www.haaretzdaily.com By Aluf Benn

Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat is acting like a "super treasurer" and allocating funds for the Fatah groups and activists dealing with terror, according to an Israeli intelligence report to the government recently.

The report says Arafat and the heads of the PA's security establishment are making it difficult for Palestinian Finance Minister Salem Fayyad to introduce proper norms and effect reforms in the Palestinian economy.

Recently the PA's financial situation has improved considerably, says the report. Since the beginning of the year Israel has transferred NIS 530 million to Fayyad, from the PA's tax funds collected by the Israeli treasury. These funds were added to the aid the PA received from Arab countries and Europe, and enabled the PA to pay its workers' wages earlier than expected.

Israel conditioned transfer of funds frozen since the beginning of the intifada on having U.S. accountants supervise the PA budget, to make sure the money is not used to finance terror activities. But, the report says, Fayyad is having trouble asserting his authority over the PA's financial system - Arafat remains in control, much to the Palestinian finance minister's chagrin.

Arafat persists in giving orders to the Palestinian treasury to earmark funds for five destinations: direct financing of Fatah activity, including terror infrastructures; financing Fatah institutions and organizations; aid to the families of Fatah suicide bombers; and compensating workshop owners in the Gaza Strip, whose holdings were destroyed by the IDF; and compensation for families whose homes were demolished by the IDF.

Arafat is believed to be using the money to strengthen his position, which was weakened among Fatah activists due to his financial difficulties. Arafat wants to prevent his people from turning to Iran for alternative financing. Israel believes Arafat will continue to allocate funds without spoiling his relations with Fayyad.

Fayyad's relations with the PA security chiefs are tense, following his attempt to regulate the wage payment to their people. He wanted the them to get their salaries via their bank accounts. The security heads objected, because they wanted to remain in control of the payments. Fayyad failed to overcome their objection, and Arafat refrained from taking a stand.

www.haaretzdaily.com By Reuters

WASHINGTON - With the nation on a heightened state of alert, President George Bush yesterday told Americans steps are being taken to protect them from another terrorist attack. The administration last week raised its terror threat advisory to "high," signifying a heightened risk of attack and prompting authorities to tighten security around Washington, New York and other high-profile targets.

Bush sought to calm the public, rattled by a taped message believed to be from fugitive Al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden urging Muslims to fight America and repel any war against Iraq. The United States blames bin Laden's Al-Qaida for the September 11, 2001, hijacked plane attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that killed about 3,000 people.

"Our nation is preparing for a variety of threats we hope never will arrive," Bush said in his weekly radio address. "Many of these dangers are unfamiliar and unsettling. Yet the best way to fight these dangers is to anticipate them, and act against them with focus and determination." Bush's advice: "Americans should go about their lives."

Democrats ridiculed the administration for dispensing advice that included stocking up on duct tape and plastic sheeting to seal homes against a chemical or biological weapons attack - saying what was really needed was more federal money for homeland security.

They called on Bush to submit to Congress within seven days a supplemental budget request for homeland defense that would total in the billions of dollars.

"It is shameful that the heroes who rushed to defend the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on September 11th have to come to Washington over and over again, hat in hand, and beg this administration for the resources they need," said Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota.

Bush has requested $41.3 billion for domestic security for fiscal 2004, a 10 percent increase. He is asking Congress for nearly $6 billion to beef up U.S. defenses against biological attack, is also expected to ask lawmakers for another $20 billion for the Pentagon within the next few weeks.

abc.net.au Sun, Feb 16 2003 11:28 AM AEDT

Editors of top science magazines have voiced concern terrorists could use studies they publish to help make chemical or biological weapons.

Because of this fear a statement has been signed by editors of leading science publications urging cautious self-censorship.

"Any work that might be used by terrorists for malevolent purposes should not be published," the statement said.

"Self-governance," the editors say, is "an alternative to government review of forthcoming journal articles."

The joint statement was released at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting and scheduled for publication in key journals next week.

It resulted from a workshop sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and the Centre for Security and International Studies (CSIS) earlier this year, at the urging of the American Society of Microbiology.

It was presented at the AAAS annual meeting by the president of the American Society of Microbiology, Ronald Atlas.

"Open publication brings benefits not only to public health but also in efforts to combat terrorism," the statement said.

"Without independent verification of research results, we can neither advance biomedical research nor provide the knowledge base for building strong biodefence systems."

Science magazine editor Donald Kennedy hopes scientists and security experts can work on the problem together.

"The two cultures now must come together for the greater good," he said.

www.usnews.com Nation & World 2/24/03 By Fouad Ajami

There can be no joy in the expedition: This increasingly inevitable war against the Iraqi regime shall be fought in the deeply anti-American lands of the Arab world. There shall be no takers in that congenitally anti-American world for assertions of American benevolence. We shall be seen as a mighty power blowing in from afar to subdue an Iraqi regime that has continued to hold out to other Arabs the false, ruinous promise of a center of Arab technological and military power. A handful of Arabs shall rally to America's banners. In the main, that world will split into those who will take the gift of American power--deliverance from Saddam Hussein--without undue enthusiasm for the country that gave that gift, and others who have seen this campaign all along through the prism of their deep animus toward the United States.

