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Digest 99, originally sent Tue May 25 02:32:16 1999 :
There are 6 messages in this issue.
Topics in today's digest:
1. NucNews-0 Brief 5/24/99
2. NucNews-3- 5/24/99 - Phillipines Protest US Army Base; Japan Ties N.Korea; Boutros-Ghali / Clinton-Albright Betrayal (2)
3. NucNews-5- 5/24/99 - Torturers' Notebooks; Pentagon info clamp; CIA Cyber-Plan Milosevic; US Senate rejects NATO combat force etc.
4. NucNews-4- 5/24/99 - US- Clinton's Compulsion; China Spying (3)-Reno - Lee - Cox; Hollywood Violence
5. NucNews-1 5/24/99 - General Lee Butler, LA Times
6. NucNews-2- 5/24/99 - Anti-Missile Test; Smallpox Danger
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Message: 1 Date: Mon, 24 May 1999 19:46:41 -0400
Subject: NucNews-0 Brief 5/24/99
[Please address replies to the original publisher (with a copy to prop1@prop1.org and NucNews@onelist.com (Archives)). Your help in refuting false information appreciated!]
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NucNews-1 5/24/99 - General Lee Butler, LA Times NucNews-2- 5/24/99 - Anti-Missile Test; Smallpox Danger NucNews-3- 5/24/99 - Phillipines Protest US Army Base; Japan Ties N.Korea; Boutros-Ghali / Clinton-Albright Bet NucNews-4- 5/24/99 - US- Clinton's Compulsion; China Spying (3)-Reno - Lee - Cox; Hollywood Violence NucNews-5- 5/24/99 - Torturers' Notebooks; Pentagon info clamp; CIA Cyber-Plan Milosevic; US Senate rejects NATO combat force etc.
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Los Angeles Times Interview - Lee Butler - A Cold Warrior Looks to Ban the Bomb After a Career in Brinkmanship By ROBERT SCHEER, Los Angeles Times, May 23, 1999 http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/OPINION/t000046254.html Retired Gen. George L. (Lee) Butler is among the very few whose job description has included the power to destroy the planet. As he recalled during a telephone conversation last week: "I lived for three years, every day of my life, with the requirement to answer a phone within three rings and be prepared to advise the president on how to retaliate with respect to the real or perceived threat of nuclear attack. I found it extremely sobering.... Part of the cross we bear by continuing to maintain this Reaganesque nuclear-weapons policy is that we're hoist on the petard of our own nuclear-weapons rhetoric."
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2. New Anti-Missile System to Be Tested This Week By WILLIAM J. BROAD, May 24, 1999 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/missile-defense.html Chart A Closer Look: 'Hitting a Bullet With a Bullet' http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/missile-defense.1.GIF.html http://graphics.nytimes.com/99/05/24/news/national/missile-defense.1.GIF
3. Smallpox Could Still Be a Danger By KEN ALIBEK and STEPHEN HANDELMAN, May 24, 1999 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/oped/24alib.html ... At one point the White House supported a proposal by the World Health Organization to destroy the remaining global stocks of smallpox virus by June 30, 1999. Last month, however, the Administration reversed that stance, announcing that instead the United States would work with Russian scientists to develop defenses against the disease.
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4. Filipinos Protest Over US Army Base By The Associated Press, May 24, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Philippines-US-Military.html MANILA, Philippines (AP) -- About 200 protesters scuffled with riot police outside the U.S. Embassy in Manila today, demonstrating against a pact that would allow large-scale U.S. military exercises in the country.
5. Japan Hints At Improving Ties With North Korea Updated 4:49 AM ET May 24, 1999, By Teruaki Ueno (Reuters) http://news.excite.com/news/r/990524/04/politics-korea-japan-perry TOKYO - Japan signaled Monday it was ready to improve its strained relations with North Korea, but officials said key obstacles remain for a possible resumption of food aid to the famine-hit Stalinist state.
6. Boutros-Ghali's Book Says Albright and Clinton Betrayed Him May 24, 1999 New York Times, By PAUL LEWIS http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/052499boutros-book.html UNITED NATIONS -- In a new book, former Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali lashes out at what he perceives was a betrayal by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the Clinton administration for denying him a second term.
Related Article:
7. Boutros-Ghali's Query to Albright: 'What Went Wrong?' By BARBARA CROSSETTE, January 1, 1997 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/early/010197un-boutros-ghali.html
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8. Clinton's Compulsion May 24, 1999 New York Times ESSAY By WILLIAM SAFIRE http://www.nytimes.com/library/opinion/safire/052499safi.html We have a President who has a problem: he lies when he doesn't really have to.... Another example of the unnecessary lie was his March 19 response to: "Can you assure the American people that under your watch, no valuable nuclear secrets were lost?" We now know that he had been briefed last November about the F.B.I. and C.I.A. suspicions.... Clinton carefully rephrased the question: "Can I tell you that there has been no espionage at the labs since I have been President? I can tell you that no one has reported to me that they suspect such a thing has occurred." ... In time, the truth will out, but deeper questions will remain: Why the Clinton compulsion to pretend he never makes a mistake? Why the sneaky word games when the truth is sure to come out? What mental process accounts for his strange habit of unnecessary denial? Join a Discussion on William Safire's Columns http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?13@@.ee7d2b4
[Should Clinton be institutionalized as criminally insane?]
9. GOP Targets Reno for China Spying By Jim Abrams Associated Press Writer Sunday, May 23, 1999; 4:48 p.m. EDT http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990523/V000233-052399-idx.html WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Clinton administration ally, Democratic Sen. Robert Torricelli, said Sunday that Attorney Janet Reno's job should be on the line over the Justice Department's failure to actively pursue suspected Chinese spying in U.S. nuclear energy labs....
10. Physicist's Mishandling of Computer Data May Not Be Crime By Vernon Loeb and Walter Pincus, Washington Post, May 24, 1999 http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-05/24/080l-052499-idx.html ... the lawyers specializing in national security cases say they do not believe the statute could be used against Lee, because he apparently did not remove the programs from government property. They said in two recent cases involving computer transfers of classified information, one involving another Los Alamos scientist and the other, former CIA director John M. Deutch, the Justice Department declined prosecution....
11. Shepherding a China Report Past the Partisan Routines By FRANCIS X. CLINES, May 24, 1999 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/washpol/cox-profile.html
12. Hollywood Under Fire for Violence May 24, 1999, By The Associated Press http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/a/AP-Hollywood-Violence.html
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13. The Torturers' Notebooks By ADAM HOCHSCHILD, May 24, 1999 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/oped/24hoch.html The disclosure this week that a Guatemalan army officer kept detailed records of the murders of political prisoners helps expose one of the most brutal military regimes in recent memory. And it raises an interesting question. What makes such functionaries keep notes about the killings, torture and "disappearances" they perpetrate? ...
14. Pentagon's Doses of Data May Obscure Air War Effect Abundant Details Reveal Little, Some Analysts Say By Bradley Graham, Washington Post, May 24, 1999; Page A20 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-05/24/106l-052499-idx.html Worried that too much information was leaking out of the Pentagon, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, decided before the first bombs dropped to clamp down on news about NATO's air campaign against Yugoslavia....
15. Clinton Backs Cyber-Plan Against Milosevic -Report Updated 2:04 AM ET May 24, 1999 (Reuters) http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/r/990524/02/news-yugoslavia-usa-cyberwar WASHINGTON - President Clinton has approved a top-secret plan to destabilize Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, using computer hackers to attack his foreign bank accounts and a sabotage campaign to erode his public support, Newsweek magazine reported Sunday....
16. Lott Says Senate Would Reject NATO Combat Force Updated 2:05 AM ET May 24, 1999 (Reuters) http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/r/990524/02/news-yugoslavia-usa WASHINGTON - The U.S. Senate would reject use of American ground troops to fight Serb forces if proposed now, but would consider backing plans for a non-combat deployment to help Kosovo refugees return home, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott said Sunday....
Noted: Sir Robert James, 66, British Historian, member of Parliament, Obituary: ... Sir Robert once commented, "The task of the historian or the biographer is the pursuit of truth, motivated by a love of learning for its own sake." By ERIC PACE, May 24, 1999 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/obit-james.html _____________________________
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Message: 2 Date: Mon, 24 May 1999 19:46:08 -0400
Subject: NucNews-3- 5/24/99 - Phillipines Protest US Army Base; Japan Ties N.Korea; Boutros-Ghali / Clinton-Albright Betrayal (2)
4. Filipinos Protest Over US Army Base
By The Associated Press, May 24, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Philippines-US-Military.html
MANILA, Philippines (AP) -- About 200 protesters scuffled with riot police outside the U.S. Embassy in Manila today, demonstrating against a pact that would allow large-scale U.S. military exercises in the country.
The activists, belonging to the National Democratic Movement, ran past riot police and destroyed a plastic cover protecting the U.S. government seal at the embassy's entrance. Police pushed them back with shields and truncheons, injuring at least one protester.
Philippine police have been placed on alert nationwide ahead of a vote next week by the Philippine Senate to decide whether to approve the Visiting Forces Agreement. The draft agreement was signed last year by Philippine and U.S. officials to regulate U.S. war exercises and ship visits.
Protests against the VFA by leftist groups have been held almost daily in recent weeks at the Philippine Senate and the U.S. Embassy. Clashes have occurred between protesters and police, but with no serious injuries.
Police spokesman Nicanor Bartolome said police are under orders to be tolerant of protesters.
The activists today burned a tire and U.S. flags, and blew up effigies of three pro-agreement Philippine senators using firecrackers.
Riot police also used truncheons to force back a group of protesters at the seaside Senate building.
Senate majority floor leader Franklin Drilon said a preliminary vote on the agreement could be held later today or Tuesday. A final vote is expected next Monday.
The VFA must have the support of at least 16 of the 23 senators for it to pass. Senator Rodolfo Biazon, a former military chief of staff, said at least 18 senators currently favor the pact.
Supporters say the VFA will help protect regional peace and stability and strengthen the Philippines' armed forces, which are among Asia's weakest.
Critics say the pact would limit the Philippine government's right to prosecute American soldiers who commit crimes in the country, promote prostitution, and drag the Philippines into conflicts with the United States' enemies.
Under the accord, the United States would generally have legal jurisdiction over U.S. soldiers who commit crimes while on duty, and the Philippines would have jurisdiction over those who commit crimes while off duty.
