Proposal would reverse 10-year policy

WASHINGTON (Kyodo) The U.S. military is considering allowing regional combatant commanders to request presidential approval for pre-emptive nuclear strikes against possible attacks with weapons of mass destruction on the United States or its allies, according to a draft nuclear operations paper.

The March 15 paper, drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is titled "Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations," providing "guidelines for the joint employment of forces in nuclear operations . . . for the employment of U.S. nuclear forces, command and control relationships, and weapons effect considerations."

"There are numerous nonstate organizations (terrorist, criminal) and about 30 nations with WMD programs, including many regional states," the paper says in recommending that commanders in the Pacific and other theaters be given an option of pre-emptive strikes against "rogue" states and terrorists and "request presidential approval for use of nuclear weapons" under set conditions.

The paper identifies nuclear, biological and chemical weapons as requiring pre-emptive strikes to prevent their use.

Allowing pre-emptive nuclear strikes against possible biological and chemical attacks would effectively contradict a "negative security assurance" policy declared 10 years ago by the Clinton administration during an international conference to review the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Creating a treaty committing nuclear powers not to use nuclear weapons against countries without nuclear weapons remains one of the most contentious issues for the 35-year-old NPT regime.

A Pentagon official said the paper "is still a draft which has to be finalized" but indicated that it is aimed at guiding "cross-spectrum" combatant commanders how to jointly carry out operations based on the Nuclear Posture Review report adopted three years ago by the Bush administration.

Citing North Korea, Iran and some other countries as threats, the report sets out contingencies for which U.S. nuclear strikes must be prepared.

It calls for developing earth-penetrating nuclear bombs to destroy hidden underground military facilities, including those for storing WMD and ballistic missiles.

"The nature (of the paper) is to explain not details but cross spectrum for how to conduct operations," the official said, noting that it "means for all services -- army, navy, air force and marine."

In 1991 after the end of the Cold War, the United States removed its ground-based nuclear weapons in Asia and Europe as well as strategic nuclear warheads on warships and submarines.

But the paper says the U.S. has the capability of reviving sea-based nuclear arms.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - With a few keystrokes, an official U.S. brochure on disarmament eliminated some historic arms-control deals and showed once again that what is left out of a report can be as telling as what's put in.

In this case, the publication's "rewriting of history," as one critic put it, also illustrates in black and white a dispute that has helped bog down the 188-country conference reviewing the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

The month-long conference entered its final three days on Wednesday with uncertain prospects for producing any major agreements to tighten controls on the spread of atomic arms, or to speed nuclear disarmament.

The brochure, produced by the U.S. State Department and distributed to hundreds of delegates, lists milestones in arms control since the 1980s, while touting reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

But the timeline omits a pivotal agreement, the 1996 treaty to ban nuclear tests, a pact negotiated by the Clinton administration and ratified by 121 countries but now rejected by President George W. Bush.

Further along, the brochure skips over the year 2000 entirely, a snub of the treaty review conference that year, when the United States and other nuclear-weapons states committed to "13 practical steps" to achieve nuclear disarmament - including activating the test-ban treaty, negotiating a pact to ban production of bomb material and "unequivocally undertaking" to totally eliminate their arsenals.

Bush administration officials now suggest the 2000 commitments are outdated. Other delegations reject that, however, demanding a reaffirmation of the goals in a final document at the current conference.

Few expect that, and they cite the blank spots in the brochure as another piece of evidence.

"Official disdain for these agreements seems to have turned into denial that they existed," said Joseph Cirincione, an arms-control specialist with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who accused the State Department of rewriting history.

"Does this mean that, because we have a change of administration, we are not accountable to other countries?" asked another disarmament advocate, Jonathan Granoff of the Global Security Institute.

Asked why the 1996 treaty and the 2000 U.S. commitments - along with similar commitments in 1995 - didn't make the 40-entry list of "progress in arms control," U.S. delegation spokesman Richard Grenell said simply: "We highlighted certain items, and it wasn't an exhaustive list."

By contrast, an official UN chronology has several entries on the test ban, and prominently notes the 1995 and 2000 agreements.

Under the 1970 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, reviewed every five years for ways to strengthen implementation, countries without nuclear weapons commit to not pursuing them in exchange for a pledge by five weapons states - the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China - to move toward disarmament. The non-weapons states, meanwhile, are guaranteed access to peaceful nuclear technology.

The United States has sought to have the conference focus on the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs.

In Geneva on Wednesday, European diplomats resume negotiations with Tehran in an effort to get the Iranians to roll back their uranium-enrichment program, which can produce both fuel for nuclear energy and material for bombs. The Iranians cite the treaty guarantee on peaceful technology in justifying the program, but Washington contends they have plans to make weapons.

North Korea was the first "defector" from the treaty, having announced its withdrawal in 2003 and now claiming to have built nuclear weapons. This was done without consequences under the treaty, and many at the conference would like to make it harder to exit the nuclear pact, and to threaten sanctions against those who do.

Many non-weapons states, however, want an additional focus on the nuclear powers, complaining they are moving too slowly on their disarmament obligations. They cite in particular Bush administration talk of "modernizing" the U.S. nuclear arsenal and rejection of the test-ban treaty.

Washington still adheres to a unilateral moratorium on testing, but treaty advocates say a formal outlawing of testing is needed to stop development of new nuclear arms.

Visiting the troubled conference on Tuesday, a U.S. negotiator of the test-ban treaty told reporters the 1996 pact is a "litmus test."

