Lugar de Harry

De prostitutes a los boletos estupendos del tazón de fuente, una punta de prueba federal revela cómo los contratistas en Iraq engañaron los E.E.U.U.

Por David Jackson y el Grotto de Jason | Reporteros de Tribune

Dentro del palacio de justicia federal valiente de esto Mississippi La ciudad del río, los secretos sucios del mercantilismo de la guerra de Iraq guarda el verter hacia fuera.

Los centenares de las páginas de expedientes de corte recientemente sin sellar detallan cómo los contragolpes formaron los meses más grandes del contrato de la ayuda de la tropa de la guerra antes de que la primera onda de los E.E.U.U. los soldados hundieron sus cargadores en la arena iraquí.

El injerto continuó bien más allá de las 2004 audiencias del congreso que las primeras llamaron atención a él. Y el fraude masivo puso en peligro la salud de los soldados americanos así como que alineó bolsillos de los contratistas los', expedientes demuestra.

Los querellantes federales en la isla de la roca han procesado a cuatro supervisores anteriores del KBR, de la firma gigante de la defensa que lleva a cabo el contrato, junto con un oficial de ejército adornado y de cinco ejecutivos de los subcontratistas del KBR basados en los E.E.U.U. o el Oriente Medio. Esos demandados, junto con dos otros empleados del KBR que han abogado por culpable en Virginia, explican un tercero de las 36 personas procesadas hasta la fecha en los crímenes del guerra-contrato de Iraq, demostración de los expedientes del departamento de la justicia.

El miércoles, un juez federal en la isla de la roca condenó a funcionario del ejército, principal Jr. de Peleti “Pete” Peleti del oficial de la autorización, a 28 meses en la prisión para tomar sobornos. Un subcontratista medio-oriental lo trató a un viaje al 2006 Tazón de fuente estupendo, un investigador de la defensa dicho.

Los querellantes no confirmarían ni negarían actividad del jurado magnífica en curso. Pero los expedientes de corte identifican a docena FBI, a un IRS y a agentes investigadores militares que se han asignado al caso. Entrevistas tan bien como testimonio en condenar para Peleti, que ha cooperado con autoridades, sugiera una punta de prueba activa.

La isla de la roca sirve como centro para la punta de prueba del mercantilismo de la guerra porque el latón del ejército en el arsenal aquí administra el contrato supuesto de LOGCAP III del KBR para alimentar, para abrigar y para apoyar los E.E.U.U. soldiers, and to help restore Iraq’s oil infrastructure.

In one case, a freight-shipping subcontractor confessed to giving $25,000 in illegal gratuities to five unnamed KBR employees “to build relationships to get additional business,” according to the man’s December 2007 statement to a federal judge in the Rock Island court. Separately, Peleti named five military colleagues who allegedly accepted bribes. Prosecutors also have identified three senior KBR executives who allegedly approved inflated bids. None of those 13 people has been charged.

A common thread runs through these cases and other KBR scandals in Iraq, from allegations the firm failed to protect employees sexually assaulted by co-workers to findings that it charged $45 per can of soda: The Pentagon has outsourced crucial troop support jobs while slashing the number of government contract watchdogs.

The dollar value of Army contracts quadrupled from $23.3 billion in 1992 to $100.6 billion in 2006, according to a recent report by a Pentagon panel. But the number of Army contract supervisors was cut from 10,000 in 1990 to 5,500 currently.

Last week, the Army pledged to add 1,400 positions to its contracting command. But even those embroiled in the frauds acknowledge the impact of so much war privatization.

“I think we downsized past the point of general competency,” said subcontractor Christopher Cahill, who for a decade prepared military supply depots under LOGCAP. Now serving 30 months in federal prison for fraud, Cahill added: “The point of a standing army is to have them equipped.”

KBR, a former subsidiary of Halliburton Co., says it has been paid $28 billion under LOGCAP III. The firm says it quickly reports all instances of suspected fraud and has repaid the Defense Department more than $1 million for questionable invoices.

In a statement, KBR said its roughly 20,000 employees and 40,000 subcontractors have performed laudably in a war zone where Army demands shift rapidly and local suppliers don’t always maintain ledger books. Spokeswoman Heather Browne wrote: “Ethics and integrity are core values for KBR.”

But a wiretapped transcript recently released in Rock Island underscores the brazen nature of the exceptions.

In October 2005, with federal agents tailing them, three war contractors slipped through London’s posh Cumberland hotel before meeting in a quiet lounge. For the rest of that afternoon, the men sipped cognac and whiskey and discussed the bribes that had greased contracts to supply U.S. troops in Iraq.

Former KBR procurement manager Stephen Seamans, who was wearing a wire strapped on by a Rock Island agent, wondered aloud whether to return $65,000 in kickbacks he got from his two companions, executives from the Saudi conglomerate Tamimi Global Co.

One of the men, Tamimi operations director Shabbir Khan, urged him to hide the money by concocting phony business records.

“Just do the paperwork,” Khan said.

Party houses, prostitutes

In October 2002, five months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Khan threw a birthday party for Seamans at a Tamimi “party house” near the Kuwait base known as Camp Arifjan. Khan “provided Seamans with a prostitute as a present,” Rock Island prosecutors wrote in court papers. Driving Seamans back to his quarters, Khan offered kickbacks that would total $130,000.

Five days later, with Seamans and Khan hammering out the fine print, KBR awarded Tamimi the war’s first $14.4 million mess hall subcontract, court records show.

In April 2003, as American troops poured into Iraq, Seamans gave Khan inside information that enabled Tamimi to secure a $2 million KBR subcontract to establish a mess hall at a Baghdad palace. Seamans submitted change orders that inflated that subcontract to $7.4 million.

By June, Seamans and fellow KBR procurement manager Jeff Mazon, a Country Club Hills resident, had executed subcontracts worth $321 million. At least one deal put U.S. soldiers at risk.

The Army LOGCAP contract required KBR to medically screen the thousands of kitchen workers that subcontractors like Tamimi imported from impoverished villages in Nepal, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.

But when Pentagon officials asked for medical records in March 2004, Khan presented “bogus” files for 550 Tamimi workers, Assistant U.S. Atty. Jeffrey Lang said in a court hearing last year.

KBR retested those 550 workers at a Kuwait City clinic and found 172 positive for exposure to hepatitis A, Lang told the judge. Khan tried to suppress those findings, warning the clinic director that Tamimi would do no more business with his medical office if he “told KBR about these results,” Lang said in court. The infectious virus can cause fatigue and other symptoms that arise weeks after contact.

Retesting of the 172 found that none had contagious hepatitis A, Lang said, and Khan’s attorneys said in court that no soldiers caught diseases from the workers or from meals they prepared. It remains unclear if that is because the workers were treated or because they did not remain infectious after the onset of symptoms.