The United States halted major exercises in the Philippines and visits by U.S. military ships in December 1996, when Manila ended a legal loophole that shielded U.S. military personnel from prosecution.
Military ties with the United States, which ruled the Philippines for nearly half a century, have remained sensitive since the Philippine Senate forced the closure of the last U.S. base in 1992.
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5. Japan Hints At Improving Ties With North Korea
Updated 4:49 AM ET May 24, 1999, By Teruaki Ueno (Reuters) http://news.excite.com/news/r/990524/04/politics-korea-japan-perry
TOKYO - Japan signaled Monday it was ready to improve its strained relations with North Korea, but officials said key obstacles remain for a possible resumption of food aid to the famine-hit Stalinist state.
Japanese officials sent mixed signals to North Korea as U.S. presidential envoy William Perry held talks with Japanese and South Korean officials in Tokyo on the eve of his "milestone" three-day visit to Pyongyang.
Perry hopes to be able to meet Kim Jong-il, which would make him the first U.S. official to meet the North Korean leader since he took over from his late father in 1994.
Earlier Monday, Japan's top government spokesman Hiromu Nonaka suggested that Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi would ask Perry to convey Tokyo's message to North Korean leaders that Japan was willing to improve its ties with Pyongyang.
Perry was to meet Obuchi later Monday.
One government official acknowledged that Japan has come under pressure to resume food aid to North Korea -- a "symbolic gesture" to show its softened posture toward the reclusive communist state.
"But we must make our position clear and North Korea should clear up our concerns," the official told Reuters on condition that he not be named.
"So I must say there are still obstacles for a move toward improving our relations with the North. Everything is up to North Korea," the official said.
Relations between Tokyo and Pyongyang have hit rock bottom over the past nine months following North Korea's surprise launch last August of a missile and an incident in March involving what Tokyo believes were North Korean spy ships operating in Japanese waters.
Shortly after the test-firing of the North Korean missile, Tokyo broke off talks on restoring ties, stopped food aid to North Korea and threatened to carry out a pre-emptive military strike against any "enemy" planning an attack on Japan.
The official said North Korea should also allay international concerns over its suspected nuclear and missile programs.
Another Japanese official said Tokyo and Pyongyang remain locked in a thorny dispute over allegations that North Korean spies have abducted at least 10 Japanese nationals.
"This abduction issue must also be resolved before we take a major step toward improving bilateral relations," the official said.
North Korea said a year ago that it had conducted a survey that failed to find any trace of 10 Japanese nationals who Tokyo has alleged were abducted by North Korean agents.
North Korea has long denied any abductions took place, and in the past had broken off normalization talks with Japan in objection to the issue being raised.
A source close to the North Korean government said that if Japan were to raise the issue again, North Korean officials would refuse to talk with their Japanese counterparts.
"North Korea has repeatedly denied the allegations. That's the end of the whole story. They (North Koreans) do not want to talk about that again," the source said.
Tokyo, which ruled the Korean peninsula as a colony from 1910 to 1945, established diplomatic relations with capitalist South Korea in 1965 but has yet to create ties with the communist North.
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6. Boutros-Ghali's Book Says Albright and Clinton Betrayed Him
May 24, 1999 New York Times, By PAUL LEWIS http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/052499boutros-book.html
UNITED NATIONS -- In a new book, former Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali lashes out at what he perceives was a betrayal by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the Clinton administration for denying him a second term.
Albright, who was America's U.N. representative at the time, comes in for the harshest treatment, not only for diplomatic double-face but also for what Boutros-Ghali sees as her lack of diplomatic skills.
She campaigned to oust him from his job, he says, "with determination, letting pass no opportunity to demolish my authority and tarnish my image all the while showing a serene face, wearing a friendly smile and repeating expressions of friendship and admiration."
He adds that her efforts to remove him from the post made him recall "what a Hindu scholar once said to me: There is no difference between diplomacy and deception."
The central thesis of Boutros-Ghali's book -- titled "Unvanquished: a U.S.-U.N. Saga" (Random House) -- is that Clinton felt obliged to deny him a second term early in the 1996 presidential election campaign because Sen. Bob Dole, the leading Republican candidate, was accusing the administration of putting the United Nations in charge of the American military by giving the secretary general a veto over air strikes against the Serbs in Bosnia.
"His mocking pronunciation of my name -- Boo-trus, Boo-trus -- sounded like a jeering mob, and his claim that American troops served under my 'command' invariably aroused his audiences," Boutros-Ghali, a former Egyptian foreign minister, wrote.
"Only once in every two decades did a U.N. and the U.S. presidential election fall in the same year," he added. "I knew that the U.N. decision might get caught up in American politics. It did."
But the book also makes clear that Boutros-Ghali believed passionately in the independence of his office and that this led to frequent disagreements with Albright and the Clinton administration over issues ranging from the administration's distaste for the Bosnia peace plan put together by former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Britain's Lord Owen, its refusal to intervene more forcibly to stop the genocide in Rwanda and America's failure to pay its United Nations dues.
Boutros-Ghali is scathing in his assessment of Albright's diplomatic skills.
She seemed to have, he writes, "little interest in the difficult diplomatic work of persuading her foreign counterparts to go along with the positions of her government, preferring to lecture or speak in declarative sentences, or simply to read verbatim from her briefing books."
"She seemed to assume," he continues, "that her mere assertion of a U.S. policy should be sufficient to achieve the support of other nations."
He also found her unusually sensitive to criticism, saying, "She tended to react to discussions of problems between the United Nations and the United States as if they were criticisms specifically directed at her performance."
But Boutros-Ghali admits he underestimated her as an opponent. When Joseph Verner Reed, an American who was an under secretary general, reported hearing her say, "I will make Boutros think I am his friend: then I will break his legs," he dismissed the story as "ridiculous," only to conclude later that he had been naive.
"Fortune is a woman, Machiavelli said, and should be treated roughly," he wrote, "but in this case it was the woman who was rough, and fortune favored her."
Responding to the book, Albright's spokesman, James Rubin, who said he discussed the issues with her, defended her treatment of the former secretary general and added that Albright had acted not only in the best American interest but also in the interest of American political support for the United Nations. "She did what she thought was right, and she thought she did it effectively," he said.
He laid the blame for Boutros-Ghali's ouster with the former secretary general himself. "It was always unfortunate that Boutros-Ghali did not have the skills to successfully manage the most important relationship for any secretary general, which is smooth cooperation with the United States," Rubin said. "It led to his downfall, so it is not surprising that he is bitter."
He added that Boutros Ghali envisioned a "grandiose role" for himself at the United Nations, which the Clinton administration could not support.
He also called it "ironic" to hear that Boutros-Ghali thought Albright was unduly sensitive to criticism, given the tone of his remarks in the book. He said she "always viewed him as intelligent and thoughtful, and wishes him well."
In the book, Boutros-Ghali strongly criticizes the Clinton administration's legacy at the United Nations and its performance in key areas, like Bosnia during its 1992-95 war.
When the United Nations was allowed to do its work without substantial U.S. involvement, as in Mozambique, the operation succeeded, he says. The world body also did well, he says, when the United States needed its help, as in Haiti.
But when the United States "wanted to appear actively involved while in reality avoiding hard decisions, as in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda, the United Nations was abused, or blamed by the United States and the operations failed, tragically and horribly," he concludes.
During their campaign to block his re-election, Boutros-Ghali says that neither Secretary of State Warren Christopher nor Albright would tell him why they were doing so.
Even after Kofi Annan's election in his stead, Boutros-Ghali wrote, Albright was studiously vague on the subject. At their final dinner together in the secretary general's Sutton Place residence, Albright would only say that he symbolized the United Nations, which was unpopular in Congress and was "blamed for trying to control American military power" through the "dual key"' system that gave him veto power over NATO air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs.
Boutros-Ghali vainly protested that she knew perfectly well it was the commanders of the U.N. peacekeeping force on the ground in Bosnia who opposed air strikes, fearing they would turn the Bosnian Serbs against their soldiers.
But he glumly concludes: "It was useless to pursue the subject. She had no intention of telling me the truth behind Washington's decision. I changed the subject again."
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Related Article:
7. Boutros-Ghali's Query to Albright: 'What Went Wrong?'
By BARBARA CROSSETTE, January 1, 1997 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/early/010197un-boutros-ghali.html
UNITED NATIONS -- A couple of weeks ago, after Madeleine Albright had finally ended Boutros Boutros-Ghali's hopes of a second term as secretary general, the defeated and dispirited Egyptian diplomat finally got his chance to ask Albright, by then President Clinton's choice as secretary of state, a few undiplomatic questions.
"What went wrong?" he asked over a private farewell dinner at his official residence. "Why this campaign against me for six months?"
Boutros-Ghali might as well have called the State Department spokesman. "She gave me the official interpretation," he recalled Tuesday, a few hours before he walked out of the United Nations as secretary general for the last time and into a New York drizzle as frosty as his relations with the White House.
Adding a bizarre touch to the evening, Ms. Albright brushed aside Boutros-Ghali's pleas for an explanation and chose the occasion to seek a favor instead.
"She asked me to help her in relations with the Arabs," said Boutros-Ghali, a pivotal figure in negotiating the 1979 Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel. "She made the point that she knew because she was against my re-election the Arab world was not happy."
Ms. Albright is now preparing for Senate hearings over confirming her as secretary of state after four years as the U.S. delegate to the United Nations. As the Middle East is likely to be a major and continuing concern of a new secretary of state, her triumphant campaign to oust Boutros-Ghali may have some unintended consequences in the Senate and, if she is approved as expected, in her new post.
A senior administration official confirmed Boutros-Ghali's account of the conversation, saying that Ms. Albright only wanted to "tap into his knowledge of the players in the Middle East."
"She asked him for an assessment of things," the official said. "She thinks he's quite wise in that area."
Boutros-Ghali said that he had answered her questions about the Middle East "like a good Boy Scout," but that he would not be much help in the immediate future. He leaves for Paris on Wednesday as Kofi Annan of Ghana takes over as his successor.
After relaxing at a European spa, he said, he will take off six months to reflect on his five years at the United Nations, dividing his time between homes in Paris and Cairo. Then he plans to write his memoirs of the Middle East during the years of President Anwar Sadat. The book is to be published by Random House in April.
Clinton administration officials have long insisted that their decision to deny Boutros-Ghali a second term stemmed from policy differences, not personal animosity. But now that the battle is over, it is clear that the 74-year old Egyptian diplomat perceived the campaign as a personal assault on his record, his integrity and his pride.