We have heard from the French and the Germans. They don't like American power, and they don't like their own irrelevance. We have also heard the more articulate, more sober assessments of the Iraqi threat from former communist lands--Albania, Romania, Estonia, Lithuania, and others--10 countries in all in eastern and central Europe that have expressed their unbending support for American goals.

The remarkable thing, amid the tumult, is the eerie silence in Arab lands. Save for Qatar and Kuwait, the dominant Arab response is a mix of anti-American belligerence and a sullen, resentful silence. To listen to the lands of Araby, the crisis at hand is the result of America's rampaging power and its greed for Arab oil, its heedless bid for imperial hegemony.

Cross hairs. There can be no reasoning with this kind of willful self-pity. The mufti of Saudi Arabia, its highest judge, spoke recently to the throngs that had come from across the Islamic world for the annual pilgrimage. A dark conspiracy, the jurist said, encircles and stalks the world of Islam. "The Islamic nation is in the cross hairs, threatened by its enemies in its morals and values." The "forces of evil," he added darkly, are at work, and the principal struggle is "at once economic and religious." A deep rot has settled on Arab lands while a "freedom deficit" leaves their inhabitants in the throes ofauthoritarian rule and their children prey to the recruiters of terror. About such troubles the jurist has nothing to offer--nothing save a dark message of enemies bent on Islam's ruin.

Whether the Arabs admit it or not, there is a deep fear across their lands of what a war of liberation in Iraq may trigger. There shall be an accounting between the Iraqi people, seared by sorrow and brutality as they have been, and an Arab street that forever averted its gaze from the crimes of Saddam Hussein. It shall be a moment of singular embarrassment when the throngs in Ramallah and Cairo take to the streets for the obligatory attacks against America while Iraqis greet the unseating of Saddam as a precious gift.

There are things the Arabs will never openly tell us about their world and its phobias. In Iraq, a victorious campaign against Saddam will overturn the rule of the Sunni Arab minority from which Saddam Hussein and his own clan hail. Greater power in a new Iraq shall come the way of the majority Shiite Arabs, and of the Kurds in the north. But neither the Shiites nor the Kurds are beloved by the Arab street. So the legend spreads that war will give Iraq over to the Kurds and the Shiites and render it vulnerable to the power of Iran and Turkey, two non-Arab neighbors. A war to disarm a terrible regime and to give its brutalized people a chance at a new beginning is thus seen as "imperial cartography"--an American exercise in redrawing the map of nation-states in the region.

America should discount this animus and the dark theories it spawns. An old order in the Arab world fights for its life and hegemony and worries that the foreigner's big guns and ideas of democracy and reform will sweep that order and its beneficiaries and its atavisms away. The Arabs eager to give Saddam Hussein an honorable way out, and the comfort of exile, do so for their own reasons. They yearn to be spared, worried that their entrenched rule will be challenged by the kind of political world emancipated Iraqis may manage to build in the shadow of American power.

We cannot still those fears, nor should we try. We should know the Arab world for what it is. We must decipher its ways and understand why the people in Lithuania and Latvia grasp the stakes in this war, while the crowds in Cairo and Ramallah continue to insist that American power is a greater threat than the brutal regime in Baghdad.

abclocal.go.com

WASHINGTON — President Bush assured anxious Americans on Saturday that government officials are "standing watch 24 hours a day against terrorism."

"Many of these dangers are unfamiliar and unsettling," Bush said in his weekly radio address after eight days under the high-risk orange level terrorism alert.

"Yet I assure you," he said, "that our government, at every level, is responding to this threat, working to track down every lead and standing watch 24 hours a day against terrorism."

The Bush administration sought to spread calm at the end of a week in which many people, at the urging of federal officials, stocked up on food, water, duct tape and other supplies to prepare for a possible new attack. Democrats ridiculed the duct tape advice, urging Bush instead to send Congress a special request to pay for equipment, personnel and training needed by first responders, the people who would quickly respond to a terror emergency.

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said Friday officials have no conclusive evidence about where, when or how the terrorists could strike. He said the government does not plan to change the alert level, although he added threat information is under constant re-evaluation.

Authorities had said they were worried about attacks timed to coincide either with the beginning of a war with Iraq or with the end of the hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to holy Mecca that ended Thursday.

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the end of the hajj is causing officials to consider seriously lowering the threat level. At the same time, the official said there remains a "lot of energy" in the intelligence system, meaning clandestine information, that has officials worried.

On the radio, But Bush said Americans should relax and let the professionals do the worrying about keeping their communities safe from attack. He asked people only to be more alert to their surroundings and suggested a trip to the Department of Homeland Security's Web site at www.dhs.gov for tips on being more vigilant.

"Americans should go about their lives," Bush said.

Beyond that, he said, the raising of the terrorism alert level on Feb. 7 from yellow to high-risk orange "is primarily a signal to federal, state and local law enforcement to take additional precautions and increase security measures against potential terrorist attacks."

Plans are in place to protect infrastructure such as dams, power plants, computer networks and communication systems, to tighten security at borders and ports, to collect better intelligence on emerging threats, and to detect a biological attack through an early warning network of sensors, Bush said.

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Last Updated: Feb 15, 2003