Still, the incident shows how even mundane meal contracts can put troops at risk. Similar disease-testing breaches cropped up at cafeterias outsourced to firms besides Tamimi, former KBR Area Supervisor Rene Robinson said in a Tribune interview.

“That was an ongoing problem,” Robinson said. “When the military asked for paperwork, it was spotty.” KBR was forced to begin vaccinating the employees at their work sites, he added.

Tamimi and its U.S. lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. The company has said it is cooperating with federal authorities.

By July 2005, Tamimi had secured some 30 KBR troop feeding subcontracts worth $793.5 million, records show. Khan continued to negotiate Iraq war subcontracts for Tamimi until shortly before he was arrested in Rock Island in March 2006.

He is now serving a 51-month prison sentence for lying to federal agents about the kickbacks he wired to Seamans, who pleaded guilty and served a year and a day in prison. Both declined to comment.

Seamans, a 46-year-old Air Force veteran, once taught ethics to junior KBR employees. At his December 2006 sentencing hearing, he expressed remorse for taking the kickbacks, telling the judge: “It is not the way that Americans do business.”

It was another repentant LOGCAP veteran standing before a Rock Island judge on Wednesday. Peleti, formerly the military’s top food service adviser for the Middle East, wept as he admitted taking bribes from Tamimi and three other subcontractors between 2003 and early 2006.

Ribbons and badges glittered across Peleti’s pressed green Army shirt. “I stand here before you today to convey my remorse and sincere regret,” he said, then broke down.

One subcontractor, Public Warehousing Co., took Peleti and another top Army official to the Super Bowl, a defense investigator said in court Wednesday. The firm has denied wrongdoing. Khan also bribed Peleti to influence LOGCAP contracts with cash. Peleti was arrested in 2006 while re-entering the U.S. at Dover Air Force Base with a duffel bag stuffed with watches and jewelry as well as about $40,000 concealed in his clothing.

While prosecutors documented kickbacks in only the first two of Tamimi’s mess hall subcontracts, they contend that the tone was set to corrupt the system.

“Tamimi and Mr. Khan have their hooks into Mr. Seamans, they have their hooks into KBR,” Lang said in court last year. “It is difficult to assess the kind of damage that did to the integrity of the subcontracting process when the first two subcontracts are corrupted.”

Auditors in the basement

Military auditors say they closely monitor the layers of KBR subcontractors who actually perform most of the LOGCAP work, stationing teams in Iraq. But one Rock Island search warrant said auditors working back in the U.S. could manage only limited reviews of the cascade of deals.

In the basement of one of KBR’s Houston office buildings, a 25-member team from the Defense Contract Audit Agency had “no communications” with “personnel on the ground,” so they could not confirm whether goods and services actually were delivered, the search warrant application said.

In the absence of oversight, some Middle Eastern businessmen would offer “Rolex watches, leather jackets, prostitutes, and the KBR guys weren’t shy about bragging about the fact that they were being treated to all that stuff,” said Paul Morrell, whose firm The Event Source ran several mess halls as a KBR subcontractor.

Such questionable relationships continued long after early procurement managers like Seamans had been rooted out. Early subcontractors such as Tamimi became almost indispensable in part by outfitting Army cafeterias with expensive power generators and refrigeration systems, records and interviews show.

“If you ever gave Tamimi a hard time, you’d get a call,” former KBR subcontract manager Harry DeWolf told the Tribune.

When subcontracts came up for renegotiation, DeWolf said, companies like Tamimi “would say, ‘Fine, we’re going to pull out all of our people and equipment.’ They really had KBR and the government over the barrel.”

Complicating the investigation of war-contract crimes, the government of Kuwait has denied a U.S. request to extradite two Middle Eastern businessmen accused of LOGCAP fraud. The country’s ambassador last year sent letters to the Justice Department asking the U.S. to drop its case against one of them, arguing that international agreements forbid U.S. prosecution of Kuwaiti residents for crimes allegedly committed on Kuwaiti soil. Prosecutors disagree, but a judge is considering Kuwait’s assertion.

Investigators also have faced challenges in dealing with KBR. The company has withheld some internal company documents relating to Mazon, Seaman’s fellow KBR procurement manager, the firm’s attorneys wrote in court filings.

In response to one subpoena, the firm gave agents about 2,760 of Mazon’s computer files but withheld 398 others, saying they were covered by attorney-client privilege or other protections.

Federal prosecutors say they have given KBR no special treatment and that the company has legal rights afforded to all firms whose employees have been charged with wrongdoing. “We did withhold some documents as being privileged,” a KBR spokeswoman wrote, but added that the company has provided statements and grand jury testimony.

Mazon has pleaded not guilty to charges that he inflated a fuel contract. His attorneys say the fuel subcontract was accidentally inflated when figures were converted from U.S. dollars to Kuwaiti dinars then back again. At least 22 KBR troop support subcontracts were inflated through similar errors, Mazon’s attorney J. Scott Arthur wrote in papers filed in Rock Island.

KBR attorneys said the company informed federal officials of three similar “double conversions” on other subcontracts. But KBR said it “has not undertaken an exhaustive search of its millions of pages of procurement documents” to determine whether other such errors exist.

Independent Online

An early draft of a pre-war British weapons dossier on Iraq included concerns over Israel’s nuclear capability, but the government fought to suppress the reference before publication, The Guardian reported on Thursday.

The newspaper said the Foreign Office convinced a tribunal to keep secret the handwritten mention of Israel in the margin of the dossier, which was drawn up to justify going to war in Iraq.

The reference, suggesting Israel had disregarded the will of the United Nations (UN) like Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, was removed before the draft was released this week under Britain’s Freedom of Information Act.

Israel, seen as a key British government ally, is thought to have the Middle East’s only atomic arsenal.

In a witness statement to the Information Tribunal, seen by The Guardian, a senior Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) official warned that any candid reference to Israel would seriously damage bilateral relations.

“I interpret this note to indicate that the person who wrote it believes that Israel has flouted the United Nations’ authority in a manner similar to that of the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein,” the official said, according to The Guardian.

“Unfortunately, there is a perception already in Israel that parts of the FCO are prejudiced against the country,” Foreign Office official Neil Wigan was quoted as saying.

He argued that the reference scrawled on the draft dossier “would therefore confirm this pre-existing suspicion and would increase the damage”.

Asked about the Guardian report, a Foreign Office spokesperson said: “We don’t comment on leaked documents.”

Succumbing to three years of pressure from freedom of information campaigners, the British government released the once-secret draft document on Monday.

The 32-page document, written by a former director of communications at the Foreign Office, cites intelligence sources to state that Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and could easily use them since it had done so before.

The document, amended in the margins, makes no mention of Saddam Hussein being capable of launching weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, a false claim later used in another government dossier to make the case for going to war.