"There were two questions I asked," he said Tuesday, recalling his last conversation with Ms. Albright. "One was why they made this decision. Then, after they made it, why this general war on me? They could have used the veto without necessarily doing what they have done."
He said that for six months, administration officials ordered U.S. embassies around the world to drum up opposition to his candidacy while warning U.N. officials not to campaign on his behalf. Despite that, 14 of 15 Security Council members voted in November to give him a second term. A U.S. veto, cast by Ms. Albright as the U.S. representative, overrode that vote.
Ms. Albright has said she continues to respect Boutros-Ghali personally.
But Tuesday, the departing secretary general said he felt a noticeable shift in his relations with the Clinton administration about two years ago, after the Republican sweep of Congress. Until then, he said, relations with Ms. Albright and the White House were excellent despite occasional spats.
He remains persuaded that he was sacrificed for domestic political gain. He said Tuesday that when he asked Ms. Albright to explain, he was given the public version of events: that he had asked initially for only one term and that was all that Washington was prepared to accept.
Officials have also said that he was a very reluctant reformer and that his presence was impeding efforts to get Congress to pay the $1.3 billion debt that the United States owes the United Nations.
"I believe that the break came with the beginnings of attacks by Republicans -- Dole's Booootros Booootros-Ghali, the black helicopters and the bad image of the United Nations," Boutros-Ghali said, referring to Bob Dole's mocking use of his name to signify foreign interference and the rumors spread by far-right groups that United Nations forces were about to invade America. "The symbol of the United Nations is the secretary general."
Ms. Albright, he asserted, led the chorus in anticipation of the confirmation battle that might come if Clinton prevailed and nominated her as secretary of state. "She was trying to promote herself," he said. "If you are attacking the United Nations, you are with the others."
In addition to directing the successful campaign to oust Boutros-Ghali, Ms. Albright also engendered criticism among Arabs when she argued against his decision to publish a report critical of Israel for its attack on the Qana refugee camp in southern Lebanon in April, which killed more than 100 refugees. The United Nations report, made public in May, said the attack was not a mistake as Israel insisted.
Trying to block the report, Ms. Albright told the secretary general that publication could damage U.S. peace efforts. He replied that a United Nations installation had been shelled and it was his duty to investigate what had happened.
In an interview in November, Boutros-Ghali said associates had told him that the decision to publish the report, written by European military experts working for the United Nations, would cost him the secretary general's job. U.S. officials deny this, saying a decision to veto his re-election had already been made by then.
What annoyed the Clinton administration more, the senior United States official said Tuesday, was a dispute in December 1995 between Boutros-Ghali and Ms. Albright over what kind of force should police the Croatian region of Eastern Slavonia when the United Nations turned over peacekeeping in Bosnia to NATO.
Boutros-Ghali, stung by charges that the United Nations had been too weak in Bosnia, wanted NATO to take on Eastern Slavonia also. The Clinton administration, trying to limit U.S. troop involvement, pressed -- and won -- the battle to create a United Nations force, though led by an American, Jacques Klein. The operation has been a great success, in large part because of Klein.
In a ruminative "Agenda for Democracy" that Boutros-Ghali has written in the form of a parting letter to the 185-member General Assembly, he said the nations of the world, not only the people, need to be democratic. The reference was to the United States and other countries with the power to ignore the view of the majority of nations.
"Democracy will not succeed if it is limited to within member states," he said. "We need democracy among member states. If global problems are solved by authoritarian means and national problems are solved by democracy, it will not work."
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Message: 3 Date: Mon, 24 May 1999 19:46:29 -0400
Subject: NucNews-5- 5/24/99 - Torturers' Notebooks; Pentagon info clamp; CIA Cyber-Plan Milosevic; US Senate rejects NATO combat force etc.
13. The Torturers' Notebooks
By ADAM HOCHSCHILD, May 24, 1999 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/oped/24hoch.html
The disclosure this week that a Guatemalan army officer kept detailed records of the murders of political prisoners helps expose one of the most brutal military regimes in recent memory. And it raises an interesting question. What makes such functionaries keep notes about the killings, torture and "disappearances" they perpetrate?
The soldier who methodically recorded the fates of 183 Guatemalans, even pasting their photos into his notebook, was not alone. When the secret police in the Soviet Union allowed me to enter one of their archives in 1991, I saw a thick-walled room in an old Moscow mansion with row upon row of floor-to-ceiling shelves of tan cardboard boxes. These held 120,000 case files of citizens shot or sent to the gulag under Stalin -- only part of the total for the Moscow region alone.
Every file contained a verbatim record of interrogations in the case. Prisoners had to sign each page of the transcript, which often ran dozens of pages. Sometimes, over several weeks of questioning, you could see how beatings and sleep deprivation had made a victim's once vigorous signature crabbed and shaky. The last document in most files was a certificate of death by execution.
The Guatemalan officer's notebook also reminded me of notebooks from another vicious counter-guerrilla war, waged a century ago: the conquest of Congo by the private army of King Leopold II of Belgium. A lieutenant named Louis Leclercq wrote in his diary on June 22, 1895, that his soldiers "brought us prisoners in the morning, three others towards evening, and three [severed] heads. A man from Baumaneh running through the forest shouting for his lost wife and child . . . received a bullet from one of our sentries. They brought us his head. . . . We burned the village."
Why do men like this write such things down?
To begin with, in one way they're not so different from the rest of us. Why do any of us keep diaries? We tend to feel that putting on paper the day's activities, whatever they may be, somehow gives them an additional significance, a flicker of immortality. Remember, these death squad members don't think of themselves as recording the fates of their victims, but as recording their own accomplishments.
Then there is bureaucracy. Armies run on paperwork, and it's no surprise that an institution that requires a form to requisition a pencil sharpener also requires one when a prisoner is executed. "Procedure meant a great deal to our rulers," Nadezhda Mandelstam said of Soviet forced confessions, "and the whole farrago of nonsense was always meticulously committed to paper."
In Stalinist Russia, interrogation records were also proof that a secret policeman was doing his job. "Those who could obtain [a confession] were to be considered successful operatives," writes Robert Conquest, the historian, "and a poor . . . operative had a short life expectancy." Even in totalitarian systems where policemen don't get shot for failing to meet quotas, proving the work has been done is still the path to keeping a job or getting promoted.
Finally, everyone wants to be a hero. To us, the Japanese soldier in Nanking, the Gestapo agent in occupied France or the Chilean torturer of General Pinochet's regime may be a brute, but to himself he is a hero -- defending the motherland, ridding the world of subversives. And, of course, this image is rigorously reinforced by his training.
When Himmler made his infamous speech justifying the Holocaust to SS generals at Poznan on Oct. 4, 1943, he said: "Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time -- apart from exceptions caused by human weakness -- to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history."
Men carrying out mass murder have usually thought themselves "decent fellows," cultivated the soldierly virtue of being "hard" and have gloried in overcoming any "weakness."
Here, for instance, is a diary entry from Georges Bricusse, another officer in King Leopold's Congo, on a hanging he ordered of an African accused of theft. He describes how the noose is put around the man's neck, and then writes:
"The rope twists for a few moments, then crack, the man is wriggling on the ground. A shot in the back of the neck and the game is up. It didn't make the least impression on me this time!! And to think that the first time I saw the whip administered, I was pale with fright. Africa has some use after all. I could now walk into fire as if to a wedding."
We do not know if the anonymous Guatemalan soldier carefully keeping his notebook wanted posterity to have a record of his deeds, or if he simply wanted to claim credit from his superiors, or if he imagined that he was steeling himself to walk heroically into enemy fire. But whatever led him to write everything down will help put to rest the lie that there was any excuse for the Guatemalan military's campaign of kidnapping, torture and murder against its own people -- a war waged with large amounts of American aid and arms.
Paradoxically, the welcome growth of war crime tribunals, the plans for a permanent international court for such crimes and the detention of Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Britain will probably make death squad commanders less likely to keep records, and therefore harder to bring to account. But, on balance, better that such men should think of their activities as criminalized than as business as usual. And there is a more important accounting that still can be done: of what regimes set the death squads in motion -- and what countries supported them.
Adam Hochschild is the author, most recently, of ``King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa.''
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14. Pentagon's Doses of Data May Obscure Air War Effect Abundant Details Reveal Little, Some Analysts Say
By Bradley Graham, Washington Post, May 24, 1999; Page A20 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-05/24/106l-052499-idx.html
Worried that too much information was leaking out of the Pentagon, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, decided before the first bombs dropped to clamp down on news about NATO's air campaign against Yugoslavia.
For several weeks after bombing began March 24, senior officials spoke only generally about "degrading" Yugoslav forces, refusing to provide even the most basic facts -- the kind that had been routine in past conflicts -- about the number of attacks or targets that U.S. and other NATO warplanes were hitting.
Since then, the Pentagon has lifted some of the veil. Now, statistics about strike missions flown, targets attacked and damage done pour out daily in briefings here and at NATO headquarters in Brussels. Journalists regularly view gun camera footage from NATO warplanes and receive updates on destruction of Yugoslav tanks, aircraft, ammunition depots, oil storage facilities and other targets.
Defense officials say the change in recent weeks reflects a reduced risk to NATO pilots now that Yugoslav air defenses have been disrupted, giving alliance commanders greater confidence that information will not compromise military operations. It also comes after protests from major news organizations about excessive Pentagon censorship.
Kenneth Bacon, the Pentagon spokesman, acknowledged adopting "an extremely conservative approach" at the outset about information. He attributed the restrictions to concerns that any details gleaned by Serb defenders could endanger NATO pilots. He also said heavy cloud cover over Yugoslavia meant little aerial photography was available to show in the first weeks.
But aside from the particulars of the conflict, Bacon said the tight hold on news was intended by Cohen and Shelton to establish a larger precedent.
"I think they both feel that over time, the Pentagon has become much too lax in providing operational information, and they would like to see a cultural change that would make the building somewhat less forthcoming," Bacon said in an interview.
While sympathetic to the need for secrecy during war, even some senior military officers regarded the extent of the initial stinginess as unwarranted and fraught with risks of its own in a democratic society.
"I was really astounded at how little information was being released," said Air Force Col. Phil Meilinger, an air power expert and professor of strategy at the Naval War College. "Not everything can be cloaked as an operational security matter. I think in our society, that's asking for trouble. If you don't tell people something, then they wonder why and start asking even more questions."
