New York Times
Subash Gurung certainly made a mockery of Tom DeLay's airport security plan. Over the weekend Mr. Gurung easily made it through security at O'Hare Airport in Chicago with several knives, a stun gun and a can of pepper spray in his carry-on luggage. The private contractors hired by United Airlines to work at the checkpoint missed these weapons, even though they found two pocket knives on his person. It is hard to believe that Mr. DeLay, the House Republican whip, is still trying to sell the idea that passenger and baggage screening should be left in private hands.
Unfortunately, he is, and he has the support of President Bush. The sorry result is that nearly two months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, Congress is still stewing over aviation security legislation. Last week the House, by a narrow margin, approved a flawed security plan that must now be reconciled with a far better Senate bill that would authorize a full federal takeover of aviation security. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta is admonishing airlines to enhance screening for the holiday travel season, but the House Republicans must come to their senses for Congress to deliver a long-term security plan.
The debate over aviation security should never have gone into a second round. It is unfortunate that the White House indulged conservative House leaders by lobbying for their weak bill. The Senate recognized that airline security was an unseemly issue for partisan bickering when it unanimously passed a bill that would create a federal security force to protect the nation's air travel system.
House Republican leaders recklessly spun the Senate's united action as a Democratic plot to swell the government's unionized payrolls for political advantage.
Their bill embraces most of the other security measures in the Senate approach, such as the expansion of the sky marshal program and tougher federal oversight of airport security, but allows the same private companies to continue carrying out the actual screening of passengers and luggage at airports.
There is room for compromise on some issues. As the House proposes, it may make more sense to entrust the Department of Transportation with overseeing airport security rather than the Justice Department.
To address concerns that a federal force could be less accountable, no civil service or union rules should allow federal screeners to strike, or prevent them from being readily disciplined for security breakdowns. On the larger issue, though, the American people will be looking to Senate negotiators to stand firm in their talks with the House.
Washington Post
"The president is fully satisfied that anybody who is continuing to be held is being held for a wise reason," presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer said the other day about the people who have been detained since Sept. 11. The remark compounded the doubts it was meant to allay. How does the president know that all is well? Has the Justice Department merely told him so, or has he insisted on the detailed accounting of the arrests -- now said to number 1,182 -- that the department has declined to give the public? If in fact he has received such an accounting, and it is as benign as he and Attorney General John Ashcroft say, why won't he make it public?
The information sought is not that complicated. Who are the people who have been picked up? How many are still in custody? What are they charged with? What is the status of their cases? Where and under what circumstances are they being held? No one expects the authorities to divulge vital, secret information. But from whom are the answers to these questions being withheld? Surely the terrorist organizations know if their members are being detained. The department says it's bound by court orders, privacy rules, etc., not to disclose some of the names and other information sought, and that in other cases -- in which people were detained by state or local authorities -- it doesn't know the outcomes. But it knows and, our sense is, could tell or try to tell a lot more about this seemingly massive law enforcement effort than it has.
We've said before that the agency has a fine line to walk between its twin responsibilities to adhere to the Constitution and also do all it can to prevent further terrorist activity. Mr. Ashcroft says the mass detentions have violated no one's civil liberties, and there have been only scattered allegations -- no real evidence -- to the contrary. All the more reason for the department to be forthcoming. Yesterday Mr. Fleischer said the bulk of those detained had been released, but then he had to backtrack -- not the truth, it turns out. What is the truth?
Washington Times
Even at a time when the nation has been shaken again and again by dire warnings from government officials, President Bush's remarks yesterday about possible nuclear terrorism were certainly an attention grabber.
Talking via speakerphone to a conference of Central and East European nations, Mr. Bush warned for the first time that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network has been seeking access to nuclear materials. "They are seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Given the means, our enemies will be a threat to every nation and eventually, to civilization itself," Mr. Bush told leaders from 17 countries. Mr. Bush warned these countries that their "freedom is under threat again," and he appealed to U.S. allies in Europe join in the fight. Coming from a man as plainspoken as Mr. Bush, these are big words, and they must be heeded.