Muscular Defense Plan Buoys Contractors
Proposed Budget Would Benefit Area Companies

By Dana Hedgpeth

A run of healthy profits for defense contractors that has lasted nearly a decade will continue for at least another year, analysts and company executives said after the Bush administration last week submitted its new defense budget.

The $515.4 billion defense spending proposal for fiscal 2009 is 7.5 percent higher than the current year’s and promises to fund some of the armed forces’ largest and most costly weapons programs. It includes $104.2 billion for weapons procurement and nearly $80 billion for research and development, testing and evaluation.

That would mean big new opportunities and more funding for major projects for local defense and technology contractors, including Lockheed Martin of Bethesda, General Dynamics of Falls Church, SI International of Reston, CACI International of Arlington and Northrop Grumman, which is based in Los Angeles but has a large presence in the Washington area.

“The expectation has been that it can’t continue to increase as it has,” Phil Finnegan, a defense analyst at the Teal Group in Fairfax, said of defense spending. “But it has surprised everyone to see how long this increase has continued. This budget was a great budget for all defense contractors. It includes continuing growth — not as fast as last year, but it enabled everyone’s programs to be funded.”

Finnegan, other analysts and executives at contracting companies said they don’t expect the party to last indefinitely.

“The fiscal year 2009 budget may be about as good as it gets for defense contractors,” said Steve Kosiak, vice president of budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “We have had eight years of quite dramatic growth in [the Defense Department’s] weapons acquisition accounts. Whoever the next president is, it is unlikely that we are going to continue a major buildup.

“The major area contractors have all done reasonably well, but they all also have major programs that are likely to face growing scrutiny in coming years, especially if budgets begin to get tighter, which seems likely.”

In the proposed budget, the Air Force plans to spend $3.4 billion on 20 F-22 Raptors, which are made by Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Pratt & Whitney. It also sets aside large sums to buy pilot-less planes such as Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems’ Predator.

The proposed budget sets aside $6.7 billion for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons program which is being built by Lockheed Martin. The Pentagon has tried to save money on the $300 billion fighter program by eliminating a backup engine being developed by General Electric. The president’s proposed budget does not include such funding, however, Congress is expected to reverse that provision.

The White House moved $1 billion that was supposed to be used to buy more presidential helicopters from Lockheed Martin into research and development. The program has had problems with costs, changes the government wanted to make to the aircraft’s features and staying on schedule.

Lockheed Martin’s C-130 cargo plane is proposed to get $956.6 million, down slightly from what it got the year before.

The Army’s Future Combat Systems, a program that will use a wireless network to connect battlefield equipment overseen by SAIC and Boeing, would get $3.56 billion. And the White House asked for more than $21 billion for space and missile-defense initiatives, areas where Boeing, Lockheed and Northrop have strong roles. .

The demand for armored vehicles continues to benefit General Dynamics, which makes the Stryker and a version of the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, or MRAP. The Stryker program got $1.2 billion and upgrades of the company’s Abrams tank was funded at $727 million, though no funding was allocated for MRAPs, which are being built by several contractors.

The Navy reduced the number of littoral combat ships being developed to operate close to shore — a reduction that is going to have “negative consequences” for Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, which are involved in building the ships, said defense consultant Loren Thompson. The fiscal 2009 budget proposes spending $1.3 billion for two such ships, but the long-term future of the program is uncertain.

Bush’s budget postpones decisions on some big-ticket items.

The Pentagon had been preparing to shut down the production lines of the F-22 Raptor fighter jet, analysts said, and the C-17 transport plane, made by Boeing. But no money was set aside in the fiscal 2009 budget to do so. Without funding, analysts said, it effectively defers the decision of whether to buy more planes or to shut down the lines to the next administration.

“These are politically contentious,” said Finnegan. With elections coming up, he said, the White House “is saying, ‘Why deal with them? Why take the pain for them of shutting down the lines? Let the next administration decide.’ ”

CACI’s president and chief executive, Paul M. Cofoni, said that when the Pentagon shifts from wartime expenses to other programs that have been put on hold, he nevertheless sees opportunities for contractors. He expects that as the military draws down troops in Iraq, the “expenses necessary to house them, to feed them, to provide ammunition for them, all get reduced.

“Those funds can be redeployed to other needs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines,” he said. “So the money’s going to go to things like intelligence and homeland security. That’s where we’re well positioned.”

AFP

When Saad Tawfiq watched Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations on February 5 2003 he shed bitter tears as he realised he had risked his life and those of his loved ones for nothing.

As one of Saddam Hussein’s most gifted engineers, Tawfiq knew that the Iraqi dictator had shut down his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes in 1995 — and he had told his handlers in US intelligence just that.

And yet here was the then US secretary of state — Tawfiq’s television was able to received international news through a link pirated from Saddam’s spies next door — waving a vial of white powder and telling the UN Security Council a story about Iraqi germ labs.

“When I saw Colin Powell I started crying. Immediately. I knew I had tried and lost,” Tawfiq told AFP five years later in the Jordanian capital Amman.

Now in his fifties, a round-faced man with a small moustache and lively eyes behind delicate spectacles, Tawfiq described how the CIA set up an elaborate operation to recruit Iraqi weapons scientists and then ignored the results.

From the end of 2002 the US spy agency had sources inside Iraq’s weapons plants telling them clearly what the whole world now knows — that Saddam had ended efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction.

Nevertheless in March 2003 the United States and Britain invaded Iraq to disarm Saddam of this non-existent arsenal and in the process triggered the effective collapse of the Iraqi state, plunging it into chaos and bringing thousands of deaths.

Saad Tawfiq’s role in this drama began in June 2002 with calls from his sister Sawsan, a doctor who lives with her husband Ali in Moreland Hills, a pleasant suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, in the mid-western United States.

“Our Abu Mahmuds are putting pressure on me,” she told him, using the nickname they shared for Saad’s secret police minder as a makeshift code for the US intelligent agent who had contacted her, “Chris.”

“Chris was very nice, very polite,” Sawsan, a small energetic woman, told AFP. Chris wanted Sawsan’s help to discover the status of Saddam’s weapons programme, and in particular his efforts to build a nuclear bomb.

She joined one of the most successful attempts by the CIA to penetrate Saddam’s Iraq, a programme dreamt up by agency veteran Charlie Allen to target Iraqi weapons technicians through their relatives.

The scientists were well known to the UN weapons inspectors who had been keeping tabs on Iraq’s arms plants since 1991, and the Americans were able to draw up a list of 30 who had relatives in the United States.

The American relatives were to be sent to Iraq and ask about weapons.

“I was nervous, and we even discussed with Ali what to do if something happened to me,” Sawsan said. “It was a very emotional visit back home, because I had not been there for years and I had not seen my brother for years.”

Sawsan was right to be nervous. Saddam’s notorious secret police dealt with spies mercilessly. She was taking a risk with her life and that of her brother, but was determined to help rid her original homeland of a tyrant.