Still troubling for some critics is the contrast between NATO's repeated claims that the airstrikes are having their intended effect and other evidence showing Yugoslav forces accomplishing their goals of smashing the secessionist Kosovo Liberation Army, emptying the rebel Serbian province of many ethnic Albanians and digging in to defend against any invasion by NATO troops.
These divergent views of the battlefield have given an air of unreality to some government accounts of the air war and have complicated predictions about whether allied bombing strategy can succeed.
Drawing an analogy with the Vietnam War, when U.S. counts of enemy war dead gave a false impression that the United States was winning, Stephen Larrabee, a defense analyst at the Rand Corp., said many statistics being cited by NATO authorities now may be irrelevant to the ultimate goal of evicting Yugoslav forces from the province.
"They're using all sorts of indices that aren't particularly meaningful," he said. "If you listen to the briefings, the message has remained very much the same from start -- Serb forces are eroding, we're winning. But the reality on the ground is, they've driven out these refugees, they've achieved most of their objectives, they're hunkering down and there's very little assurance that we're going to be able to get at their forces, which are dispersed."
On the central question of whether NATO's airstrikes can ultimately change President Slobodan Milosevic's mind, battlefield assessments by the Pentagon and NATO have provided scant insight, just repeated assertions that no rational leader would continue to subject his military to such destruction.
"You're getting a pretty good account now of where the strikes are going on in Kosovo," said Anthony Cordesman, a military expert with the Center for International and Strategic Studies. "But the problem I have -- and anyone looking at this has -- is okay, we have this data, so what? Does it tell us when Milosevic is going to give in? Does it tell us when Serbian operations are truly crippled? No."
Pentagon officials, mindful of the Vietnam precedent, insist they are being careful to avoid exaggerating the impact of the air campaign. But military spokesmen also bristle at suggestions the allied airstrikes are making little difference by blasting away at Yugoslav military capabilities.
"There is a misperception at the success of this campaign, in a lot of fronts," Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Wald, the Pentagon's chief military briefer on the war, told reporters last week. "I think the pilots I've talked to are frustrated that people don't understand how well it is going."
While briefings about the air operation have become more detailed, they also have acquired a propaganda element aimed at demonizing Milosevic and his Belgrade government and imparting a moral imperative to the conflict. U.S. and NATO spokesmen, in scripts closely coordinated with the help of several public affairs specialists loaned by Washington to Brussels, routinely mix reports on allied strikes with fresh accusations of atrocities by Yugoslav forces.
Just last week, officials used Pentagon and NATO podiums to broadcast allegations that Yugoslav authorities have begun to dig up mass graves of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo to destroy evidence that could be used against them in war crimes trials. Yugoslav authorities also were accused of moving the bodies of some victims to make the deaths appear to have been caused by air strikes.
On the subject of civilian casualties, alliance officials have become quicker at acknowledging bombing mistakes, following a five-day delay last month in admitting NATO planes erroneously struck a convoy of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. But U.S. and allied officials still tend to try to deflect blame at the outset and wait at least one news cycle or two before owning up to attacks gone awry.
When news bulletins flashed May 14, for instance, that scores of refugees in the Kosovo village of Korisa were killed in an air attack, allied officials asserted there were no NATO strikes in the area and suggested Yugoslav artillery may have killed the refugees by shelling. The next day, NATO spokesmen acknowledged that allied aircraft indeed attacked the village, unaware the refugees were there and believing it harbored a Yugoslav military command post.
Even so, alliance officials sought to turn the episode against Milosevic, saying Yugoslav forces brought the refugees into Korisa to use them as "human shields" against allied attack. Interviews with survivors by journalists on the scene suggested, however, that the refugees may have ended up in the village more by happenstance than design, having been blocked earlier in the day from entering Albania and directed to Korisa to bed down for the night.
Serbian Losses
Number of destroyed or severely damaged Serbian military targets, according to NATO headquarters and briefings:
Tanks 70
Armored personnel carriers 130
Artillery 130
Trucks 250
Planes 80
Bridges 31
Major roads into Kosovo 2
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15. Clinton Backs Cyber-Plan Against Milosevic -Report
Updated 2:04 AM ET May 24, 1999 (Reuters) http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/r/990524/02/news-yugoslavia-usa-cyberwar
WASHINGTON - President Clinton has approved a top-secret plan to destabilize Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, using computer hackers to attack his foreign bank accounts and a sabotage campaign to erode his public support, Newsweek magazine reported Sunday.
The magazine, in its May 31 edition, quoted sources as saying Clinton issued an intelligence "finding" allowing the Central Intelligence Agency to find "ways to get at Milosevic."
The finding would permit the CIA to train ethnic Albanian rebels in Kosovo in the art of sabotage, including such tricks as cutting telephone lines, fouling gasoline reserves and pilfering food supplies, the magazine said.
A U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity denied part of the Newsweek report, saying the United States would not be involved in arming, training or equipping ethnic Albanian rebels to conduct sabotage.
The CIA also was instructed to wage a cyberwar against Milosevic, using computer hackers to tap into the Yugoslav president's foreign bank accounts, the magazine said.
Newsweek said other NATO allies were not to be told about the secret war.
The Senate and House of Representatives intelligence committees were briefed on the decision, Newsweek said. Some lawmakers criticized the idea, questioning the legality and wisdom of launching a risky covert action that could alienate other NATO members, the magazine said.
"If they pull it off, it will be great," Newsweek quoted one government cyberwar expert as saying. "If they screw it up, they are going to be in a world of trouble."
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, told the television program "Fox News Sunday" he thought a cyberspace war against the Yugoslav leader was "totally acceptable."
"I wouldn't be surprised if we were using it here as part of an effort to bring the war in Kosovo home to the people, the civilians in Belgrade, so that they pressure Milosevic to break and make an agreement with NATO," he said.
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16. Lott Says Senate Would Reject NATO Combat Force
Updated 2:05 AM ET May 24, 1999 (Reuters) http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/r/990524/02/news-yugoslavia-usa
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Senate would reject use of American ground troops to fight Serb forces if proposed now, but would consider backing plans for a non-combat deployment to help Kosovo refugees return home, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott said Sunday.
NATO reportedly is under pressure to decide if it will assemble an invasion force potent enough to confront Serb troops and clear the way for 800,000 refugees massed outside Kosovo, the rebellious Serbian province, to return to their homes before winter.
NATO has relied on its air campaign to prosecute the war and its diplomatic initiatives to seek a peaceful solution, and has downplayed any suggestions a combat ground force will be necessary to bring Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to his knees.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, speaking before Lott on the CBS program "Face the Nation," said NATO has for some time been assessing the need for ground troops in hostile and non-hostile, or "non-permissible," situations. But Albright said the focus has been, and still is, on the air war and diplomacy, and a peacekeeping force with a non-combat profile.
"What I'm saying is that we have asked for an update (on ground troops), and (President Clinton) has said that all options are on the table, but we have also said, and I repeat, that the air campaign is working."
There is no timetable to end the bombing, but in talks with Pentagon officials last week top NATO commander U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark made clear any plans for an allied ground force to get the refugees home by winter must take shape soon.
NATO has proposed a NATO peacekeeping force of about 50,000 troops -- including 7,000 U.S. forces -- which Albright said would "provide an environment for the refugees to go back. That's what they are for." In an Op-Ed column in Sunday's New York Times, Clinton said Russian troops should participate in the force as well.
But Lott sent the Clinton administration and NATO a message about congressional sentiment on any use of ground troops in the Kosovo crisis.
"If you're in the so-called permissive atmosphere where you're taking the Kosovars (ethnic Albanians) back into Kosovo that would be one thing, but if you're talking about preparing for fighting their way in there absolutely not," the Mississippi Republican said when asked if the Senate would currently approve the use of combat troops.
"The president has repeatedly told the American people that we would not use ground troops in a combat mode there. The American people, I believe overwhelmingly, would be opposed to that."
Clinton has said he would seek congressional approval of any plans to introduce ground troops into a combat situation.
Lott says he hopes the air campaign will work, but he disagreed with Albright's assessment on the program that it has been "very successful." He said it appears a resolution to the conflict is not close at hand.
"Well, surely the bombs are taking a toll, but again, when the secretary says we have degraded their military fighting capability by one-third -- excuse me, one-third," Lott said.
"When we've been bombing now for almost two months, 60,000 sorties and we've only degraded their military fighting capability by one-third, that is very tough to understand or accept. They're still extremely dangerous."
Earlier this month, a divided U.S. Senate killed a measure that would have permitted Clinton to use "all necessary force" in the Kosovo conflict. However last week, Congress approved almost $12 billion to meet Clinton's request to fund the Balkan operation.
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat and member of the Armed Services Committee, said on "Fox News Sunday" that NATO should deploy troops and be ready to "go in on the ground" if Milosevic remains "insanely intransigent and does not -- basically allow his country to be destroyed to protect his own rule."
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Noted:
Sir Robert James, 66, British Historian, member of Parliament, Obituary: ... Sir Robert once commented, "The task of the historian or the biographer is the pursuit of truth, motivated by a love of learning for its own sake." By ERIC PACE, May 24, 1999 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/obit-james.html
______________________
- Fifth of five messages - _____________________
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Message: 4 Date: Mon, 24 May 1999 19:46:22 -0400
Subject: NucNews-4- 5/24/99 - US- Clinton's Compulsion; China Spying (3)-Reno - Lee - Cox; Hollywood Violence
8. Clinton's Compulsion
May 24, 1999 New York Times ESSAY By WILLIAM SAFIRE http://www.nytimes.com/library/opinion/safire/052499safi.html
We have a President who has a problem: he lies when he doesn't really have to.
This mysterious compulsion is not to be confused with the rational falsehood. His finger-wagging denial of a sexual relationship last year was designed to cut off further inquiry, and he could logically assume at the time he would not be contradicted by hard evidence. It was a calculated deception by a well-ordered brain.
The deceptions this year are different. Not only were the misleading statements made about the weightiest matters -- war and national security -- no purpose was served in uttering them.
That's the puzzling part.
For example, on March 24, he said: "I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war." He reiterated that policy time and again.
Vice President Gore dutifully followed his line when asked in April, "Are there any circumstances under which you would support using American ground troops?" Gore replied: "That option is not under consideration . . . that option was removed from consideration."
Clinton was criticized immediately by Senator John McCain and in this space for taking the potential use of troops off the table at the start. Even Clinton supporters now concede that the President erred by giving Slobodan Milosevic an assurance against invasion. When the leader of the Western alliance, Britain's Tony Blair, told Clinton recently that ground troops must at least be assembled, and when the NATO commander argued that the bombing alone would not accomplish the mission, Clinton properly changed his policy.
