News 101

Rumsfeld heralds shift to "war of ideas" on terror

PARIS - Questioning whether the United States is winning the war on terror, Donald Rumsfeld has set the stage for a policy shift that will put more emphasis on the struggle for hearts and minds.

In a leaked memo and in public comments this week, the U.S. defence secretary stressed the importance of defeating terrorism not just through military victories but in a "war of ideas".

In the memo, where he asked top defence officials "Are we winning or losing the global war on terror?", Rumsfeld referred three times to the danger from madrassas -- religious schools in the Islamic world which he said were recruiting young militants.

And in an interview with the Washington Times, he floated the idea of a "21st century information agency in the government" to help wage the battle of minds.

"The overwhelming majority of the people of all religions don't believe in terrorism. They don't believe in running around killing innocent men, women and children. And we need more people standing up and saying that in the world, not just us."

For critics of U.S. policy, this shift in emphasis cannot come soon enough.

French terrorism expert Xavier Raufer said Washington's strategy to date "is not working, it's stupid".

He said the key failure was precisely its inability to counter the power of Osama bin Laden's exhortations to jihad or holy war, spread via recorded messages broadcast on Arabic media, including one as recently as last Saturday.

Washington was focusing too much on the man and not enough on the message, treating the al Qaeda leader as though he was an army commander or the head of a traditional guerrilla group.

"Bin Laden is not the chief of the IRA (Irish Republican Army)," Raufer said. "His only power is to preach...He has the power to disseminate, to incite people to go into jihad, but he cannot force them. He can push people, he can inflame them but he cannot give any orders. He is not the general of an army."

LIMITED RETHINK
Many critics have long urged Washington to reappraise its wider Middle East policy to address the deeper underlying causes of Islamic terror, but Rumsfeld's comments did not suggest such a rethink was likely.

Ivo Daalder of the U.S.-based Brookings Institution said it was simplistic to suggest the key to the problem lay in the madrassas.

"He ought to be looking at the question of our policy towards the Middle East, our policy of supporting repressive Arab regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt," he said. "It struck me it was a little too narrow a framework."

U.S.-based security analysts said the leaked Rumsfeld memo was not a sign of panic, but showed the Bush administration accepting the need to update its thinking in the light of setbacks in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

"We've been in Afghanistan nearly two years now and they're still shooting at us. And there may not have been an al Qaeda connection in Iraq a year ago but there sure is now," said John Pike, head of the GlobalSecurity.org think-tank.

"The perception is that the memo was leaked by Rummy and intended to demonstrate he's on the ball, he's not an idiot and he realises they need to continue to update their planning."

IRAQ PULLOUT 'NOT AN OPTION'
Nor do analysts see any sign of a fundamental rethink of the U.S. military presence in Iraq, which President George W. Bush has described as the central front in the war on terror.

Despite daily attacks on U.S. forces, Pike said the United States could sustain the current level of violence indefinitely and the strategic stakes in oil-rich Iraq were too high for it to walk away.

"Declaring victory and going home is not an option in Iraq the way it was in Vietnam," he said.

"If they inaugurated (former exile Ahmad) Chalabi as president and wished him well and left, some man with a moustache would show up a few days later, shoot him in the head and say that he was in charge."

Pike said any switch in Iraq policy was likely to involve intensified counter-terrorist operations by U.S. special forces. He said Washington could hope to cut its troop presence from 130,000 to 50,000 within 18 months, if within that time the Central Intelligence Agency could build up a loyal Iraqi secret police apparatus to reinforce control.

But Daalder said the temptation to scale back the U.S. occupation would increase as next year's presidential election approached, and especially if former Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein were captured.

"The sign to look for is the day they get Saddam," he said. "There will be an extraordinarily large temptation to use the killing or capture of Saddam Hussein as the signal that we can now reduce our presence."

Iraqi governing council members

Abdel-Zahraa Othman Mohammed, head of the Islamic Dawa party in Basra. Writer, political activist. Shiite.

Abdel Aziz al Hakim, a religious and political leader from the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, brother of Mohammad Bakr al Hakim, who was assassinated in a car bombing in Najaf. Shiite.

Abdel-Karim al Mohammedawi, head of the Iraqi Hezbollah Party of God. Dubbed "Prince of the Marshes" for leading a 17-year resistance movement against Saddam in the marshes, for which he spent six years in prison. Shiite.

Adnan Pachachi, president of the Iraqi Independent Democrats. Former Iraqi foreign minister and permanent representative to the United Nations. Shiite.

Ahmad Chalabi, founder and head of the London-based Iraqi National Congress, mathematics professor and businessman. Shiite.

Ahmed al Barak, human rights activist and lawyer from Babel. Tribal leader of the Al Bu Sultan tribe of Babel, Iraq. Shiite.

Iyad Allawi, secretary-general for the Iraqi National Accord, opposition member within Iraq. Shiite.

Dara Noor Alzin, judge. Sentenced to jail for ruling that one of Saddam Hussein's edicts was unconstitutional. Imprisoned at Abu Ghraib prison, he was released in the general amnesty last October. Sunni.

Ibrahim al Jafari, spokesman for the Islamic Dawa Party, which was persecuted by Saddam. Born in Karbala, educated in medicine in Mosul. Spent time in the United States and the United Kingdom. Shiite.

Ghazi Ajil al Yawer, Mosul sheikh, civil engineer, recently vice president of Hicvap Technology Co. in Riyadh. Sunni.

Hamid Majid Moussa, secretary of the Iraqi Communist Party since 1993. Born in Babel, Iraq. Economist and petroleum researcher. Shiite.

Jalal Talabani, secretary-general of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and a leading figure of the Iraqi democratic movement. Kurd.

Mohsen Abdel Hamid, secretary-general of the Iraqi Islamic Party, born in Kirkuk, author of more than 30 books on the Quran. Baghdad University professor. Sunni.

Mohammed Bahr al Uloum, Najaf cleric who returned from London, where he headed the Ahl al Bayt charitable center. Shiite.

Mahmoud Othman, independent politician and longtime leader of the Kurdish National Struggle. Kurd.

Massood Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, former peshmerga (fighter), elected president in 1979, re-elected in 1999. Kurd.

Mouwafak al Rubii, born in al Shatra, member of the British Royal Doctors' College, consultant in internal medicine and neurology, human rights activist. Returned from United Kingdom. Shiite.

Naseer Kamel al Chaderji, leader of the National Democratic Party, Baghdad resident, lawyer, businessman and farm owner. Sunni.

Raja Habib al Khuzaai, medical doctor, head of the maternity hospital in Diwaniya. Lived in the United Kingdom from the late 1960s until she returned to Iraq in 1977. Shiite.

Samir Shakir Mahmoud al Sumaidy, from the al Sumaidy clan with documented lineage from the prophet Mohammad through Mousa al Khadhum (a nephew of the prophet). Writer, entrepreneur and opposition figure. Shiite.

Salaheddine Muhammad Bahaaeddine, secretary-general of the Kurdistan Islamic Union, born in Halabja, author of several books. Kurd.

Sondul Chapouk, a civil engineer and teacher from Kirkuk, women's rights activist. Turkoman.

Wael Abduk Latif, deputy head judge in Basra, practiced civil and criminal law before being disbarred and imprisoned by Saddam. Shiite.

Yonadam Kana, secretary-general of the Assyrian Democratic Movement. Former minister of public works and housing and former minister of industry and energy in Iraqi Kurdistan. Engineer and activist against the former regime. Christian.

Deceased - Aquila al Hashimi, female diplomat who led Iraq's delegation to the New York donors conference. PhD in Modern Literature. Worked with U.N. programs in Iraq since 1991, killed by unknown gunmen in August. Shiite.

Coalition troops operating in Iraq

The $36 billion estimated cost of rebuilding Iraq which Washington hopes to raise at a conference in Madrid on Thursday comes on top of a $20 billion estimate for security, rebuilding the oil industry and other spending.

The first day of the conference will be devoted mainly to setting out Iraq's reconstruction needs, and donor countries will make pledges on Friday.

Here is a short table by country of forces currently operating in Iraq or who may be deployed there:


In Iraq+ En Route or
Alerted+
United States 155,000 15,000+
Britain 12,000
TOTALS: 167,000 15,000
OTHER COUNTRIES:
Albania 100
Australia 1,000
Bulgaria 470
Czech Rep. 706
Denmark 410 90
Dominican Rep. 300
El Salvador 360
Estonia 50
Honduras 370
Hungary #
Italy
(inc. Romanian &
Portuguese elements) 3,400
Japan 41
Kazakhstan 25
Latvia 36
Lithuania 193
Macedonia 28
Mongolia 180
Netherlands 1,100
New Zealand #
Nicaragua 230
Norway 104
Philippines 175
Poland 2,400
Romania 400
Slovakia 69 120
Spain 1,300
South Korea 700
Thailand 21 422
Ukraine 2,000
TOTALS 15,918 882
NOTE: Many figures are rounded or estimated.
+ As of Sept 25, 2003
# Precise figure not known

In Hawaii, culture and environment force the need for balance

Within a few hundred feet of the entrance to the Army's Makua Military Reservation sits a hand-built altar, a thigh-high structure of rocks stacked upon rocks as wide as a kitchen table.

Though it's just a dot within the valley's 4,190 acres, the sacred "ahu" serves as a reminder to the Army of its responsibility to protect the land that Native Hawaiians had cared for long before the first round of ammunition was fired there.

The altar was built two years ago by Native Hawaiian groups who reached an agreement with the Army that allows them controlled access to Makua Valley for cultural purposes.

Away from Oahu's tourist spots and 35 miles from downtown Honolulu on Oahu's Leeward Coast, the rugged valley is off limits to other civilians.

"We want to do what's best for Makua Valley," said Alvin Char, chief of the environmental division of U.S. Army Garrison Hawaii. "It's vital for training, but we think we can have the training missions and malama (Hawaiian for 'take care of') Makua as well."

Beyond the cultural significance of Makua Valley is its environmental significance.

In 1998, a local preservation group called Malama Makua took legal action that stopped the Army's live-fire training at Makua until shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Lawyers for the group agreed the Army needed the valley for training during the war on terrorism, and the Army agreed to limit its live-fire training in the valley and the types of ammunition it uses.

As the only live-fire training area on Oahu capable of adequately preparing company-size units, the Army considers Makua Valley critical to training.

But the valley's cultural and environmental significance to Hawaii also has forced the military to strike a balance between taking care of the land and providing soldiers with realistic training conditions.

"Paying attention to the environment and being aware of impact to the environment is critical to continue training here in Hawaii," said Kapua Kawelo, a biologist in the Army's environmental division who helps identify and preserve endangered species and critical habitat.

Environmental issues within the military are being raised on Capitol Hill this month as the Department of Defense pushes for exemptions to some of the nation's key environmental laws, claiming they hamper the military's ability to train in peace as it fights in war.

The White House-backed package first was introduced last year and contained eight provisions. Congress passed three last year, and the Pentagon now is seeking passage of the remaining five. House and Senate versions of the legislation are being reconciled in conference committee.

Environmentalists are vehemently opposed to the proposal, calling it unwarranted. Some allege it is part of an administration effort to weaken the nation's environmental laws.

At Makua Valley, environmental groups have praised some of the Army's environmental efforts but say more still needs to be done to preserve culturally sensitive sites.

"They've made some good efforts, but they're still missing the marks on the cultural sites," said Sparky Rodrigues, a spokesman for Malama Makua. "For years, they've denied that there's been cultural sites. That means they've been bombing and shooting at cultural sites for generations now."

Rodrigues said Malama Makua hopes to eventually have more access to the valley to identify, restore and maintain sites important to Hawaiians.

Although the Army's programs to look after natural and cultural resources didn't really get going until the mid 1990s, officials say they aggressively work to ensure that such sites are protected once discovered.

That goes for plant and animal life, too. The valley is home to federally designated critical habitat for protected plants, birds and snails.

Just last month, the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, which represents Malama Makua, threatened to sue the Army again after a controlled burn in July raged out of control, burning half the valley and destroying scores of rare plants and 150 acres of critical habitat.

While many of the rare species are far enough out of the training area that they are unaffected by the exercises, some have been found closer to the training range.

In those instances, the Army incorporates the habitat as part of its training scenario by designating it as a mine field or some other hazard that soldiers would have to avoid, said Laurie Lucking, cultural resources manager for U.S. Army Garrison Hawaii.

Other times, the coordinates of a rare species are programmed into the Global Positioning System targeting technology of a particular weapon, prompting a warning to the soldier operating the equipment when a shell might do harm, she said.

The Army also provides classroom training for soldiers to make them aware of the environmental issues surrounding Makua, all with an eye toward the military's goal of having soldiers prepared, said Army spokeswoman Maj. Stacy Bathrick.

"The command realizes that everyone down to the infantryman on the ground who is conducting a combined-arms live-fire exercise needs to be aware of how important it is to train in realistic conditions while we protect the environment," Bathrick said.

In all, the Army spends between $1 million and $1.5 million a year on preservation efforts, Char said.

Some of the most important work in the preservation effort doesn't require any money.

"We talk to different groups - we're constantly trying to identify people with ties to these areas," Lucking said. "You just learn to speak to the right people in order to get a handle on the spiritually important areas, as well as the archaeological sites and just the culture in general.

"It's a dialogue."

U.S. science tested on humans abroad
Ethics: Debate surrounds the practice of shifting experiments overseas to circumvent U.S. regulations


When Chinese and American researchers reported this week that they had used a cutting-edge DNA transfer to impregnate an infertile woman in China, they set off an ethical, political and scientific debate.

The reason: The American scientist turned his technique over to Chinese colleagues because they could try it without waiting for permission from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The announcement touched a nerve in the scientific community. Should a U.S. researcher move experiments overseas to avoid regulations designed to protect human research subjects?

To some, the answer is clear. "I think in this situation, doing research in another country where the regulations are less protective of patients is not ethical. And there have been many situations before where that's been made clear," said Mildred K. Cho, associate director of the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics.

But not everyone is so sure. The debate reflects divisions of thought in a fast-moving medical discipline where scientists are using the building blocks of biology to treat disease, create new human tissues to replace damaged ones and - in this case - spur development of new human life.

Critics argue that the nuclear-transfer technique doctors used to impregnate the Chinese woman was perilously close to human cloning. Others say it's much more like the in vitro fertilization techniques widely used in U.S. clinics.

"This is clearly closer to the way they do traditional infertility treatment," said Jonathan D. Moreno, director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia.

Moreno says the FDA might be going too far by requiring anyone who wants to transfer a mother and father's DNA into a donor's egg as part of a fertility treatment to apply to the agency for permission.