The CIA provided her with a detailed questionnaire about Iraq’s weapons programmes. Fearing she would forget it, Sawsan disguised it in sketches and crosswords in a kind of homemade code.

Tawfiq picked his sister up from Baghdad airport on September 9, 2002. Her homecoming was emotional, but the pair had work to do. They met secretly at night in the family garden and took walks together in the city.

The weapons engineer was astonished by the CIA’s questions, which he thought showed the depths of the agency’s ignorance about events in his country.

“I went crazy. The questions were dumb. She was telling me: ‘They know you have a programme,’ and I was saying: ‘There is nothing. Tell them there is nothing, absolutely nothing. They have left us with nothing’,” Tawfiq said.

“She was taking notes. There were 20 major questions, and to all of them the answer was: ‘No, no, no…’ I kept swearing on the grave of my mother.”

According to Tawfiq, Saddam Hussein gave the order to dismantle Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programmes in 1995, after his brother-in-law and arms chief Hussein Kamel defected and briefed the UN inspectors.

“I was Saddam’s scientist,” Tawfiq declared, with an ironic smile. “In 1991 if you exposed something you were killed. In 1995 if you hid something you were killed!”

Sawsan dutifully gathered this information and returned to the United States to pass it on to her handlers. But the CIA was unimpressed.

“Saad told me there was nothing left,” she told AFP. “That everything had been either destroyed or dismantled by the UN and the regime has abandoned its nuclear programme. And he begged me to explain all that back in the States.

“I went back and I reported what he had told me in full detail. I even went personally to Washington. In the beginning they listened to me but then they told me that my brother was lying,” she said.

Of course Tawfiq and other colleagues approached by the CIA were telling the truth, as the United States would discover after it had launched a bloody war that has cost tens of thousands of lives.

Paul R. Pillar, the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia at the time of the operation to question Tawfiq, said weapons scientists had not been ignored, but had been contradicted by other sources.

“To the extent that the debriefings did not have more of an effect in Washington, it probably was not because the effort came too late but instead because there were other indications that seemed to contradict what the individuals were saying, and that suggested Iraqi unconventional weapons programmes were continuing,” he told AFP.

But as Saddam’s scientist lamented five years later: “You don’t have to destroy a country for that.”

The White House has overlooked the basic rule of ‘know your enemy’ in its anti-terrorist strategy in the ‘war on terror’, an analyst says.

“The attention of the US military and intelligence community is directed almost uniformly towards hunting down militant leaders or protecting US forces, [and] not towards understanding the enemy we now face,” AFP quoted Bruce Hoffman, a professor at Georgetown University as saying.

“Al-Qaeda’s ability to continue this struggle is based absolutely on its capacity to attract new recruits and replenish its resources,” Hoffman continued.

He noted that through ignorance of the enemy, the Bush administration faces ignorance of the nature of its policies against al-Qaeda, its goals, strengths and weaknesses.

“Without knowing our enemy, we cannot fulfill the most basic requirements of an effective counter-terrorist strategy: pre-empting and preventing terrorist operations and deterring their attacks,” he concluded.

MD/HGH/DT

An Iranian commander has revealed that France had plans to equip Saddam Hussein with nuclear weapons during the Iraq-imposed war on Iran.

According to General Mir-Feisal Baqerzadeh, the now retired French general and former intelligence official, Philippe Rondot, had made the offer to the Iraqi Baathist regime during a visit to the country as an advisor to the French prime minister .

Baqerzadeh made the remark citing a document registered at the defense ministry of the former Iraqi Baathist regime dated April 20, 1987.

The document was prepared by the Iraqi General Adnan Khairallah reporting to Saddam about his meeting with the visiting Rondot, said the Iranian general.

During the meeting, Rondot expressed his delight with the measures taken by Saddam’s regime against the Iranian forces.

In the meeting, Rondot also informed Khairallah about the meeting held earlier at the French military headquarters on ways to tackle potential moves by the Iranian forces and suggested the idea of using high-flexibility boats against them.

For his part, Khairallah briefed Rodot on the vast amount of satellite-based information on the Iranian military formations made available to the Iraqi side by the US.

Based on the document, the former French general emphasized the advisability of occupying Iranian cities, with particular reference to the southwestern city of Abadan.

Baqerzadeh says that Rondot also spoke of his ‘effective’ role in persuading the French authorities to provide Iraq with Mirage aircraft and Ronald missiles.

According to the document, the French had been looking at the possibility of giving Iraq ‘a very small type’ of nuclear weapon. It is underlined in the document that the matter must be kept confidential.

Rondot is reported in the document as having told Khairallah that possessing such a weapon, despite its being small, would be necessary and effective in helping Iraq impose its conditions on Iran.

MJ/GM/BGH

Chris Floyd  

Penny Coleman at Alternet.com gives us a look at a new program designed to dull the moral sensibilities of American soldiers in combat on the imperial frontiers: Pentagon, Big Pharma: Drug Troops to Numb Them to Horrors of War.But as we’ll see below, this attempt to peddle magic pills to chase away the horrors of war is just one front in a long-term, wide-ranging “warfighter enhancement program” — including the neurological and genetic re-engineering of soldiers’ minds and bodies to create what the Pentagon calls “iron bodied and iron willed personnel”: tireless, relentless, remorseless, unstoppable.

I.
Coleman takes specific aim at the “Psychological Kevlar Act,” aimed at reducing the alarming spread of soldier suicides and post-traumatic stress disorder spawned by the illegal invasion of Iraq. The program relies heavily on dosing soldiers with Propranalol, which, “if taken immediately following a traumatic event, can subdue a victim’s stress response and so soften his or her perception of the memory,” as Coleman notes. “That does not mean the memory has been erased, but proponents claim that the drug can render it emotionally toothless.” She continues:

But is it moral to weaken memories of horrendous acts a person has committed? Some would say that there is no difference between offering injured soldiers penicillin to prevent an infection and giving a drug that prevents them from suffering from a posttraumatic stress injury for the rest of their lives. Others, like Leon Kass, former chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, object to propranolol’s use on the grounds that it medicates away one’s conscience…Barry Romo, a national coordinator for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, is even more blunt. “That’s the devil pill,” he says. “That’s the monster pill, the anti-morality pill. That’s the pill that can make men and women do anything and think they can get away with it. Even if it doesn’t work, what’s scary is that a young soldier could believe it will.”