But he could not bring himself to say forthrightly that the time had come for such new pressure on Serbia.
Instead, he insisted that he had "always said . . . that we have not and will not take any option off the table."
That's just not so, and everybody knows it. Why does he do it? Does he imagine that nobody will remember what he has been saying all along?
His diehard defenders explain that his words "to fight a war" limited the meaning of "do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo." Under that parsing, he intended only to put them in a "permissive environment."
That's demonstrably untrue, too. His Secretary of State says that the 50,000 NATO troops might well be used in a "non-permissive environment." (That euphemism for invasion means "a place where soldiers shoot at you." When is NPE Day?)
Another example of the unnecessary lie was his March 19 response to: "Can you assure the American people that under your watch, no valuable nuclear secrets were lost?"
We now know that he had been briefed last November about the F.B.I. and C.I.A. suspicions, and in January had received the secret Cox committee report detailing security lapses during the Clinton "watch."
Clinton carefully rephrased the question: "Can I tell you that there has been no espionage at the labs since I have been President? I can tell you that no one has reported to me that they suspect such a thing has occurred." And again: "To the best of my knowledge" (he wasn't even under oath) "no one has said anything to me about any espionage which occurred by the Chinese against the labs during my Presidency."
A deliberate deception. On NBC's "Meet the Press" on May 9, Tim Russert extracted from Energy Secretary Bill Richardson an admission that Clinton was "fully, fully briefed" on espionage in "past and present Administrations." Clinton aides evidently savaged Richardson for letting the truth be badgered out of him. On ABC's "This Week" yesterday, that Vice Presidential hopeful threw his credibility on his sword, telling Sam Donaldson the President was "correct" in his deception. Here's why Clinton inserted "at the labs" and "against the labs" in his answers. As Richardson lamely explained: "we don't know whether it came from our labs."
Thus does the requirement to cover the President's slippery prevarications corrupt everyone loyal to him.
In time, the truth will out, but deeper questions will remain: Why the Clinton compulsion to pretend he never makes a mistake? Why the sneaky word games when the truth is sure to come out? What mental process accounts for his strange habit of unnecessary denial?
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[Should Clinton be institutionalized as criminally insane?]
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9. GOP Targets Reno for China Spying
By Jim Abrams Associated Press Writer Sunday, May 23, 1999; 4:48 p.m. EDT http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990523/V000233-052399-idx.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Clinton administration ally, Democratic Sen. Robert Torricelli, said Sunday that Attorney Janet Reno's job should be on the line over the Justice Department's failure to actively pursue suspected Chinese spying in U.S. nuclear energy labs.
The Republican chairman of the Senate intelligence committee said Reno should lose her job in light of a congressional report, due for release this week, on Chinese espionage.
A Justice Department spokesman said Reno believes she acted responsibly and according to the Constitution.
A second Cabinet member, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, whose department oversees the labs, said tighter security measures were in place at the labs and it remained unclear what secrets were stolen.
``We cannot overdramatize conclusions that are not conclusive yet,'' he said on ABC's ``This Week.''
A select House committee under Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., planned to make public on Tuesday its findings on Chinese attempts to buy and steal U.S. technology for rocket launching and nuclear programs.
The report's conclusions have filtered out in recent weeks: that over the past two decades, China has obtained sensitive information about seven major weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
Republicans said someone must take responsibility for the slow response to a security breach at the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab in New Mexico that first came to light in 1995.
The Senate intelligence committee chairman, Richard Shelby, R-Ala., pointed to Reno, saying the attorney general and her top lieutenants should go.
``I believe it's time, considering her role, or lack of role, her trying to defend the indefensible,'' he said on CBS' ``Face the Nation.''
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., also on CBS, agreed that ``some heads should roll.'' Somebody, he said, ``made some major mistakes here, and somebody needs to be accountable.''
GOP presidential hopeful Sen. Bob Smith, R-N.H., said on CNN's ``Late Edition'' that he would press for a full investigation and if officials ``are held accountable, they are going to go to jail.''
Torricelli, on CBS, was nearly as critical, saying Reno's failure of judgment in the Los Alamos case were ``inexplicable.''
``I think it's time for President Clinton to have a conversation with the attorney general about her ability to perform her duties and whether or not it is in the national interest for her to continue,'' said Torricelli, D-N.J.
The lawmakers specifically pointed to the Justice Department's repeated denials of requests by the FBI to wiretap Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee, who is suspected of passing secrets to the Chinese.
The department said there were insufficient grounds for a court order to monitor Wen, who was fired from the lab this March, three years after he first came under suspicion.
Justice Department spokesman Myron Marlin said Reno had reviewed the decision and fully supported it.
``The Justice Department cannot and must not authorize intrusion by the government into the lives of its citizens when the evidence presented as in this case fails to meet the standards established by the Constitution'' and surveillance laws, he said.
Some Republicans have urged Reno to resign over her refusal to request appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate alleged Chinese contributions to Clinton's 1996 presidential campaign.
Meantime, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright expressed dismay she was not told of the potentially major security losses until earlier this year. ``I was not briefed. That was wrong and I made that clear and that has been rectified,'' she said on CBS.
Cox, on NBC's ``Meet the Press,'' said Richardson has made a serious effort to tighten security, and there had been a ``sea change'' in administration attitudes since the middle of last year, when his committee began investigating Chinese attempts to gain U.S. satellite and nuclear technology.
In other details from the Cox report:
--Time magazine said in its latest edition that a top Defense official in 1996 warned Loral Space and Communications, which had contracted with China to launch its satellites, not to give China any help with its problem-ridden rocket systems without State Department permission. Loral went ahead with its advice to China, whose rockets subsequently showed dramatic improvements.
--The Orange County Register in California reported that private guards hired by Loral and other U.S. companies to provide security for U.S. satellite launches in China slept on the job, went to work drunk and solicited prostitutes.
---
Prosecuting Lee Is Problematic
10. Physicist's Mishandling of Computer Data May Not Be Crime
By Vernon Loeb and Walter Pincus, Washington Post, May 24, 1999 http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-05/24/080l-052499-idx.html
Espionage suspect Wen Ho Lee's transfer of top secret computer programs from a classified to a vulnerable computer network at Los Alamos National Laboratory has left federal prosecutors wrestling with the question of whether such mishandling of classified information in cyberspace constitutes a crime.
Lacking evidence of espionage, FBI agents have focused on Lee's unauthorized data transfer ever since they searched his desktop computer in March and discovered top secret "legacy codes" in a system that could have been accessed by hackers.
But there is no known prosecution of anyone for transferring classified data from classified to unclassified government computer systems, leaving prosecutors to fathom the frontiers of cybersecurity under espionage statutes that make no reference to computers, according to lawyers specializing in national security law and U.S. officials familiar with the case....
Lee has denied passing classified information to China and has said through his attorney he took "substantial steps" to safeguard the transferred computer codes.
A provision of the federal espionage statute makes the removal of classified defense information from its "proper place of custody" through "gross negligence" a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison, according to lawyers specializing in national security cases.
But it is unclear whether Lee could be charged under that provision, absent intent on his part to make unlawful use of the data or evidence it was obtained by unauthorized individuals, they said.
"You've got a clear security breech," said former CIA inspector general Frederick Hitz. "But as far as a criminal prosecution . . . I would think that's going to be tough."
Another law makes the "unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material" at one's home a misdemeanor punishable by a maximum $1,000 fine and one-year prison sentence. The measure was enacted to safeguard classified materials against careless handling, not espionage.
Two former National Security Agency employees, a husband and wife, were the first to be prosecuted under the law last year, pleading guilty to having retained classified documents at their home after leaving government service.
But the lawyers specializing in national security cases say they do not believe the statute could be used against Lee, because he apparently did not remove the programs from government property.
They said in two recent cases involving computer transfers of classified information, one involving another Los Alamos scientist and the other, former CIA director John M. Deutch, the Justice Department declined prosecution....
Deutch was investigated by the Justice Department for transferring more than 30 classified documents to his personal, unsecured laptop during his tenure as CIA director from May 1995 to December 1996. The security breach was discovered when CIA specialists went to his Washington home to remove a classified computer and safe and discovered the classified files on his personal computer.
Under CIA policy, Deutch's security violation was forwarded to Justice for review, but officials there declined prosecution. The case was recently recently returned to the CIA for review by Inspector General Britt Snider, who is expected to complete a report on the matter soon.
Deutch, who does government consulting and teaches at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, could have his security clearance lifted for a period of time, one government source said.
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11. Shepherding a China Report Past the Partisan Routines
By FRANCIS X. CLINES, May 24, 1999 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/washpol/cox-profile.html
WASHINGTON -- He is something of a closet Renaissance man in the House, one who speaks Russian, savors Ayn Rand and seeks out the latest translation of Omar Khayyám. For a hobby, he reads book after book on mathematicians.
And so Representative Christopher Cox may seem the perfect prospect for presiding over the House's arcane and ultra-secret investigation of suspected espionage by China.
After all, a man who raced through three years of college at the University of Southern California, then pursued twin degrees in law and business in the next four years at Harvard, ought to be able to manage one of the most complex and technical, not to mention most intensely reviewed, redacted and rewritten, reports of recent Congressional vintage: the tome detailing China's years of suspected espionage, which will be released to the public on Tuesday morning in its unclassified version.
"My Groundhog Day will be over," Cox exulted in his office, saying that after repetitiously renegotiating every jot and tittle of the report with the Administration, he felt like the Bill Murray character who had to relive a day in Punxsutawney over and over.
"After two months we were nowhere," said Cox, a Republican from Newport Beach, Calif., who headed the House's eight-member select committee that completed its full top-secret China report last January, only to find the task compounded in the negotiations with the White House over the declassified version. The struggle was understandable, for the panel's mandate was to delve into President Clinton's decision to waive export controls over advanced space technology to China. Beyond missile technology, the highly sensitive inquiry had subtexts of political fund-raising abuses and global economic policy.
"Essentially the guts of the report were blacked out," said Cox of White House vettings that required numerous rewritings by the committee until some acceptable public ground was laboriously reached.
For all that success, the real achievement by the 46-year-old Cox may be that his committee conducted its job with none of the partisan bombast and political firefights that have marked five years of Congressional investigations of Clinton by the Capitol's Republican majority. Almost eerily, the Cox committee stands brickbat-free as it moves off stage.
