King Abdullah: Al Qaeda WMDs Came From Syria

Jordan airs confessions of al-Qaeda suspects

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Medical workers face military draft
Pentagon plan calls up medics, nurses, doctors in national emergencies
By Jon Dougherty


The Pentagon will draft experienced medical personnel, including medics, nurses and physicians, in the event of a national emergency.

The "health care personnel delivery system" is being readied by the Department of Defense, according to a report published by the Newhouse News Service, to cope with military casualties from a large-scale biological or chemical attack. The plan was authorized by Congress in 1987 to deal with large-scale casualties that outstripped the active-duty military's ability to handle them.

The news service also reported the Pentagon is considering other "special skills" drafts, to include military linguists, computer experts or engineers, that could arise from other immediate needs.

"We're going to elevate that kind of draft to be a priority," Lewis Brodsky, acting director of the Selective Service System, told Newhouse News Service.

The plan calls for the president to issue a proclamation ordering 13.5 million health-care professionals to register for a draft within 13 days. Following the proclamation, Congress would quickly pass legislation authorizing the draft of health-care workers aged 20-44, and for the first time in U.S. history, the draft would include women.

The Pentagon would then inform the Selective Service System of the number of personnel needed for each of the 62 medical specialties. The news service said a separate draft lottery would be held for each specialty.

The Defense Department believes it could draft up to 80,000 personnel - surgeons, dentists, nurses, X-ray personnel, paramedics, etc. - within several months of the draft through the Military Entrance Processing Command.

The news service said the plan, however, isn't well-known among the medical community.

"If you were to ask 10 doctors, maybe one might have heard something about it," Dr. Marybeth McCall, chief medical officer at Crouse Hospital in Syracuse, N.Y., and an Air Force veteran, told the news service.

According to the Selective Service website, the medical draft would "provide a fair and equitable draft of doctors, nurses, medical technicians and those with certain other health-care skills if, in some future emergency, the military's existing medical capability proved insufficient and there is a shortage of volunteers."

It would "draft a very small percentage of America's health-care providers into military service. Impact on the availability of civilian health care would be minimal."

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, which created the country's first peacetime draft and formally established the Selective Service System as an independent federal agency.

"From 1948 until 1973, during both peacetime and periods of conflict, men were drafted to fill vacancies in the armed forces which could not be filled through voluntary means," says information posted on the Selective Service website.

The draft ended in 1973, near the close of the Vietnam War, and reverted to an all-volunteer force. Registration for the draft was suspended in 1975 but resumed again during the waning days of President Jimmy Carter's administration in 1980, in response to the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan.

Men who reach their 18th birthday are required by law to register for the draft. Newhouse News said Selective Service maintains 2,000 active draft boards around the country that would handle appeals for exemptions, deferments and postponements.

As WorldNetDaily reported, the U.S. was not considering a military draft to fill combat ranks even after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

"No heightened measures have been undertaken to bring the nation closer to the re-establishment of conscription" following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S., Selective Service said in a statement issued in November 2001.

As Terrorists Strike Arab Targets, Escalation Fears Arise

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

Published: April 30, 2004

IDDA, Saudi Arabia, April 29 --- A string of significant terrorist
actions, all within days of one another, in major Arab capitals, may
signal that the war in Iraq is fueling the very kind of extremism it was
supposed to curtail, Arab officials and analysts said Thursday.

They believe that the attacks--- in Damascus, Syria; Riyadh, Saudi
Arabia; and Amman, Jordan--- were the acts of terrorist cells that have
been formed throughout the region in response to a call by Osama bin
Laden, the founder of Al Qaeda, to rise up and strike the West and to
the images of Americans killing Iraqis shown on television.

There are as yet no direct indications that any structural or
organizational ties link the loose-knit groups committing such acts, the
analysts said. Rather, they are bound by a common ideology of jihad, or
holy war, and common enemies--- the West, particularly the United States,
and Arab governments they perceive as traitors to Islam.

"The American policy in Iraq created a chaotic atmosphere, which has had
a ripple effect across the region, inspiring chaotic, random
operations," said Mohammed Salah, an expert on extremist groups and a
writer for Al Hayat, an Arab newspaper in London.

Investigators have yet to uncover any formal links between the three
attacks.

"I doubt they were coordinated," Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi
foreign minister, told a gathering of editors at The New York Times on
Wednesday. "I say this partly because of the lack of professionalism in
the attacks in Saudi Arabia. Now they are using targets of opportunity,
not design."