It is “a kind of moral lobotomy,” says Coleman, whose husband killed himself after coming home from the Vietnam War. She puts the bill — which is being sponsored by Robert Kennedy Jr., among others — in the historical context of military training:

Since World War II, our military has sought and found any number of ways to override the values and belief systems recruits have absorbed from their families, schools, communities and religions. Using the principles of operant conditioning, the military has found ways to reprogram their human software, overriding those characteristics that are inconvenient in a military context, most particularly the inherent resistance human beings have to killing others of their own species. “Modern combat training conditions soldiers to act reflexively to stimuli,” says Lt. Col. Peter Kilner, a professor of philosophy and ethics at West Point, “and this maximizes soldiers’ lethality, but it does so by bypassing their moral autonomy. Soldiers are conditioned to act without considering the moral repercussions of their actions; they are enabled to kill without making the conscious decision to do so. If they are unable to justify to themselves the fact that they killed another human being, they will likely — and understandably — suffer enormous guilt. This guilt manifests itself as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and it has damaged the lives of thousands of men who performed their duty in combat.”

II.
Killing the soul is the ultimate aim of those who seek to create tools for empire, instead of recruiting citizens to defend the Republic from attack. I wrote about this in 2004 (Manufacturing Intent:The Army’s Cult of Killing Leaves a Generation Gap):

Yet despite the vast tonnage of celluloid and printer’s ink devoted to [the] praise [of the “greatest generation” soldiers of WWII), what is perhaps the truest, highest measure of their worth has been almost universally neglected. And what is this hidden glory, which does more honor to the people of the United States than every single military action ordered by their corruption-riddled leaders during the past fifty years? It’s the fact that in the midst of history’s most vicious, all-devouring, inhuman war, only about 15 percent of American soldiers on the battlefield actually tried to kill anyone.

In-depth studies by the U.S. Army after WWII showed that between 80 to 85 percent of the greatest generation never fired their weapons at an exposed enemy in combat, as military psychologist Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman reports. Many times they had the chance, but could not bring themselves to do it. They either withheld their fire altogether or else shot into the air, to the side, anywhere but at the fellow human beings – their blood kin in biology, mind and mortality – facing them across the line…These were not “warriors,” bloodthirsty automatons with stripped-down brains and cauterized souls, slavering in Pavlovian fury at the bell-clap of command. No, they were real men, willing, as Grossman notes, to stand up for a cause, even die for it, but not willing, in the end, to transgress the natural law (implanted by God or evolution, take your pick) that says: Do not kill your own kind – and every person of every race and nation is your own kind.

…But far from celebrating this example of genuine glory, the military brass were horrified at the low “firing rates” and anemic “kill ratios” of American soldiery. They immediately set about trying to break the next generation of recruits of their natural resistance to slaughtering their own kind. Incorporating the latest techniques for psychological manipulation, new training programs were designed to brutalize the mind and habituate soldiers to the idea of killing automatically, by reflex, “at the bell-clap of command,” without the intervention of any of those inefficient scruples displayed by their illustrious predecessors.

And it worked. The dehumanization process led to a steady rise in firing rates for U.S. soldiers during subsequent conflicts. In the Korean War, 55 percent were ready to pump hot lead into enemy flesh. And by the time the greatest generation’s own children took the field, in Vietnam, the willingness to slaughter was almost total: 95 percent of combat troops there fired with the intent to kill.

And today in occupied Iraq, the brutalizing beat goes on. “Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, it’s like it pounds in my brain,” a U.S. soldier told the Los Angeles Times last week. Another shrugged at the sight of freshly slaughtered bodies. “It doesn’t bother me at all,” he said. “I’m a warrior. My soldiers, they are all warriors. They have no problems. There’s no place in this Army for men who aren’t warriors.” Said a third: “We talk about killing all the time. I never used to be this way…but it’s like I can’t stop. I’m worried what I’ll be like when I get home.”

…Yet strangely enough, this new model army, imbued with eager “warrior spirit,” has not produced the kind of lasting victories won by the reluctant fifteen-percenters of yore. It was stalemated in Korea, defeated in Vietnam, chased out of Lebanon and Somalia, balked in Afghanistan…and is now [bogged down] in bloody quagmire [in Iraq].

Could it be that the systematic degradation of natural morality and common human feeling – especially in the service of dubious ends – is not actually the best way to achieve national greatness?

II.
But the endless efforts to raise “kill rates” are just part of the picture. As I noted in the Moscow Times back in 2003, “warfighter enhancement” is being taken to whole new levels of technological advancement – and moral depravity. I’m doing further research on the current state of the “enhancement” programs, but they are still going full-bore since the time the excerpts below were written:

Pentagon dark lord Donald Rumsfeld is shoveling billions of tax dollars into the research furnaces of federal laboratories and private universities across the land in the wide-ranging effort to spawn “super soldiers,” fired by drugs and electromagnetic “brain zaps” to fight without ceasing for days on end. The work is being directed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The DARPA “war fighter enhancement” programs — an acceleration of bipartisan biotinkering that’s been going on for years — will involve injecting young men and women with hormonal, neurological and genetic concoctions; implanting microchips and electrodes in their bodies to control their internal organs and brain functions; and plying them with drugs that deaden some of their normal human tendencies: the need for sleep, the fear of death, the reluctance to kill their fellow human beings.

The research is “very aggressive and wide open,” says Admiral Stephen Baker of the Center for Defense Information. Indeed, the U.S. Special Operations Command envisions the creation of “iron bodied and iron willed personnel” who can “resist the mental and physiological effects of sleep deprivation” while relying on “ergogenic substances” to “manage” the “environmental and mentally induced stress” of the battlefield. Their bodies juiced, their brains swaddled in Prozacian haze, the enhanced warfighters can churn relentlessly, remorselessly toward dominion.

And the term “creation” is not just fanciful rhetoric: some of the research now underway involves actually altering the genetic code of soldiers, modifying bits of DNA to fashion a new type of human specimen, one that functions like a machine, killing tirelessly for days and nights on end. These mutations will “revolutionize the contemporary order of battle” and guarantee “operational dominance across the whole range of potential U.S. military employments,” the DARPA wizards enthuse.

Of course, the Pentagon is not waiting on sci-fi technology to enhance the physical abilities of its warfighters; old-fashioned off-the-shelf “additives” have long been shoved down soldiers’ throats. For example, the use of amphetamines for pilots has been widespread for decades; during the first Bush-Saddam War, whole squadrons were cranked up on the stuff. Not only is the gobbling of speed officially sanctioned, it’s actively encouraged, even implicitly mandated–careers can be derailed for pilots who refuse to drug themselves.

The results of this dope-peddling were clearly seen on the new imperial frontier of Afghanistan last spring, when two U.S. pilots — hopped up on speed — killed four Canadian allies in a “friendly fire” bombing raid. The pilots, now facing legal charges, say Air Force brass pressured them into taking the mind-altering drug before the fatal flight.

But such glitches are inevitable in any grand scientific undertaking, and DARPA remains undeterred in its bold quest to “push the limits of human input/output,” advance the “symbiotic relationship between man and machine,” and customize “pharmaceutical technology” to “embolden the warfighter and his superiors,” as military scientists declared at a Pentagon-sponsored conference on “future warfare.”