"Our report was unanimous because we stuck to the facts," said Cox, carefully praising the committee's minority Democrats, led by Norm Dicks of Washington. "Things about which we disagreed we simply left on the cutting-room floor because there was so much that was incontrovertible fact."
Dicks still sounds amazed. "There we were, Republicans and Democrats functioning together in the middle of impeachment," he said. "Chris Cox has been a man of his word: there were no leaks during the election. Chris played it straight."
Dicks said the panel's unusual creation of a joint investigating staff and even a unified press office had set a precedent for cooperation that would be dearly needed when legislation was proposed to remedy the security lapses.
"The report was worth the wait," concluded Cox, exuding a quiet satisfaction that, whatever public furor may ensue, critics will be hard-pressed to dismiss the report as merely another partisan salvo. It was as if Cox, a politician ambitious enough to have vied unsuccessfully for the speakership in last fall's Republican meltdown, understood that the clever way to stand out in his China task was to buck the noisy, partisan routine.
Still, he says his only real escape from the job lately is sinking into books about mathematicians. "It takes me completely away from work," he explained, smiling apologetically at his six-year binge of math reading. "A crime novel would only get me thinking about the crime bill."
There is an off-handedness to Cox's manner that is belied by his résumé. He sped through the University of Southern California, shifting his major to English after cramming on math. At Harvard he edited the Law Review. He eventually was hired as a counsel by the Reagan Administration as a kind of aberrant whiz kid, an openly pro-Reagan Harvard man.
"I'm not sure I actually ever discovered an appetite for politics," said Cox, elected to the House in 1988 after suddenly entering a primary that already included 13 Republicans. "It was merely impulsive. The Reagan Administration was ending and I needed a job." ...
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12. Hollywood Under Fire for Violence
May 24, 1999, By The Associated Press http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/a/AP-Hollywood-Violence.html
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The entertainment industry has been very kind to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, donating more than $500,000 to the California Democrat's campaigns since 1991.
And yet when she was faced with a proposal mandating a federal investigation into Hollywood's marketing practices for violent shows and games, Feinstein voted yes. The blood of Littleton, she decided, couldn't be ignored.
``Isn't it time,'' she asked, ``at the very least, that the manufacturers of video games, television programs, motion pictures and music acknowledge the impact on young people of the carnage they promulgate?''
In the weeks since two students rampaged through a Colorado high school, killing 12 classmates and a teacher, Hollywood has been under siege by lawmakers -- friends and foes alike. The industry has been lumped in with tobacco, alcohol and guns as a social scourge in need of governmental intervention.
And the heat is only going to increase. On Thursday, a 15-year-old boy upset over a broken romance shot and wounded six students at a high school in suburban Georgia.
That there was no evidence that movies, television, music or video games played any direct role in the Georgia attack doesn't matter in the current political climate. Lawmakers are now pointing to Hollywood as a major contributor to a wider cultural problem.
``What I see is that we've fundamentally, as a society, moved to a culture that glorifies violence and death,'' said Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan. ``The whole message that people are trying to send to the (entertainment) industry is that if you glorify gratuitous violence, it has an impact.''
Brownback was the sponsor of the legislation, voted on by Feinstein, to authorize an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice into whether Hollywood is marketing violent shows and games to children.
The measure overwhelmingly passed earlier this month.
It is just one of several steps taken in Washington since the April massacre in Littleton, Colo. -- from authorization of a study of violent entertainment to requiring government agencies to consider a show's violence level before granting a permit to film on federal property.
And there have been signs that Hollywood is getting the message. Last week, CBS said it was leaving off its schedule a pilot series called ``Falcone,'' about a mob war in New York City, because of concerns about its violence.
``We felt a responsibility not to put it on now,'' CBS President Leslie Moonves said. ``It just didn't feel right.''
But others in Hollywood have been either silent or defiant. Two of the world's most powerful entertainment executives have criticized politicians for singling out Hollywood.
``It's unfortunate that the American people who really look to their government for leadership instead get finger-pointing and chest-pounding,'' said Edgar Bronfman, chief executive Seagram Co., parent of Universal Studios.
Violence ``is not an entertainment problem,'' he said earlier this month in Florida. ``It's a societal problem and I believe the government would be well-served to deal with it as a societal problem rather than create a quick fix that may be popular but ultimately is a disservice to their constituents.''
And in a speech last month in Beverly Hills, Time Warner Chairman Gerald Levin, whose son was stabbed and shot to death during a robbery in May 1997, called for an end to the ``proliferation of guns'' and condemned what he called grandstanding politicians.
``This is the season of political opportunism,'' Levin told the Hollywood Radio and Television Society. ``I can't help but think that television is an easy scapegoat. Where is the cry to stop the proliferation of guns?''
The Senate has, in fact, passed a number of new gun restrictions as amendments to a juvenile crime bill. On Thursday, the Senate slapped fresh restrictions on firearms sales at gun shows and pawnshops.
But senators have also gone after Hollywood. Along with the investigation of marketing practices, the Senate has authorized a federal study into the psychological effects violent video games and music have on youths.
Lawmakers also have proposed making the movie industry's voluntary ratings system legally enforceable, holding a theater owner liable for allowing underage kids into movies rated R or NC-17.
And on Wednesday, the Senate passed a requirement that federal agencies not grant permits for movie or TV filming on government property until they consider whether the production ``glorifies or endorses wanton and gratuitous violence.''
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Message: 5 Date: Mon, 24 May 1999 19:45:53 -0400
Subject: NucNews-1 5/24/99 - General Lee Butler, LA Times
Los Angeles Times Interview - Lee Butler - A Cold Warrior Looks to Ban the Bomb After a Career in Brinkmanship
By ROBERT SCHEER, Los Angeles Times, May 23, 1999 http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/OPINION/t000046254.html
Retired Gen. George L. (Lee) Butler is among the very few whose job description has included the power to destroy the planet. As he recalled during a telephone conversation last week: "I lived for three years, every day of my life, with the requirement to answer a phone within three rings and be prepared to advise the president on how to retaliate with respect to the real or perceived threat of nuclear attack. I found it extremely sobering."
Butler, 59, a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and a much-decorated Vietnam air-combat veteran, came to that awesome responsibility upon ascending to the post of commander of U.S. strategic nuclear forces. He held that job between 1991 and 1994 in the Bush administration, just after the Cold War came to an abrupt end. But the U.S reliance on nuclear deterrence did not.
While working for the Joint Chiefs under the direction of Gen. Colin L. Powell, Butler was charged with reevaluating the U.S. nuclear deterrent in the aftermath of the Cold War. It was Butler's recommendation to stand down the U.S. nuclear force from hair-trigger alert for the first time in 30 years, and the Bush administration acted on his recommendation, with Mikhail S. Gorbachev, then the Soviet leader, following suit.
"So I felt when I retired in 1994," Butler recalled, "that nuclear-arms control was on a pretty good track. START II was signed and starting the ratification process, and I had a great sense of relief and gratification that all had begun to change fairly quickly." But he ruefully concedes that his optimism was misplaced: "Here we are, years later, and things look pretty much the same."
The impasse on nuclear-arms control deeply worries Butler as he assays a Russia close to ruin with deteriorating control over its still deadly nuclear arsenal. "The Russians survey a strategic landscape in which our Senate has imposed a moratorium on any sort of cuts that we might make, so here we are with 6,000, 7,000 operational weapons, about half of them on alert; and they are struggling to keep about a third of that many viable."
While everyone is focused on the fighting in Kosovo, Butler considers Russia's weakness and instability a prescription for disaster and so has devoted his retirement years to getting arms control back on track. The father of two and grandparent of three, Butler is highly motivated in his quest to ban nuclear weapons, but then again he knows what those weapons can do when perhaps the rest of us have forgotten.
Question: The whole effort to abolish nuclear weapons, which you have been involved with, seems to be on a back burner as relations with the Russians deteriorate. Are you worried about their ability to control their own weapons?
Answer: I am, to some extent. My own view is that, with regard to the operational weapons, I think they're as concerned as we, if not more so, about keeping those accountable and safe and secure. I worry more about the components back in the labs and in the multiplicity of storage sites that they built over the years, and I just can't believe they have the resources to keep those to the same standards that they did during the Cold War. I've been following some of the reports coming out of the secret cities--for example, Krasnoyarsk, where that reactor is still running, cranking out maybe 40 tons of plutonium a year and folks are on half-wages and dispirited and poor morale and God knows what kind of discipline they're able to maintain, and that's an enormous temptation. So I guess I worry more about that stuff getting into the wrong hands than I do about accidental launch.
Q: Speaking of stuff getting into the wrong hands, what do you make of the charges of China stealing secrets from the Los Alamos lab?
A: I'm not so much outraged that China is spying on us. Everybody spies on everybody else--even our friends spy on us. That's one thing, but that just simply means we all have the greater obligation to safeguard those secrets we feel could be most damaging to our national security if revealed. So I put a lot of responsibility on our own doorstep here.
Q: In terms of arms control, what right do we have, aside from that they shouldn't steal, to tell China not to develop an arsenal of this sort?
A: We don't, we clearly don't have that right. Part of the cross we bear by continuing to maintain this Reaganesque nuclear-weapons policy is that we're hoist on the petard of our own nuclear-weapons rhetoric. I keep thinking about that phone call the president must have had with his counterparts in India and Pakistan, trying to persuade them not to test or to develop nuclear weapons when we still have words that say nuclear weapons are essential to our security. In fact, they are the cornerstone of our security, when we have no reasonable threat that we can point to; and yet any of those nations can say, "Look at us, our survival is threatened." It puts us in a terrible position with regard to containing proliferation, or just to bring moral suasion to bear in terms of trying to end the nuclear era after half a century.
Q: Why hasn't there been more progress toward eliminating nuclear weapons?
A: It's a whole host of things. I thought there was a kind of a cosmic roll of the dice, in the sense that, at the very moment the Cold War was coming to a spontaneous, unanticipated conclusion, George Bush failed at reelection and, consequently, at a moment when what we needed more than anything else was continuity in our national-security and foreign-policy team, it was totally disrupted.
Q: But why is the Clinton administration not more aggressive on nuclear-arms control?
