New York Times
Hardly anyone knew his name when he began his campaign for the Senate in 1990. He had no money to speak of, no experience in politics. He traveled the state in a rickety green school bus, wore a work shirt and jeans, wrote his own speeches and stayed in people's homes rather than hotels. Twelve years later, everyone in Minnesota and everyone of importance in Washington knew who Paul Wellstone was: a principled fighter for liberal causes, a maverick in a Senate known more for collegiality than fierce independence, a sworn enemy of big-money politics -- he championed a ban on gifts to lawmakers by special interests, much to the annoyance of many of his colleagues -- and a reliable friend of the dispossessed and the environment. He voted against giving two presidents named George Bush the authority to wage war against Iraq. His was a consistent voice for the poor and against what he regarded as adventurism, the kind of voice that seemed to have gone out of style more than 30 years ago.
The Senate lost that voice yesterday when a twin-engine private plane carrying Mr. Wellstone and seven others went down in freezing rain and light snow in northern Minnesota. All eight were killed. That the dead included Mr. Wellstone's wife and daughter made the loss all the more searing. ...
Mr. Wellstone's death just 11 days before the election threw the battle for the Senate into uncharted territory. Before yesterday, Democrats held control by a single seat, and Mr. Wellstone's re-election was not a sure thing. His opponent is a popular and moderate former mayor of St. Paul, and Mr. Wellstone had not helped himself by retreating from repeated pledges not to seek a third term. In characteristically blunt fashion, however, he said he had broken his promise because, with a Republican president and the Senate up for grabs, "now is not the time for me to walk away."
It was not immediately clear what the Democrats would now do to mount a campaign. They have until four days before the election to name a replacement. The only clear outcome was that the Senate had lost a decent and compassionate man.
Miami Herald
The recent conviction of Ana Belén Montes, the highest-ranking Cuban spy ever caught in the United States, validates concerns that Fidel Castro's intelligence agents continue to operate here and elsewhere, including at high levels in Washington.
The unrepentant Montes, the senior Cuba analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, was the key person analyzing intelligence information relating to Cuba at the Pentagon. She provided the Cuban government top secret American intelligence and also participated in the production of an important classified Defense Department report downplaying the threat from Castro's Cuba. Montes also tried to influence academia and regularly circulated in academic circles that took a benign view of Castro.
Cuban intelligence links to the Rescue airplane shoot-down in 1996 were found when the Cuban ''Wasp network'' spy ring was uncovered in 1998 in Miami.
This case underscored the infiltration of the Cuban-exile community by Castro operatives. These agents were trained for sabotage and, by presenting themselves as exiles, used to discredit the entire community.
Together these two cases should highlight to doubters the seriousness of the continuing Cuban intelligence threat to the United States.
Washington Times
Despite resistance, federal policymakers appear to be moving toward allowing Americans to be vaccinated against smallpox. Last week, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the primary source of advice on such matters to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, endorsed the idea of pre-attack vaccinations for more than 500,000 health care workers. It represents a fairly dramatic change of mind for the ACIP's experts, who had previously recommended providing the pre-vaccination option to only a few hundred health care workers in each state.
However, not all medical professionals agree with the ACIP's recommendations, much less the idea of voluntary mass vaccinations. They fear that the vaccine is too risky, both in terms of its potentially lethal side effects and its potential to infect vulnerable individuals. Given those adverse consequences, they fear that the public's confidence in other immunization and vaccination programs will be undermined. Instead, they suggest that a small-scale vaccination program would be acceptable until the dangers of vaccination can be assessed or an attack is imminent.
While it is true that such a program would be useful, it simply does not go far enough. ...
While smallpox has not been seen for decades, it remains an ominous threat, and every American is a potential target. The ACIP was wise to change its recommendations. It is hoped that the administration understands that voluntary public vaccinations are necessary to preserve both public health and personal freedom.
San Francisco Chronicle
The capture of the Washington-area snipers offers up more hard lessons in the war against terrorism.
For more than a year, the nation has spent billions of dollars to track down Osama bin Laden and crush al Qaida. Yet we are as vulnerable to external attack as we were on Sept. 11. Late this week, a blue ribbon task force set up by the Council on Foreign Relations concluded that we are "dangerously unprepared" for another terrorist attack.
The East Coast sniper attacks show that we are equally unprepared for crude terrorist attacks launched from our own shores. No sophisticates, these two indigent snipers terrorized millions of people for weeks, all the while eluding local, state and federal law enforcement personnel -- under the noses of the FBI, the CIA and the Pentagon.
All they needed to carry out their demented acts of terror were a car and a rifle.
One lesson to be drawn is that our yearlong "war against terrorism" will require far more sophistication than we have displayed so far. Another is that instead of focusing almost exclusively on foreign threats, we must fight terrorism at home with equal vigor.
One way to proceed is to make sure that rifles like the one used by the suspected Washington killers are tightly regulated. For starters, Congress must set up a national ballistic "fingerprinting" system, using well-proven technology. The notion of registering guns must be placed on the national agenda. And the National Rifle Association's ability to quash serious debate on the issue must be broken.
Some will use the fact that 17-year-old John Lee Malvo, arrested along with John Allen Muhammad, appears to be an illegal immigrant to call for restrictions on immigration. That would be precisely the wrong lesson. If anything we should devise an immigration policy so people are not smuggled across our borders, but come in with visas.
Another danger is that Islam at home and abroad will be further demonized unfairly, just because the last name of the alleged sniper happened to be Muhammad.
Baltimore Sun
In March 1995, a correspondent for The Sun walked along the streets that demarcated the rubble that had once been the center of Grozny, capital of Chechnya. Whatever had not been pulverized was riddled with bullet holes. One old truck near the Presidential Palace had been remade into fine filigree. The Russian soldiers at their posts wore black bandanas over the lower halves of their faces, like cattle rustlers. In front of one checkpoint, they had left a body out on the street, a warning to others.
This was the first Chechen war. No one was talking about terrorism or jihad then.
The correspondent came upon a family that lived by night in a pitch-black bomb shelter in a park. They came out in the daytime, avoiding the land mines and fresh graves all around, to wash and cook. Indira Bitayeva, her right eye shut tight by an oozing infection, was scooping green water out of the bottom of a bomb crater; her mother needed it for the soup she was making.
Indira was 14. Suppose, for a moment, that she survived the first Chechen war, and the second. She would be 21 today. She would likely have married by now, might very probably be a widow. A Chechen widow with nothing left to lose -- could that have been Indira on television this week, wrapped in a black chador and a belt of plastic explosives, ready along with other Chechen widows to take the lives of several hundred hostages at a theater in Moscow? ...
Today, Moscow is in the center of the whirlwind. Russian President Vladimir Putin rose to power and popularity on the strength of his prosecution of the second Chechen war, but now that war has come to his doorstep.
His options are terribly limited. He thought he was ruthless, but his opponents are more ruthless, and in their own minds unconquerable.
"We are more keen on dying than you are keen on living," said one of the hostage-takers this week.
(Compiled by United Press International)
