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Getting
terrorist suspects off the streets can be a struggle. But one lengthy
surveillance ended last week when French authorities arrested Christian
Ganczarski, a Muslim convert born in Germany, at a Paris airport.
Ganczarski made several visits to Qaeda training camps, and he was phoned
by a Qaeda suicide bomber moments before the suspect blew himself up at a
Tunisian synagogue in April 2002. Intelligence has shown Ganczarski may
have had contacts with Qaeda mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and may
have been involved in 9-11.
The Bush
administration pressed Germany to arrest Ganczarski, but the Germans said
they couldn’t: he hadn’t committed a crime. The FBI protested when
Ganczarski was then allowed to leave for Saudi Arabia last year. But
neither the Germans nor the Saudis were able to do anything about him
until a Saudi crackdown after the recent Riyadh bombings. French
authorities say that Ganczarski flew to Paris after being expelled from
Saudi Arabia. U.S. officials say he may have planned to travel from Saudi
Arabia to orchestrate a Bali-style nightclub attack on the French island
Reunion.
Investigators were watching
Ganczarski, but for a long time couldn’t touch him. NEWSWEEK has learned
that Canadian officials flat-out lost would-be Millennium bomber Ahmed
Ressam. According to Canadian and U.S. government documents, CSIS,
Canada’s spy agency, first identified Ressam’s voice on a tap in 1996. By
March 1998, CSIS knew that Ressam was headed to an Afghan training camp.
What it didn’t know was that Ressam had obtained a real Canadian passport
using a phony name and had later re-entered Canada and gone underground.
It also had no idea that his training in Afghanistan had set him on course
for an attack in America. Because they thought Ressam was part of a
militant network focused on Algeria, Canadian officials say it is likely
that nobody in Canada told U.S. officials an international terror suspect
was loose, probably in Vancouver. Ultimately, Ressam was arrested by a
U.S. Customs inspector who thought Ressam looked nervous driving an
explosives-laden car off a ferry from British Columbia.
—Mark Hosenball
U.S.-MEXICO
Border Brotherhood
U.S. borders have been tightened since September 11,
but that has done little to deter more than a million Latin
Americans—primarily Mexicans—from trying to sneak into the country each
year. Human smugglers known as coyotes have actually been the biggest
beneficiaries of the Bush administration’s policy of homeland protection:
trips that cost $500 a decade ago now run $2,000, and they have more
takers. Tragically, fatalities are also up: in the past year, almost 100
migrants have died attempting the crossing, often from suffocating inside
closed trucks.
Washington took a
high-profile stab at addressing those casualties last week with the launch
of Operation Desert Safeguard, which will beef up patrols and medical
resources in the border region and increase cooperation with Mexican
police. Immigration advocates, though, complain that the plan misses the
point. “There’s no doubt that these measures will help save lives,” says
Deborah Meyers of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank.
“But ultimately, we’re still addressing a symptom of the problem.” Meyers
and others argue that the more pressing need is to le—galize the 2 million
illegal Mexicans already working in the United States, a measure that
seemed likely to pass until September 11. More legal mechanisms need to be
created if Mexicans are to enter the United States without enduring long
waits for temporary work visas. And it would help to give Mexican workers
reason to stay put in their own country by boosting the economy in Mexico,
where 15 percent of the population currently lives on less than $1 a
day.
The coming year could bring more
substantial improvements. Although nothing is openly in the cards as yet,
the Bush administration could find itself reassessing its Mexico policy in
the run-up to the 2004 elections, particularly if the Democrats make it an
issue in their primaries, says Meyers. After all, winning the presidency
without the Latino vote is a near impossibility.
—Malcolm Beith
MEDIA
Outward Bound
Some media watchers suspected that heads would roll at The
New York Times after fallen star Jayson Blair resigned on May 1. Many
thought that Blair, charged with plagiarism, was never going to be the one
to shoulder all the blame. But it still came as a surprise to many when
the Times’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., confirmed last week that
Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, the paper’s executive and managing editors,
were resigning. “This was like a cold-water shock,” Gail Collins, the
Times’s editorial- page editor, told NEWSWEEK. “Even for those people who
wanted to see [Raines] go.”
So what now?
Sulzberger knows the paper still has a tough road ahead. Joe Lelyveld, who
has been named interim executive editor, has told friends he expects to be
in place only for a month or so. Bill Keller, the paper’s former managing
editor, is one obvious choice—he has experience running the newsroom and
is well liked and respected internally. Two former Timesmen, Dean Baquet
(now the managing editor at the Los Angeles Times) and Marty Baron
(currently the top editor at The Boston Globe, a New York Times property)
are also strong candidates. John Geddes, the paper’s current deputy
managing editor, and Collins —are seen as dark-horse options.