"If countries that promised never to have nuclear weapons now see weapons states holding open the option to test, some of them think, 'Why should we give up nuclear weapons?' " said former ambassador Thomas Graham.

Early last summer, United States Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a top secret "Interim Global Strike Alert Order'' directing the military to assume and maintain readiness to attack hostile countries that are developing weapons of mass destruction, specifically Iran and North Korea.

Two months later, Lieutenant-General Bruce Carlson, commander of the 8th Air Force, told a reporter that his fleet of B-2 and B-52 bombers had changed its way of operating so that it could be ready to carry out such missions. "We're now at the point where we are essentially on alert,'' Carlson said in an interview with the Shreveport Times.

"We have the capacity to plan and execute global strikes.''

Carlson said his forces were the US Strategic Command's "focal point for global strike'' and could execute an attack "in half a day or less.''

In the secret world of military planning, global strike has become the term to describe a specific pre-emptive attack. When military officials refer to global strike, they stress its conventional elements. Surprisingly, however, global strike also includes a nuclear option, which runs counter to traditional US notions about the defensive role of nuclear weapons.

The official US position on the use of nuclear weapons has not changed. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has taken steps to de-emphasize the importance of its nuclear arsenal.

The Bush administration has said it remains committed to reducing its nuclear stockpile while keeping a credible deterrent against other nuclear powers. Administration and military officials have stressed this continuity in testimony over the past several years before various congressional committees.

But a confluence of events, beginning with the September 11, 2001, attacks and the president's forthright commitment to the idea of pre-emptive action to prevent future attacks, has set in motion a process that has led to a fundamental change in how the US military might respond to certain possible threats.

Understanding how Washington got to this point, and what it might mean for US policy, is particularly important now - with the renewed focus last week on Iran's nuclear intentions and on speculation that North Korea is ready to conduct its first test of a nuclear weapon.

Global strike has become one of the core missions for the Omaha-based Strategic Command, or Stratcom.

Once, Stratcom oversaw only the nation's nuclear forces; now it has responsibility for overseeing a global strike plan with both conventional and nuclear options.

President George W Bush spelled out the definition of a "full-spectrum'' global strike in a January 2003 classified directive, describing it as "a capability to deliver rapid, extended range, precision kinetic (nuclear and conventional) and non-kinetic effects in support of theater and national objectives.''

This blurring of the nuclear/conventional line, wittingly or unwittingly, could heighten the risk that the nuclear option will be used.

Exhibit A may be the Stratcom contingency plan for dealing with "imminent'' threats from countries such as North Korea or Iran, formally known as Conplan 8022-02.

Conplan 8022 is different from other war plans in that it posits a small-scale operation and no "boots on the ground.''

The typical war plan encompasses an amalgam of forces - air, ground, sea - and takes into account the logistics and political dimensions needed to sustain those forces in protracted operations. All these elements generally require significant lead time to be effective.

Existing Pentagon war plans, developed for specific regions or "theaters,'' are essentially defensive responses to invasions or attacks. The global strike plan is offensive, triggered by the perception of an imminent threat and carried out by presidential order.

Corpus Christi TX - Air Force Lt. General Henry "Trey" Obering announced May 16 the completion of the final major assembly of Sea-Based X-Band Radar at Kiewit Offshore Services at Corpus Christi, Texas with the successful deployment of the radar's protective radome.

The radome weighs 18,000 pounds, stands over 103 feet high, and is 120 feet in diameter. Made entirely of a high-tech synthetic fabric, the radome is supported by air pressure alone and can withstand winds more than 130 miles per hour.

The design and fabrication of the radome required development of several new processes, materials, and technologies, and is one of the largest air-supported radomes ever developed, and one far more durable than any approaching its size. [...]

With the installation of the radome, the sea-based X-band radar enters an intense phase of final integration, test, and evaluation prior to entering service in the Ballistic Missile Defense System late this year.

Over the next several months the SBX will undergo a wide range of sea trials and exercises prior to cruising this summer to its home port of Adak, Alaska in the Aleutian Islands. [...]

Initially, it will provide the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) element of the Ballistic Missile Defense System with an advanced training and decoy discrimination capability that will help interceptor missiles located in Alaska and California provide a defense against a limited long-range missile attack aimed at any of our 50 states.

Over time it will be able to support other missiles that may be used against our homeland, deployed forces, allies and friends.

Airlie VA - A comprehensive defense against nuclear missiles is still decades away, a Nobel Prize winning U.S. scientist said Tuesday.

"If we could turn on overnight a completely effective missile defense system, I would be completely in favor of it, even if it cost hundreds of billions of dollars," Professor Steven Weinberg, winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physics, told a conference on the militarization of space Tuesday.

The two day conference held in Airlie, Va., was organized by the Nuclear Policy Research Institute.

However, Weinberg described the current system being deployed in Alaska and elsewhere by the Bush administration to defend against a limited ICBM attack as "a system which has no capability at all."

"There is no prospect" of an effective ABM system to defend the United States against ballistic missile attack for years, perhaps even decades, to come," he said.

Weinberg is a physics professor at the University of Texas in Austin.

Washington - China takes U.S. plans to boost its space military capabilities very seriously and is likely to respond with energetic counter-measures of her own, a leading expert on the Chinese space program told United Press International.

Chinese experts and leaders fear if the United States achieves absolute military and strategic superiority in space it could be used to intervene in China's affairs, such as the Taiwan issue, Hui Zhang, an expert on space weaponization and China's nuclear policy at the John F, Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University told UPI. [...]

Hu Xiaodi, China's veteran senior negotiator on space weaponization, expressed Beijing's fears at a Committee on Peace and Disarmament panel on Oct. 11, 2001.