A: It's really puzzling. If I had to put my finger on it, in this arena real progress comes down to one thing, and that is motivation and guidance from the top. It has to come from the Oval Office, and that's why I hark back to the latter days of the Bush regime, because that's the way all that got done. There was no anguishing negotiation with our own bureaucracy, much less that in Moscow. We just made a political calculation of what the new state of the Russia-U.S. relationship would tolerate safely, measures that we could take independently that would send a signal of trust. There was a willingness to exercise boldness and leadership and vision, and I don't think that this administration came to town prepared to do that on the international front. They had a very ambitious domestic agenda and tackled things like Medicare right out of the bag. Got off on a terrible foot with the military, and I think all that soured the relationship and, to some extent, poisoned the well.
Q: Also, with Bush, it was good having a war hero as president who couldn't be baited as being a dove.
A: Yes. In my view, the single most important set of arms-control accomplishments were George Bush's unilateral measures back in '91. We took all of the tactical nukes off the ships and brought them home from Europe and took the bombers off alert and accelerated the retirement of the Minuteman II force. And [Soviet President Mikhail S.] Gorbachev kind of unilaterally followed suit shortly thereafter and accelerated retirement of some of their programs that were standing down under START I. It's kind of ironic that, today, we have a Republican Congress that thwarts arms-control progress and yet it was a Republican administration that really moved the ball down the field.
Q: What about the threat from China and from the so-called rogue nations?
A: I've been through this so many times--it was my business, and this stuff about rogue nations, it just infuriates me to hear responsible people use bumper-sticker labels like that. As if you can reduce the complexity of sovereign entities with complex histories and cultures and bureaucracies to a label in order to avoid having to think about them seriously. We call Iran a rogue nation, and 20 years ago they were our closest ally; when the shah was in power, they were our friends.
Q: If one accepted the idea of a sort of rogue or terrorist nation or force, it is difficult to think of thwarting them with sophisticated nuclear delivery systems.
A: Exactly. I went through this in the Persian Gulf, because I was the planner and had to think through the question of what if Saddam [Hussein] has a so-called weapon of mass destruction, which is another term I just really dislike because it lumps together three weapons of enormously disparate consequence. But it doesn't take long to parse that out. If he'd employed chemicals, there is no circumstance I can imagine under which the United States should or would have replied with a nuclear weapon, or biological for that matter. Those are terrible weapons, but we've faced chemical weapons for years. And biological weapons, when you look at them from a battlefield perspective, which I've done much of my years as a planner, they're pretty difficult to even think about how you use them without threatening yourself as much as anybody else.
And as far as a nuke is concerned, my sense was that even if he'd had a nuclear weapon, I cannot imagine he would have employed it except in extremis, which means that we were going to occupy his country and either kill him or put him on trial as a war criminal--in which case, I suspect, where he would have employed the weapon, presuming it actually worked, would not have been against us or Saudi Arabia but probably in Israel. In which case there is nothing we could have done to stop that; it would have been an extraordinary catastrophe.
But in terms of using a nuclear weapon in retaliation, the political and military and economic consequences or obstacles were just overwhelming.
Q: Let me ask again about China and the risk of their putting a sophisticated warhead on a ballistic missile.
A: You're out there worrying about the prospect of ballistic missiles, but for most nations that would be the last thing in the world you'd ever want to resort to in terms of a desire to explode a nuclear device against the United States. There are more technologically efficient ways of getting that done. Suitcase bombs or offshore launching of a cruise [missile] strapped to the hull of a freighter are far more plausible than any ballistic-missile attack.
But all of that presupposes an urge on the part of China to make a nuclear attack on the United States, which is effectively to commit suicide, and that's where it all breaks down for me.
China has only been re-demonized here recently. Even in the latter stages of the Cold War, we didn't treat China as much of a threat. All of a sudden now, they're being elevated again. That's still a country that is fragile and, in some respects, perishable as any nation that size could possibly be. To me it's part and parcel of the business of not thinking responsibly or even intelligently about the international environment in which we operate, what U.S. interests are and how we deal with the nations that intersect most importantly with those.
Q: What do you think about this revival of the Strategic Defense Initiative?
A: I have a lot of reservations about it. I feel a sense of personal responsibility because the Rumsfeld Report, which I helped author, is being touted by the proponents of ballistic missile defense as being justification for getting on with it. But what I told [former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld] and said to committees on the Hill in private, when we took our report over at their request, was I see no need to proceed to ballistic missile defense until the following requirements are met: One, we see threats that are commensurate with that level of effort, and nothing that we had in our report portrayed that. Secondly, that the technology is in hand; you just can't wish and make it happen. And third, that whatever we do, we don't unilaterally abrogate the [Antiballistic Missile Treaty], that we make this a cooperative negotiation with Russia that finds a way to square the circle of our security concerns and theirs.
Q: Finally, what are the risks of accidental nuclear war?
A: What one would worry more about is the kind of event that happened in January of 1995, when that experimental rocket was launched in the coast of Norway. That was initially assessed by the Russian command-and-control system as having been a Trident launch, and that was passed on all the way up to [President Boris N.] Yeltsin as a prospective ICBM attack from the United States. That information was only headed off in the final few moments.
The Russian command-and-control system and early-warning system is in a state of great decline. About two-thirds of the satellites they relied on for early-warning capability are inactive or failing. That means there are very large sectors of the United States they either can not see or can not see for several hours each day--which puts them in a much more fragile posture with regard to the single most critical aspect of this deterrence equation, which is adequate forewarning of an attack. They are experiencing false alarms now on almost a routine basis. And I shudder to think about what the state of the morale and discipline of their rocket forces are, who are suffering along with everyone else with regard to not being paid and inadequate wages and an extremely dismal quality of life.
There are worrisome aspects to all of that, but those are circumstance that we can deal with the simple step of reducing the alert status of these weapons. That's why people like myself are so puzzled and dismayed that our government won't even address that.*
"By continuing to maintain this Reaganesque nuclear-weapons policy. . .we're hoist on the petard of our own nuclear-weapons rhetoric."
"This stuff about rogue nations, it just infuriates me. . .As if you can reduce sovereign entities with complex histories and cultures and bureaucracies to a label."
"You're out there worrying about the prospect of ballistic missiles, but for most nations that would be the last thing in the world you'd ever want to resort to." - - -
Robert Scheer, a Contributing Editor to The Times, Is the Author of "With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War."
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Message: 6 Date: Mon, 24 May 1999 19:46:01 -0400
Subject: NucNews-2- 5/24/99 - Anti-Missile Test; Smallpox Danger
2. New Anti-Missile System to Be Tested This Week
By WILLIAM J. BROAD, May 24, 1999 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/missile-defense.html
After decades of flops, $100 billion in costs and sharp rises in the political stakes, the Pentagon is trying again to defend the United States against missile attack.
The "Star Wars" dream of zapping enemy warheads with orbiting lasers, which President Reagan championed, is long gone. Instead, the military leaders of the Clinton administration have seized on an older, less controversial approach that is nonetheless proving to be diabolically hard.
On Tuesday, if all goes as planned, a launcher on a 10-wheeled truck is to fire a 20-foot interceptor missile from a test site in the New Mexico desert. The goal is for the interceptor to speed above the earth, pinpoint a mock warhead, zero in with a "kill vehicle" on its radiated heat and smash it to bits by force of impact.
Since this approach was first proposed in 1976, it has been tested a total of 16 times. Fourteen times it failed, most recently in March. In two tests, in 1984 and 1991, the interceptors succeeded in hitting targets. But congressional sleuths later found that the tests had been quietly made less challenging and that some results had been exaggerated.
Critics say this record suggests the idea will never be practical. But this would-be weapon still stars in a push to shield the United States from enemy warheads. "It's not an impossible task," Lt. Gen. Lester Lyles of the Air Force, director of the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, insisted in an interview, saying improvements in the program will prove the critics are wrong. "We just need to make sure we take all the bugs out."
Last year North Korea fired a missile over Japan, helping stir the current defensive push. But Republicans have also seized upon anti-missile defense as an issue. In March, after the White House yielded to pressure and dropped long-standing objections to anti-missile deployments, the Senate and House voted overwhelmingly for the United States to build a defensive system based on what are known as "hit to kill" interceptors.
Last Thursday the House reiterated that stance, approving a bill passed by the Senate in March that calls for deploying the system as soon as technologically possible. President Clinton is expected to sign the bill.
Now the question is whether there is any reason to think the weapon can actually work reliably and, if so, when a system might be built. Congress is pushing for an anti-missile force to be set up as soon as 2003 or 2005, and the Pentagon says that such dates may be feasible.
Lyles and other Pentagon leaders say that the run of testing flops has forced major overhauls, and that in coming months feats of interception will prove the weapon's feasibility.
But critics say political considerations, including a Democratic desire to deprive Republicans of a campaign issue, are triumphing over scientific truth. They are concerned that with deployment of a missile system, Washington might abandon the proven approach of diplomacy and arms control in favor of a potentially false sense of security backed by a faulty defense system.
"It makes us feel good," said Joseph Cirincione, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "But it's just the illusion of protection."
Over the decades, the United States has sunk about $110 billion into anti-missile arms and research. Successes have been rare.
In March, in the New Mexican desert, the Theater High-Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, the most advanced interceptor the Pentagon is testing against targets, was fired toward a mock warhead. The 6-foot "kill vehicle" missed its target.
Even so, the Pentagon claimed success in 16 of 17 test goals, though weeks later it sheepishly admitted that two of four was a more accurate portrayal.
This Tuesday, the same balky interceptor is to be fired again from the White Sands Missile Range, probably to the accompaniment of hundreds of crossed fingers. To date, since the early 1990s, THAAD has cost taxpayers $3.9 billion. Its main contractor is Lockheed Martin Corp., which was fined $15 million for the failure in March.
The troubled system is but one of a small army of similar defensive arms undergoing development. The culmination is to be a large interceptor meant to shield the nation -- not just soldiers, ships and battlefields -- from enemy attack.
Claims of Success, Series of Failures
The hit-to-kill effort grew out of the realization, decades ago, that a defense system based on nuclear warheads would do more harm than good. Fiery blasts from interceptors tipped with nuclear arms might destroy even distant enemy warheads, but they would also produce huge bursts of electromagnetic energy that, like a riot of lightning bolts, could disable electronic devices on the ground, crippling the nation and the military.
Starting in 1976, the Pentagon sought interceptors so extraordinarily precise that nuclear fireballs would be unnecessary. The key was to be destruction by impact, just as when two cars collide. Interceptor and warhead would hit at blinding speeds and destroy each other.
The rub was how to guide the racing interceptor. Ground controls were too slow. So final guidance had to be done by the defensive weapon itself, working autonomously.