Like many ethicists, he sees a future of controversial research popping up in countries with less restrictive policies than the United States because biological and genetic information is easy and cheap to transfer.

Some foreign labs are already paying top dollar to recruit U.S. researchers, and countries that haven't traditionally been seen as research powerhouses now have a growing number of highly trained scientists.

In their experiment, researchers from New York University and Sun Yat-Sen University of Medical Science in Guangzhou, China, took DNA from a prospective mother and father and transferred it into a hollowed-out donor's egg whose own nucleus had been removed.

The reconstructed product was then transferred into the mother's uterus.

She became pregnant with triplets, but none lived - the result of obstetric complications that researchers said were unrelated.

In an abstract of their findings presented to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the scientists said they detected no genetic defects or other problems in the fetuses they tested.

Cloning Dolly
Scientists used a similar nucleus-swapping technique in creating Dolly the sheep. But in that case, a sheep's own DNA was fused into a hollowed-out egg before being implanted, creating Dolly, an exact copy.

"There's no fine line there," said Dr. John Gearhart, a developmental biologist with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He said the Chinese fertility treatment was not an example of cloning.

"The procedure is technically the same, but the origin of the nucleus is different. In cloning, you're trying to reproduce an individual that already exists."

But even some who agree with that assessment of the procedure are concerned about the fact that the NYU professor appeared to be dodging U.S. regulations that were designed to protect patients. They note that the reconstructed embryos contained DNA from three people - the mother, father and the donor of the egg.

"We are taking the risk there to introduce third-party DNA, and we don't know, what are the consequences?" said Dr. Jairo E. Garcia, director of the in vitro fertilization program at the Johns Hopkins Fertility Center.

Researcher Jamie Grifo developed the procedure used in the Chinese experiment at NYU and tried it in 1998 on several patients who did not become pregnant.

He told The New York Times that he shared his knowledge with Chinese scientists after the FDA in 2001 began requiring anyone doing such experiments to apply for permission.

The application is similar to the one a pharmaceutical company must file before testing an experimental drug in people, something Grifo said was too time-consuming and expensive, and unlikely to be granted.

"We knew patients would benefit, and we did not want to see the research die," he told the Times.

Dodging regulatory hurdles is not unheard of in medical research. In the United States, for example, it is unethical for scientists testing an experimental therapy to use placebos (sugar pills or drugs with inactive ingredients) on fatally ill test subjects if there are proven treatments available. But in recent years, critics have attacked U.S. pharmaceutical companies for testing therapies in the Third World, where regulations concerning placebos are less strict.

Some research institutions have been criticized for other lapses abroad that would not be tolerated here.

Malaria against AIDS
In 2000, the FDA ordered the Cincinnati-based Heimlich Institute to stop experiments in which Chinese AIDS patients were injected with malaria in an effort to kill the AIDS virus - a widely discredited treatment known as malariotherapy. The study was conducted in the 1990s on a small group of patients in collaboration with Chinese scientists.

The Bush administration's strict, but hotly contested, regulations on embryonic stem cell research, imposed in 2001, have also prompted some scientists to move to countries such as the United Kingdom and Singapore, where regulations on stem cell work are less restrictive.

The globalization of biological and genetic research will provide fertile ground for ethical controversy in the future, according to John E. Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org. One reason is the potential for big money in biotechnology today.

"Frankly, compared to most other scientific disciplines it's a heck of a lot more lucrative," Pike said. "You're not going to get rich quick in physics. All the available get-rich-quick schemes in chemistry pretty much played out a century ago."

In a globalized setting, some ethicists say, the simple presumption that American moral and regulatory standards are superior is dangerous ground.

Patient protection should always be paramount, said Laurence B. McCullough, a professor of medical ethics at Baylor College of Medicine. But he added, "The ethical and legal standards of the United States aren't the last word on the subject. ... In an ethically controversial area, there's more than one way to manage the controversy."

At NYU, Dr. Keith M. Krasinski, chairman of the medical school's Institutional Review Board, said the university normally reviews all research on humans that it sponsors or that its faculty members conduct.

But he said the university's approval wasn't necessary in the Chinese fertility experiment because Grifo "didn't conduct the research."

"He didn't supervise the research. He was never in China," Krasinski added. "He's not in trouble in any way." He said Grifo is listed as a co-author in the research findings as matter of academic "courtesy."

'Think very carefully'
That reasoning is unlikely to satisfy many critics. Scientists "should think very carefully and be sure of their moral position when they go to a place like China to conduct research," said Alan Colman, chief scientific officer of ES Cell International in Singapore, a biotech firm that does stem cell research.

Colman said one way to prevent scientists from circumventing regulations in their home country is to follow the German model. Germany holds its stem-cell scientists accountable no matter where in the world they do their research. If a German researcher is found to have conducted unauthorized stem cell work abroad, he can be held criminally liable when he returns, Colman said.

"At the end of the day, a scientist who goes abroad is often judged by his peers at home," Colman said. "That's very powerful pressure and I hope will make them think twice."

Feds Want All-Seeing Eye in Sky

Spooks, suits, generals and geeks gathered here this week to discuss a common goal: an all-seeing, omnipresent set of eyes in the sky to keep an unblinking view of the entire world at once.

Representatives from the military, spy agencies and the defense industry met to find ways to put a new generation of spy satellites in orbit to aid in war, homeland security and spy craft. But talking about Big Brother vision in a hotel ballroom is proving to be a whole lot easier than executing it in orbit. Several of the satellite systems are wrapped in controversy, cost overruns or long delays.

"We need to know something about everything all the time," Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, told the gathering of nearly 1,400 at the Geo-Intel 2003 conference here at the French Quarter's edge. "We need an illuminator, throwing into relief all the pictures and activities on the Earth's surface. And then we need to be able to switch on the spotlight, or alert other systems, to dive deep."

"This system has to be never-blinking, never-straying," added Rich Haver, a Northrop Grumman executive and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's former special assistant for intelligence. "Our enemies can never be sure when they're being looked at."

Space-based radar, or SBR, is Cambone's preferred method for fulfilling these aims. America's current imaging satellites can cover only thin slices of the Earth at any one time as the spacecraft pass overhead. A constellation of 10 to 24 SBR satellites, slated for 2012 or so, would cover almost the entire globe at once. Unlike the standard birds now in orbit, whose eyes are blocked by cloud and darkness, the SBR array would use weather-piercing synthetic aperture radar to look below without interruption. What's more, the radar could track tanks, jeeps and planes, giving their locations to American bombers and fighter planes.

In theory, anyway. The program, led by the U.S. Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center, was slated for 2008. That's been pushed back at least four years. Even now, the guidelines for developing SBR satellites, which the military would have to give to defense companies before development can begin, are missing in action. Congress has cut the president's $270 million funding request by $100 million. And outside observers aren't impressed with what they've heard about the project.

"Sure, the Air Force may already have designs. But I'm not going to give 10 cents for 'em," Haver said.

"Continuous coverage of everything in the air or on the ground is a solution in search of a problem," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org.

"There's an awful lot of time looking at nothing," he said. America's current fleet of spy planes "can focus on an area you're interested in, at a fraction of the cost."

John Werle, a vice president for space and intelligence systems at Boeing -- which is competing for the SBR contract -- calls that a shortsighted view. A global view will spawn entire new industries and government capabilities, just like the Internet's far-flung spread of information.

Federal authorities have something else in mind before SBR satellites arrive. It's called Future Imagery Architecture, or FIA, and it's scheduled for launch in a couple of years. Run out of the ultra-secret National Reconnaissance Office, little is known publicly about the satellite group. But what is known isn't good.

In a September report (PDF), the Pentagon's Defense Science Board called the program "significantly underfunded and technically flawed. The task force believes this FIA program is not executable."

The Pentagon recently had to add $4 billion to a reported $25 billion effort to develop the FIA system. Industry insiders say the project may be as much as three years behind schedule.

That's a charge retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, denied. Given the complexity of the FIA project, "it's not unprecedented to have challenges, from a cost and scheduling standpoint," he said, describing the program as "on schedule."

But just in case it isn't, federal authorities are working on yet another backstop plan -- one that relies on a new generation of commercial satellites to take pictures.

Through a project called NextView, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency is encouraging private companies to develop satellites with a resolution of a quarter of a meter -- two to four times as sharp as the commercial eyes now in orbit. On Sept. 30, the agency plunked down a $500 million NextView deposit on a new satellite from Longmont, Colorado's DigitalGlobe.

The award came as a surprise to the industry, which assumed the largess would be split between DigitalGlobe and its competitor, Space Imaging of Thornton, Colorado. But Space Imaging wouldn't commit to what it felt was an unrealistic late-2005 launch deadline.

Clapper now says he's scrambling to find a comparable pile of cash for Space Imaging, which "can't go forward with our next-generation system without a NextView award," said company Vice President Mark Brender.

In an April 25 national security directive, President Bush called for the government to encourage a strong commercial satellite industry. That, in Clapper's view, means he has to support "at least two major vendors."

Space Imaging's funds may be coming soon. Industry insiders believe the money for the company's new satellite may come from the $87 billion package for reconstructing Iraq, now being debated in Congress. It's sure to be one of many emergency grants the military will be asking for on its way to what Clapper calls "the ultimate eye in the sky."

Bush backs sanctions against Syria: Damascus has failed to fight terrorism, Washington says

The Bush administration withdrew its opposition to a congressional measure toughening sanctions on Syria yesterday, saying its government has failed to meet promises to fight terrorism and restrain anti-Israel fighters.

"We have repeatedly said that Syria is on the wrong side of the war on terrorism and that Syria has got to stop harbouring terrorists," said Scott McClellan, White House press secretary.

As Mr. McClellan spoke, the House international relations committee voted 33-2 to approve the measure, known as the Syria Accountability Act. It threatens penalties that include prohibiting all U.S. exports to Syria except food and medicine, barring U.S. investments or business operations in Syria, and banning Syrian aircraft from U.S. air space.

The measure has had majority support in both parties in both the U.S. House and Senate. The Bush administration previously viewed it as interference in its diplomatic efforts to win allies in fighting terrorism.

The sanctions measure gained traction three days after Israeli jets bombed a target inside Syria that Israel said was a base used by Palestinian terrorists, including Islamic Jihad and Hamas, which have carried out suicide bombings against Israel.

The raid, Israel's first attack on Syrian territory since 1982, came in response to a suicide bombing Saturday in Haifa, in northern Israel, that killed 19 people. Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility.

George W. Bush, the President, said Israel has the right to defend itself. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the U.S. has evidence showing the target was in "active use" as a terrorist base up to the time of the bombing. He declined to name a particular group or give other details.

During a visit to Damascus after the Iraq war, Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, presented Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with a series of demands, including closing Syria-based offices run by Hezbollah and taking action against similar groups that the U.S. labels sponsors of terrorism.

Mr. Powell warned Syria that a failure to crack down on terrorist groups would lead to "consequences" that might include the sanctions being threatened by Congress. The sanctions include language allowing the president to waive their implementation if he deems it in the interest of national security.

Syria has made no meaningful progress toward meeting these demands, Mr. Boucher said today.

The international relations committee, before approving the Syria Accountability Act, voted to reject an amendment urging Mr. Bush not to appoint an ambassador to Syria.

Opponents said they supported the sentiment but felt the U.S. should take actions that signal an interest in talking with Syria about a compromise.

Syria said today it would respond militarily if Israel continued to attack its territory, Reuters reported, cited the country's ambassador to Spain.

"If Israel attacks Syria one, two and three times, of course the people of Syria and the government of Syria and the army will react to defend ourselves," said Ambassador Mohsen Bilal.

Asked if that meant responding militarily, he said: "By all means. If Israel continues to attack us and continues its aggression, of course we shall react to the attacks in spite of the fact that we are fighting for peace and wish to reopen the [1991] Madrid [peace] conference."

Israel said it has "no interest" in escalating tensions with Syria following Sunday's bombing, according to a statement issued after a Cabinet meeting yesterday. At the same time, the Israeli government "cannot allow external anti-Israel terrorism to enjoy immunity," the e-mailed statement said.

An analyst with Globalsecurity .org, a private military research institution in Washington, said satellite photos of Israel's target in Syria prior to the bombing showed no clear evidence of terrorist activity.

The site, which Israel identified as the Ain Saheb camp, is about 16 kilometres northwest of Damascus. The area appears to be a tourist destination, and the camp's location alongside a highway makes it an unlikely location for secretive activities, said the analyst, Tim Brown.

Streamlining Iraq new goal of White House

The White House insisted Monday that its decision to play a greater role in the rebuilding of Iraq and Afghanistan was not an acknowledgment of problems with U.S.-led efforts.

Instead, administration officials portrayed the move as an attempt to streamline decision-making as Congress debates President Bush's request to spend $87 billion to stabilize the war-torn countries.

Members of Congress have been sharply critical of the administration's plan for postwar Iraq, and Taliban militias are feared to be reorganizing in Afghanistan. A confidential memo circulated last week said the Iraq Stabilization Group would be overseen by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

"Condi's team is going to make sure that the efforts are continued to be coordinated so that we continue to make progress," Bush said during a news conference with President Mwai Kibaki of Kenya. "And listen, we're making good progress in Iraq. Sometimes it's hard to tell it when you listen to the filter (of critics)."

It remained unclear Monday how differently decisions would be made under the new stabilization group than under the current system. Administration officials described the group as an entity that would work with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to make more day-to-day decisions without having to consult with the deputies from the Pentagon or the State Department.

L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. official in Iraq, would continue to report to the Defense Department.

"This group can work to help cut through some of the bureaucracy and red tape here in Washington, D.C., so that we can make sure, as our efforts accelerate in Iraq, that they're getting the full assistance from Washington, D.C.," said Scott McClellan, White House press secretary.

Several key members of Congress who have traveled to Iraq have returned with warnings about continued violence if basic services there are not restored.

They have said that the administration should have anticipated the violent resistance that has made rebuilding more difficult and that it should have better prepared American taxpayers for the length and the cost of the Iraqi operations.

"Almost two years after the fall of the Taliban and nearly six months after the fall of Baghdad, the White House finally is organizing itself to deal with the realities of postwar Afghanistan and Iraq," said Senator John Edwards, a North Carolina Democrat who is running for president. "It's about time President Bush tried to get his bureaucracy in order, but rearranging flow charts is no substitute for leadership."

Others who also have been critical of the administration's approach in Iraq praised Bush's decision.

A spokesman for Senator Richard G. Lugar, the Indiana Republican who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that it "is a move in the direction of what he's been calling for": reassessment and re-evaluation of the postwar decisions.

John Pike is director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Virginia-based think tank that specializes in military issues. He said that the move to form a group to oversee day-to-day decisions is a good one.