"It is rather the attempt toward the domination of outer space, which is expected to serve to turn the absolute security and perpetual authority (many people call this hegemony) of one country on earth," he said. "The unilateralism and exceptionalism that are on the rise in recent months also mutually reinforce this."

Chinese strategists believe that U.S. missile-defense plans pose a great threat to China's national security, Zhang said. They believe such defenses could be used to neutralize China's nuclear deterrent and give the United States more freedom to encroach on China's sovereignty, including on Taiwan-related issues, he said. [...]

But China would not stand passively by and do nothing if the United States pushed ahead with its ambitious plans to develop new weapons for force projection from and through space, Zhang said.

"Historically, China's sole purpose for developing its nuclear weapons was to guard itself against the threat of nuclear blackmail," he said.

"China first (intends to) pursue an arms control agreement to ban space weaponization, as it is advocating now," Zhang said. However, "If this effort fails, and if what China perceives as its legitimate security concerns are ignored, China would very likely develop responses to neutralize such a threat."

These responses would depend on the specific infrastructure of the U.S. missile defense and space weaponization programs, Zhang said. But they could include producing as many as 14 or 15 times as many ICBMs with a range of more than 7,800 miles that are able to threaten the United States, he said. [...]

Washington - The Pentagon Monday announced the possible sale of three Aegis naval weapons systems to Australia, saying it would increase the ability of the US and Australian navies to operate together.

The Defense Security and Cooperation Agency (DSCA) estimated the value of the sale at as high as 350 million dollars.

Aegis systems are centered on a sophisticated computerized command system that can cue air defense missiles to enemy missiles and aircraft detected by targeting radar. Using its AN/SPY-1 phased array radar, it can track over a hundred targets simultaneously. [...]

St. Petersburg FL - Cyber Defense Systems has announced that on May 13 their CyberScout UAV performed its first transition flight from hover flight to forward flight.

The CyberScout, a gas powered VTOL type vehicle, is the first in a series of planned UAV's being developed to hover and/or fly horizontally for up to 60 minutes at speeds of 300 MPH plus.

The successful test flight began with a stable hover followed by a vertical ascent to 200 feet above ground level then to forward flight.

When ready for market, the CyberScout should weigh approximately 80 pounds with a camera, a standard flight autopilot with an autonomous flight system, and hold a five-pound payload pod, which can be rapidly field-configured with a wide array of cameras, sensors, weapons, and instruments. [...]

It is 42 inches wide, 1,090 miles long and is intended to save the West from relying on Middle Eastern oil. Nothing has been allowed to stand in its way - and it finally opens today

The first drops of crude will snake their way along a pipeline that traverses some of the most unstable and war-ravaged countries on earth. This is the oil flow that was meant to save the West, and this morning the taps were turned on.

Only 42 inches wide, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan was supposed to alter global oil markets forever. The 1,000-mile project has transformed the geopolitics of the Caucasus and its impact is now being felt in the vastness of central Asia.

Output is supposed to reach one million barrels a day - more than 1 per cent of world production - from an underground reserve that could hold as many as 220 billion barrels.

Its architects and investors claimed the pipeline would shore up energy supplies in the US and Europe for 50 years, protecting our gas-guzzling way of life and easing our reliance on the House of Saud.

The goal of the ambitious project, which makes its tortuous way from the Caspian in Azerbaijan, through Georgia to the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, is to ease the reliance of the West on the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) and bring cheaper fuel to our filling stations. The pipe threads its way through the region in a seemingly modest private corridor only 50 yards wide but nothing has been allowed to stand in its way. From forests to labour laws and endangered species to democracy protesters: all have given way to the costliest and most significant pipeline ever built.

The project, known as BTC, has driven a wedge between the US and Russia, triggered political unrest in the countries it passes through and their neighbours and sparked concern at extensive damage to the environment.

Since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the US, concern at the West's dependence on Persian Gulf oil has intensified. For Washington, the opening is a cause for celebration. "We view this as a significant step forward in the energy security of that region," said Samuel Bodman, the American energy secretary, who stood next to the three heads of state at today's ceremony.

With him at the pumping station controls was the president of the tiny former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. The BTC has allowed Ilham Aliev to become a firm friend of the West while overseeing a government condemned for human rights abuses and sitting at the head of an administration placed 140 out of 146 in Transparency International's global corruption index.

The politics of the pipeline have also changed the face of Georgia, where the battle for control with Russia saw immense US influence deployed in support of the so-called "Rose Revolution". The popular protest ushered the American-educated Mikhail Saakashvili into power two years ago. Washington's new ties with Tbilisi were amply demonstrated when George Bush became the first US president to visit the country earlier this month.

In the long-term US ally Turkey, where the pipeline crucially delivers its oil direct to the Mediterranean - bypassing the tanker-clogged Bosphorus straits, it is no accident that it does so right next to the American airbase at Incirlik. [...]

Once the Soviet empire fell, the Caspian found itself surrounded by five nation states - Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan.

The region's supply of cheap oil and key position on the historic border between the West and the East meant that countries quickly moved into position like pieces on a chessboard.

Three rival plans were drawn up - a northern route through Russia, a southern alternative through Iran and the central option through the Caucasus to the Mediterranean.

The winner could be in little doubt: the middle road was the only one which guaranteed Washington and its corporate allies a corridor of control.

The US Vice-President Dick Cheney, who was then chief executive of oil services giant Halliburton, was among the first to be swept away in the excitement.

"I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian," he said in 1998.

