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<p>This article is based on interviews with more than 125 witnesses to the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center and its aftermath. These witnesses include survivors and their relatives, friends and co-workers, as well as relatives, friends and co-workers of those who died or remain missing. All dialogue was witnessed by reporters or confirmed by one or more people present when the words were spoken. All thoughts attributed to people in the article come from those people.</p>

<p>MUNICH, Germany -- Steffen Ufer didn't have to think long before agreeing to defend a Sudanese businessman against extradition to the U.S.</p> <p>One of Germany's top criminal lawyers, the 60-year-old Bavarian thought the U.S. charges against Mamdouh Mahmud Salim were exaggerated, a view shared by German law-enforcement agencies. The allegation that Mr. Salim was a key figure in an international terrorist organization, al Qaeda, rang false, especially after Mr. Ufer got to know the gaunt, ascetic man from Khartoum. It was 1998 and two U.S. embassies had just been blown up in Africa, killing 224 people.</p>

LMATY, Kazakhstan - As Communism crumbled, the United States set up investment funds to foster start-up companies and other ventures in fledgling market economies. But many of these efforts were undermined, financial experts say, when Washington appointed individuals with little business experience - politicians, lawyers and academics - to make investment decisions. A case in point is the Central Asian-American Enterprise Fund. Through a string of bad business decisions, and possibly fraud, the fund has lost as much as $80 million that it received from American taxpayers, resulting in discussions within the United States about shutting it down, said a ...

What Happened When Well-to-Do Parents Tried to Prep a Public School for Their Kids By LISA BANNON Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL LOS ANGELES -- One morning in November 1999, Ted Henning bounded up the stairs of Cheremoya Avenue School to join other neighborhood parents on a mission. Inside the elementary school's cramped library, two dozen teachers sat waiting to receive them. After filing in and exchanging polite hellos, Mr. Henning and the handful of other parents offered some suggestions for improving the school. Among them: setting up a computer lab, renovating the playground and perhaps adding music ...

LOOSE CANNON: THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR DEMOCRACY by Barbara Conry Barbara Conry is a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. Executive Summary The National Endowment for Democracy is a foreign policy loose cannon. Promoting democracy is a nebulous objective that can be manipulated to justify any whim of the special-interest groups--the Republican and Democratic parties, organized labor, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce--that control most of NED's funds. As those groups execute their own foreign policies, they often work against American interests and meddle needlessly in the affairs of other countries, under- mining the democratic movements ...

PART TWO Crimes against humanity On the twentieth of December 2000, as the first part of this article was being readied for publication, we contacted Henry Kissinger's office, stipulating our areas of interest and requesting an interview. Receiving no direct response from him, we wrote again and graciously offered to match the usual sultanlike fee that he charges for making pronouncements. This elicited only a pompous letter from a hireling, and we were left to assume that there are some subjects Kissinger prefers not to discuss, not even for ready money. Whether or not their perpetrator cares to comment on ...

PART ONE The making of a war criminal THE 1968 ELECTION INDOCHINA * CHILE It will become clear, and may as well be stated at the outset, that this is written by a political opponent of Henry Kissinger. Nonetheless, I have found myself continually amazed at how much hostile and discreditable material I have felt compelled to omit. I am concerned only with those Kissingerian offenses that might or should form the basis of a legal prosecution: for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, ...

Shortly before Christmas in 1997, a small group of Mexican Mafia soldiers gathered at the glittering Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas to discuss assassinating one of their leaders.The target was Mariano "Chuy" Martinez, a shaven-headed East L.A. native who was the gang's highest-ranking member in Los Angeles. Martinez, then 39, was one tough cholo. He had been shot so many times that he carried bullet fragments in his head, chest and spine. He had even survived a bullet between the eyes, courtesy of a man he tried to rob. At Corcoran State Prison, where he did time for attempted murder, ...

Imagine a mile-long floating structure so massive that it sneers down at an aircraft carrier. The U.S. Navy is mulling just such a craft-a Joint Mobile Offshore Base (JMOB) that could move under its own power anywhere on the ocean and withstand the most violent conditions. The JMOB is not alone in its giant ambitions. Plans are also being developed for a cargo-ship port, airport and even a floating city. Researchers presented engineering analyses of several of these projects at the June meeting of the International Society of Offshore and Polar Engineers in Stavanger, Norway. None of the so-called Very ...

Teachers' unions from around the world have issued a collective warning about the potential downsides of globalization, contending that the new global economy based on free trade and deregulation, if left unchecked, threatens the quality of, and access to, education in rich and poor countries alike. The alarm was sounded in this resort city near the Gulf of Thailand, where some 1,100 delegates gathered for a meeting of Education International, a worldwide coalition of labor organizations representing education employees in 154 countries, including the United States.Throughout the July 25-29 event, known as the World Congress, attendees decried what they ...

