WOMEN OFF FRONT LINES

WOMEN OFF FRONT LINES
Sat Oct 20 2001 14:32:19 ET

WASHINGTON -- As the Pentagon brass prepares for the Afghan ground war, the administration is reconsidering--and will most likely kill--Clinton-era proposals to put women into battle zones, US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT claims in fresh editions.

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"That's all changing," a senior Defense official tells the magazine set for publication on Monday.

Frontline "units won't involve women," adds another Pentagon big.

And that's in Afghanistan or anywhere else.

What's more, Bush appointees are planning to sideline the organization that fought to put women closer to the frontlines.

"They will slowly be minimalized and marginalized," says the Pentagon official about the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services.

The switch comes at a critical time, since the Army is creating new reconnaissance and surveillance units open to women, despite a tradition of keeping female troops out of firefight zones.

The change represents a victory for brass who opposed the Clinton rules and the private Center for Military Readiness, which has fought applying political correctness to the Pentagon.

But turning the ship has just begun: Center boss Elaine Donnelly says many of the Clinton rules are unknown to the Bushies.

Elsewhere in US NEWSville:

Two top government bioterror experts are convinced the anthrax sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's office was “professionally made” and stems, directly or indirectly, from another nation’s bioweapons program.

The key, they say, lies not in the anthrax itself but in its formulation how the agent is prepared, its ability to become airborne, the structure of the particles and size of the spores. That over 30 people became exposed from a single envelope is telling, they add.

Tom Ridge, director of the new Office of Homeland Security, said that the anthrax in the Daschle letter had not been “weaponized.”

At least one outside expert concurs. “The empirical evidence suggests that’s weapons grade material,” says Richard Spertzel, former head of the United Nations biological inspection team in Iraq. Ridge “does not know what he’s talking about,” Spertzel told U.S. News.

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