Now, more than a decade and $4bn (£2.2bn) later, almost three quarters of which came from bank loans which were underwritten by government agencies and £320m in taxpayers' money, the pipeline is open. But this chapter of what Rudyard Kipling called the "Great Game" - the secret battle to dominate central Asia - has only reached the end of its first phase.

The fanfare at the British oil giant BP's gleaming new terminal at Sangachal in Azerbaijan may yet prove to be premature.

Stripped of the American hype of the 1990s, the crude that began a very modest flow this morning is the first instalment of a reserve many analysts are now convinced is actually only 32 billion barrels - equivalent to that of a small Gulf player such as Qatar.

The game now moves to the transCaspian pipeline and to the immense plains of Turkmenistan and the political cauldron of Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and beyond.

President Bush said the other day that the world should see his administration's handling of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison as a model of transparency and accountability. He said those responsible were being systematically punished, regardless of rank. It made for a nice Oval Office photo-op on a Friday morning. Unfortunately, none of it is true.

The administration has provided nothing remotely like a full and honest accounting of the extent of the abuses at American prison camps in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It has withheld internal reports and stonewalled external inquiries, while clinging to the fiction that the abuse was confined to isolated acts, like the sadistic behavior of one night crew in one cellblock at Abu Ghraib. The administration has prevented any serious investigation of policy makers at the White House, the Justice Department and the Pentagon by orchestrating official probes so that none could come even close to the central question of how the prison policies were formulated and how they led to the abuses.

But a two-part series in The Times by Tim Golden provides a horrifying new confirmation that what happened at Abu Ghraib was no aberration, but part of a widespread pattern. It showed the tragic impact of the initial decision by Mr. Bush and his top advisers that they were not going to follow the Geneva Conventions, or indeed American law, for prisoners taken in antiterrorist operations.

The series details the killing of two Afghan prisoners at the Bagram prison camp, one of them an innocent taxi driver who was tormented to death by American soldiers. The investigative file on Bagram, obtained by The Times, showed that the mistreatment of prisoners was routine: shackling them to the ceilings of their cells, depriving them of sleep, kicking and hitting them, sexually humiliating them and threatening them with guard dogs - the very same behavior later repeated in Iraq.

This pattern should not surprise anyone by now. The same general who organized the harsh interrogation techniques at Guantánamo Bay was later sent to Iraq, as were some of the prison guard units from Bagram. Guards at the Iraq and Afghanistan prisons were sent to their duties from civilian life, with no experience and little training.

One thing they were taught at Bagram was the "common peroneal strike" - a blow to the side of the leg just above the knee that can cause severe damage. It is clearly out of bounds for a civilized army, but it was used at Bagram routinely. The taxi driver, Dilawar, died after "blunt force injuries to the lower extremities" stopped his heart, according to the autopsy report.

The trouble is, normal bounds did not apply at Bagram, because the president had muddied the water with conflicting orders. In a February 2002 memo, he spoke of giving prisoners humane treatment, but only when it suited "military necessity," and he also said members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban were not entitled to prisoner-of-war status. That led interrogators to believe that they "could deviate slightly from the rules," according to an Army Reserve sergeant who served at Bagram.

It now appears that those slight deviations included killing prisoners, and then covering up the reason they died.

The US abdicated its responsibility to set a global example in upholding human rights in 2004 and, with the UK, led a "dangerous new agenda" by sanctioning torture in a failed attempt to combat terrorism, Amnesty International warned today.

Speaking at the launch of Amnesty's annual report into human rights abuses, the group's secretary general, Irene Khan, said governments worldwide had betrayed their promises on human rights last year.

She singled out as bleak examples international inaction on the killings in Darfur, the UN's failure to deal with abuses in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the torture of prisoners by the US military in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The US came in for particular criticism over its pronouncements on torture and for "usurping the language of justice and freedom to pursue policies of fear and insecurity", she told a London press conference.

"The USA, as the unrivalled political, military and economic hyperpower, sets the tone for governmental behaviour worldwide," she said. "When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a licence to others to commit abuse with impunity."

She said practices such as the detention without trial of more than 500 men at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba undermined US moral authority and had damaged the Bush administration's ability to put pressure on other countries for progress on human rights.

"The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law," she said. " Guantánamo evokes memories of Soviet repression."

Ms Khan likened the Bush administration's practice of holding unregistered prisoners, or "ghost detainees", at secret locations to tactics deployed in some Latin American countries.

The US government's use of dubious terms such as environmental manipulations, stress positions and sensory manipulation to describe the treatment of prisoners amounted to "cynical attempts to redefine and sanitise torture", she said. She also criticised what she said was the UK's acceptance of intelligence derived by torture in certain circumstances.

"To say in a 21st-century democracy that torture is acceptable is to push us back to medieval ages," she warned.

Against this backdrop, armed groups had continued to make shocking attacks on civilians, Amnesty reported. These included the murder of hundreds of parents and children in Beslan, the massacre of commuters in Madrid and the beheadings and bombings in Iraq. Yet governments had persisted with failed, but politically convenient, strategies on tacking terrorism, Ms Khan said. "Four years after 9/11, the promise to make the world a safer place remains hollow."

With tens of thousands of people killed and more than 2 million displaced by the violence in Darfur in western Sudan, Ms Khan called on African leaders to stand firm on human rights, accusing the African Union of failing the people of Zimbabwe.

"African leaders do a disservice to their own people when they use African solidarity as a cover for impunity rather than a call for accountability," Ms Khan said.