Downsizing amid the uprising Aug 10th 2001 From The Economist Global Agenda On top of the hundreds of lives claimed by the current fighting between the Israelis and the Palestinians, there are escalating economic costs NOW, as always during the ten-month-old Palestinian uprising, attention is focused on the latest bout of fighting. On August 9th, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a restaurant in Jerusalem, killing at least 15 people and wounding scores. It was followed early on Friday by the Israeli response: security forces seized the Palestinian headquarters in Jerusalem and Israeli jets destroyed a Palestinian police station ...

Seeing Is Believing: What Do Boys Do When They Find a Real Gun? Geoffrey A. Jackman; Mirna M. Farah; Arthur L. Kellermann; Harold K. Simon. Author's Abstract: COPYRIGHT 2001 American Academy of Pediatrics Objectives. To determine how boys behave when they find a handgun in a presumably safe environment and to compare parental expectations of their child's interest in real guns with this observed behavior. Methods. A convenience sample of 8- to 12-year-old boys was recruited from families that completed a survey on firearm ownership, storage practices, and parental perceptions. Parents were asked to rate their child's interest in ...

Eight U.S. Marine Officers Charged in Osprey Probe By Charles AldingerWASHINGTON (Reuters) - Eight U.S. Marine officers implicated in the alleged falsification of maintenance records on the V-22 ``Osprey (news - web sites)'' helicopter have been charged with violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the Marine Corps said on Friday.The corps said in an announcement from Norfolk, Virginia, that the eight had been ordered to undergo hearings that could lead to military courts martial.The officers were not identified pending their decisions to accept or reject the ``Article 15'' fact-finding hearings in a seven-month probe of alleged attempts to cover ...

A war to control Zimbabwe's national army is going on between two of the government's top officials as the battle to succeed President Robert Mugabe continues. Emmerson Mnangagwa, speaker of parliament and Mugabe's preferred successor, and Mines and Energy Minister Sydney Sekeremayi are lobbying intensively, a situation that has created two camps in the forces, say sources in the army. Mnangagwa, while having the support of Mugabe, who is the commander in chief of armed forces, can only count on the support of a few army officers who are Mugabe's loyalists and have no hold on the army hierarchy, say ...

HE IS a general who calls himself president, but he sees himself as a saviour. "I have a job to do here and therefore I cannot and will not let the nation down," declared Pervez Musharraf upon appointing himself president of Pakistan on June 20th. There is no doubt that Pakistan needs saving. It is deeply in debt and poverty has been rising. It is an Islamic federation regarded as insufficiently Islamic by zealots and imperfectly federal by most of its ethnic groups. Many of the malcontents are armed. Formally, Pakistan calls itself a democracy, but it has no sitting ...

Officer fired; chief alleges racial profiling By Jonathan Osborne American-Statesman Staff Friday, August 10, 2001 Senior Austin officer Timothy Enlow was working off-duty security in the Fiesta Mart parking lot when the young men -- two 16-year-old African Americans -- drove up in a new Ford F-150 pickup truck. When the teens later left the store that March 13 evening, the officer noticed a broken reverse light and tried to pull them over in the parking lot. A chase ensued -- first by vehicle and then on foot. It ended with the driver's arrest. Enlow, who admitted that he didn't ...

Bush Needs a Pro-Growth Agenda -- ASAP By Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth The failure of the White House to promote an aggressive economic recovery plan may severely imperil GOP chances of holding on to the House and taking back control of the Senate in 2002. As economist Larry Kudlow points out, we are now officially in a private-sector recession (two straight quarters of no growth in the economy outside of government). A weak economy in 2002 will mean major and potentially catastrophic GOP losses at the polls in the crucial midterm elections. Yet ever since ...

Guilty and Framed By Stuart Taylor, Jr. The American Lawyer December 1995 You've probably heard about the current darling of the radical-chic crowd and the America-bashing European intellectual set: Mumia Abu-Jamal, a convicted cop killer seeking to parlay his literary and black militant credentials into a ticket off death row. In a full-page advertisement in the August 9 New York Times, 112 writers, actors, politicians, and others declared: "There is strong reason to believe that as an outspoken critic of the Philadelphia police and the judicial and prison systems, Mumia Abu-Jamal has been sentenced to death because of his political ...

he Defense Department's newest satellite technology, Warfighter I, sits inside a protected clean room in Germantown, Md. To enter, you must run your shoes through a cleaning device and then don a "bunny suit," a layered hooded outfit that covers every part of your body except your eyes. "Human skin sloughs off as many 30,000 particles a second," says the program manager, Michael Lembeck, as we step onto a tacky mat, essentially an enormous piece of flypaper. "If one speck of skin got on the Warfighter's lens," he adds with friendly hyperbole, "it would set us back 20 years." The ...

Fair-use quotations follow - go to the original story for more. Anonymous Web browser company SafeWeb of Oakland, Calif., got more than just a box of candy hearts from the Central Intelligence Agency in time for Valentine's Day - it got a $1 million investment from the CIA's non-profit venture capital arm, as well as a commitment to use a customized version of SafeWeb's Triangle Boy software to surf the Web in anonymity. Triangle Boy is a new SafeWeb product that allows CIA field agents and other employees in foreign countries to transmit information back to field offices or the ...