One thing is certain: whoever takes over will face a
staff that seems emboldened by its success in ousting the much-reviled
Raines. “We’ve created a situation where management is impossible,” says
one longtime Times staffer. In the newsroom on 43d Street, there’s a deep
fear that it may be some time before the paper has completely repaired the
damage from the events Blair set in motion.
—Seth Mnookin
1/4 ENVIRONMENT
Evergreen?
Global warming may
be to blame for recent brutal heat waves and deadly storms. But at least
our plants have been enjoying the weather. According to a study published
last week in Science, regional climate changes over the past two decades
have spurred a 6 percent increase in plant growth around the world, from
tropical plants in the Amazon to tundra shrubs in the colder parts of the
world. Rising temperatures, increased rainfall and decreased cloud cover
all have played a part, explains the study’s co-author, Ramakrisna Nemani
of the University of Montana’s School of Forestry. “Climate changes
completely dominate plant responses,” says Nemani.
Sponsored by NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy, Nemani and his
colleagues used nearly 20 years of climatic and satellite data to chart
the warming trend’s effect on plant growth. As the world baked—the ’80s
and ’90s were two of the warmest decades on record—the vegetation in its
ecosystems flourished. In the Amazon, for instance, decreased cloud cover
allowed more sunlight to reach plants like periwinkle, whose extract is
used to treat cancer. In India, monsoon-dependent trees, like teak and
rosewood, benefited from increased rainfall. In North America, warmer air
temperatures lengthened the growing season for tundra shrubs.
Despite these positive repercussions, climate change
could well cast a shadow on plant life in the long term. Scientists argue
that continued growth could disrupt fragile ecosystems that have been in
place for thousands of years; take the strangler figs, climber plants
whose spurred growth could entirely smother the taller trees they usually
adorn. Still, here’s to green while we’ve got it.
—Kristin Kovner
LIBERIA
Court of Opinion
The United Nations is new at playing cop, and it
shows. Last week its prosecutors clashed with its diplomats when a special
tribunal investigating war crimes in Sierra Leone unsealed an indictment
of rogue Liberian President Charles Taylor, who helped create the rebel
force notorious for amputating hands as a terror tactic. Even backers of
an international criminal-justice system questioned the timing: Taylor was
in Ghana opening peace talks with two Liberian rebel groups that control
most of his country. Ghana balked at arresting a visiting head of state,
and Taylor bolted for home. The court’s legal move, while clearly within
its mandate, may have reduced chances for a negotiated end to the
conflict.
The reputation of such courts is
already straining. Former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic’s
self-defense in The Hague tribunal has turned the proceeding into a farce.
In Arusha, Tanzania, the prosecution of Rwandans accused in the 1994
genocide has proved clumsy and subject to suspected lawyer-fee abuses.
Having missed its mark last week, the Sierra Leone panel faces a mixed
result at best because Taylor may never fall into its grasp. Washington,
which is leaving prosecution in Iraq to local tribunals, remains hesitant
to ratify the 1998 treaty establishing an International Criminal Court.
Miscues like last week’s hardly advance the case.
—Tom Masland
ITALY
Traffic on the Tiber
When in rome...do as the French and British? In an
effort to combat congestion, the Italian capital recently spent .2.5
million to clean up the River Tiber and transform it into a thoroughfare
for aquatic buses, just like London and Paris have done. City officials
hope as many as 15 percent of the 7 million annual visitors to the city
will use the Tiber taxis. It hasn’t been an easy task (sanitation workers
have dredged up 38 tons of waste from the river so far, including a Fiat
and countless mopeds and wine bottles) but with the summer tourist season
fast approaching, city officials are confident that their master plan will
be a hit.
It’s likely they’ll be right. For
a mere euro each way, commuter boats make eight stops between the Olympic
stadium in northern Rome and the city’s southern suburbs. Glass-covered
tourist boats offer multilingual tours of the city from just .10. There is
even a dinner barge that meanders along the river at sunset, doling out
wine and pasta below the bridges for just .43 a head. Officials say that
by July, boats will travel more than 30 kilometers to the Mediterranean
port of Ostia. Rome has even reached an accord with London and Paris
whereby river enthusiasts can buy a tri-city pass, good for travel on any
of the three rivers.
There are of course
already some complaints. While traveling on the Tiber may work well for
the tourists, business commuters will probably need to rely on a more
efficient service—the boats are unpredictable, always late and float down
the Tiber at a leisurely pace. Admits Mayor Walter Veltroni: “It’s an
alternative means of transport for those who aren’t in a hurry.”