The director of Amnesty's Africa programme, Kolawole Olaniyan, added that the failure to protect women and children in Congo, as well as sham elections in Togo, had highlighted weaknesses in the African Union. Apathy, indifference and the international community's failure to keep its promises had only added to Africa's human rights problems, he said.

Ms Khan defended Amnesty against accusations that the report had focused unduly on human rights abuses by the US, saying the accusations were backed up by facts.

"We are not doing this to pursue an anti-American agenda," she said. "We are pointing out to the US the role it can play to create a positive role model."

MADRID - A car bomb injured at least 34 people in the Spanish capital on Wednesday in an apparent rebuff by Basque separatist guerrillas ETA to government peace overtures.

The bomb, in a stolen car, blew up in an industrial zone in northeastern Madrid 45 minutes after a Basque newspaper received a warning in the name of ETA, officials said.

The warning gave police time to seal off the area, but dozens were hurt by flying glass or the force of the blast. [...]

An emergency services spokeswoman told state radio that 34 people had been treated so far, mostly for cuts and hearing damage, but only one required hospital treatment.

Interior Minister Jose Antonio Alonso said the bomb was estimated to contain between 18 and 20 kgs (40 to 44 lbs) of explosives, he said.

The blast appeared to be a defiant response by ETA to a vote by the Spanish Parliament last week granting the government permission to open peace talks with the group if it laid down its arms.

The bomb came two days after French police detained three suspected ETA members and hours before two leaders of Batasuna, banned as the political wing of ETA, were due to appear in a Madrid court to answer charges of belonging to ETA. [...]

NICOSIA (Reuters) - Bioterrorism is a credible threat which authorities worldwide have underestimated, the world's top law enforcement agency warned on Wednesday.

Interpol says the world is largely unprepared for the possibility of attacks with crude biological agents -- some of which can be developed in a kitchen -- that militant groups have developed a heightened interest in.

"We, as police, cannot afford to be unprepared for the eventual use of biological agents by terrorist groups," Interpol president Jackie Selebi told a regional conference in Cyprus.

The world intelligence community has long warned that the militant group al Qaeda could try to use biological weapons such as anthrax, ricin, smallpox, plague or Ebola.

Al Qaeda manuals on preparation of biological agents were discovered at the group's training camps in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion in 2001.

"I do not want to scare everybody to say there is going to be a bio-terrorist attack. I am simply saying that, dealing with the issue of terrorism, you must deal with the issue of terrorism in its totality, including the possible use of biological agents," Selebi told journalists.

HIDDEN KILLERS

Biological agents are easy to make, carry and conceal but do not, at the moment at least, have the capacity to claim large numbers of casualties at once.

Interpol has a dedicated unit working on raising awareness of the threat, developing training programs and encouraging new legislation in jurisdictions where a prosecution for using bio-agents is possible only once the agent is actually deployed and therefore far too late.

"Failing in this area is not an option. The consequences of such failure are far to dire to contemplate," he said.

Asked if Interpol members were now prepared to counter the threat, Selebi replied: "They are being prepared."

The devastating effects of deliberate use of biological agents to inflict harm manifested itself with the anthrax scare of 2001, in which five people died in the United States after exposure to barely-visible flecks of the bacteria.

A leading US expert on biological warfare said the FBI had identified the perpetrator of last fall’s anthrax attacks on the congressional Democratic leadership and other targets, but was "dragging its feet" in making an arrest and pressing charges, for fear that secret government activities would be exposed.

Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, director of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Program for the Federation of American Scientists, an independent, non-governmental professional group, made the charge in a speech February 18 at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

She said the FBI had known since last October the identity of the person who mailed lethal quantities of anthrax in letters to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Senator Patrick Leahy, and several media outlets. Sources she described as "government insiders" told her the individual in question had been interrogated several times, but not arrested.

At least five anthrax-laced letters were mailed last fall, causing five deaths and several more serious illnesses. Three of them, with a weaker variety of the bacteria, went to the publisher of the Star tabloid, the New York Post, and NBC News anchorman Tom Brokaw. Two more, with extremely powerful doses, went to Daschle and Leahy.

As microbiologists have more carefully studied the anthrax in the Daschle and Leahy letters, they have remarked on the purity and potency of the spores. It has become clear that only a small number of people, those with both the necessary scientific knowledge and access to government stocks of anthrax developed for bacteriological weapons, could have carried out the attack.

According to an account in the Trenton Times, Rosenberg told her Princeton audience that the suspect was likely to be a scientist who formerly worked at the US government’s main biological warfare laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland, near Frederick, about 40 miles northwest of Washington DC.

In response to a question as to whether the knowledge required to produce the anthrax was widespread among scientists at major drug and chemical companies, Rosenberg said this conception was refuted by a careful examination of the letters to Capitol Hill. "I think that the results of the analyses show that access to classified information was essential," she said, "and that rules out most of the people in the pharmaceutical industry."

The extreme toxicity of the anthrax spores suggests that the attacker not only had experience in handling anthrax in a military setting, but had been vaccinated and received annual booster shots, and had access to classified information about how to treat the spores chemically so they would spread through the air without clumping together.

"We can draw a likely portrait of the perpetrator as a former Fort Detrick scientist who is now working for a contractor in the Washington, DC area," Rosenberg said. "He had reason for travel to Florida, New Jersey and the United Kingdom.... There is also the likelihood the perpetrator made the anthrax himself. He grew it, probably on a solid medium and weaponized it at a private location where he had accumulated the equipment and the material.