"They're coming to grips with this being a high-visibility, long-term issue that they need some sort of structure to deal with,"

Report underlines scale of intelligence failure


The long-awaited report by the Iraq Survey Group headed by David Kay suggests Saddam Hussein had the know-how to produce chemical and biological weapons, and the intention to pursue a nuclear weapons programme. But it found no evidence of weapons themselves.

"It found everything but those weapons," a Ministry of Defence official said yesterday. The group of 1,200 scientists and technicians found a network of clandestine laboratories run by Saddam's intelligence and security services. They found evidence of secret procurement programmes involving foreign companies.

But virtually every part of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction programme could be explained by reference to other benign uses, they said last night. They found large amounts of documentary evidence, but, MoD officials admitted, "no shining weapons".

The conclusion is in marked contrast to the claim in last year's British government dossier on Iraq's weapons programme which implied that it was continuing to produce such weapons and could deploy some of them within 45 minutes. Sources close to the survey group said last night that to visit every possible banned weapons site in Iraq was impossible. Its mission, they said, would "only succeed if we are led to the truth by the Iraqis themselves".

They admitted, too, that most of the information it received was "single-sourced". It had interviewed 500 Iraqis potentially implicated in the country's WMD programme but suffered from a residual fear of Saddam's security apparatus, the sources said. "It is impossible to predict what will or won't be found," a defence source said.

Andy Oppenheimer, a weapons expert with Jane's Terrorism and Security Monitor, said: "We have known for some time that the expertise was there for all three kinds of WMDs. Saddam tried - and succeeded - in getting equipment after 1998 but there hasn't been anything that could be said to be a culmination of that. A lot of hope was being put into the interviews with Iraqi scientists. But there still hasn't been anything tangible. Iraq had a very substantial body of expertise but the problem is finding anything that could have been an immediate threat, such as battlefield weapons. Iraq was trying to develop WMDs - trying, but there is nothing that represents an immediate threat."

Daniel Neep, head of the Middle East programme at the Royal United Services Institute, said: "It does underline the fact that there was a fundamental failure of intelligence, not just in what was presented to the public. The ramifications of that are going to take some time to unfold. A lot of credibility was placed on defectors without necessarily corroborating the information from other sources. Questions have to be raised about why we didn't have better information about what was going on in Iraq."

Nuclear

The Iraq Survey Group found no evidence of nuclear weapons under construction but said it had found evidence of Saddam gearing up to build one once international sanctions had been lifted.

Before the war, the consensus among specialists on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as within MI6 and the CIA, was that Saddam had no nuclear weapons and that it would take years to build them - yet the British and US governments insisted that Saddam had a covert programme. Two stories were circulated before the war that have since been largely discredited. The US said Iraq was illegally importing aluminium tubes for an alleged nuclear weapons programme and both the US and British governments claimed that Iraq had secretly tried to secure uranium from Niger.

The British government last night hailed the Iraq Survey Group as vindication of its concerns about Saddam: basically, that he was intent on securing nuclear weapons. An MoD official concluded: "No existing weapons but continuing intention [to develop] when the time was right and once sanctions were finished."

Support for this viewpoint came from Tim Trevan, a former British weapons inspector in Iraq and the author of Saddam's Secrets: The Hunt for Iraq's Hidden Weapons. He said last night: "I think it is reasonable to assume there was no active construction of any nuclear weapons. There was a longer-term desire for a nuclear programme that would be consistent with the psychology of Saddam." He added: "If [material] was hidden or destroyed, very few people would have been involved. It would not have been scientists but intelligence people. It is quite possible we might not ever find it."

Toby Dodge, an Iraq specialist at Warwick University, took a more sceptical view: "The whole case for war was based on allegations of active procurement. The Kay report kills the argument for nuclear procurement which by implication kills the whole case for WMD." John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, agreed with the Kay assessment that there was intent, though not much was happening on the nuclear front. He added that nuclear material was easy to conceal: "The material to make one bomb a year would fit inside a grocery store."

Ewen MacAskill and Brian Whitaker

Biological

The Kay report describes a "clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses" run by Iraqi intelligence service. It said one had been housed in a prison lab complex. The report refers to "strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist's home, one of which can be used to produce biological weapons". MoD sources said the seed stock of this unidentified organism could be turned into a "weaponisable biological weapon" within 48 hours. In one of the few specific examples, the report also refers to a single vial of "C.botulinum Okra B", which British sources claimed could be used in weapons within 48 hours.

Professor Harry Smith, emeritus professor of microbiology at Birmingham University and chairman of the Royal Society's working group on biological weapons, said: "What were these secret labs like? Did they have containment units? It looks as though the Iraqis were still thinking of these weapons but nothing concrete had been done. You need more detail to really know and the survey group won't get it, I think."

Dr Glen Rangwala, of Cambridge University, said the discovery of a vial of C Botulinum in the home of an Iraqi scientist, which the report says could have been used to produce a biological agent, was not conclusive. "It's not a strain which is most toxic. It can be used for the vaccination of cattle. The types which Iraq developed before 1991 were A and B Botulinum."

Jonathan Steele

Delivery systems

The report refers to hitherto unknown Iraqi plans to procure or develop long-range missiles and warheads to put on them. But, in common with its references to chemical and biological weapons, the message is that while the intention was there, the capability was not.

"There was warhead design but no evidence of actual warheads," a British defence source said last night. He was referring to the report's description of a claim by "one cooperative source" who said he suspected that a new missile system "was intended to have a CW[chemical]-filled warhead". The report adds: "But no detainee has admitted any actual knowledge of plans for unconventional warheads for any current or planned ballistic missile".

This contrasts with the claims and impression of the government's dossier published last September, which implied Saddam had chemical and biological warheads which could be fired at western targets within 45 minutes. That the reference was only to short-range battlefield weapons only became clear after evidence to the Hutton inquiry. Yesterday the survey group said it had found no evidence even of those.

The government's September dossier spoke of the deployment of Samoud missiles with a range of at least 125 miles, the retention of Hussein missiles with a range of 400 miles, and the production of Ababil missiles with a range of at least 125 miles. Dr Trevor Findlay, director of Vertic, an independent verification and inspection research body, said: "It's one thing to order the development of missiles. You have to test them in the open and we would have known from satellites if he had tried."

Professor Paul Rogers of Bradford University's school of peace studies said: "No Scuds have been found. This runs counter to what the US and the British said before the war. They gave figures that they thought Iraq had between 12 and 20. As for orders to develop ballistic missiles with a range of up to 600 miles, this is not much more than what they did 12 years ago with the modified Scuds which were to go 400 miles. The new information is only significant in a minor way."

Richard Norton-Taylor

WMD aspirations

The report argues that "judged by those scientists and other insiders who worked in his military-industrial programmes, Saddam had not given up his aspirations and intentions to continue to acquire WMD".

Prof Rogers said last night: "You could hardly expect anything else, given that he had them in 1991. But it's a long way from saying they were close to getting anything again. If the Unmovic inspection process had not been called off on the eve of the war, the Iraqis wouldn't have been able to develop anything."

Prof Rogers said he was surprised by two main aspects of the Kay report. First, its candour. "Given that Dr Kay said two months ago that he expected to find major stuff and he was pretty convinced the Iraqis had it, the report is really very candid. They don't seem to be egging the pudding." Second was the conclusion that no weapons had been found, not even Scud missiles. "In all honesty, I did think before the war that Iraq had some residual biological and chemical weapons capability for use in extremis as a deterrent. The fact that it doesn't exist demonstrates an incredible intelligence failure before the war. It's on a par with the failure to predict the Iranian revolution in 1979."

Jonathan Steele

Chemical

The report admits it has "not yet found evidence to confirm prewar reporting that Iraqi military units were prepared to use CW against coalition forces". (This was the notorious 45-minute claim in the British government's September dossier).

Dr Findlay said: "In the absence of any weapons, the inspectors would have had to find military operational manuals about plans for use. No one before the war wanted to say there were no stored stocks of agents and precursors. They were always possible. It's a surprise the survey group hasn't found them. This confirms the good work which Unscom and Unmovic did, even though they were quite conservative in their conclusions." Commenting on the survey group's report that no detained Iraqi scientist or official admitted any knowledge of plans for unconventional warheads for any current or planned ballistic missile, Prof Rogers said: "It now seems pretty conclusive that the Iraqis took a decision to dismantle."

Navy has fewest ships since before World War I

When the last sailor walked off the amphibious ship Anchorage this week, ending the ship's 34 years of naval service, the Navy's fleet of warships shrank to its smallest size since before World War I. Above, the Anchorage pulls into the 32nd Street Naval Station in July.

When the last sailor walked off the amphibious ship Anchorage yesterday, ending the ship's 34 years of naval service, the Navy's fleet of warships shrank to its smallest size since before World War I.

The battle force – the Navy's fleet of front-line aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, amphibious ships and selected support vessels – now numbers 296 ships with the Anchorage's decommissioning.

The Navy has continued to shrink despite increasing demands on the maritime force since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

During the past two years, the Navy has been very busy. Dozens of warships fired cruise missiles, launched bombers and carried Marines during recent operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of those same ships deployed Marines to Liberia and the Horn of Africa. Others are watching developments on the Korean Peninsula.

"We've cut too deep," said Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-El Cajon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. "We need more ships."

However, Navy officials say it's necessary to decommission older, more costly ships such as the Anchorage to save enough money to buy new warships. At the same time, many defense analysts say the Navy can slim down even further without undue risk because today's warships are more technologically advanced and in larger numbers than any other navy.

More than two decades ago, President Reagan called for a 600-ship Navy to challenge the Soviet Union. The Navy got close, with a shipbuilding program that produced a fleet of 594 vessels.

But today the Navy has shrunk to its smallest size since dreadnoughts and Britain's Royal Navy ruled the waves supreme – and in coming years, it will continue shrinking.

During the past fiscal year, which ended Tuesday, 20 ships – from the carrier Constellation to the landing ship Frederick – were retired, while only four new vessels were added to the fleet.

Ten ships, starting with the Anchorage, will be decommissioned during the next 12 months. Six warships – four destroyers and two submarines – will be added to the fleet during the same period.

By 2006, the Navy's battle force will have only 291 ships, according to Pentagon budget plans.

Not until 2009 is the fleet scheduled to climb above 300 vessels again.

The fleet's smaller size has some naval advocates, including two powerful local congressmen, worried as the United States continues to fight a global war on terrorism that is likely to last for years.

"Our naval forces should be greater," Hunter said.

Fewer ships contribute to longer deployments for sailors and Marines, said Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Escondido. Long deployments will reduce personnel retention and increase ship repair costs, he added.

The numbers also worry some naval officers.

"It's significant because the Navy operates all over the world, and to be able to respond to any contingency, you have to have the numbers," said Rear Adm. Willie Marsh, who commands Amphibious Group 3, based in San Diego. He spoke yesterday after the Anchorage's decommissioning.

Top Navy officials and several outside naval analysts believe the Navy can survive with fewer ships for several years.

Navy leaders have projected a 375-ship fleet in 20 years or so, if Congress buys a new class of small, maneuverable high-tech ships. But current official plans project a fleet of 310 warships.

"Focusing on numbers alone is not the answer to building a fleet," said Lt. Elissa Smith, a Navy spokeswoman in Washington.

By decommissioning older, less-capable warships, the Navy expects to save money to offset the cost of building and maintaining more modern ships, including a new class of amphibious vessels joining the fleet in two years, new destroyers and dozens of "littoral combat" ships.

New San Antonio-class amphibious ships, which carry Marines and their weaponry, will be added to the fleet in coming years, Marsh said.

New missile-carrying destroyers are envisioned to replace older cruisers.

The littoral vessels would be small warships capable of operating near coastlines, with a modular design so different war-fighting capabilities could be added or removed to match each mission.

Hunter and Cunningham strongly favor building more new ships, but worry that the force is being cut too thin in the near term.

A strong Navy is needed for several reasons, Hunter said, including protection of the long sea lanes between the United States and possible trouble spots, guarding against potential terrorist attacks in the Middle East and Asia, the potential for conflict on the Korean Peninsula and the rising military strength of China.

"The world's oceans haven't shrunk," Hunter added.

But GlobalSecurity.org defense analyst John Pike said America's enemies have shrunk from Cold War days.

With no monolithic enemy like the Soviet Union, the Pentagon has trouble proving its need for a huge maritime force, he said.

"Do we have enough ships to do what?" Pike asked rhetorically.

While many conservatives worry about the growing Chinese threat, several analysts said China's navy is decades away from challenging the U.S. fleet.

"No one is going to challenge us at sea for the next 20 years," said analyst and naval historian Norman Polmar.

Having an adequate fleet to deal with adversaries on faraway shores is a paramount concern, said Cunningham, a Vietnam-era Navy fighter ace and member of the House Appropriations Committee.

"I think 360 is the magic number," he added. "At 300 ships, you turn into a pumpkin, and we're (still) going down."

But many analysts doubt there is a major concern in having a fleet smaller than 300 ships because the numbers game is less significant than in past decades.

"It's ludicrous to compare today's Navy with the ships of World War II," Polmar said.

A single aircraft carrier today has more firepower than all the U.S. carriers of World War II. A guided-missile cruiser that launched dozens of Tomahawk cruise missiles at Baghdad six months ago is vastly more capable than a cruiser built in the 1960s.

Also, only the United States and allies such as Britain, Japan, Italy and Australia have state-of-the-art warships.

The military's needs also have changed.

Today's Navy, largely designed to fight a blue-water war against the Soviets, has transformed itself into a force that sits off the coast and strikes deep into enemy territory with cruise missiles, attack bombers and long-range assaults by Marines.

"The issue is not how many ships we have; the issue is how many ships we can put in harm's way at a time," Pike said.

The Navy's recently instituted surge plan, which keeps carriers and their escorts at heightened states of readiness and training, helps mitigate the smaller fleet size, said Robert Work, an analyst at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

With no immediate naval threat, Work said, "I think the chief of naval operations (Adm. Vern Clark) did the right thing. Sacrificing numbers to build up the fleet in the long term is very prudent."

Bush gets first taste of scandal, Thrust ... , ... & parry

The scene at the White House on Tuesday was all too familiar -- reporters running through the hallways, frantic cell phone calls, urgent updates on the news wires and breaking news on the cable TV networks.

It was a scene played out repeatedly over the years, most recently during the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky scandals of the Clinton administration. Now it's unfolding for the first time in the Bush White House.

In this case, the Justice Department has launched a full-scale criminal investigation to determine who in the Bush administration might have leaked the identity of a CIA operative -- and why.