What happens to the burnt-out husks of these “iron” soldiers after their minds and bodies have been eaten way by relentless modification and ceaseless toil is, of course, of no concern to the Bush Regime. Even now, the White House is cutting back on health benefits to military veterans — even going so far as to order veterans hospitals not to advertise their available services, lest broken soldiers actually seek to claim the promise of support their government once gave them. For men like Bush — protected scions of privilege who sit out wars in safety, in booze-addled luxury — such promises are just cynical sucker ploys, aimed at coaxing decent soldiers into acting as the hitmen of empire, then discarding them when they’re no longer needed.

How very strange it is: those who want to turn American soldiers into mindless, drug-addled mutants and send them off to kill and die in far-flung wars of imperial conquest are seen as patriots, noble leaders, doing the will of God; while those who would rather see these good men and women called home, treated with honor and respect–their talents and dedication applied solely to the defense of their own great country, not pressed into the service of a greedy, rapacious elite–are denounced as “traitors,” “anti-American agitators,” “allies of terrorism.”

But such is the inversion of values — the wisdom gone astray and turned to fell practice - -that now rules in Bush’s Washington, and in the Pentagon’s fiery crucibles of war.

As Bush and Sarkozy lose patience with Assad, Syrian MP threatens Dimona

A Syrian member of parliament thought to be familiar with the thinking of President Bashar al-Assad is quoted in the London-based pan-Arab daily newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi on Saturday as saying that Syria could strike Israel’s nuclear reactor in Dimona as retaliation for any future forays into Syrian airspace and violation of Syrian “sovereignty”, Haaretz reports.

MP Mohammad Habash noted that Dimona is well within range of Syrian missiles, and that Damascus does not rule out the possibility of additional Israeli attacks against Syria. Though Habash said that Syria has no interest in escalating tensions between the two countries, he also said that no such contacts are currently being held between them.

An attempt to exchange messages between Israel and Syria in recent months has failed, Haaretz reports, citing European diplomatic sources as saying that the reason for the impasse was an inability to reach an agenda for talks and that “the bottom line was a negative one.” But in off-the-record conversations, several sources close to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert are quoted as saying that “the Syrian track still has higher chances of success when compared to the Palestinian track” and needed to be given a chance.

“It is a lot simpler and it is possible to achieve an agreement in a short time,” one of Olmert’s confidants said. “The only problem is that the Syrians are not sending positive signals.”

“The Syrians wanted the talks to revolve only on the Golan [Heights],” the European diplomats are quoted as saying. “But Israel wanted to first talk about other issues that trouble it, such as [Syrian] ties with Iran and the support for Hezbollah and Hamas, and Syria did not agree.”

The U.S., however, appears strongly opposed to any gestures or concessions toward Damascus. President George W. Bush told a White House press conference last week that he was fed up with Syrian President Bashar Assad. “Syria needs to stay out of Lebanon,” Bush said when asked whether he would be willing to talk to Assad about stabilizing Lebanon, which is caught up in a political crisis over the election of a new president. “My patience ran out on President Assad a long time ago,” he said. “The reason why is because he houses Hamas, he facilitates Hezbollah, suiciders go from his country into Iraq and he destabilizes Lebanon,” the president said.

During last week’s foreign ministers’ meeting in Paris to donate to the Palestinian Authority, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice attacked Syria for what she said was a missed opportunity at Annapolis. “Annapolis was a chance we gave Syria and its test were the [presidential] elections in Lebanon. So far, the Syrians have failed completely.” European diplomatic sources also said that “Syria is undermining any chance for an accord [in Lebanon] and is pushing Hezbollah and the rest of its allies in Lebanon to raise the bar on their demands.”

The same sources said that Assad is interested in giving the impression, whatever the cost may be, “that without him nothing will move in Lebanon,” and therefore the assessment is that the crisis there will continue.

In an interview published on Wednesday, 19 December 2007, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said he told Assad that “Lebanon has a right to have an autonomous president who will have a national unity government,” adding bluntly: “You (Assad) must use all the means and abilities at your disposal to influence the attainment of this goal!’” He accused Damascus of using its influence over Lebanese opposition groups to perpetuate the crisis in Beirut.

http://web.israelinsider.com/Articles/Diplomacy/12498.htm

A former senior CIA analyst says the United States and Israel are planning war against Iran before the next presidential election.

Ray McGovern said Monday despite a recent National Intelligence Estimate conceding that Iran is not conducting a nuclear weapons program, a joint US and Israeli war on the Islamic Republic is likely to happen.

The former analyst expounded that the close American relationship with Israel, which alleges Iran is a threat to its existence and to the international community, is the driving force behind a potential strike.

McGovern called on those wishing to prevent a military conflict with Iran to voice their opposition to President Bush’s headstrong approach towards Tehran and its nuclear program.

Although the report by US intelligence services has meant another embarrassment for the White House over its accusation against Tehran, the US president seems to be indifferent to the assessment.

President Bush, who is scheduled to visit Jerusalem in January, bald-facedly continues his rhetoric against the Islamic Republic, claiming Tehran poses a threat to the international community.

MD/MG

1. Attacks may be made solely against military targets. Parties to a conflict must distinguish between civilians and combatants, and civilians may not be attacked.

2. Persons who do not or can no longer take part in the hostilities are entitled to respect for their life and for their physical and mental integrity.

3. It is forbidden to kill or wound an adversary who has surrendered or who can no longer take part in the fighting.

4. The wounded and sick must be cared for by the party that holds them. Medical personnel and facilities, identified by the Red Cross or Red Crescent symbol, must not be attacked.

5. Prisoners are entitled to respect for their life, their dignity, their personal rights, and their beliefs.

6. Torture, cruel or degrading corporal and other punishment is forbidden.

7. Weapons and methods of warfare likely to cause unnecessary losses or excessive suffering, or severe or long-term damage to the environment, may not be used.

BRASSCHECK

By Sharon Weinberger

Military funded researchers are preparing to test a nonlethal weapon that combines light and sound. Nicholas C. Nicholas, chief scientist of Penn State’s Applied Research Laboratory, told an audience yesterday at a nonlethal weapons conference that in the first half of next year, the lab plans to test DSLAD, the Distributed Sound and Light Array Debilitator. It’ll use essentially off the shelf technology to see if combining aversive noises with light produce some special debiliating effects. Anecdotal effects include dizziness and loss of balance, and of course, nausea. In other words, DSLAD could be another potential “puke ray.”

As I wrote yesterday, the Applied Research Lab, which receives funding from the Pentagon’s Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate, is also hoping to test the behavioral effects of sound at higher decibels, which could lead to a sonic blaster.

Last year, there was a lot of excitement about the Sheriff, a system that would combine a number of nonlethal technologies, such as a dazzling laser, sound beam and the pain ray. But what makes this new work significant is that there isn’t a lot of hard data on sound weapons, let alone weapons that combine sound and light.

The GOP is negotiating in bad faith, Obey says.