Later in the day, at a press conference with French President Jacques Chirac, Mr. Bush declined to elaborate on his statements, but called bin Laden an "evil man" who is working on acquiring "evil weapons." Mr. Bush noted that assistance from U.S. allies is crucial now: "A coalition partner must do more than just express sympathy. A coalition partner must perform." Yesterday, in a welcome move, the German government stepped up and assigned 3,900 troops to the war on terrorism.
There's no doubt that this will take steady nerves. Since the nightmarish attacks on September 11, we have been visited by a plague of biological warfare, though the actual extent of the attack has so far been very limited in scope. Government officials are being vaccinated against smallpox, and in California the National Guard is patrolling the state's bridges against possible terrorist attacks.
No one doubts that demented mastermind bin Laden would use nuclear weapons if he had them. We are not talking about a Hiroshima-size nuclear blast, however, but more likely contamination via a "dirty bomb," nuclear material wrapped around a conventional explosive and delivered by less dramatic means than a missile -- a boat, for instance, or a plane.
If Mr. Bush was issuing another general warning in order to rally U.S. allies and buck up wavering public support for the war against terrorism in Afghanistan, he could find better ways to do it. It was one thing to warn against potential nuclear aggression from rogue states as a group in the course of the missile defense debate. A nuclear alert with name and address on it is an altogether different matter.
If, on the other hand, a nuclear attack is a realistic scenario, if there is credible evidence to support this warning, Mr. Bush must inform Americans in very specific terms what his administration is planning to do to protect them. By tomorrow night, we should know. The president is set to address the nation about homeland defense. After yesterday's statements, nuclear terrorism should be his top priority.
San Antonio Express-News
Hopes for peace in Colombia appear bleak.
In the 37 years that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia -- the oldest guerrilla movement in Latin America -- has been fighting the Colombian government, no one has reached out to the rebels more than the current president, Andrés Pastrana.
Pastrana, who was elected three years ago after promising to negotiate a lasting peace agreement with the rebels, ceded the insurgents a 16,000-square-mile territory, an area about the size of Connecticut and Massachusetts combined.
Unfortunately, as many observers have long feared, it has become clear that the rebels have no intention of negotiating a peace agreement with the Colombian government.
In recent weeks, the 16,000-soldier guerrilla force, better known by its Spanish-language initials FARC, again has resorted to kidnappings for ransom and killing innocent civilians.
One of them was Consuelo Araujo, a close friend of renowned Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez. The former culture minister was kidnapped and shot in the head before government troops could rescue her.
Moreover, intelligence reports show that FARC is making large profits from the illegal drug trade in Colombia.
Pastrana's four-year term ends in 2002, and he cannot be re-elected because the Colombian Constitution prohibits it. He has given the rebels a Jan. 20 deadline to negotiate a peace agreement with the government.
If there's no peace agreement by then, the Colombian government should declare war on the FARC and try to recover the ceded territory.
At the same time, the Pastrana administration should go after the right-wing paramilitary forces that terrorize the South American nation as much as the FARC.
The argument against such a military offensive is that many civilians will be caught in the crossfire. But even when the FARC and the government have a truce, the guerrillas still kidnap and kill innocent people, and the paramilitary forces take advantage of the chaos to do the same.
The United States, however, must stay out of Colombia's conflict. The Bush administration has its hands full with the war against terrorism and the military incursion in Afghanistan.
The nation does not need to be dragged into a Vietnam-style conflict in Colombia.
The temptation to help Pastrana will be strong because the success of the drug war could be at stake. But the lives of American soldiers must not be risked in a civil war that only the army of Colombia can fight.
Columbus Dispatch
With the videotaped statement released over the weekend, terrorist plotter Osama bin Laden committed a strategic error.
He took his considerable cachet and gambled it on one throw of the dice, condemning the leaders of most Muslim nations as infidels and hypocrites, and urging the rest of the world's 1 billion Muslims to rise up in a religious war against these leaders and the West.
The gamble failed.
Until that videotape appeared, bin Laden enjoyed considerable latitude in the Muslim world, not only in the streets, but also in the corridors of power, where he provokes such fear that many national leaders preferred covertly to appease him or bribe him to stay away.