The Pentagon's solution was to have the interceptor zero in on heat emanating from enemy warheads. An infrared seeker and a tiny computer would fire small jets, steering the hurtling mass of metal toward sure destruction.
The first test was in February 1983. A mock enemy warhead was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Thousands of miles away in the South Pacific, at Kwajalein Atoll, an interceptor of the Homing Overlay Experiment blasted off. Unfortunately it missed the warhead by a wide margin. New tests in May and December of that year also failed.
In June 1984, however, an interceptor smashed a mock target to bits.
"We successfully 'hit a bullet with a bullet' for the first time," Lt. Gen. James Abrahamson of the Air Force, head of the Pentagon's anti-missile program, told Congress. The interceptor, he added, had worked by zeroing in on "a warhead with its inherent heat."
But the Pentagon had actually raised that heat artificially so the test was easier, investigators at the congressional General Accounting Office reported years later. The doctoring was done by heating the mock warhead before launch to 100 degrees. And in flight, the long warhead was instructed to fly sideways, exposing a greater surface area to the distant heat seeker.
The congressional team bluntly noted that dozens of public statements by Defense Department officials had failed to mention "the steps taken to enhance the target's signature."
The next hit-to-kill test, in January 1991, was also touted as a major success. It not only demolished a mock warhead but was said to have succeeded in ignoring two inflatable decoys. The ability to ignore false targets is considered crucial in anti-missile warfare, as foes are expected to scatter decoys and chaff around warheads in hopes of confusing and defeating any defense.
But investigators from the congressional accounting office reported later that the two decoys had been tethered to either side of the dummy warhead, and the interceptor's computer had been programmed to pick out the target in the middle.
In 1992 another interceptor blasted off, only this time the system was allowed to try to freely distinguish between a mock warhead and a decoy. It missed both.
Over the years, all other tests of such hit-to-kill interceptors have failed.
"It's amazing," said John Pike, head of space policy for the Federation of American Scientists, a private group in Washington skeptical of missile defenses. "If you talk about clean, unambiguous, hit-a-bullet-with-a-bullet kinds of tests, they still haven't done it."
A $28 Billion Shield or an Empty Shell?
In 1997, the reliability crisis prompted the Pentagon to appoint a panel headed by Larry Welch, a former Air Force chief of staff. Its blistering report, issued in February 1998, found the failures rooted in poor design and fabrication, lax management and lack of rigorous government oversight.
Managers tended "to trivialize the causes of these costly failures," the panel said, adding that aggressive new test schedules had joined with such callousness to produce a "rush to failure."
As if on cue, the next flight test of THAAD failed. So did its next experiment, on March 29.
Pentagon officials say the misses seem to be rooted in different kinds of breakdowns, the diversity of which they call worrisome.
In an interview, Lyles of the anti-missile program said the failures had been traced to things like dirty optics, broken wires and empty fuel tanks. But a quality-control revolution, he asserted, would soon end the troubles.
"It's a hard business," Lyles said. "But I'm confident we can do it."
The Pentagon's anti-missile program is soon to test the large interceptor now envisioned for national missile defense. Its kill vehicle weighs just 121 pounds and is less than 4 feet long -- smaller, and perhaps trickier, than THAAD's.
Beginning around August, a 45-foot interceptor is to try to smash mock warheads in a total of four separate tests before June 2000. The Clinton administration then plans to make a decision on whether to respond to the congressional call and actually deploy a network of at least 20 and perhaps as many as 200 interceptors.
The cost of such a force has been estimated at up to $28 billion. Its interceptors, possibly needing to fly far to hit enemy warheads, would be 55 feet long.
Coming in an election year, with the White House eager to deny the Republicans any chance to look stronger on national defense, the decision is widely expected to be a green light. Construction work at aerospace industry plants would also mean big money for vote-rich states like California.
The interceptors, based in North Dakota or Alaska, or both, are to be able to destroy warheads launched by rogue nations like Iran or North Korea, both of which are developing long-range missiles. The system is also to have some effectiveness against an accidental launching from China or Russia.
Experts say any version of the plan would clash with the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty, which limits defenses in hopes of discouraging costly new arms races. Washington and Moscow might agree to an initial deployment in North Dakota, experts add, since Russia already has a small defensive force. But a second deployment in Alaska, they say, would require more extensive treaty modifications to which Moscow might object.
But many critics fear the costly project will be little more than an empty shell. Even if the interceptor can be made to destroy dummy targets, they say, an enemy might challenge it with real warheads and feints of unexpected design.
Richard Garwin, a physicist and anti-missile foe, said North Korea -- long suspected of working on biological weapons, in particular smallpox, a deadly scourge -- might load a missile with hundreds of bomblets filled with lethal germs. The bomblets would be impossible to hit, he said, and could be widely dispersed.
"We don't have a clue about how to deal with that," Garwin said.
Critics also note that enemies can always sidestep any anti-missile defense by simply avoiding the use of ballistic missiles. Boats, trucks, airplanes or cruise missiles could deliver weapons of mass destruction to U.S. cities.
The best way of dealing with all the dangers, critics say, is to deter foes with the threat of swift and massive retaliation -- a policy, they note, that has worked for half a century.
But some experts, including some military officials, worry that deterrence might fail in the future, especially with rogue states. A backup, they argue, is increasingly needed and can be made to work, despite the rash of testing failures.
Hans Mark, the Pentagon's top scientist, recently gave what appeared to be the administration's strongest thumbs-up to date. In March he told the American Physical Society that there was "no question" that the United States could and should build a nationwide defense.
"By definition," Mark said, "this is feasible."
---
Chart
A Closer Look: 'Hitting a Bullet With a Bullet' http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/missile-defense.1.GIF.html http://graphics.nytimes.com/99/05/24/news/national/missile-defense.1.GIF
1-- As soon as an enemy missile clears the cloud cover, early warning satellites and early warning radar detect and track the missile.
2-- High-resolution radar on the ground tracks the warhead and any decoys. Information is coordinated at a command center.
3-- One or more interceptors, made up of a kill vehicle and booster, are launched from the ground, guided by information from the command center.
4-- Using on-board sensors, as well as information from the ground, the kill vehicle isolates the warhead from decoys and debris.
5-- The kill vehicle maneuvers to collide with the warhead, destroying both vehicles.
Credit: The New York Times
Source: Ballistic Missile Defense Organization
----------------
3. Smallpox Could Still Be a Danger
By KEN ALIBEK and STEPHEN HANDELMAN, May 24, 1999 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/oped/24alib.html
In 1986, when the world was becoming enthralled by perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev signed a secret plan for a new Soviet weapons program. The five-year, $1 billion plan authorized Russian military scientists to turn smallpox and other deadly microorganisms into instruments of war.
It was, at the time, the most ambitious program for biological weapons development anywhere. And it ought to make us think twice about the Administration's current plan for engaging in smallpox research with Russia.
At one point the White House supported a proposal by the World Health Organization to destroy the remaining global stocks of smallpox virus by June 30, 1999. Last month, however, the Administration reversed that stance, announcing that instead the United States would work with Russian scientists to develop defenses against the disease.
The health organization, now meeting in Geneva, apparently will follow the latest recommendation of its governing body and agree to postpone destruction of the virus until at least 2002.
This is a sound decision -- up to a point. As many scientists have noted, the fact that smallpox has been eradicated from the planet -- the last outbreak occurred in 1977 -- doesn't remove the danger of this ancient scourge. Bioterrorists, rogue states or even natural causes could prompt an unexpected revival. Retaining some samples would allow us to continue research into natural and man-made permutations of the virus.
The real questions involve where that research should be done and under whose auspices.
Two sites are currently authorized by the health organization as repositories for smallpox: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and the Russian State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology (known as Vector) near Novosibirsk, in Siberia.
Vector was the Soviet Union's most advanced viral weapons research and development laboratory, but it has since ended its military function. The United States now finances an admirable exchange program intended to encourage Vector scientists, like their counterparts in the Soviet nuclear weapons program, to make the transition to peaceful research. Administration officials believe the smallpox program will generate trust between the two countries and strengthen national security.
However, they are missing the larger picture.
While the Russian Government has officially disavowed the Gorbachev program, we still don't have reliable information about the status of Moscow's once-formidable biological warfare establishment. The four principal military installations assigned to make biological weapons during the cold war remain off-limits to international inspectors.
A decision by the World Health Organization to retain the smallpox virus would therefore present us with an awkward dilemma. Several countries today are believed to hold unauthorized stocks of smallpox that could be turned into weaponry, and current medical defenses against biological warfare agents are inadequate. Since American scientists are unlikely to risk conducting advanced smallpox research in an urban area like Atlanta, Vector would in effect receive a formal blessing from the world community as the leading laboratory for work with the virus. Can we be sure that Russia's civilian expertise will not leak into the military sphere?
There is no evidence that Russia is a biological weapons threat today, but it is also impossible to rule out this prospect in the future, particularly under a post-Yeltsin Government resentful of American power. Russia's huge stockpiles of smallpox, plague, anthrax and other biological warfare agents have been destroyed, but seed stocks remain, along with the technical expertise and documentation for turning them into weapons. And bioweaponeering is easily disguised as peaceful research.
This isn't an academic point.
As late as 1997, Russian scientific journals were reporting successful genetic experiments involving poxviruses at former bioweapons research laboratories, including Vector. The experiments were defended as efforts to explore new defenses against disease. Nevertheless, such research was originally conceived as part of a larger military program to develop new smallpox strains useful in biological warfare, and its purpose is questionable today.
Without proper oversight and control, there is no way to insure that smallpox research in Russia remains benign. American hopes that binational cooperation will provide that oversight are a misreading of history. Moscow began upgrading its biological warfare program in 1972, the year it signed the Biological Weapons Convention banning such weapons, and its scientific sophistication was matched by its skill in keeping its activities hidden from the world.
The only reliable protection for sensitive smallpox work is a truly transparent regime. That would require transferring the remaining stocks in the United States and Russia to a protected laboratory where scientists from all countries could work together under the scrutiny of the international community. That lab could be located in a third country like Switzerland, where the World Health Organization has its headquarters. Smallpox research must continue, but it would be dangerous to allow it to become a national franchise, for Russia or anybody else.
Ken Alibek, deputy director of the Soviet biological warfare program until 1992, is chief scientist for Hadron Inc., a Virginia research and development company. He and Stephen Handelman, a journalist formerly based in Moscow, are co-authors of ``Biohazard.''