"We know that the FBI is looking at this person, and it’s likely that he participated in the past in secret activities that the government would not like to see disclosed," Rosenberg said. "And this raises the question of whether the FBI may be dragging its feet somewhat and may not be so anxious to bring to public light the person who did this.

"I know that there are insiders, working for the government, who know this person and who are worried that it could happen that some kind of quiet deal is made so that he just disappears from view," Rosenberg said.

"I hope that doesn’t happen, and that is my motivation to continue to follow this and to try to encourage press coverage and pressure on the FBI to follow up and publicly prosecute the perpetrator."

Rosenberg also expressed the belief that the Bush administration refused last summer to sign an international biological weapons treaty banning germ warfare weapons because of ongoing secret research and development of such weapons.

The issues raised by Rosenberg are of extraordinary significance. They suggest that the FBI is not only refusing to carry out a serious investigation into the anthrax attacks, but lying to the American public about its efforts. Two weeks before Rosenberg’s speech, the FBI held a press conference in the Trenton area to announce it was doubling to $2.5 million the reward for information leading to the arrest of those responsible. The FBI also sent out an e-mail to 40,000 microbiologists appealing for their assistance in the investigation.

FBI sources told the New York Times that they had made little headway in the investigation and had no firm suspects, according to a report published in the Times January 23. But by Rosenberg’s account, the FBI has long known who mailed the spores, and has interviewed the individual several times.

A similar piece of disinformation appeared in the Wall Street Journal February 12. The newspaper reported, citing FBI sources, that the anthrax investigation was now centered on US military labs, beginning with Ft. Detrick and Dugway, Utah. But again, the investigation was presented as painstaking and thorough, with very few positive leads.

Further evidence of the FBI’s lack of interest comes from Canadian anthrax researchers. Bush administration officials have suggested, in recent press interviews, that a vigorous effort is under way to identify the exact source of the anthrax used in the Leahy letter by comparing it genetically to varieties of the Ames strain of anthrax distributed to labs in North America and Britain. But according to Bill Kournikakis, a biologist at the Defense Research Establishment in Suffield, Alberta, "We have never been contacted by any law enforcement agency with regard to our Ames strain."

One additional fact points to the conclusion that someone connected to Ft. Detrick is responsible for the anthrax attacks. An anonymous letter was sent to a US marine base in late September, after the anthrax letters were posted but before any cases were diagnosed or the attack publicized, declaring that an Egyptian-American scientist, Ayaad Assaad, was a bioterrorist. Assaad was laid off from Ft. Detrick in 1997. He later charged that his dismissal involved racial prejudice and harassment. He has been cleared of any role in the anthrax mailings.

The timing of the denunciation—after the September 11 terrorist attacks but before the anthrax letters became publicly known—suggests that the anonymous accuser was the person who mailed the anthrax letters. The attacker sought to accuse an Arab-American of the crime in order to throw investigators off his trail, just as he used Islamic fundamentalist language in the anthrax letters themselves. The attacker must have been familiar enough with Ft. Detrick to know that Assaad would be a potential target for such a frame-up.

The anthrax spores enclosed in envelopes mailed to two leading Senate Democrats in October are biologically identical to bacteria secretly manufactured at a US germ warfare facility during the last decade, according to press reports and an analysis by a leading microbiologist.

The army biological and chemical warfare unit at the Dugway Proving Ground, about 80 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah, may well be the source of the weapons-grade anthrax sent to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. Scientists at Dugway grew and processed spores deriving from the Ames strain—the strain that appeared in all the letters sent to media outlets and Congress.

The spores had been carefully milled to produce the size most effective in spreading the deadly bacteria, between one and three microns. [...]

The Washington Post, in a front-page report December 16, cited these experts as concluding: "Genetic fingerprinting studies indicate that the anthrax spores mailed to Capitol Hill are identical to stocks of the deadly bacteria maintained by the US Army since 1980." At least one of the scientists told the Post that "the original source" of the anthrax in the Daschle and Leahy letters "had to have been USAMRIID," i.e., Fort Detrick.

The Post added: "The FBI’s investigation into the anthrax attacks is increasingly focusing on whether US government bioweapons research programs, including one conducted by the CIA, may have been the source of deadly anthrax powder sent through the mail, according to sources with knowledge of the probe. The results of the genetic tests strengthen that possibility. The FBI is focusing on a contractor that worked with the CIA, one source said."

The genetic fingerprinting finding was made by a research team led by geneticist Paul Keim at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, the newspaper said, adding that the FBI had begun interviewing CIA officials responsible for the CIA’s own germ warfare program, which made use of the Ames strain.

The Post added that both profit and politics were being considered as possible factors in the anthrax letters: "Investigators are considering a wide range of possible motives for the anthrax attacks, including vengeance of some sort, profiteering by someone involved in the anthrax cleanup business, or perhaps an effort by someone to cast blame on Iraq..."

While this new direction in the investigation is well known in official Washington, neither the Bush administration nor the major television networks have focused any public attention on the growing likelihood that a section of the state apparatus itself, with close links to far-right elements, is the probable source of the anthrax attacks.

- Radical Islamic groups are pressing ahead with plans for worldwide anti-U.S. protests later this week. A demonstration in Indonesia Sunday indicated the level of anger directed towards America over Koran abuse allegations.

"Destroy America and its allies," Indonesian extremist leader Muhammad Iqbal told a rally outside the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, using a public address system to address the crowd. "Kill those who desecrate Islam."

An estimated 7,000 Muslims protested in the Indonesian capital, a gathering that drew several dozen Islamic organizations, including the mainstream "moderate" groups Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, each of which claims millions of members.

