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To: D. Long who wrote (6863)	10/15/2001 7:33:48 AM
From: John Carragher	Respond to of 23908

October 15, 2001 The Anthrax Source The usual government and media suspects are advising Americans not to "panic" amid the latest anthrax mailings, and of course that's right. The risks to any single person are small enough that it makes little sense to stockpile Cipro or buy a gas mask. But we hope all the cautionary words don't deflect attention from the genuinely scary prospect here: State sponsorship. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft says it is "premature" to declare any link among the three anthrax mailings to three different American states, or any one of them to the September 11 attacks. And, yes, it is possible that three copycats decided, independently, that now was the time to airmail the anthrax they had somehow stockpiled for just such a terror occasion. But it's not very likely. The more rational hypothesis is that these were organized acts of terror, and that the anthrax wasn't produced in random basements. Several circumstantial links to Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network are already known. Some of the World Trade Center hijackers, including suspected ringleader Mohamed Atta, visited an airfield near the site of the Boca Raton, Florida, anthrax mailings. The anthrax package sent to a Microsoft office in Reno, Nevada, was mailed from Malaysia, another al Qaeda haunt. One of the September 11 hijackers, Khaled Almihdhar, visited Malaysia earlier this year, appearing in a surveillance tape with another suspected associate of bin Laden. The terrorist's followers also met in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, in January 2000 as part of the plot to bomb the USS Cole in Yemen later the same year. As for the package sent to NBC in New York, it was postmarked on September 18 from Trenton, New Jersey. That state, especially Jersey City, was the home of the first attempt to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993, a plot also linked to bin Laden associates. More generally, as Dick Cheney said last Friday on PBS's "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," "We know that [bin Laden] has over the years tried to acquire weapons of mass destruction, both biological and chemical weapons." Mr. Cheney added that the U.S. has obtained "copies of the manuals" that al Qaeda "actually used to train people" in how "to deploy and use these kinds of substances." Which brings us to who might have supplied bin Laden's gang. The likeliest answer is some government. Growing your own anthrax isn't difficult but turning it into a useful weapon is. Terrorist bands have in the past tried to use anthrax as a weapon, notably in Japan, but failed. Liquid anthrax is useless for terror and keeping airborne anthrax spores in the proper form to kill isn't easy. The U.S. cases have apparently all involved a powdered form of the disease. And this weekend's left-wing British Guardian newspaper cites intelligence sources as saying that, "Making powder needs repeated washings in huge centrifuges, followed by intensive drying, which requires sealed environments. The technology would cost millions." Bin Laden couldn't be doing all this in Afghan caves. The leading supplier suspect has to be Iraq. Saddam Hussein used weapons-grade anthrax against his own Kurdish population with lousy results, before turning to more efficiently lethal chemical weapons. U.S. intelligence sources believe Saddam has stockpiled thousands of pounds of biological agents, including anthrax. U.S. officials let Saddam know during the Gulf War that if he used such agents against U.S. forces he would get a destructive response. But that doesn't mean he, or his agents, might not want to unleash the weapon from a deniable distance, or via third parties. His anti-American animus hasn't lessened since his Gulf defeat. And Czech government sources have reported that Atta, the hijacking mastermind, met at least once with Iraqi diplomat Ahmad Samir Al-Ani in Prague. We rehearse all this because the best defense against anthrax attacks isn't passing out Cipro to every American. It is to go on relentless offense against the terrorist sources. In this sense the anthrax scare has boomeranged on the terrorists. American public support for the bombing in Afghanistan has actually risen since the first anthrax reports. Ending this war won't end terror, of course. Saddam or no, others will want to use anthrax or the like, and even after this week we still believe the greatest threat is nuclear terrorism. Americans are simply going to have to live from now on with a certain level of risk. The good news is that most Americans have been doing precisely that, with 110,000 showing up at Michigan Stadium as usual this autumn weekend. New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani put it well the other day when he said that Americans should begin to behave the way the British did during the London blitz: Cope with the danger when it appears but otherwise go cheerfully about your lives. Meanwhile, the government has to do everything possible to destroy the anthrax threat at its state-sponsored source.