By Jonathan Weisman

    A Democratic deal to give President Bush some war funding in exchange for additional domestic spending appeared to collapse last night after House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey (D-Wis.) accused Republicans of bargaining in bad faith.

    Instead, Obey said he will push a huge spending bill that would hew to the president’s spending limit by stripping it of all lawmakers’ pet projects, as well as most of the Bush administration’s top priorities. It would also contain no money for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    ”Absent a Republican willingness to sit down and work out a reasonable compromise, I think we ought to end the game and go to the president’s numbers,” Obey said. “I was willing to listen to the argument that we ought to at least add more for Afghanistan, but when the White House refuses to compromise, when the White House continues to stick it in our eye, I say to hell with it.”

    House Democratic leaders were scheduled to complete work last night on a $520 billion spending bill that included $11 billion in funding for domestic programs above the president’s request, half of what Democrats had initially approved. The bill would have also contained $30 billion for the war in Afghanistan, upon which the Senate would have added billions more for Iraq before final congressional approval.

    But a stern veto threat this weekend from White House budget director Jim Nussle put the deal in jeopardy, and Obey said he is prepared for a long standoff with the White House.

    ”If anybody thinks we can get out of here this week, they’re smoking something illegal,” he said.

    Obey’s proposal would ax about 9,500 home-district and home-state projects worth a total of $9.5 billion, according to Keith Ashdown, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a budget watchdog group. Republicans inserted about 40 percent of those projects. Not all of that money could be eliminated, however. The budget of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is parceled out as home-district projects, and Congress has no intention of eliminating the Army Corps.

    Obey would not specify where the remaining billions would come from to reach Bush’s bottom line, beyond saying the money would be shaved from the president’s priorities. One possibility would be funding for abstinence education. Other targets could be nuclear weapons research and development in the Energy Department, NASA programs and high-technology border security efforts that have come under criticism for being wasteful and ineffective, said Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense.
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    Obey’s proposal did not move the White House to negotiate, spokesman Tony Fratto said. “Different day, different Democrat, different direction. Our position hasn’t changed,” Fratto said.

    House Republican leaders would be happy to take Obey’s offer on spending, GOP aides said yesterday. But rank-and-file lawmakers from both parties could revolt. Home-district projects - known as earmarks - were stripped from the fiscal 2007 spending bills early this year, after Democrats took control of Congress and hastily disposed of budget bills their Republican predecessors had not passed. Earmarks were also eliminated from the 2006 appropriations bill that funded labor, health and education programs, the biggest domestic spending bill of the year.

    ”There are a lot of people who were very disappointed last year when nobody got any earmarks. If they do it again for the second year in a row, it will be a very bitter pill to swallow,” said Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.), an appropriator who complained that he could lose $400,000 he needs for the Abraham Lincoln bicentennial celebration, slated to begin Feb. 12.

    LaHood is not the only Republican appropriator who is angry at the White House and at GOP leaders who have refused to negotiate with Democrats on domestic spending levels. In recent days, Rep. David L. Hobson (Ohio), ranking Republican on the Appropriations subcommittee in charge of energy and water projects, had a heated discussion with House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), arguing that Boehner should come off his hard line.

    Rep. James T. Walsh (N.Y.), another senior Republican appropriator, took to the House floor to argue: “If the proposal is to split the difference, to reduce the amount of spending above the president’s request by $11 billion, I would advise the president to take yes for an answer.”

    But most Republicans are expected to fall in line, as the GOP leadership pushes to regain the mantle of small-government conservatism. Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), another member of the Appropriations Committee, said Republican lawmakers will face no political jeopardy for not bringing money home for their districts, because they can simply blame Democrats.

    ”The smartest thing for [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi to do is to realize the White House always wins these spending contests,” he said, advising her to “cut your losses, get out of town and say Bush is still relevant” to the legislative process.

    That still leaves the war-funding issue unresolved. Democratic leadership aides on Capitol Hill concede that at some point, Republicans can add some money for Iraq as a stripped-down spending bill winds through Congress. But plans for a quick end to the showdown appear to be fading.

    ”It is extraordinary that the president would request an 11 percent increase for the Department of Defense, a 12 percent increase for foreign aid, and $195 billion of emergency funding for the war while asserting that a 4.7 percent increase for domestic programs is fiscally irresponsible,” Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) said.

SP: why did the Netherlands vote against an international enquiry into depleted uranium?

The Netherlands delegation to the United Nations General Assembly has been instructed by parliament to change its position and give its support to demands for an international enquiry into the effects of depleted uranium. A motion presented by SP defence and disarmament spokeswoman Krista van Velzen in favour of such an enquiry won the backing of her parliamentary colleagues earlier this week, yet when the matter came before the UN the Dutch delegation voted – for the second time in a month - against. Declaring that she is not prepared to put up with such a blatant negation of a democratic decision, Van Velzen is demanding an explanation from the cabinet. At the same time, the SP will be joined by Labour colleagues in organising a hearing on the effects of depleted uranium on health.

The Netherlands delegation last month voted against a resolution in favour of an enquiry, on the grounds that a single word suggested a causal connection between depleted uranium and negative health effects. “There’s a great deal of uncertainty about the effects of the military use of depleted uranium,” Van Velzen said. “In Italy a parliamentary enquiry is currently being conducted and compensation has been paid out to soldiers who probably became ill as a result of contact with recycled nuclear waste. Families of such people have also received compensation payments. This is not a time to be burying our heads in the sand. We need to know precisely what we are dealing with and take appropriate measures.”

The SP motion adopted this week by parliament called on the government to change its position in a UN vote scheduled for the following day and support an enquiry, if necessary having the single offending word removed. Together with the PvdA (Labour Party) the SP has also taken the initiative to organise a hearing to look into the health effects of depleted uranium.

Despite parliament’s demand for change, the Netherlands delegation last night nevertheless once again voted against a resolution calling on the UN to establish an enquiry into the matter. “Unlike the Italians, who are paying compensation, the Dutch government is refusing to face the facts,” said Van Velzen. “They’re obviously better informed down there, which is why we need a parliamentary hearing, so that we can gather as much information as possible on the adverse health effects of depleted uranium.”

Spokesperson Chris Isleib did not respond to a request for comment on a passage from the Defense Department’s annual report sent to Congress last April that suggests the Pentagon is gearing up to resume the tests.

Resumption of open-air testing would reverse a long-standing moratorium adopted after a public outcry against them following accidents in the Sixties.

The Pentagon’s annual report apparently calls for both the developmental and operational “field testing of (CBW) full systems,” not just simulations.

The Pentagon’s report to Congress contains the following passage: “More than thirty years have passed since outdoor live-agent chemical tests were banned in the United States, and the last outdoor test with live chemical agent was performed, so much of the infrastructure for the field testing of chemical detectors no longer exists or is seriously outdated. The currently budgeted improvements in the T&E infrastructure will greatly enhance both the developmental and operational field testing of full systems, with better simulated representation of threats and characterization of system response.” “T&E” is an acronym for testing and evaluation.