The bombing outside the traffic police headquarters in Riyadh last week
seemed partly inspired by the fact that it was one of the few
significant government buildings in the Saudi capital not ringed by
large concrete barriers.

Prince Saud also noted that the attackers, at least those in Saudi
Arabia, did not have the discipline of earlier ones, leaving behind
weapons and not scrubbing their hideouts of all traces that they had
been there.

"They are less efficient but not necessarily less dangerous," Prince
Saud said. "There is no method to their madness."

Experts believe the one thing probably linking all of them is the fatwa
or religious fiat that Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda issued in February
1998 to "fight Jews and crusaders" wherever they are. Israel's attacks
on Palestinians provided some incentive for extremists to answer this
call, but nothing galvanized it quite like the presence of American
military forces occupying Iraq.

"There is an active underground party in the Arab world that believes in
jihad; they actually call one another jihadis," said Jamal Khashoggi, an
expert on extremist groups within Islam and a senior advisor to Prince
Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to London. "It looks like the
call from Osama bin Laden for jihadis to rise up and hit American and
other Western targets is being answered across the Arab world."

The American-led invasion of Iraq, in particular, motivated more people
than the Palestinian-Israeli conflict because the stakes seemed higher
and it was so much more accessible. Decapitating Saddam Hussein's
government without having any security system to replace it created the
kind of anarchy that allowed shadowy groups to multiply endlessly. The
same thing happened previously in places like Somalia and Lebanon, but
nothing matched the scale of Iraq.

"The Americans are creating more and more locations for Al Qaeda to
operate," said Mr. Khashoggi.

The experts noted that there is tendency to blame Al Qaeda for
everything when there may be no tie other than sympathy.

"Each operation can inspire a cell in another country to act," said Mr.
Salah, the columnist. "They inspire each other, but they don't
necessarily contact each other or know each other."

On the other hand, the experts noted that all such cells used to be
isolated by nationality. The groups that went to Afghanistan to train
together all tended to stay together and take the fight to their own
countries ? Algerians to Algeria, Egyptians to Egypt. But the movement
has become much more fluid now that the jihadis are being chased around
the world, with different nationalities showing up in attacks in
different locations. Those who fought in Afghanistan, Chechnya or other
major conflicts probably know each other, although they may not be in
contact.

The experts noted that true Qaeda operations tend to have certain
similarities ? particularly a spectacular target that will create
maximum publicity at minimal cost.

The recent suicide bombing attempts against Iraq's oil-loading
facilities in the Persian Gulf, for example, was probably a Qaeda
operation, the analysts suggested. The bombing in Damascus probably was
not, they said, given the lack of an obvious Western target and the
operation's poor execution.

The experts were also doubtful that the plan the Jordanian government
announced, including the capture of enough chemical explosives
reportedly to kill 80,000 people, was something Al Qaeda would support.
Qaeda operatives have tried to justify the killings of small numbers of
Muslims as an unfortunate side effect of ridding the Arab world of the
infidels, but such a mass killing of other Arabs would likely turn the
public against them.

Indeed, an estimated 40,000 marchers filed through the Jordanian capital
on Thursday to protest such attacks. In Saudi Arabia, too, there has
been an outpouring of sympathy for the police officers.

A group called the Brigade of the Two Holy Mosques, believed to be
linked to Al Qaeda, claimed responsibility for the Riyadh bombing, using
the jihadist vocabulary to declare that the Saudi government had
renounced Islam, evidently through its close ties with the United
States. A few days later, however, another recording made by the reputed
leader of Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, after public opinion was clearly
universally negative to the attack, claimed that Al Qaeda had nothing to
do with the blast, which killed five.

"They are local groups but they function one way or another under the
Qaeda umbrella," said Ahmed Moussalli, a professor of political science
at the American University of Beirut and an expert on Islamic
fundamentalist movements. "But there is no coordination in terms of ? on
this day we will do this, we will do this in Riyadh on this day and then
on this day in Damascus."

One of the groups' major objectives is to prove that these governments
are weak despite their ties to America.


This appears true even in the case of Syria. While Damascus has sharply
criticized the American occupation of Iraq and has voiced support for
the resistance, it also publicly has heralded its role in helping the
United States against Al Qaeda. Showing that small cells can acquire
arms even in a police state like Syria comes as something of a shock to
both the government and the public.

Another motivation, the experts believe, is to try to influence the
American election by showing that the war on terrorism has failed.

"They want to prove that the American policy and the war on terrorism
did not quell the Islamic resistance," said Mr. Salah. "I would expect
such attacks to increase in the coming months on a wide scale."