Iqbal called President Bush and his allies "infidels" (unbelievers), while other speakers also called for war. [...]

DUBAI (Reuters) - Al Qaeda's wing in Iraq said it was behind the assassination of an official in the Ministry of State for National Security on Monday, according to an Internet posting.

A statement from Al Qaeda in Iraq said its men killed Wael Rubaie and his driver as they headed to work in central Baghdad.

AL-QAEDA has established a foothold in Palestine with a new militant group based in Gaza formed by extremists who have become disillusioned with Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Amid the biggest flare-up of violence in Gaza since a ceasefire was declared three months ago by Palestinians and Israelis, the Jerusalem Post has quoted unnamed Palestinian Authority security officials as saying that a new group called Jundallah or 'Allah's Brigade' had links to the terrorist organisation headed by Osama bin Laden.

The new terror group consists mainly of former Hamas and Islamic Jihad members who believe these two militant groups have become too moderate. It has close ties to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran.

Khaled Abu Toameh, a journalist for the Jerusalem Post, Israel's oldest and most respected English-language daily, has interviewed PA officials who said the establishment of Jundallah confirmed suspicions that al-Qaeda was attempting to gain a foothold in Gaza ahead of the planned Israeli withdrawal beginning on August 15.

Comment: So the scene is set. "al-Qaeda" is in Palestine, according to the Zionist Jerusalem Post quoting "unnamed Palestinian Authority security officials". Is the JP capable of lying or publishing claims by dubious sources? Is Fox News a US government broadcasting channel?

The PA officials were quoted as saying that Jundallah gunmen launched their first attack on Israeli soldiers near Rafah in Gaza last week. Four soldiers were wounded in the incident. Abu Abdullah al-Khattab, who identified himself as the spokesman for Jundallah in Gaza, denied his group was linked to al-Qaeda but hinted that as well as Israeli targets, the group was planning to target US interests in the region.

"Our people will not remain idle in the face of American crimes in Muslim countries," he said. "Soon everyone will see operations [against the US] that will make all the Muslims delighted." He also said Jundallah would not honour any unofficial truce with Israel.

Comment: Now we have the set up: "al-Qaeda", linked to Palestinian groups, is planning to target US interests in the the region. Get it? It seems that Sharon's plan for the final solution to the Palestinian problem will involve the US doing his dirty work.

But on the record, PA officials were yesterday reluctant to confirm links between Jundallah and al-Qaeda, with senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, casting doubt on ties. "It is very unlikely that al-Qaeda would be operating in Gaza," he told the Scotland on Sunday.

Comment: So "unnamed" and therefore unofficial, Palestinian Authority security officials claim that "al-Qaeda" is in Palestine, Official PA officials claim that it is very unlikely, and how does the Jerusalem Post and the Scotsman title their article? "Al-Qaeda gains Palestine foothold". It's called subtly programming the masses' minds with lies.

A spokesman for the Palestinian interior minister, Nasser Youssef, said he could not comment on the report.

But analysts say public confirmation of al-Qaeda links would place the PA in a difficult position since it would mean they would face even greater international pressure to take action against militants who are also closely tied to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Comment: Amazing! Sharon has been pushing the PA to take action against militants for years, and now suddenly "al-Qaeda" come up with the goods for Sharon! If "al-Qaeda" didn't exist, Sharon really would have to invent it.

As well as confronting the possibility of violent protests from Jewish settlers who refuse to leave, Israeli officials fear Palestinian militants will step up violence in the lead-up and during the pullout.

The emergence of a new militant group in Gaza, especially one with reported links to al-Qaeda, was not surprising, said Ra'anan Gissin, an aide to prime minister Sharon.

"There is some evidence of links between militants in Gaza and al-Qaeda," he told the Scotland on Sunday. "We are watching and following such developments very closely but for us, local terrorist groups are just as dangerous."

Comment: Just for the record, the Palestinian militants are NOT terrorists! They are fighting a just campaign against an massively more powerful aggressor that robbed them of most of their land and made them prisoners in what land they were left. The only terrorists in this particular equation are the Israeli military, their government masters and the Bush regime that funds the entire criminal operation.

It is not the first time al-Qaeda's name has been connected with Palestinian militants. In February 2003, an Israeli military court sentenced a Palestinian man to 27 years in prison for training in Afghanistan with bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.

A member of Hamas, Nabil Oukal was arrested in 2000 and allegedly told Israeli interrogators he was recruited by al-Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan to form a network in the Palestinian territories.

"While this information about Jundallah has yet to be confirmed, there's no doubt that al-Qaeda has tried and continues to try and recruit members of other organisations such as Hamas or Islamic Jihad," said Dr Ely Karmon, a senior researcher in international terrorism at Israel's International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism.

"It is a great concern for Israel if al-Qaeda does get a foothold in the Palestinian territories since with al-Qaeda, all bets are off. Unlike Hamas and other local groups who face direct consequences once they carry out a terrorist operation, al-Qaeda are ready to sacrifice many Muslims to further their cause."

Comment: And so we come the crux of the matter. It is indeed true that "al-Qaeda" have been caught attempting to recruit Palestinians into their organization in the Gaza strip, the major point, however, is that the "al-Qaeda" operatives were proven to be Israeli intelligence!

Mossad Exposed in Phony 'Palestinian Al-Qaeda' Caper

by Michele Steinberg and Hussein Askary

The United States government has been provided with concrete evidence that the Israeli Mossad and other Israeli intelligence services have been involved in a 13-month effort to "recruit" an Israeli-run, phony "al-Qaeda cell" among Palestinians, so that Israel could achieve a frontline position in the U.S. war against terrorism and get a green light for a worldwide "revenge without borders" policy. The question: Does the United States have the moral fiber to investigate?