In Washington, scandals come and go like the four seasons. Some have blossomed into stories of historic proportions; others have withered quickly.

Just how this one might develop is still anyone's guess. But clearly in the short term, it's another headache for President Bush, who is heading into an election year facing increasingly tough questions about his rationale for war against Iraq and its troubled aftermath.

"It's just other pawn on the game board in this larger pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game about whether there was sufficient intelligence to justify war with Iraq," said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington-area think tank that examines intelligence and defense policy.

The White House's current discomfort can be traced to the July 14 disclosure by conservative columnist Robert Novak that Valerie Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was a CIA operative.

The media largely ignored the Novak revelation, despite Wilson's oft-repeated claims that the White House was meting out punishment for the criticisms he had stirred over the quality of intelligence used to go to war. But his charges gained new steam last week, with word that the CIA had requested an investigation.

Wilson initially fingered White House senior adviser Karl Rove, Bush's longtime chief political strategist, as the leaker. But the White House has vehemently denied that Rove was involved, and Wilson has toned down his accusation.

Sensing an opening, Democrats on Capitol Hill and the campaign trail ratcheted up their criticisms and demanded that Attorney General John Ashcroft name a special counsel to handle the investigation.

Intent on keeping the controversy in the public eye, House Democrats invited Wilson to address their caucus today. Wilson, according to The Washington Post, makes no secret of being a left-leaning Democrat but says he has no political agenda.

Republicans respond that the Democrats are only playing politics, and political analysts predict the rhetoric will continue to flow along partisan lines.

"Both parties are guilty of selective outrage," said Washington analyst Charles Cook. "If you're a Democrat or a liberal, this just confirms all your worst suspicions. And if you're a conservative or a Republican, you will have selective outrage and just overlook it and move on."

So far, the White House has rejected the calls for a special counsel, though the Justice Department has not ruled one out.

The issue is a sensitive one, not only for the White House, but also for Ashcroft, a former Republican senator from Missouri who once retained Rove as a campaign consultant.

The attorney general was in no mood to elaborate during a news conference Tuesday, where he read a statement promising a full investigation by career Justice Department staff.

Ashcroft cut off questions after he was asked twice by reporters if he could assure the nation his investigation would be independent. "Apparently there aren't any other questions," he said as he stalked out of the room.

Later in Chicago, where he addressed a re-election fund-raiser and met with business leaders, Bush was more patient.

"I want to know the truth," he said, welcoming the Justice investigation, which he said would be carried out fairly.

From Washington to Chicago, the questions kept coming. Chief among them: Just where does this investigation go?

A veteran of the many Clinton scrapes predicts that ultimately there will be an independent investigation.

"The question is when," said Chris Lehane, a lawyer who worked in the Clinton White House and was Vice President Al Gore's press secretary during the 2000 campaign.

Unlike the Clinton scandals of Whitewater, which dealt with personal finances, and Monica Lewinsky, Lehane noted, the investigation of the Bush White House deals with national security issues. And he said they "directly implicate the broader policy decisions by the administration on Iraq."

NATO ministers meeting in Colo. are faced with hard tasks

NATO ministers met in Colorado Springs, Colo. two decades ago with a singular purpose: keeping the Eastern Bloc on its side of Europe.

They arrive Oct. 8 at The Broadmoor hotel facing a far more complex world and must fundamentally change the alliance, which includes a host of former enemies that switched sides when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

"When the Cold War was on, we were pretty set on who our enemy was and what we needed to do to keep him from taking any actions against NATO," said retired Army Col. Victor Fernandez of Colorado Springs, a Vietnam veteran who later helped develop NATO war plans. "Now that's no longer an issue."

Decisions awaiting the ministers include how to change the combined might of the alliance to a quicker, lighter force capable of global action and whether NATO will expand peacekeeping efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The end of the Cold War left the 54-year-old alliance with a new set of enemies, including international terrorists and war criminals in Kosovo.

Ministers of the 19 NATO countries and the seven nations invited to join the alliance are trying to change their military forces to fight terrorism and brushfire wars such as the ones America fought in Somalia and Panama.

"The threats to Europe will come from other places," said J.D. Crouch, assistant secretary for international security policy in the U.S. Department of Defense.

Many predict the Colorado Springs meeting will center on changing NATO from a defensive force to one that can dispatch troops and equipment quickly to any point on the globe.

That means a radical change in tactics and equipment.

"It is certainly an organization whose mission is in a state of flux," said John Pike, director of the defense think tank GlobalSecurity.org

NATO has seen enormous changes in the past year as German-led NATO troops have moved into Afghanistan and a Polish division took over peacekeeping duties in part of Iraq with NATO help, Crouch said.

Some of the more powerful members of the alliance broke with America about the war in Iraq. France and Germany led a group of four of the 19-voting members in opposing the war. Belgium and Luxembourg opposed the Iraq invasion.

The Iraq rift won't be an issue in Colorado Springs, Crouch said. "I would not characterize this as a fence-mending issue," he said.

Not everyone agrees.

Robert Hunter, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO for the Clinton administration who works for RAND, a think tank focusing on government and international policy, said rebuilding friendships will be a key to the Colorado Springs gathering.

"This will be the post-war, let's-make-nice-to-everyone meeting," Hunter said. "The war is over, and now you need everybody, and the allies will want to build those bridges."

Where nations stand since the Iraq invasion will be shown when ministers discuss whether the alliance should expand its peacekeeping duties there.

Now NATO is commanding more than 5,000 troops in Afghanistan, the first time the alliance has stretched its boundaries beyond Europe.

America wants the alliance to get ready for more action outside the alliance's traditional boundaries.

"We're not going to be fighting in Europe," Crouch said. "There's no Warsaw Pact."

NATO's decadelong move to modernize will cost billions and take time.

The alliance's biggest combat capabilities remain based on machines designed for the Cold War, including 62-ton American tanks. Those tanks can take weeks to hit the ground in a combat zone.

To fight in the invasion of Iraq, tanks were shipped by sea, and delivery of the vehicles took weeks.

The U.S. Army this year unveiled lighter units that can get to war in hours instead of weeks.

But experts say NATO allies must spend more money before they can boast similar capabilities.

"There will be pressure from the U.S. for them to spend more money," Hunter said.

Pike described the equipment held by NATO allies who were once part of the Soviet bloc as "basically a snapshot of the world in 1989."

Under discussion will be changing tactics and technology.

Communications abilities and plans must be ironed out for the countries to work together in war.

Some discussions in Colorado Springs will look at specialized combat skills that can be mined from smaller NATO members in time of war, Crouch said.

"Not every member of NATO can have a 360-degree military," Crouch said, explaining the cost of maintaining an American-style army, navy and air force would cripple smaller NATO contributors such as Hungary, Iceland and Luxembourg.

Those smaller alliance players will be asked to hone their best skills, from running field hospitals to disposing explosives, and bring them to NATO missions.

America is examining its commitment to keeping troops in Europe. Defense officials are looking at moving or pulling back troops housed in England, Germany and Italy.

That's an item that won't be up for discussion yet, Crouch said. "We're still in the pre-decision phase on that," he said.

I didn't know these guys were still around...

US seeks to speed Iraq security handoff

The Pentagon is accelerating its plans to replace US soldiers with Iraqi security forces, hoping to have 80,000 trained Iraqi police on the job within 18 to 24 months now that there is little chance of substantial help from foreign troops. More than 40,000 Iraqi soldiers are expected to be deployed by February.

Military officials say they are increasingly concerned about the morale and fighting ability of US Army soldiers in Iraq, who are confronting a guerrilla war that is threatening rebuilding efforts. In the short term, the Pentagon plans to call up thousands of additional National Guard troops and may have to consider tapping forces now assigned to other missions around the world. The lack of support from other nations, however, is forcing the United States to turn quickly to the Iraqis themselves for more assistance. Instead of having the full Iraqi police force trained in six years, as was originally planned, US officials hope to have it in place by early 2005. Most US soldiers in Iraq are involved in police activity, guarding against looters and assisting in reconstruction efforts.

"They have to find a substitute for US forces because the Iraqi operation is shaping up to be the perfect storm for the US Army, a commitment that cannot be sustained at current levels without walking away from all sorts of other global operations," said a senior Pentagon official, who said his comments reflected Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's thinking.

Pentagon officials worry that another victim of the war will be the Army's ability to recruit new soldiers or keep the ones it now has. But some retired generals and security specialists say that speeding up the handover is a gamble.

"Iraq cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of hostile interests. We cannot Vietnamize it and walk away," said John Pike, director of the GlobalSecurity.org think tank. "The dilemma in building up the Iraqi military is how do you develop forces that can simultaneously maintain order in Iraq and remain subservient to American orders?"

Hopes that Washington could recruit more nations to contribute troops dimmed this week at the UN, where President Bush failed to win Security Council support for a new Iraq resolution. Officials said it could be months before an agreement is reached, and even then Pentagon officials do not expect the kind of help they need. The United States now has an estimated 130,000 troops in Iraq, joined by another 30,000 from Britain, Poland, and other nations.

General John Abizaid, the head of US Central Command who is overseeing the Iraq operation, said yesterday that US plans currently do not anticipate the addition of a third international division. For planning purposes, Abizaid said, the deadline for such a division would be the start of October. "Since it doesn't look like we'll have a coalition brigade, we have to plan for American forces," he said.

Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee, General John Keane, the Army's vice chief of staff, said that the lack of international support would affect both active and reserve soldiers.

Military officials, members of Congress, and specialists said that without foreign help, the Army, which numbers less than 500,000 members on active duty, cannot handle the Iraq mission for long without suffering serious, long-term effects. "The stresses that missions have on our forces are of great concern to myself and other members of Congress," said Representative Stephen Buyer, an Indiana Republican and Army Reserve officer. He scheduled a meeting with Pentagon officials next week to discuss reserve readiness, retention, and recruitment.

Others are blunter. Edward Atkenson, a retired major general and senior adviser to the Association of the US Army in Arlington, Va., an advocacy group, said the Army faces greater long-term harm from the Iraq operation than it suffered after the Vietnam War.

"We don't have the draft like we had back then to fall back on," he said. "The Army is about as stretched as it can be." He said there were few attractive options available to limit the kind of damage the service suffered in Vietnam. One is to use troops from the military's "strategic reserve" of about four Army divisions -- about 100,000 troops -- designed to deal with unpredictable national security threats that could arise at any time, he said.

Another possibility is to recruit more soldiers, but that is a long, difficult process. A third option is to rely more on part-time soldiers. "The army's numbers don't look bad now in recruiting and retention, but there is some anxiety, particularly in the Guard and Reserve," said GlobalSecurity.org's Pike. "You basically have a peacetime military that is fighting a war, and that is a problem. The National Guard has not recruited people to fight wars."

Given those options, military officials and specialists said, turning over control more quickly to the Iraqis seems more attractive.

Currently, there are 40,000 Iraqi police and 20,000 civil defense officials on the job. The soldiers expected to complete training by February will represent the first significant Iraqi military group constituted since the end of the war.

As recently as two months ago, the US planned to transfer most security-related military operations to Iraqi control by February, according to a "working document" dated July 23 titled "Vision to Restore Full Sovereignty to the Iraqi People."

But L. Paul Bremer III, the US administrator in Iraq, told the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday that the document was out of date and that in many cases goals had been sped up, for Iraq's military as well as police. Whereas previous US plans called for having a 7,000-member Iraqi army up and running by spring, plans now call for 40,000.

Abizaid underscored the necessity of the move: "The more Iraqis that are . . . doing the security work to defend their own country, the sooner we will be able to draw down our forces, and the sooner we will be able to turn over the country to the rightful owners, which are the Iraqis." Without foreign help, specialists said, the Army has no choice. But many agree that it is risky and that foreign troops would be better in the short term. Loren Thompson, chief executive officer of the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va., think tank, said, "The only way to rectify things is train the Iraqis to do it or risk destroying the Guard and Reserve, not to mention the active-duty Army."

Iraq is biggest 21st century test of 20th century practice

The call for United Nations-backed multinational forces to join U.S. troops in Iraq is the 21st century's biggest test of a 20th century practice - the forging of alliances to achieve military, political or humanitarian goals.

From World War II through Korea, Gulf War I and Kosovo, success has been regularly achieved by like-minded nations acting in concert. Numerous brush-fire wars and civil conflicts also were ended by the intervention of forces from several countries under U.N. or other unified command.

"Global challenges also require global solutions, and few indeed are the situations in which the United States or any other country can act completely alone," says Sashi Tharoor, U.N. undersecretary-general for communications and public affairs.

"When American actions seem driven by U.S. national security imperatives alone, partners can prove hard to find - as became clear when, in marked contrast to the first Gulf War, only a small 'coalition of the willing' joined Washington the second time around," Tharoor wrote in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

While other analysts agree the United States can still act alone against unilateral threats, "it has to be something that poses a 'clear and present danger' to the United States," said retired Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who led Desert Storm, the 34-nation coalition that drove Iraqi invaders from Kuwait in 1991.

In an interview, Schwarzkopf cited the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and al-Qaida terrorism as examples of such threats. "What al-Qaida did to the World Trade Center, and their rhetoric regarding the U.S., gives us the green light to go ahead with unilateral activities as required," he said.

Patrick Garrett, who studies multinational warfare at the think tank GlobalSecurity.org, said that "if the task is small, the United States can probably act on its own, but if the task is huge, it needs to have some extra support, as it now does in Iraq."

Korea and Gulf War I, where multinational forces were called on to restore a pre-conflict status quo, were "clear examples of aggression that could be identified by everyone," Garrett said.

Schwarzkopf recalled that Desert Storm had "no fewer than seven U.N. mandates to kick the Iraqis out of Kuwait," but any further move against Saddam Hussein would have met resistance from coalition members, especially the Arabs.

Had the United States tried to go that alone, he said, "I'm certain that we would have run into the situation we ran into today. We would have been like the dinosaur in the tar pit."

Now, with a conquered Iraq proving more problematical than expected, the Bush administration seeks a U.N. peacekeeping mandate to strengthen the hand of the 138,000 American and 23,000 other foreign soldiers, and perhaps induce other nations to send forces.

The U.S.-led effort to establish a new order in Baghdad reflects a legacy of military intervention dating back to 1803, when Commodore Stephen Decatur was dispatched to quell the Barbary pirates preying on Mediterranean commerce.

Decatur became an overnight hero on the shores of Tripoli, and later coined a phrase that would guide Americans through two centuries of adventures abroad: "Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong."

Right or wrong, Americans later forced feudal Japan to open its doors, freed Cuba and the Philippines from Spain, and helped install some governments and depose others, chased border bandits and enforced stability from China to Mexico to Haiti to Grenada.