But by condemning the leaders of virtually every Muslim nation as traitors to the faith because they and the states they head are part of the United Nations, bin Laden has forced them to choose sides when many would have preferred simply to continue appeasing him.
This was clear in Damascus, Syria, at a Saturday meeting of the Arab League attended by the foreign ministers of Bahrain, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen and the Palestinian Authority. There, Amr Moussa, secretary general of the League, declared flatly that bin Laden "does not speak for Arabs and Muslims.''
Ahmed Maher, Egypt's foreign minister, concurred, saying that there is no war between Islam and the West. "I think there is a war between bin Laden and the world,'' Maher said.
These comments were all the more remarkable because the Arab League is not an Uncle Sam fan club. Far from it. The purpose of Saturday's meeting was to plan strategies for helping the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel, a U.S. ally. Moussa also underlined the Arab League's opposition to any U.S.-led attack against Arab states accused of sponsoring terrorism.
Bin Laden's blunder is not a surprise. He appears to be descending into megalomania, a self- anointed prophet intoxicated by his own poisonous brew of hatred, religious bigotry, twisted historical revisionism and apocalyptic fantasy.
This is a downhill path worn smooth by people such as Adolf Hitler, Branch Davidian leader David Koresh and People's Temple leader Jim Jones, all of whom ended badly, taking many followers and innocents with them.
While many Muslims around the world share some parts of bin Laden's resentment of the West's political, economic and cultural power, relatively few are ready to enlist in a global war of civilizations. As long as bin Laden hung back just a bit from calling outright for Armageddon, the possibility that he could do so could not be discounted, and this gave him power. But now the possibility can be discounted and he is much diminished as a result.
All bin Laden commands is a hard core of fanatics, not an entire religion or civilization. The true message in last weekend's videotape is that bin Laden and his bloodthirsty little army are alone against the world. Just as with violent, fanatic movements of the past, this one, too, has set itself up for destruction.
Dallas Morning News
Coalition week has arrived in Washington.
President Bush spent Tuesday morning addressing Central European leaders via satellite. And throughout the week, he and his top aides will meet with the leaders of Pakistan, India, Yemen, Britain, France, Algeria, and Morocco. He also will address the United Nations General Assembly Saturday.
The consultations are extremely important. Former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey had a point when he told this editorial page last week that he worries about all members of the coalition "except Great Britain."
Here's a look at several points:
PAKISTAN AND AFGHANISTAN: Mr. Bush gets to go eye to eye with Gen. Pervez Musharraf Saturday. Mr. Bush likes that kind of personal diplomacy. He will need to use finesse, however.
Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Charles Kupchan correctly notes that "Pakistan has been getting it coming and going." For its participation in this war, which has cost the Musharraf government at home, Pakistan's leaders will want the U.S. to remain a presence in Afghanistan long after Osama bin Laden and the Taliban have met their destiny.
Fair enough. But Mr. Bush will need to impress upon Gen. Musharraf that the U.S. cannot alone solve Afghanistan's woes. The United Nations also must play a major role.
PAKISTAN AND INDIA: President Bush must impress upon Gen. Musharaff and Indian Prime Minister Atal Vajpayee the overwhelming need to renew a dialogue about their longstanding differences, many of which center around the disputed state of Kashmir.
Stephen Cohen of the Brookings Institution points out that they have previously agreed to several good-faith measures. The president should press them to start acting on them now.
Mr. Bush does not like special envoys, but he should consider naming a roving diplomat to focus on this particularly crucial area.
U.S. AND RUSSIA: This is one part of the coalition where there appears plenty of room to cheer. The two nations now have a mutual interest in curbing terrorism with a global reach. Russia faces its own Muslim restiveness in Chechnya, after all.
When Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush meet in Washington and Texas next week, we particularly hope they discuss how Russia can nudge Iran toward a constructive role in the campaign against terrorism.
Maintaining the coalition remains Mr. Bush's most immediate task. Such advances as predominantly Muslim Turkey's decision to dispatch troops to the cause deserve celebration. But the chore of keeping coalition members focused will remain tricky, very tricky.
(Compiled by United Press International)