To: D. Long who wrote (6863)	10/15/2001 9:29:01 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23908

[...] In the first six months of the [current] year, China posted 7.8 percent growth in gross domestic product, a figure that might be inflated as local officials are eager to show good results. But even if this is taken into account, China's growth remains significantly higher than that of the US, where the economy is approaching zero growth. In the same period, China's retail sales of consumer goods rose by 10.3 percent, slightly higher than the 9.7 percent of the same period last year. Consumer prices rose by 1.5 percent in July, outstripping the 0.3 percent increase in prices for the whole of 2000. Yet prices of clothing, household appliances, transportation and communication continued to drop. In other words, internal demand is growing but many prices are falling sharply. The textile industry, light industry, telecoms and transportation companies - all sectors where state-owned enterprises (SOEs) still dominate the market - are cutting prices. On the other hand, the Finance Ministry said fiscal revenue in the first six months of the year was 787.2 billion yuan (US$95 billion), 26.2 percent higher than in the same period last year. The largest contributors here are SOEs - a fact confirmed by the ministry's July announcement of a plan to overhaul the now outdated tax system. The reform will try to bring in more revenue from the private sector, an indication that SOEs contribute most of the revenue. Thus, the data show that SOEs are both dropping their prices and paying more taxes; in other words, their profits are higher. And this indicates that SOE reforms are working, providing more goods and services at lower prices. SOE efficiency has improved, contributing to the overall performance of the country, where the efficiency of the non-state sector is known to be higher.. This rise in efficiency is an element of a bigger picture. In the past six years, China's growth rate has been higher than that of the US, while the inflation rate has been lower. And the prospects, unlike those of the world's other seven largest economies, are not gloomy. Exports could grow by just 5 percent this year, compared to the nearly 28 percent of last year. Yet, in the first six months, contracted foreign direct investment grew by 40 percent, a measure of both foreign and domestic confidence (as a large chunk of FDI is re-imported private Chinese capital). More money is expected to pour in over the next months as China approaches entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) early next year. Moreover, during the January-June period, investment in fixed assets surged by 15.1 percent year-on-year. Investment by the private and collective sectors jumped 7.5 percent, with the real estate and automobile sectors leading the way. Overall increasing domestic demand contributed 93 percent of the 7.9 percent GDP growth. Banks are more solid. Deposits now exceed loans by 2.7 trillion yuan (some US$326 billion) while the four commercial banks claim a net drop of 2.1 percentage points in their non-performing loans in the first half of this year. The government could harness these funds with bond issues, and in fact the Ministry of Finance plans to issue 150 billion yuan (US$18 billion) of bonds this year. Some Chinese economists argue that more money should be spent to redress the bad debts situation. However, the prevailing view is that the government should spend more money to boost the economy and internal demand, due to the poor world outlook for exports. Bad debts would become a smaller percentage of GDP as the overall economy grows. We can see, then, an improvement in the situation of the banks, the SOEs, and of course the private and non-state enterprises. These improvements in turn allow China to produce electrical appliances at lower prices, which fiercely compete with Japan's traditional exports. Some Japanese analysts blame this competition from China for contributing to the present weakness of the Japanese economy, and then argue for the devaluation of the yen or the revaluation of the renminbi. In this case, their judgement seems in line with that of China's black market, which now puts the yuan at 8.20 to the dollar. Adjustment of the exchange rate between the Japanese and Chinese currencies seems a shortcut around a very complex situation, in which not only Chinese but also South Korean and Thai goods, sometimes with Japanese brand names, compete with products from Japan. In fact, this renminbi "revaluation" points at other problems that have been growing in China and that the government is tackling without touching the renminbi exchange rate. From: atimes.com