In some cases the United States acted alone, in others it had allies.

When communist North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, Washington called for the United Nations' first military intervention, then led the fight to restore the prewar dividing line at the 38th parallel.

In three years of war, U.N. forces from 18 countries suffered 16,000 dead - along with 415,000 South Koreans and 33,000 Americans. Fifty years later, the two Koreas remain technically at war and U.S. troops are still based there under a token U.N. flag.

Intervening a decade later in Vietnam with a handful of allies - South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Thailand - but no U.N. sanction, the United States lost a war that seared the nation's conscience and left it wary of military adventures with unclear or shifting purpose.

That was manifested in President Reagan's decision to quit Lebanon in 1983 after a truck bomb killed 241 Marines, President Clinton's pullout from Somalia a decade later after 18 Army rangers died in an operation gone wrong, and Clinton's refusal to send ground troops or attack helicopters into Kosovo.

The U.S. humiliations in Lebanon and Somalia were not eased by the fact that France - now at odds with Washington over Iraq - was a key ally in Beirut and lost 58 soldiers in another bombing the same day, or that 24 Pakistani U.N. peacekeepers died in a Somalia ambush.

President Bush recently warned America's enemies not to assume from the examples of Beirut and Somalia "that if you inflict harm on Americans we will run from a challenge."

The truck bomb that killed the senior U.N. envoy in Iraq, Brazilian diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello, and 22 others last month prompted the United Nations to sharply reduce its Iraq staff, but also spurred U.S. officials to seek U.N. backing for an expanded multinational force.

As in Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait and the former Yugoslavia, the United States would insist on overall command of any such force and be justified in doing so, experts say.

"The key is preponderance of forces - whoever has that, there is no question they should be in command," Schwarzkopf said. He recalled that in Desert Storm, the first President Bush flatly rejected a Saudi demand to command all forces based on its soil.

Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, a critic of the current president's decision to attack Iraq without full U.N. approval, agreed, saying on television shows Sept. 21 that the United States, with the largest armed component, is entitled to lead.

Being in charge, however, has its limitations, Garrett said.

"The United States is vested in Iraq, with no way to get out. It is there to occupy the country and push it in a certain direction," he said. "Other countries, like Poland, have said their purpose is security, to keep people from killing each other, and they aren't going to be involved with the political leadership."

Other complications could arise within the coalition from different ways of dealing with Iraq's civilians and fractious religious rivalries, differing tactical concepts, and incompatible equipment and communications, Garrett said.

A partitioning of Iraq into separate sectors, akin to post-World War II Germany, could lead to strains among allies and aggravate Iraq's already severe ethnic and religious tensions.

There also is the complication known as "mission creep" - a force sent to perform one role being forced to assume others for which it is ill-prepared.

A classic example was Somalia, where the original U.S. deployment to protect aid distribution segued into "national reconciliation" and "nation building," which in turn led to bloody clashes with Mogadishu's warlord-led street armies.

The War Game
David Hirst 's account of the Arab-Israeli conflict, The Gun and the Olive Branch, caused a storm 25 years ago. In this edited extract from his new and updated edition he offers a personal and highly controversial view of the current crisis in the Middle East
By the summer of 2002, George Bush had firmly set his new course: “regime change” and reform in the Muslim and Arab worlds, and, where necessary, American military intervention to achieve it. Hitherto, it had been assumed that the US could not go to war in one of the two great zones of Middle East crisis — Iraq and the Gulf — before it had at least calmed things down in the other, older and more explosive one, Palestine. But the American administration’s neoconservatives had a very simple answer to that. The road to war on Iraq no longer lay through peace in Palestine; peace in Palestine lay through war on Baghdad.

It was all set forth, in its most comprehensive, well-nigh megalomaniac form, by Norman Podhoretz, the neocons’ veteran intellectual luminary, in the September 2002 issue of his magazine, Commentary. Changes in regime, he proclaimed, were “the sine qua non throughout the region”. They might “clear a path to the long-overdue internal reform and modernization of Islam”.

This was a full and final elaboration of that project, “A Clean Break”, which some of his kindred spirits had first laid before Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu back in 1996. It was the apotheosis of the “strategic alliance”, at least as much an Israeli grand design as an American one.

Under the guise of forcibly divesting Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction, the US now sought to “reshape” the entire Middle East, with this most richly endowed and pivotal of countries as the lynchpin of a whole new, pro-American geopolitical order. Witnessing such an overwhelming display of American will and power, other regimes, such as Syria in particular, would either have to bend to American purposes or suffer the same fate.

With the assault on Iraq, the US was not merely adopting Israel’s long-established methods — of initiative, offence and pre-emption — it was also adopting Israel’s adversaries as its own. Iraq had always ranked high among those; it was one of its so-called “faraway” enemies. These had come to be seen as more menacing than the “near” ones, and especially since they had begun developing weapons of mass destruction.

So excited was Israeli Premier Ariel Sharon about this whole new Middle East order in the making that he told the Times, “the day after” Iraq, the US and Britain should turn to that other “faraway” enemy — Iran. For Israel, the ayatollahs’ Iran had always seemed the greater menace of the two, by virtue of its intrinsic weight, its fundamentalist, theologically anti-Zionist leadership, its more serious, diversified and supposedly Russian-assisted nuclear armaments programe, its ideological affinity with, or direct sponsorship of, such Islamist organizations as Hamas or Hezbollah.

Nothing, in fact, better illustrated the ascendancy which Israel and the American “friends of Israel” have acquired over American policy-making than did Iran. Quite simply, said Iran expert James Bill, the “US views Iran through spectacles manufactured in Israel”. Impressing on the US the gravity of the Iranian threat has long been a foremost Israeli preoccupation.

By the early 1990s, the former Minister Moshe Sneh was warning that Israel “cannot possibly put up with a nuclear bomb in Iranian hands”. That could and should be collectively prevented, he said, “since Iran threatens the interests of all rational states in the Middle East”. However: “If the Western states don’t do their duty, Israel will find itself forced to act alone, and will accomplish its task by any (ie including nuclear) means.” The hint of anti-American blackmail in that remark was nothing exceptional; it has always been a leitmotif of Israeli discourse on the subject.

The showdown with Iraq has only encouraged this kind of thinking. “Within two years,” said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, “either the US or Israelis are going to attack Iran’s (nuclear sites) or acquiesce in Iran being a nuclear state.”

To where this Israeli-American, neoconservative blueprint for the Middle East will lead is impossible to forecast. What can be said for sure is that it could easily turn out to be as calamitous in its consequences, for the region, America and Israel, as it is preposterously partisan in motivation, fantastically ambitious in design and terribly risky in practice.

Even if, to begin with, it achieves what, by its authors’ estimate, is an outward, short-term measure of success, it will not end the violence in the Middle East. Far more likely is that, in the medium or the long term, it will make it very much worse. For the violence truly to end, its roots must be eradicated, too, and the noxious soil that feeds them cleansed.

It is late, but perhaps not too late, for that to happen. The historic — and historically generous — compromise offer which Yasser Arafat, back in 1988, first put forward for the sharing of Palestine between its indigenous people and the Zionists who drove most of them out still officially stands. It is completely obvious by now that, without external persuasion, Israel will never accept it; that the persuasion can only come from Israel’s last real friend in the world, the US; that, for the persuasion to work, there has to be “reform” or “regime change” in Israel quite as far-reaching as any to be wrought on the other side.

Given the partisanship, it is, admittedly, highly unlikely to happen any time soon. But if it doesn’t happen in the reasonably foreseeable future, there may come a time when it can no longer happen at all. The Palestinian leadership may withdraw its offer, having concluded, like many of its people already have, that, however conciliatory it becomes, whatever fresh concessions it makes, it will never be enough for an adversary that seems to want all. The Hamas rejectionists, and/or those, secular as well as religious, who think like them, may take over the leadership. The whole, broader, Arab-Israeli peace process which Anwar Sadat began, and which came to be seen as irreversible, may prove to be reversible after all. In which case, the time may also come when the cost to the US of continuing to support its infinitely importunate protégé in a never-ending conflict against an ever-widening circle of adversaries is greater than its will and resources to sustain it.

That would very likely be a time when Israel itself is already in dire peril. And if it were, then America would very likely discover something else: That the friend and ally it has succored all these years is not only a colonial state, not only extremist by temperament, racist in practice, and increasingly fundamentalist in the ideology that drives it, it is also eminently capable of becoming an “irrational” state at America’s expense as well as its own.

The threatening of wild, irrational violence, in response to political pressure, has been an Israeli impulse from the very earliest days. It was first authoritatively documented, in the 1950s, by Moshe Sharett, the dovish prime minister, who wrote of his Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon that he “constantly preached for acts of madness” or “going crazy” if ever Israel were crossed. Without a “just, comprehensive and lasting” peace which only America can bring to pass, Israel will remain at least as likely a candidate as Iran, and a far more enduring one, for the role of “nuclear-crazy” state.

Iran can never be threatened in its very existence. Israel can. Indeed, such a threat could even grow out of the current intifada. That, at least, is the pessimistic opinion of Martin van Creveld, professor of military history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “If it went on much longer,” he said, “the Israeli government (would) lose control of the people. In campaigns like this, the anti-terror forces lose, because they don’t win, and the rebels win by not losing. I regard a total Israeli defeat as unavoidable. That will mean the collapse of the Israeli state and society. We’ll destroy ourselves.”

In this situation, he went on, more and more Israelis were coming to regard the “transfer” of the Palestinians as the only salvation; resort to it was growing “more probable” with each passing day. Sharon “wants to escalate the conflict and knows that nothing else will succeed”.

But would the world permit such ethnic cleansing?

“That depends on who does it and how quickly it happens. We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force. Let me quote Gen. Moshe Dayan: “Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.” I consider it all hopeless at this point. We shall have to try to prevent things from coming to that, if at all possible. Our armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.”

Iraq war claims 16th Hoosier

A bomb blast during the weekend claimed the life of the 16th Hoosier to die this year while serving in the Iraq war.

Staff Sgt. Frederick L. Miller Jr., 27, was killed Saturday outside Ramadi, about 60 miles west of Baghdad, when a bomb exploded near his Humvee, the Defense Department announced Monday.

"I just wish it was a dream and that I'm gonna wake up and he'll be here," said his mother, Anne Miller, from her home in Hagerstown. He leaves behind a pregnant wife, two children and a grieving community.

"It's just a shame," said Russell Wampler, the president of the Hagerstown Town Council, population 1,832. "It's a loss that will be felt by the whole town. There's no doubt about that."

Miller commanded a Bradley Fighting Vehicle assigned to Troop K in the 3rd Squadron of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment based at Fort Carson, Colo.

His death and that of two other troops in a mortar attack Saturday brought to 164 the number of U.S. soldiers killed since President Bush declared an end to major fighting in Iraq on May 1. During the heavy fighting before then, 138 soldiers died. The latest deaths brought to 302 the number of U.S. soldiers who have died since the U.S.-led coalition launched military operations in Iraq on March 20.

Miller joined the Army after high school and would have celebrated his eighth year of service next month.

He was discharged after his first tour of duty, but, his mother said, he re-enlisted after the Sept. 11 attacks. "It was his purpose to save our country," she said. "He had a job to do."

Miller had served in combat zones before, with tours in Kosovo, Yugoslavia, and Bosnia. In his last e-mail sent Sept. 11, Miller said things had been getting "pretty crazy" in Iraq, but he told his mother not to worry.

Anne and Frederick Miller last saw their son on Christmas, when he came home on leave with his wife, Jamie, and daughters, Haley, 8, and Sierra, 6. Jamie is pregnant with the couple's third child.

The baby, expected to be a boy, is due in December. Jamie and their children have been living with her parents in Florida.

Concerned that his parents had been spending a lot of money on long-distance phone calls, Miller decided to take action.

"He told me he had a big package for us, but it wasn't gonna fit in his car," she said. "He bought us a whole computer setup. He told us we had to get with the now generation."

Miller also has a sister, Jolene, 21, and two brothers, Justin, 17, and Randy, 16.

The family moved to eastern Indiana's Wayne County in 1991, and he played football at Richmond High School before graduating in 1994.

A steady stream of neighbors bringing condolences and food came to the Miller home on Lacy Road.

Miller's outfit includes more than 300 armored vehicles, including M-1 tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, according to GlobalSecurity.org. The 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment has more than 4,700 soldiers. At least 17 soldiers from the unit's base in Colorado have died in Iraq.

U.S. Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., who represents the area, phoned the family to tell them Miller was a hero.

"He died like every other American soldier throughout our nation's history, bringing hope and freedom to a people who have never known it before," Pence said in a statement released Monday. "I extend my deepest sympathies and fervent prayers to Staff Sgt. Miller's wife and family as they grieve the loss of this heroic American."

“When anybody does cheap-shot arguments, it means they’re not sure they have their arguments and can’t win,” Schumer said. “When they go below the belt, they’re not sure they can win above the belt.”

Anodder Short Hits Wall Street

The deadlier legacy of Aids

Paris - Already a human disaster of almost unimaginable proportions, Africa's Aids pandemic is also fast emerging as a security concern, with fears it will breed regional wars, civil strife and terrorism.

Experts speaking ahead of a major conference on Africa's Aids crisis opening in Nairobi on Sunday said the disease is inflicting such grim costs that more countries may join Somalia, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo on the list of sick, war-ravaged states.

South of the Sahara, about 30 million people have Aids or the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) which causes it, according to the UN agency UNAids. Last year alone, 2.2 million Africans died of the disease.

In seven southern African countries (Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe) at least a fifth of the adult population has the virus.

A whole generation

In these worst-hit countries, a whole generation of human capital is being wiped out by Aids.

The economic and social cost is such that their stability is at threat, the experts say.

Fields are lacking labourers to sow and harvest. Schools are going without teachers. Hospitals are losing their doctors and nurses. Business is losing entrepreneurs who bring dynamism and investment.

The decimation of the rural workforce creates a vicious circle, for it adds to the food shortages in famine-stricken countries, UNAids chief advisor for Africa, Michel de Groulard, said. People with HIV, who are the least resistant to malnutrition, are often the first to die.

Army of orphans

They leave behind a ragged army of Aids orphans, whose numbers are set to reach some 20 million by the end of this decade.

These children, uneducated and shunned, are easy targets for criminals and militias, de Groulard said.

"These children fall prey to all kinds of organisations and manipulators, who can turn them into child soldiers or eventually terrorists. It's a genuine risk," he said.

Put together, these ingredients are a potent formula for dislocation and civil violence, de Groulard said.

"This especially concerns southern Africa - Mozambique, Zimbabwe and to a lesser degree Botswana. All of this zone is very vulnerable in that respect," he said in an interview.