—Barbie Nadeau
BOOKS
Donald Rumsfeld’s Poetic
License
Truth may be beauty, but
evading the truth can be downright poetic. In a June 2002 interview with
The Washington Times, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, “The
truth is, look:/If something is going to happen,/ There has to be
something/For it to happen with/ That’s interested in having it happen.”
Rumsfeld’s verse, long embedded in news briefings, interviews and the U.S.
Defense Department Web site, has now been collected in one volume, “Pieces
of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld,” compiled
and edited by Hart Seely.
Not everyone’s
words can be converted to verse by pressing the return key in weird
places. Seely, a reporter for the Syracuse Post-Standard, first tried to
fit Ari Fleischer’s sentences into stanzas but the press secretary’s words
proved too controlled for art. When Seely started reading Rumsfeld
transcripts, he discovered real talent. “This guy wasn’t saying anything
about anything!” With colorful tangents and a tendency to repeat himself
in a majestic way—”Like a chorus in a bad song,” says Seely—Rumsfeld’s
words were already lyrical. Like modern African-American street poetry,
Rumsfeld’s riffs originated as oral improvisation, Seely writes in his
introduction. In “The Unknown,” Rumsfeld’s thoughts are particularly deep:
“As we know,/There are known knowns./There are things we know we know./We
also know/There are known unknowns./ That is to say/We know there are some
things/We do not know./But there are also unknown unknowns,/The ones we
don’t know we don’t know.” Says Seely, “The unknown unknown is a brilliant
concept. I wish he’d take it one step further and go unknown unknown
unknown.”
—Susannah
Meadows
IRELAND
Into the Drink
Around the tables in Dublin’s Temple Bar area, the sense of
resignation is as thick as the plumes of smoke wisping toward the ceiling.
“If it happens, it happens,” says Mark Collender, an off-duty policeman as
he drains his second pint of Guinness. He’s referring to Irish Prime
Minister BertieAhern’s vow to crack down on alcohol abuse. Warning labels
would be slapped on bottles; there will be restrictions on alcohol
advertising on radio and TV. Ahern has even proposed banning happy hours.
Ireland will also, as of Jan. 1, become the first European country to ban
smoking from all places of employment, including pubs and
restaurants.
Much of the Irish public
supports Ahern. They worry that alcohol consumption has gone up 46 percent
in Ireland since 1990, even as it’s declined elsewhere in Europe. A
quarter of Ireland’s emergency-room cases are now alcohol-related. Lisa
Carley, the bartender at the Hairy Lemon in Dublin, considers drinking to
be Ireland’s national sport. “It’s just what we do,” she says with a
shrug—helping to prove Ahern’s point.
—John Ghazvinian
Ricky Martin
Ricky martin has
been missing in action since his days of living la vida loca. But the
suave Puerto Rican has a new album—his first in Spanish since 1998—called
“Almas Del Silencio” (Souls of Silence). Martin bared his soul to
NEWSWEEK’s Vanessa Juarez:
Why a Spanish album now?
I never said I was going to stop recording in Spanish. That would
be like denying who I am. I was about to release an album in English, but
then I thought, “Hold on, I need to go back to step one.” For me, step one
is Spanish.
Do you realize you started a Latin explosion?
I never thought of an explosion. I was just enjoying what I
was doing. After that, a lot of people came. Look at Shakira, she’s done
amazing. And Jennifer Lopez, she’s a diva, mama.
What else have you been up
to?
I spent some time in India and
became part of a foundation called Sabera. Philanthropy is very important
to me. The thing is, since we live in a first-world country, we say,
“Yeah, yeah, whatever, I don’t care, that’s their reality, not ours.” No,
man, don’t be so narrow-minded, dude, their reality is affecting us as
well.
You were once in the group Menudo. Have you eaten menudo—the chile,
hominy and tripe soup?
No, I never did.
I think that’s from Mexico. Let me tell you, in Puerto Rico, they have all
the crazy things, too—very fattening but oh so tasty.
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“They will arrive too late.” A
resident of Bunia, Congo, on the U.N.’s deployment of French soldiers to
restore order in the town, where recent ethnic violence has killed at
least 430
“Gulping for air, I started crying and
yelling at him, ‘What do you mean? What are you saying? Why did you lie to
me?’ ” Sen. Hillary Clinton, in her new book, “Living
History,” describing the morning when President Bill Clinton admitted to
her he had been sexually involved with White House intern Monica
Lewinsky
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Mideast: Will
Bush's Charm Make a Difference?