“Either the military has resumed open-air testing already or they are preparing to do so,” said Francis Boyle, a University of Illinois Professor of International Law who authored the implementing legislation for the U.S. Biological Weapons Convention signed into law by President George Bush Sr. and who has tracked subsequent developments closely.

“I am stunned by the nature of this development,” Boyle said. “This is a major reversal of policy.” The 1972 treaty against germ warfare, which the U.S. signed, forbids developing weapons that spread disease, such as anthrax, a pathogen that is regarded by the military as “ideal” for conducting germ warfare.

“The Pentagon is fully prepared to launch biological warfare by means of anthrax,” Boyle charged. “All the equipment has been acquired and all the training conducted and most combat-ready members of U.S. armed forces have been given protective equipment and vaccines that allegedly would protect them from that agent.”

Open-air testing takes research into deadly agents out of the laboratories in order to study their effectiveness, including their aerial dispersion patterns, and whether they actually infect and kill in field trials. Since the anthrax attacks on Congress in October, 2001, the Bush administration has funded a vast biological research expansion at hundreds of private and university laboratories in the U.S. and abroad involving anthrax and other deadly pathogens.

The anthrax attacks killed five people, including two postal workers, injured 17 others and temporarily shut down the operations of the U.S. Congress, Supreme Court, and other Federal entities.

Although a Federal statute permits the president to authorize open-air testing of CBW agents, Boyle said this “does not solve the compliance problem that it might violate the international Chemical Weapons Convention and the Biological Weapons Convention as well as their related domestic implementing legislation making such violations crimes.”

Boyle charged the U.S. is already “in breach” of both conventions and also of U.S. domestic criminal law implementing them. In February, 2003, for example, the U.S. granted itself a patent on an illegal, long-range biological-weapons grenade, evidently for offensive purposes.

Boyle said the development of anthrax for possible offensive purposes is underscored by the government’s efforts “to try to stockpile anthrax vaccines and antibiotics for 25-million plus Americans to protect the civilian population in the event there is any ‘blowback’ from the use of anthrax in biowarfare abroad by the Pentagon.”

“In theory,” Boyle added, “you cannot wage biowarfare abroad unless you can protect your civilian population from either retaliation in kind, or blowback, or both.” Under Project BioShield, Homeland Security is spending $5.6 billion to stockpile vaccines and drugs to fight anthrax, smallpox, and other bioterror agents. The project had been marked by delays and operational problems and on December 12th last year Congress passed legislation to pump another $1 billion into BioShield to fund three years of additional research by the private sector.

Boyle said evidence the U.S. has super-weapons-grade anthrax was demonstrated in the October, 2001, anthrax mail attacks on Senators Thomas Daschle(D-S.D.) and Patrick Leahy(D-Vt.) The strain of highly sophisticated anthrax employed has allegedly been traced back to the primary U.S. Army biological warfare campus at Ft. Detrick, Md. The attacks killed five persons and sickened 17 others. A current effort to expand Ft. Detrick has sparked widespread community opposition, according to a report in the Baltimore Sun.

“Obviously, someone working for the United States government has a stockpile of super-weapons grade anthrax that can be used again domestically for the purposes of political terrorism or abroad to wage offensive warfare,” Boyle said.

The Associated Press has reported the U.S. Army is replacing its Military Institute of Infectious Diseases at Ft. Detrick “with a new laboratory that would be a component of a biodefense campus operated by several agencies.” The Army told AP the laboratory is intended to continue research solely for defense against biological threats.

Undercutting the argument U.S. research is for “defensive” purposes is the fact government scientists have been creating new strains of pathogens for which there is no known cure. Richard Novick, a professor of microbiology at New York University, has stated, “I cannot envision any imaginable justification for changing the antigenicity of anthrax as a defensive measure.” Changing a pathogen’s antigenicity means altering its basic structure so that existing vaccines will prove ineffective against it.

Biological warfare involves the use of living organisms for military purposes. Such weapons can be viral, bacterial, and fungal, among other forms, and can be spread over a large geographic terrain by wind, water, insect, animal, or human transmission, according to Jeremy Rifkin, author of “The Biotech Century”(Penguin).

Boyle said the Federal government has been plowing money into upgrading Ft. Detrick, Md., and other CBW facilities where such pathogens are studied, developed, tested, and stored. By some estimates, the U.S. since 2002 has invested some $43 billion in hundreds of government, commercial, and university laboratories in the U.S. for the study of pathogens that might be used for biological warfare.

According to Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright, more than 300 scientific institutions and 12,000 individuals have access to pathogens suitable for biowarfare and terrorism. Ebright found that the Number of National Institute of Health grants to research infectious diseases with biowarfare potential shot up from 33 in the 1995-2000 period to 497 by 2006.Ebright has stated the government’s tenfold expansion of Biosafety Level-4 laboratories, such as those at Fort Detrick, raises the risk of accidents and the diversion of dangerous organisms. “If a worker in one of these facilities removes a single viral particle or a single cell, which cannot be detected or prevented, that single particle or cell can form the basis of an outbreak.”

During the Cold War era, notably in the Fifties and Sixties, various Government agencies engaged in open-air CBW testing on U.S. soil and on naval vessels at sea to study the effects of weaponized pathogens. U.S. cities, including New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, were among the targets and sickness and even a number of deaths were reported as a result.

According to an article titled “Lethal Breeze” by Lee Davidson in the Deseret News of Salt Lake City of June 5, 1994, “In decades of secret chemical arms tests, the Army released into Utah winds more than a half million pounds of deadly nerve agents.” Among them, he said, was VX, a pinhead-sized drop of which can be lethal. The tests were conducted at Dugway Proving Ground but Davidson said the evidence suggests “some (agents) may have escaped with the wind.”

Pentagon documents obtained by the News listed 1,635 field trials or demonstrations with nerve agents VX, GA and GB between 1951 and 1969, “when the Army discontinued use of actual nerve agents in open-air tests after escaped nerve gas apparently killed 6,000 sheep in Skull Valley,” Davidson wrote. The Skull Valley strike also sickened a rancher and members of his family.

Boyle has previously charged the Pentagon with “gearing up to fight and ‘win’ biological warfare” pursuant to two Bush national strategy directives adopted in 2002 “without public knowledge and review.” He contends the Pentagon’s Chemical and Biological Defense program was revised in 2003 to implement those directives, endorsing “first-use” strike of chemical and biological weapons in war.

The implementing legislation Boyle wrote that was enacted unanimously by Congress was known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989. Boyle has written extensively on the subject. Among his published works are “Biowarfare and Terrorism” and “Destroying World Order: U.S. Imperialism In the Middle East Before and After September 11th,” both from Clarity Press.