Meanwhile, the security forces which underpin stability in many African countries are getting progressively weaker.

A military conference in Gaborone, the Botswanan capital, was told last week that in southern African countries as many as 60 percent of troops have HIV.

The pandemic "could be a source for intra- and interstate conflict," Botswanan Major General Bakwena Oitsile said.

"If the security forces become weaker due to ill health, the countries' constitutions could be easily challenged. The political structures that ensure democratic governance could be threatened."

Terrorist havens

Devastated, turmoil-ridden countries, where law and order have broken down and the economy amounts to little more than a black market, are ripe for becoming terrorist havens, as was the case in Somalia, US analyst Patrick Garrett said.

"If an economy implodes as a result of massive Aids prevalence, then certainly terrorism can take root," Garrett, an associate at Washington thinktank Globalsecurity.org, said.

Such worries clearly figure in the thinking behind the five-year, $15bn US initiative to help African and Caribbean countries against Aids.

In February, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief George Tenet branded the pandemic a threat to US national security for its ability to "further weaken already beleaguered states."

"It's not just a health crisis, it's a crisis of nation states. Nations will collapse if they don't fix this problem," US Secretary of State Colin Powell warned in May.

The six-day Nairobi forum, the International Conference on Aids and STIs (Sexually Transmitted Infections) in Africa, known as Icasa, is the biggest regional forum on the continent's Aids problems. It is held every two years, alternating with the International Aids Conference.

Bush will wait before setting goals for NASA


Saying "the more we explore, the better off America is," President Bush said Tuesday that he was not yet prepared to outline a specific vision for NASA's future or what space exploration should entail.

Instead, Bush said in an interview with the Orlando Sentinel and reporters for 11 other newspapers, he will wait for recommendations from a panel of advisers before outlining a vision for America's space program.

"We've got an interagency study going on now that will enlighten us as to the best recommendations necessary for NASA to proceed in a way that is a good use of taxpayer dollars," Bush said, adding that he has not decided whether the study's goals should include manned exploration of other planets and beyond.

"I really don't have an opinion on Mars, but I do have an opinion that the more we explore, the better off America is," he said. "I believe in pushing the boundaries."

Bush's first public statement on his vision for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration comes less than a month after an independent board sharply criticized the lack of a unified vision for NASA, saying it was a factor in the agency's culture that contributed to the Feb. 1 crash of the space shuttle Columbia, killing all seven astronauts on board.

The president's statement met with immediate skepticism about whether the administration is committed to space exploration.

"Well, it's not John Kennedy," said John Pike, a space expert who runs the think tank GlobalSecurity.org.

Kennedy, president when NASA launched the first manned spaceflights, set a goal in 1961 to place an American on the moon by the end of that decade. NASA landed its first astronauts there July 20, 1969.

"These are not decisions that can be made by committees," Pike said. "Considering that he's been president for three years, if he does not have developed views on these matters yet, it doesn't sound like it's likely to change."

Others said it was notable that Bush is not supporting a manned Mars mission, because his father, George H.W. Bush, set that goal in 1989 during his presidency. Congress bagged the idea as too costly and never funded it. Bush said he has a top-level administration group -- including Vice President Dick Cheney, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe and White House science adviser John Marburger -- working on space policy.

O'Keefe, appointed to head the space agency in 2001 largely because of his experience at the White House budget office reining in federal spending, said Bush's comments indicated strong support for NASA.

"I am certain the president will make a proper decision, whatever that is," said O'Keefe, who attends the group's meetings but would not discuss specifics.

Since Columbia broke apart as it headed toward a Florida landing, Congress has been waiting to hear the president's goals for NASA before committing the huge sum of money experts say is needed to right the space agency.

The options range from speeding up development of an orbital space plane to augment the aging fleet of three remaining shuttles to setting a Mars mission as a long-term goal.

Sending astronauts to Mars likely would cost $100 billion, Pike said -- roughly the same, after adjusting for inflation, as the cost of the Apollo moon program Kennedy launched.

Whatever mission emerges for NASA, Bush said, it must be strong enough to gather broad-based support.

"It's very important for NASA to have a clear set of goals that are justifiable so that, when we go to Congress, the funding will come," he said.

The first President Bush ran into problems when, on the 20th anniversary of the first lunar landing, he announced the Space Exploration Initiative, focused on a Mars mission. The Democrat-controlled Congress refused to pay for the program.

The current President Bush has not made space a high priority, said space expert Roger Handberg, political-science professor at the University of Central Florida.

"The administration is supportive of human spaceflight," Handberg said, "as long as it doesn't cost much."

The nation has long lacked leadership on space issues, according to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, which spent seven months on a wide-ranging probe of the causes of the Columbia tragedy.

"The U.S. civilian space effort has moved forward for more than 30 years without a guiding vision, and none seems imminent," the board wrote in its report. "In the past, this absence of a strategic vision in itself has reflected a policy decision, since there have been many opportunities for national leaders to agree on ambitious goals for space, and none have done so."

Pike said only a president can commit the nation to a project as expensive as sending astronauts to Mars. The mission is complicated and expensive because of the length of time and distance traveled.

Handberg said Bush is like many members of Congress in not having a viewpoint on whether to go to Mars. Beyond the "dreamers" at NASA and among space advocates, the cost of going to Mars is unrealistically high, he said.

Bush said he had no specific timetable for the White House space panel but wanted suggestions from it "sooner rather than later."

Said O'Keefe: "We've got instructions to be expeditious."

Tamara Lytle can be reached at 202-824-8255 or tlytle@tribune.com.

Reservists say they remain in Iraq with no mission

Members of a Fort Eustis reserve unit say they were sent to fly perilous missions over Iraq with outdated night vision goggles, old missile-avoidance systems and communications equipment they were unable to use.

They had to secretly borrow higher-quality night-vision goggles from a Navy source who ``probably put his career on the line to do something that our chain of command was unwilling to do,'' they say.

In a letter to Rep. Jo Ann Davis, R-1st District, the soldiers say they were treated like second-class citizens when compared with active-duty military, even though they were involved in the search for weapons of mass destruction during combat.

``Our air crews asked, `Why are the active units getting the extra protection and we are not, are we not as valuable? Is our mission not as important?' '' the letter asks.

It points out that some of the soldiers were issued bulletproof vests without the insertable ceramic plates that make them bulletproof and mittens with wool inserts -- ``knowing that the average temperature from April through October is 120 degrees.''

And though their mission ended June 24, they say they are being kept at a tented compound in Camp Udairi, Kuwait, ``without a purpose,'' a deployment the Army said probably will not end until next year.

The letter was written by Chief Warrant Officer Bill Basabilbaso of Newport News, a pilot and flight instructor in the unit. It echoes concerns raised by many other reservists, whose call-ups have increased dramatically since the United States launched its war on terrorism in 2001.

Basabilbaso said he sent the letter to Davis ``for her eyes only, not for public consumption.''

He said he wrote to Davis ``hoping she could initiate an investigation that will result in better funding and better training for the reserve soldier and better management of the reserve soldier once deployed.''

``This is a serious situation,'' Chris Connelly, Davis' chief of staff, said Friday. He said Davis will ask the secretary of the Army to review the issues raised in the letter.

Friends and family members of the 45-man Army aviation detachment said the letter expresses concerns shared by unit members and their families.

``It is disturbing to know that our men and women in uniform are being sent to fight a war without the proper equipment,'' said Kerry Bannon, a Norfolk resident whose fiance, Spc. Gregory Robinette, is a member of the unit.

Bannon said she supports the president, but the letter's questions need to be answered. She sent a version of the letter to Virginia's two U.S. senators, John Warner, who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and George Allen; and Rep. Ed Schrock, who represents the 2nd District.

In response, Schrock is ``drafting a letter to go to Army legislative affairs to try to find out what the problems are,'' said Tom Gordy, Schrock's chief of staff, on Friday. ``We often see that active-duty components have more modern equipment, and the reserve components sometimes have equipment that does not meet standards. A lot of times the reserves get the hand-me-downs.''

The disparity between equipment used by reserve and active-duty components ``is an issue we're going to have to address to reduce friendly-fire incidents and make sure we do things most efficiently,'' Gordy said.

Allen responded to Bannon on Sept. 5, saying he was sending a copy of the letter to the Department of the Army ``for their consideration, and I have asked them to keep me informed of their progress.''

Warner spokesman John Ullyot said Friday that the senator ``is looking into the matter.''

The reserve unit -- Detachment 1, B Company, 5th Battalion, 159th Aviation Regiment -- is made up of pilots who fly Chinook CH-47D helicopters and their support crew, including flight engineers, technicians and mechanics.

Most of the unit's members live in Virginia. They include college students, policemen, medical evacuation pilots, business owners and current and former airline pilots.

The part-time soldiers were mobilized Feb. 2 and arrived in Kuwait March 7, accompanied by four disassembled Chinooks the men reassembled at Camp Udairi, a U.S. air base in Kuwait, about 15 miles south of the Iraqi border.

The unit's battalion commander said last week that their deployment has been extended to a year under a new Pentagon policy that will mean longer duty assignments for Army reservists and National Guardsmen in Iraq and Kuwait. The unit's activation orders called for the members to spend no more than 179 days overseas.

The unit's aviators logged about 400 hours of daytime and nighttime flying during their mission, which was supporting the 75th Exploitation Task Force in the unsuccessful search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the letter said. Much of the mission was conducted under combat conditions after the March 20 Iraqi invasion. The unit suffered no casualties.

These are among the issues addressed in the letter:

Night-vision goggles

The unit unsuccessfully lobbied superiors to buy upgraded goggles long before deployment to Kuwait because the goggles that had been issued, called Type 1, are obsolete, the letter said.

``The Type 1 style were responsible for the many losses of aircraft and crews during Desert Storm,'' the letter said.

During a 10-year period starting in the mid-1980s, more than 183 aviators were killed and hundreds were injured in 88 crashes in which night-vision goggles were used, according to news reports. Flyers were wearing Type 1 goggles when some of those crashes occurred, according to those reports.

The head of the Army's aviation night-vision program said it would be an oversimplification to blame crashes and deaths solely on goggles. But he said the Army does not encourage the use of Type 1 goggles in combat.

Few Type 1 goggles remain in the Army's inventory, and most of them probably belong to reserve units, said Master Warrant Officer Dennis J. McIntire, who heads the Army's Aviation Night Vision Devices Branch at Fort Rucker, Ala.

He said the Fort Eustis unit should have upgraded to newer goggles before deployment. ``We want the guys who are on the front to have the best stuff,'' he said.

The detachment's commanders ``made every attempt'' to acquire upgraded goggles before deployment but were unsuccessful, said Lt. Col. Mark C. Smith, who commands the 5th Battalion, 159th Aviation Regiment. Smith responded from Kuwait to a series of written questions.

About a week before deployment, the reservists borrowed higher-quality goggles to use in the Middle East from a man who works for the Navy's night-vision goggles branch.

The special goggles amplify tiny particles of light and heat images, affording aviators a green-hued view of nocturnal landscapes that are virtually indiscernible to the unaided eye.

Still, flying in a low-light desert environment at night, especially under hostile conditions, ``is incredibly dangerous, the most dangerous helicopter flying you can do,'' said Tim Brown, a senior fellow with the Washington think tank GlobalSecurity.org.

There's little room for error when a pilot is traveling at more than 100 mph, Brown said, hugging the ground under radar at an altitude of 50 feet or less. ``You want the best equipment there is for that,'' he said.

Outmoded communications and safety equipment.

The unit's helicopters are equipped with outdated missile-avoidance systems, and commanders turned down aviators' requests for newer ones, the letter said.

It added that the latest equipment can help aviators avoid heat-seeking missiles used by Iraqi soldiers. The aging systems still installed on the unit's Chinooks were designed to combat missiles used in the 1970s and early 1980s, according to the letter.

Those systems are effective ``only under the best conditions, i.e. seeing the missile when it is launched and then being able to fly the helicopter behind something that will mask our huge heat signature such as a large sand dune or building (unlikely).''

The new systems cost about $80,000 each. Unit members said they were told that the Army provided only active-duty units with the systems.

Smith said the battalion asked to be moved up on the Army's ``Force Modernization Plan'' to obtain the systems but was unable to get them before deployment.

However, Smith said, the current equipment ``is an effective system and provides adequate protection for our helicopters.''

Most of the soldiers in the unit deployed without desert flight suits and flight boots, the letter said. Many of the soldiers, including ground crewmen, were not given protective inserts for their bulletproof vests, though flight crews were provided with the proper vests before taking part in the search for weapons of mass destruction, a member of the unit said.

``We even had to take money out of our own pockets to get oil and oil filters for the military vehicles we were taking with us,'' the letter said.

The unit members also complained that they were not properly trained to use on-board radios and other communications equipment that could help distinguish friend from foe in combat conditions.

``Since we operated out of Kuwait far into Iraq,'' the letter said, ``we had no way to relay problems, or get changes to our mission as they arose.''

More importantly, ``we had no way to relay a message if we had problems, or forced landings, unless we were in a location where we could contact the patrolling AWACS,'' or reconnaissance aircraft, the letter said.

Smith responded that the detachment was without a communications officer for more than a year before mobilization. Shortly before the unit was mobilized, it was assigned a replacement officer ``who has done an outstanding job'' providing training on high-frequency radios and other communications equipment, he said.

Unfortunately, he said, some of the training was provided after Detatchment 1 had departed.

Defense analyst Brown said he is not surprised when he hears that reserve units are not as well-equipped or highly trained as active components of the armed forces.

``Generally the Guard and reserve are the last to get the new stuff,'' he said. ``The active-duty guys . . . they always get the new stuff.''

Stuck in Kuwait

In Kuwait, the men in Detachment 1 spend their nights sleeping in air-conditioned tents and their days battling boredom, relatives and friends said. They kill time hanging out at the morale welfare center, watching football games on TV, playing video games on an Xbox and making day trips to Camp Doha, family members said.

Families and friends of the unit's members said earlier this month that they were issued orders to be sent home in September, but those orders were revoked without explanation.

Smith said he requested that the detachment be extended ``to assist this battalion in accomplishing this mission.'' He did not describe that mission.

Now the men are part of the Pentagon's new policy, which means that Army reservists will spend one year in the Middle East unless the U.S. Central Command decides to send them home early, Smith said.

Smith said he understands the soldiers' disappointment. ``But I consider them vital to the success of this unit's mission in support of the global war on terrorism.''

The Virginian-Pilot recently contacted more than a dozen family members and friends of the men in the unit, but most were reluctant to talk, saying they feared reprisals from the military.