Evidence of the Israeli dirty tricks burst onto the public scene on Dec. 6, when Col. Rashid Abu Shbak, head of the Palestinian Preventive Security Services in the Gaza Strip, held a press conference revealing the details of the alleged plot, as his agency had put the pieces together. The revelations undermine the "big lie" that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has used to justify new brutal attacks on Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip and other occupied areas. Sharon claimed on Dec. 4 that Israeli intelligence had "hard evidence" of al-Qaeda operations in the Gaza Strip. Now, the top Palestinian leadership has shown the United States and other nations how Israeli intelligence entities were creating that al-Qaeda link!

American leader Lyndon LaRouche, a Democratic Presidential pre-candidate in 2004, commented that these revelations, if confirmed, could be "of strategic importance" in stopping the American, British, and Israeli warhawks pushing for a Middle East war, beginning with an invasion of Iraq. A war would justify the Sharon government's plan to annihilate the very idea of a Palestinian state. LaRouche warned that if institutions of the American Presidency and the international community successfully block an American pre-emptive war on Iraq, the biggest danger would be that a "mega-terror" attack, blamed on Palestinians, or an "Iraqi-linked" al-Qaeda, would be staged by Israel's ruling Jabotinskyite fanatics, to put the war back on the agenda.

News about the Mossad-run attempt to create an al-Qaeda cell came when well-informed intelligence sources based in Washington had already told EIR that there are many doubts about the Mossad's hasty declaration that "al-Qaeda" had been responsible for the Nov. 28 attack on a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, where three Israelis were killed, and the failed rocket attack on an Israeli chartered jet that was departing from Mombasa airport. There was no identification of the bombers within the first five days of the incident, the sources pointed out, yet Sharon's government ministers went on an immediate propaganda rampage announcing worldwide revenge (see article in this section). Authorities in Kenya also denied the al-Qaeda link. But the usefulness of blaming al-Qaeda, for the Israeli right, was palpable, when Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the Kenya attacks "a golden opportunity" to prove to the United States that Bush's war on terrorism, and Israel's war with the Palestinians is the same thing. Netanyahu's faction has violently rejected the Palestinian Authority's revelations, and so far, the American and European press have followed suit, despite the dramatic nature of these charges, and the documents that the Palestinians have provided to the international press.

Chronology of the Revelations

On Dec. 7, the British news service, Reuters, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, and Qatar-based Al-Jazeera TV network, all reported that the Palestinian Authority had accused the Mossad of creating a phony al-Qaeda cell in the Gaza Strip. Ha'aretz reported, "the head of Palestinian Preventive Security" in the Gaza Strip, Col. Rashid Abu Shbak, said on Dec. 6, "that his forces had identified a number of Palestinian collaborators who had been ordered by Israeli security agencies to 'work in the Gaza Strip under the name of al-Qaeda.' He said the investigation was ongoing and evidence would be presented soon." Al-Jazeera TV added that the Palestinian authorities had arrested a group of Palestinian "collaborators with Israeli occupation" in Gaza, involved in the operation.

Reuters' reporter Diala Saadeh, under the headline, "Palestinians: Israel Faked Gaza al-Qaeda Presence," quoted a number of Palestinian Authority (P.A.) senior officials, including President Yasser Arafat, who told reporters at his West Bank Ramallah headquarters, that Sharon's claims of al-Qaeda operations in Palestinian territories "is a big, big, big lie to cover [Sharon's] attacks and his crimes against our people everywhere." P.A. Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo detailed the case: "There are certain elements who were instructed by the Mossad to form a cell under the name of al-Qaeda in the Gaza Strip in order to justify the assault and the military campaigns of the Israeli occupation army against Gaza."

Palestinian officials promised to provide detailed evidence, and did so on Dec. 8, in a press conference addressed by Colonel Shbak, and by Palestinian Minister for Planning and International Cooperation Nabil Shaath. Shbak told the international representatives that, "Over the past nine months, we've been investigating eight cases in which Israeli intelligence posing as al-Qaeda operatives recruited Palestinians in the Gaza Strip." Colonel Shbak said that 3 men were under arrest, and 11 had been released. He explained that those released had voluntarily provided information going back to May 2002, about the contacts that had been made asking them to operate as an "al-Qaeda" group. The alleged al-Qaeda recruiters were traced to Israeli intelligence, said Colonel Shbak. He detailed incidents, some of which were described in official documents, of cell phone calls and e-mails, where Palestinians were asked to "join al-Qaeda." Shbak said, "We investigated the origin of those calls, which used [wireless phone] roaming, and messages, and found out they all came from Israel," reported the publication, IslamOnline. He said that the potential "recruits," had been given money and weapons, "although most of these weapons did not even work." He also noted that the money for these targetted Palestinians "was transferred from bank accounts in Jerusalem or Israel."

Minister Shaath announced at the press conference that the P.A. had "handed ambassadors and consuls of the Arab and foreign countries, documents revealing the involvement of the Israeli intelligence in recruiting citizens from Gaza Strip in a fake organization carrying the name of Qaeda." He said the ploy was intended "to create a new excuse to escalate the aggression on Gaza Strip."

The international community was jolted again on Dec. 10, when Colonel Shbak held another press conference and the Preventive Security Agency presented the Mossad's potential recruiter himself to the international media. According to reports in the Arabic press in Dubai, London and Ramallah, the man appeared in disguise (f