like that."

Who would go fearless against falling? Sarah Goldberg, 69, attracted rapt interest from the Riverdale audience when she shared her story. She has an ongoing relationship with the floor. She figures she averages two or three falls a year. Once, she fell in the shower and lay there for 17 hours until she was discovered. "You name the place," she said, "and I've fallen there."

She was riding in a motorized scooter today. She had fallen just a few months ago. Nonetheless, she carries on undeterred. She has an invulnerable core. She stares fear of falling in the face and makes it quake.

"I worry about falling," she said. "But I don't fear it. I don't restrict my life."

A couple of years ago, she had an occupational therapist visit her apartment to try to make it as fall-proof as possible. Two months ago, after her most recent fall, she again invited a professional in for an update. "You always have to upgrade," Ms. Goldberg said.

The toilet was raised, some additional handrails installed. She got a dressing stick, a rod with a hook at the end to help her pull on pants. She got an elongated shoehorn. She got a reacher so she can grab things she drops without bending over and risking a fall. She also uses it to shut the door behind her.

She makes a point of doing weight lifting and tai chi at the senior center to stay in shape.

And so she lives. "You shouldn't stop going on living because you have a fear of falling," she said. "Once you restrict your life, you're finished. Everything goes. I love life too much for that."

'You'll Catch Your Death!' An Old Wives' Tale? Well . . .

'You'll Catch Your Death!' An Old Wives' Tale? Well . . .
By ABIGAIL ZUGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/04/health/04COLD.html

If there is anything worse than the mucky, dreary, icy weather of winter, it is the sniffly, stuffy, achy congestion of a winter cold, an internal misery so perfectly in tune with the misery outside that no one has to wonder where a cold in the nose got its name.

Nor is it any wonder that medical folklore has forged a stubborn link between the two: catch a chill and you'll catch a cold, common wisdom runs, especially if you are rash enough to wander around in the cold with damp hair or wet feet.

A survey of the medical literature shows that for more than a century, scientists have invested an extraordinary amount of time and energy in debunking this old saw, with the aid of a small army of shivering, sneezing volunteers. But despite their efforts, the link between colds and the weather still lingers and continues to inspire yet more research.

"Health and the weather was a big topic in previous periods of history," said Dr. Jack M. Gwaltney Jr., an emeritus professor of medicine at the University of Virginia and one of the world's leading experts on the common cold. Many infectious diseases cycle with the seasons, Dr. Gwaltney said, and doctors still seldom understand why.

Colds, of course, are caused by any of several hundred different strains of virus. People get more colds in the winter at least in part because nasty weather drives them indoors to make extremely close contact with one another's infectious mucus.

But the story is more complicated than that, as a century of experiments shows.

The link between chills and infection dates from Louis Pasteur, who found in 1878 that chickens are naturally immune to anthrax. He guessed that their high body temperatures might be responsible (normal chicken temperature varies from 104 to 107) and decided to expose a chicken to anthrax and then chill it in a basin of water. The chicken developed anthrax and died. Pasteur repeated the experiment with a chicken he fished out of the water after a few hours and warmed in a blanket. That chicken became sick but recovered.

Generations of experimental biologists replicated Pasteur's experiments with other animals and other germs, and confirmed that chilled monkeys were more susceptible to polio, and chilled mice and rabbits were more likely to succumb to pneumonia and a variety of other respiratory infections.

Meanwhile, other scientists began to look for similar tendencies in chilled humans.

A German scientist studying thousands of soldiers during World War I reported that those stationed in cold, wet trenches for 72 hours were four times as likely to develop colds as those kept in their barracks. Young women in college studied in the 1940's reported colds more frequently during cold rainy periods than cold sunny days. Mounties in the Canadian Arctic developed more colds and more severe colds during periods of unusual exertion in cold day and night conditions.

But scientists also found the reverse. On a tiny frigid island in the Arctic Sea studied in the 1930's, for instance, no inhabitant caught cold during the winter. It was only after the ice broke and the first ship bringing provisions docked in May that the islanders got sick, presumably from infected sailors.

Experimenters soon stopped chilling animals in the laboratory and began chilling people instead. In the years after World War II, thousands of volunteers thronged to the Common Cold Research Unit in Salisbury, England, where they were paid for allowing researchers to drip a little infected mucus into their noses.

Among the volunteers were 12 people who were assigned to bathe and then wander around cold corridors in wet socks and bathing suits "for half an hour or as long as they could bear it," the chief researcher wrote in a report.

"Most showed a drop of several degrees in body temperature and felt rather chilly and unhappy for a time," he reported, but whether or not they were exposed to infected mucus, they were no more likely to catch cold than their warmer colleagues.

In the 1950's, Chicago researchers repeated the experiment on a larger scale with several hundred volunteers sitting in their socks and underwear in a 60-degree room before being inoculated with infectious mucus. Others, in coats, hats and gloves, spent two hours in a large freezer. The conclusion: all 253 chilled volunteers caught cold at exactly the same rate as 175 members of a warm control group.

The discovery of the rhinovirus, the most common cause of the common cold, inspired Texas researchers to readdress the question. In 1968, they reported that they had chilled 27 men in a cold room or a cold bath, then dripped a strain of rhinovirus in their noses at various times afterward. Some were chilled after they had actually developed a cold, to see whether it lingered longer.

Chilling had no effect on the chances of catching a cold or the severity of colds caught. Enough is enough, these researchers said at the end of their report. "Further studies seem unwarranted."

But the studies have continued nonetheless.

Many experiments have tried to assess the effects of the cold on immune function. Animals kept in profound cold have somewhat dampened immune systems, but researchers disagree on whether this is an effect of the cold itself or a stress response to a frightening and unpleasant experience. In 1999, Canadian researchers found exactly the opposite effect in humans: exposure to the cold seemed to stimulate many separate facets of the immune system in healthy young men spending two hours in the equivalent of a large refrigerator.

Meanwhile, virologists have learned that the common cold is a complex entity — not a single disease at all, but many similar ones, and that all of them cycle in response to the weather in ways that are still not understood. It turns out that rhinoviruses cause colds mostly in the spring and the fall. Other families of viruses cause most winter colds. Among them is the influenza virus, which causes colds as well as the flu, but is too dangerous to use in human experiments to figure out why.

Dr. Gwaltney, the cold expert, suggests that it is not temperature but humidity that fosters many colds. The rhinovirus thrives in humidity, and his research in the 1970's showed that peak rhinovirus seasons correlate with runs of overcast, wet spring and fall days that keep children inside to infect their elders while allowing the virus enough humidity to thrive.

"Climate has both biological and behavioral consequences," Dr. Gwaltney said. "There are plenty of experiments left to do."

Years ago, a group of cold researchers identified the poker game as the ideal setting for studying cold transmission. Poker players clustered around a table are virtually encased in the invisible infectious spray generated by coughs, sneezes and excited conversation, they handle the same chips and cards over and over again, often touch fingers, and stay in their seats for hours.

Cold researchers have already thrown a series of 12-hour poker parties for sniffling cold victims and healthy volunteers. In some of them, the guests played poker wearing large plastic collars, similar to the ones dogs wear after surgery, to see if preventing people from touching their noses might decrease viral transmission. (Just as many became sick.)

It may be only a matter of time before new armies of volunteers are invited to poker parties held in the back of a meat locker, just to settle the matter of colds and the cold definitively, once and for all.

In the meantime, it does not hurt to bundle up.