One who did talk is Amanda Harris of Wise. She is the wife of a helicopter mechanic in the unit, Spc. Brian Harris. The two wed on Jan. 30, three days before he left Southwest Virginia for Fort Eustis.

``Neither one of us would be so frustrated if he had a mission there, but their mission is over,'' said Amanda Harris, 21.

In their letter, the unit members noted that their continued deployment in Kuwait without a mission ``will damage the retention of good experienced soldiers in the unit.''

The letter concludes: ``We did our mission; it is time for us to return to our lives, because we know that soon enough, we will be called again to serve for an extended period of time.''

Some may not want to send troops

Even if the Bush administration gets a new United Nations resolution authorizing an international force, many world leaders face formidable problems in trying to convince their people of the wisdom of sending troops to a country where U.S. soldiers are attacked almost daily.

"Think of the domestic politics for those who are considering sending troops," says Ellen Laipson, president of the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank specializing in national security. "Even if there is a U.N. mandate, they're facing a much more dangerous security environment."

Bush shifted course last week when he proposed to cede some control over postwar Iraq to the United Nations in hopes of persuading allies to send more peacekeeping troops.

Public opinion polls in France, Germany, India, Pakistan, Russia and Turkey, some of the nations the Pentagon hopes will supply troops, show that people remain strongly opposed to the Iraq operation.

Pentagon planners are counting on a second multinational force, besides one led by Poland, to replace the Army's 101st Airborne in February, but no country has emerged to lead that division, and no forces have been identified as replacements.

The most prized troops are from nations that have trained with U.S. forces, have modern weapons and are well-funded.

"You need pretty capable troops, like northern Europeans, who are well-trained for this," says Nancy Soderberg, a former U.N. ambassador and President Clinton's director of the National Security Council. "This is a war, and the Third World countries who are good at peacekeeping when there is peace to keep will not work here."

Even if the U.N. Security Council authorizes a force, that won't solve the other problems that stand in the way of finding and getting more troops to Iraq:

• Political opposition. Parliaments in Turkey and India have rejected sending troops, and a U.N. resolution might not sway or overcome their opposition. India said Friday that it wouldn't send troops even with a resolution.

• Lack of available, well-trained troops. There are 15 U.N. peacekeeping missions underway around the world, plus non-U.N. multinational forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Those deployments have drained troops from countries with well-trained forces.

• Transportation. Because most military forces are designed to defend the homeland, few have the capability to transport forces any substantial distance.

For example, a U.N. force for Congo, largely from Uruguay, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Indonesia and Nepal, took nearly four months to arrive.

• Open-ended mission. Defense analysts say a nation generally needs three times the number of troops it will send on a foreign mission to ensure a rotation of fresh soldiers. Under that guideline, a nation would need 15,000 available troops to send 5,000 to Iraq. Few countries have that kind of flexibility for an Iraq mission with an unknown end date.

• Ineffective forces and Iraqi political opposition to troops from certain nations. For example, "Pakistani troops have proven incapable of policing their own border with Afghanistan, and the image of (Hindu) Indian troops effectively stabilizing a Muslim population is difficult to sustain," says Andrew Krepinevich, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. "The Russian experience against Muslims in Chechnya could render them most unwelcome in Iraq."

NATO members such as Denmark and the Netherlands that backed the U.S. effort have few additional troops to spare but are trying to increase their commitment. The Danish parliament is considering increasing its 422-troop deployment in Iraq by a few hundred.

"Clearly, this is not the time to say it is horrible down there and let's pull out and not send any more. This is the time for the opposite, namely to stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States and the Iraqi people," said Karen Eva Abrahamsen with the Danish Embassy.

All that could leave the Pentagon to cobble a force with troops from less advanced militaries, something experts say wouldn't work.

Eastern European nations in line to join NATO and others looking to win favor with the United States are making contributions but are already facing problems in Iraq.

The Bulgarians, for example, have found their older weapons and communication systems breaking down in the harsh elements.

"Some of these nations want to help, but their military and equipment is obsolete for a desert environment," says Patrick Garrett, an analyst with GlobalSecurity.org, an Alexandria, Va., defense study group. "They cannot handle the rigors of the climate as well as the rigors of an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade)."

Some participating countries would want to negotiate memorandums of understanding with the United States specifying the duties their troops would perform. That leaves open the possibility that some nations would insist on staying out of high-risk areas or would refuse to participate in policing and anti-terrorist activities that have caused serious problems for the U.S.-led coalition.

CARRIER PILOTS GROUNDED FOR CRASH INVESTIGATION

Fighter pilots aboard the George Washington have stopped flying as investigators arrived on the Norfolk-based carrier to investigate why a cable failed to catch an F/A-18 Hornet on Thursday.

Navy officials said the cable, known as an arresting wire, on the carrier's flight deck broke during the jet's landing. The Hornet then went overboard, forcing the pilot to eject and injuring about a dozen sailors.

But key details - how the accident happened and how sailors on the flight deck were injured - remained undisclosed.

The George Washington has been underway and off the coast of Virginia since Tuesday, testing new pilots' ability to take off and land on the 4 1/2-acre flight deck. The pre-deployment process is known as carrier qualifications for the Atlantic Fleet Replacement Squadron, some of the Navy's newest pilots.

The pilot involved in the accident was rescued safely from the water, but five of the injured were flown off the carrier to local hospitals, officials said.

Portsmouth Naval Medical Center treated and planned to release three sailors Friday, said spokeswoman Lt. Jackie Fisher. The sailors declined to be interviewed, said Cmdr. Lydia Robertson, a spokeswoman for the Atlantic Fleet's Naval Air Force.

One of the sailors brought to the trauma unit at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital was moved Friday to Portsmouth Naval because the patient's condition had improved, Fisher said.

The other sailor at Norfolk General was still listed in serious condition Friday. The Navy has not released the names of the injured.

According to officials, the Hornet pilot approached the carrier at around 4 p.m. and tried to latch his tailhook to the flight deck's fourth and last arresting wire. The wire did not hold.

About 12 sailors were injured, officials said. Most had cuts and bruises. The Navy did not say whether the unsecured wire struck the sailors directly. An F-14 Tomcat fighter jet and an E-2C Hawkeye early-warning plane were also damaged during the accident, officials said.

All of the injured sailors "are doing fine," Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Vern Clark told reporters Friday after a briefing he received on the accident. Clark, the Navy's top officer, was in Virginia Beach as keynote speaker for the establishment of the Navy's Human Performance Center at Dam Neck.

"My immediate interest is the speedy recovery of those sailors," he said. "The second order of business is to find out how this happened. Something like this hasn't happened in years and years."

Since 1980, there have been three deaths, 12 major injuries and five minor injuries associated with arresting gear-related accidents, according to data compiled Friday for The Virginian-Pilot by the Naval Safety Center in Norfolk. The data included Thursday's accident.

Two teams intend to explore the accident's aftermath, Robertson said. One group would look at the arresting wire gear; the other would serve as an investigation team into the accident.

The George Washington, a Nimitz-class carrier, is essentially a floating airport, capable of launching as many as four aircraft per minute. The ship's four catapults and four arresting gear engines can launch and recover aircraft simultaneously.

The four arresting wires, each consisting of thick cables connected to hydraulic rams below deck, bring landing aircraft going as fast as 150 mph to a stop in less than 400 feet, according to GlobalSecurity.org, an independent Web site specializing in defense information.

BUYERS AND SELLERS IN DEATH TRADE

Links with al-Qaeda. Decades of human rights abuses in East Timor. Now violently suppressing Aceh independence movement at a cost of 12,000 lives. BUYING: Since 1997 Labour government has approved 377 arms export licences to region. UK-built Scorpion tanks and Hawk jets being used in Aceh, breaking contractual agreements.

Pakistan

Al-Qaeda known to operate in Pakistan. Offered undercover journalists anti-personnel landmines after meeting at DSEi 1999. BUYING: Despite conflict over Kashmir with nuclear rival India, British government approved military sales worth £15million, while also arming India. SELLING: PM Pervez Musharraf recently admitted Israel was only country he would be reluctant to sell arms to. Pakistan Ordnance Factory makes landmines, bombs, grenades, machine guns and rifles.

Israel

Despite breaking dozens of UN resolutions in conflict over Palestine, Britain doubled defence contracts to £22million in 2001. BUYING: In 2002, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw bent UK regulations to allow sale of parts for US-built F16s used in attacks on Occupied Territories. SELLING: Israel Military Industries sells cluster bombs, sub-machine guns, machine guns, missiles, mortar ammunition. IMI was asked by MoD not to display cluster bombs this year but could still tout for future business. Pressure group GlobalSecurity.org claims Rafael's Haifa operation is site of a nuclear weapons design lab.

Syria

Invited by government but declined to attend. Labelled rogue state by US because of suspected illegal chemical weapons programme and links with terror group Hezbollah.

Bulgaria

More than one million Kalashnikovs left Bulgaria after Cold War, ending up with some of world''s most brutal armies, militants and gangsters.

A 1999 Human Rights Watch report called country''s defence industry an "anything goes weapons bazaar"." Allegedly broke UN embargo on selling weapons to Sierra Leone in 1998. SELLING: Arsenal Co. makes assault rifles, grenade launchers and anti-aircraft guns.

India

BUYING: British government approved military sales worth £118million to India in 2002, when country was teetering on brink of nuclear war with Pakistan over Kashmir.

Saudi Arabia BUYING: British arms exports to Saudi were worth about £63million in 2002, despite abusive regime.

China

Long suspected of selling weapons on to rogue states, despite a partial arms embargo. SELLING: Norinco make rifles, sub-machine guns, machine guns.

Turkey

Turkey remains key military ally in the Middle East, despite appalling human rights record against Kurds. BUYING: Human Rights Watch reported weapons sold to Turkey by UK, US, Germany and Russia were used to commit atrocities. Also suspected of selling on UK military technology to rogue states. SELLING: MKEK, makes ammunition, small arms, rockets, hand grenades, pistols, artillery rockets and explosives, multiple launch rocket systems and chemicals for arms production.

Morocco

Al-Qaeda known to operate in Morocco. War on Want has called for ban on weapons which could be used to support Morocco''s armed occupation of Western Sahara, such as gun parts sold by Britain in 2001. Belgium

SELLING: FN Herstal, Rifles, machine guns, small arms ammunition. In 2002, company won contract to export 5,500 machine guns to Nepal.

Romania

SELLING: Despite Britain''s ratification of anti-landmine Ottowa Treaty in March 1999, Romanian defence firm Romtechnica openly used DSEi that autumn to promote its anti-personnel landmines.

South Africa

BUYING: Currently spending more than £3.5billion on major defence contracts with European firms, including 24 BAE Hawk jets. SELLING: Thirty-six South African companies will have stalls at fair including Dene which makes missiles, infantry weapons and ammunition. Secured £18million deal with Algeria in 1998 when government there was involved in conflict with Islamist opponents.

Tanzania

BUYING: The British government approved a £28million BAE contract to sell an air traffic control system in 1998, opposed by Chancellor Gordon Brown and the World Bank.

United Kingdom

SELLING: BAE Systems, Britain''s biggest defence firm has been caught up in controversy over its high pressure sales tactics, boardroom antics. It has been forced to issue stern denials of bribery in deals with India, the Czech Republic and South Africa and against UN allegations it broke sanctions to sell to Robert Mugabe''s regime in Zimbabwe. Best- known for Hawk jets, naval vessels and missile defence technology, but also sells artillery, small arms and mortars to 50 countries through subsidiary RO Defence. Heckler & Koch has factories in Nottingham and sells under licence in Pakistan, Turkey and until recently, Iran and Myanmar. Rifles, sub-machine guns and machine guns in use in 90 countries. Alvis, UK sold Scorpion tanks to Indonesia which were deployed in violent suppression of independence movement in Aceh, breaking restrictions placed on their use in a Labour- government backed 1997 £100million contract.

America's growing network of bases

For a symbol of the way that America's overseas presence has changed since September 11, 2001, look no further than the Peter J Ganci air base.

Named after a New York fire chief killed when the World Trade Centre collapsed, this small but strategic base is in the central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan. This used to be no more than a smudge on the post-Soviet map until it was transformed by the war on terrorism.

Ganci is a different beast from the sprawling American air bases of East Anglia, Germany, Italy or Japan, which resemble transplanted slices of small-town America.

Instead it is essentially temporary, ready to be mothballed or closed should the threat to the United States shift elsewhere. For bases like Ganci, and dozens more that have sprung up since 2001, impermanence is the whole point. They are heavily guarded and discreet to avoid provoking often hostile local populations. There are no wives or children to be seen: only air force technicians, soldiers or special forces.

The other constant is the presence of contractors from the private corporations that provide logistics to the US military.

Some outsiders have watched the astonishing spread of US power across the globe and accused America of building a new empire.

Ganci lies at the heart of what Pentagon planners call "the arc of instability" - a band of troubled, poor or failed states taking in the drug-producing areas of Latin America, much of Africa, the Balkans, the Middle East, Central Asia and South-East Asia.

Before September 11, few in Washington gave much thought to these unhappy regions. Since the attacks, the United States has moved with speed and stealth to secure air bases, landing rights, and military agreements across the arc.

"Since September 11, 2001, the United States has built, upgraded or expanded military facilities in Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, Oman, Bulgaria, Romania, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Djibouti, the Philippines and Diego Garcia," said Patrick Garrett, who tracks US military deployments for a Washington clearing house for strategic intelligence, globalsecurity.org.

The United States is reportedly seeking bases in Mali and Algeria, and permission to refuel in Uganda and Senegal. There is also talk of bases in Singapore, Australia and even Vietnam.

It certainly looks like a new empire. But empires imply a desire to hold and defend vast territories. The United States wants only to land, fight - then leave, if need be.

Pentagon chiefs envisage a global network of "lily pads" or "warm bases", forward depots which would hold enough weaponry, vehicles and supplies to equip large rapid reaction forces, which would fly in at short notice through a handful of large air hubs, such as Ramstein in Germany. Other equipment would be kept in floating warehouses at sea.

Strike forces would head for "virtual bases", airfields in any of a wide range of countries to have granted the United States emergency access rights.

So, far from entangling the United States in imperial alliances, the new doctrine is instead born of distrust, and America's fears of being let down by even its oldest allies, argues Celeste Johnson Ward, a fellow of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

In the long term, the Pentagon's dreams are more radical still.

Its research arm recently solicited bids for a new breed of space-based unmanned hypersonic bombers, capable of taking off from American soil and striking targets on the far side of the globe within two hours, without waiting for permission to use bases, or for overflight rights.

The ultimate aim is to leave America's enemies in fear of a strike from a clear blue sky at any second or, in the Pentagon's words, "to hold adversary vital interests at risk at all times".

History of Camp Shelby

A history of Camp Shelby Army National Guard Training Site:

1917: Camp Shelby activated as training camp for World War I troops. Named in honor of Isaac Shelby, Indian fighter, Revolutionary War hero and 1st Governor of Kentucky, by the first troops to train there, the 38th Division.

1918: Camp Shelby deactivated at end of World War I.

1934: State of Mississippi acquires Camp Shelby for use as National Guard summer camp.

1940: Camp Shelby reopens as federal installation, with its population exceeding 100,000 troops at one time during World War II. The base also housed a prisoner of war camp for members of the German Afrika Corps. Camp Shelby is closed at conclusion of war.

Korean War: Camp Shelby becomes emergency railhead facility.

1956: Continental Army Command designates Camp Shelby as a permanent training site.

1958: Congress allocates money for first permanent-type barracks at Camp Shelby.

Here comes the space competition
With China embarking on an ambitious program to put one of its own in orbit, the skies won't be just ours and the Russians' for long


The first rocket man came from China, and so may the next.

Around 1500, the legend goes, a man named Wan Hu strapped himself into a chair, had assistants light the fuses of 47 attached rockets and took off into the sky.

Next month, if all goes according to plan, another man, or possibly two, will climb into the more modern Shenzhou 5 spacecraft and blast off once again for space.

Whether Wan Hu made it or blew himself to bits remains lost in myth. But if these new rocket men succeed, China would officially join the United States and Soviet Union as the only nations to put people in orbit.

China's planned launch isn't the only flight activity stealing the space spotlight from the United States. Europe sent its first mission to Mars in June and plans to launch a lunar probe by the end of this month. India recently announced that it intends to launch a moon mission in 2008. And Brazil was trying to launch South America's first satellite when the rocket exploded on the launch pad on Aug. 22, killing 21 technicians.

How these foreign efforts fare could affect how NASA copes with the aftermath of the Columbia shuttle disaster. A successful launch by China, for instance, might reinvigorate U.S. politicians to formulate a national vision for space.

"Some of us specialists down in the trenches, we can see an overall impact way down the road that will force the administration to make real decisions about the future of space flight," said Charles P. Vick, a space analyst and consultant with the Web site globalsecurity .org.

In the near term, no country can threaten NASA's role as the world's premier space agency. "But the question is, what happens if NASA starts looking lame compared to China?" said astronomer Jonathan McDowell, author of an online newsletter about space launches.

For the most part, information about China's space program is limited to government releases through state-run media. Still, Western observers have cobbled together what they believe is a fairly comprehensive picture of what to expect this fall.

Decades of work

The Shenzhou 5 launch is the latest accomplishment of a space program that China has worked on for decades, said Phillip Clark of Molniya Space Consultancy in England.

China launched its first satellite in 1970, but its manned space flight program didn't take off until the government began Project 921 in 1992, as part of a national push to invest in science and technology. For help, China looked to Russia's expertise, sending its astronaut candidates to a Russian training camp and purchasing old Soyuz spacecraft, the mainstay of Soviet and Russian manned space flight.

Chinese engineers have since designed the series of Shenzhou, or "heavenly vessel," spacecraft. Some parts, such as the booster rockets, are technologically original, said Phillip Saunders, director of the East Asia nonproliferation program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. Other aspects are adapted and expanded from Russian designs; from the outside, the Shenzhou looks like a Soyuz, but it is larger, more powerful and more maneuverable.

The first Shenzhou flew in secrecy in November 1999. It lifted off from the main launch pad at Jiuquan, in the Gobi Desert of northwestern China, and landed after orbiting Earth for a day, said Mr. Clark, who analyzed orbital data from NASA for each of the Chinese flights.

Three following flights each lasted a week and grew progressively more complex: Shenzhou 2 did its first maneuvers in orbit in January 2001, Shenzhou 3 carried a dummy astronaut in March 2002, and Shenzhou 4 had a complete life-support system on its flight in December 2002.

Shenzhou 5 is supposed to fly sometime this fall, according to Chinese media reports. Oct. 1 marks the anniversary of the government's coming to power, and many space observers have targeted Oct. 10 as a possible launch date.

Because the Chinese space program has gone forward so slowly and carefully, it may very well pull off the Shenzhou 5 launch without the kind of setbacks that plagued the U.S.-Soviet space race of the 1960s, said Mr. Clark. The real question is whether anyone in the West will notice.

"It may be a two-day news story wonder," he said.

Whichever man China chooses - and all the candidates are reportedly men - he will join the ranks of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and astronaut Alan Shepard as his country's first representative in space. (Gagarin made one full orbit of Earth in 1961; Shepard and Gus Grissom made suborbital flights before John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth in 1962.)

The taikonauts or yuhang yuans, as Chinese space fliers are called, will probably become national heroes as astronauts and cosmonauts were in the 1960s, said Dr. Saunders. "This is something that is seen as a tremendous achievement, both for Chinese science and technology and for the Chinese system," he said.

What will happen after Shenzhou 5 remains a mystery. China isn't due to release another five-year plan for its space program until nearly 2006. But the government has floated ideas of a manned space station, an unmanned lunar probe, or even a manned trip to the moon.

"You can assume they will start working on a manned lunar landing," said Mr. Vick of globalsecurity.org. "That becomes a different game where they're in effect taking us on."

Expensive goal

But to do so, China would have to develop a new launch vehicle that could break out of Earth orbit - something that would take many more years and a lot more money. China currently spends an estimated $ 2 billion annually on its entire space program; the United States spent $ 7 billion each year, in modern dollars, just to develop the Apollo program to the moon.

Instead, China may take Russia's approach and develop a space station like the now-defunct Mir, Mr. Clark said. Such a station would give taikonauts a platform for doing long-term scientific experiments and a base for further exploration. (China has made overtures to join the 16-nation International Space Station, now in orbit, but was rebuffed by members of Congress including Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., chair of the House subcommittee on space and aeronautics.)

As for going to the moon, no official announcement has been made, much less any sort of schedule set.

"I've always had the view that the Chinese have penciled in 2020 or thereabouts as being the time that they'd like to have their first people on the moon," said Mr. Clark. "In July 2019, there won't be anyone else there to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's landing."

In essence, China is now where the United States and Soviet Union were four decades ago - practicing the first steps into space and perhaps harboring dreams of further exploration. But in the earliest of those steps, space experts see no problems with the Shenzhou 5 launch going off as planned.

"The things that could set it back would be technological problems on their side," said Dr. Saunders, "or if there is a renewed focus on safety concerns, not just in light of the U.S. shuttle disaster but also the Brazilian launch."

Brazil's rocket tragedy has decimated its technological workforce, said Dr. McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. It was Brazil's third attempt at launching a satellite aboard its own rocket. Government officials have not pinpointed a cause for the disaster, but the country has pledged to continue its space program even as the investigation continues.

Joining the crowd

Nine other countries have gone where Brazil has not yet, launching their own rockets successfully. In 2002, according to Dr. McDowell's satellite catalog, the launch roster looked like a list of ethnic restaurants: 23 were Russian, 18 American, 11 European, four Chinese, three Japanese, one Indian and one Israeli. That breakdown roughly corresponds to current list of space powers in the world, a list once dominated solely by the Soviet Union and the United States.

France and Great Britain have also launched their own satellites, but now work under the aegis of the European Space Agency, or ESA. Fifteen countries belong to ESA, which is based in Paris. Its members have worked smoothly together as a freestanding agency in which countries can spend money on as many or as few projects as they like, said Alasdair McLean, a space policy analyst in Aberdeen, Scotland.

ESA's new Mars Express mission, and its upcoming SMART-1 probe to the moon, reflect how Europe has always emphasized science over manned space flight, he said. ESA does maintain a small group of astronauts in Germany who hitch rides into space aboard U.S. or Russian launch vehicles.

"Europe is just getting to the point now where it's competing as an equal, but it's definitely Avis to NASA's Hertz," said Dr. McDowell.

The last guest astronaut to go into space was Israel's Ilan Ramon, who died in February aboard Columbia. The next will be Spain's Pedro Duque, who is slated to launch to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft on Oct. 18.

Mr. Duque will fly up with U.S. astronaut Michael Foale, a veteran of the Mir station, and cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri. Mr. Foale and Mr. Kaleri will replace the current two-man space station crew, while Mr. Duque will come back to Earth after a week in space.

The ever-changing roster aboard the space station continues to reflect that most of the money for the station comes from the United States and most of the long-term space experience from the Russians, said Dr. McDowell.

Even the new U.S.-Russian cooperation may not set the standard in space for long. Decades ago, Arthur C. Clarke envisioned such a pairing in his novel 2010, the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey. But as the Americans and Russians fly together to Jupiter, they are caught offguard by another mission - a spaceship from China.

E-mail awitze@dallasnews.com

FILE 1963/Associated PressThe crowded frontier

October 1957: Soviet Union launches Sputnik, kicking off modern space race.

January 1958: United States launches its first satellite, Explorer 1.

April 1961: Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbits Earth, the first human in space.

May 1961: Alan Shepard becomes first American in space.

December 1964: Italy becomes third nation to send a satellite into space

November 1965: France launches its first satellite.

July 1969: Neil Armstrong walks on the moon.

February 1970: Japan launches its first satellite.

April 1970: China launches its first satellite.

April 1971: Soviet Union launches Salyut 1, first of many Russian space stations.

October 1971: Great Britain launches first satellite, after government has already shut down its space program.

May 1973: Skylab, the United States' first and only space station, is launched.

July 1980: India launches its first satellite.

April 1981: United States flies its first space shuttle, Columbia.

September 1988: Israel launches its first satellite.

November 2000: Two Russians and one American become first residents of International Space Station.

October 2003: China is expected to launch its first man into space

SOURCES: Space Almanac, Dallas Morning News research

Hit By A Mistake,
A Marine Asks Why; Marine Facing Recovery After Bombing Accident While Assigned to Anti-Terrorism Duty in Africa

Marine Cpl. Steven Johnson is another wounded soldier back from war.

But Johnson's war was different. While other members of his reserve company from Greensboro went to Kuwait and Iraq this winter, he agreed to serve as a helicopter radio operator in Djibouti, a small desert country in Eastern Africa that coalition forces use as a base for the war on terrorism.

From the time that nine 750-pound bombs dropped around him the morning of June 22, Johnson said, he realized that his company had been hit by the U.S. Air Force. The Marines had been participating in a training exercise with the Air Force, he explained, and there were no enemies in the area.

One Marine died and seven others and one sailor were injured that day. Johnson, severely burned and with numerous bones broken, almost died. After two months in a military hospital, he returned to his home in Kannapolis on Aug. 29.

What awaits Johnson now is at least a year of therapy. His dream of being a police officer is on hold.

And he has had a different homecoming from most wounded warriors. Though Johnson has been honored in his community, medals traditionally aren't handed out for training injuries.

"A bomb's a bomb, I don't care whether your friends drop it or your enemies drop it," said Johnson, who is 22. "I was still doing my duty."

Air Force officials have not contacted him or his family. Johnson said he knows that the bombing was an accident, but he is left with questions about why it happened during an exercise designed to enhance communication procedures between air and ground forces.

"The investigation is still pending, awaiting final approval," said Lt. Gary Arasin, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, Air Force. "It's one of those things. You train your folks, you equip them, you try to prevent accidents from happening. But we're in a dangerous business. That's basically it." Crawling from the wreckage

Military accidents, whether in training or combat, can be as dramatic as a bombing or as commonplace as a Humvee crash. Accidental deaths have long outweighed those in combat. During 1991, the year that included the first Gulf War, 931 service people died in accidents and 148 died in "hostile" incidents, according to the Department of Defense.

By the time Johnson joined Junior ROTC at A.L. Brown High School in Kannapolis, the number of accidental deaths had been dipping for years, thanks to enhanced technology and safety measures.

After graduating from high school, Johnson enlisted in the reserves and studied at Rowan-Cabarrus Community College.

In January, he said, his sergeant called from Greensboro and said that the coalition forces in Djibouti needed a radio operator. Johnson went, figuring that he would soon be bound for Iraq anyway.

His mother said she felt a sort of relief at the news.

"If he had to go somewhere, this would maybe be a safer place," Patricia Johnson said.

Johnson was with a Marine helicopter squadron at Camp Lemonier Djibouti. There was a lot of boredom and training, Johnson said, but he also took part in some activities that he is not allowed to talk about.

That's not unusual for those serving in Djibouti, said Patrick Garrett, an associate analyst for GlobalSecurity.org, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank in Alexandria, Va., that studies defense and other issues.

"The only time you hear about what they're doing is if they make an enormous mistake or have an enormous success, like killing an al-Qaida member in Yemen last year," he said.

The accident in June was a mistake that made national news.

It was similar to three other training exercises that the Air Force and Marines had held in Djibouti since December.

Two choppers had just landed at an observation point near the bombing range. Johnson was monitoring radio traffic in one of them when the Air Force B-52 dropped the bombs.

Somehow, Johnson said, he dragged himself from the burning helicopter and ran about 15 feet, with his shin bone popping out of his right leg, before he fell among some rocks.

The Marine captain who had been piloting his chopper, Capt. Seth Michaud of Hudson, Mass., was lying on the sand near him, Johnson said. He had massive chest and stomach injuries, and he died about half an hour later. He was 27 and left behind a wife and young son.

Johnson suffered second- and third-degree burns over 30 percent of his body, a broken right leg, two broken arms, a shattered left elbow, nerve damage in his left arm, and numerous injuries from shrapnel. He later learned that he had lost 40 percent of the hearing in his right ear, but doctors said that he should get most of his hearing back.

Apparently, the observation point was mistaken for the target point, said Michaud's father, Francis Michaud of Hudson.

In the minutes after the bombing, Johnson said, he struggled to survive.

"Boot camp'll give you this mentality; you almost think you're invincible," he said. "The first bomb hits, you figure you're not invincible. That mentality did save my life, though."

He said he didn't feel so much pain as weariness. Fellow Marines urged him to stay awake, and Johnson said he did so by talking about his fiancee and his parents.

He was flown to a Djibouti hospital, where he finally passed out. He doesn't remember anything else, he said, until waking up at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, on July 4.

For a month, Johnson was in intensive care. His 5-foot, 10-inch frame shriveled from 160 pounds to 128.

He spent his final month there going through twice-daily cleansing of his burns, an ordeal in which nurses stripped away his dead skin. He learned how to stand and then to walk again.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stopped by to see Johnson during a visit to the hospital. But no one from the Air Force has made any effort to apologize, visit or console him, which bothers some in Johnson's family.

"You'd have thought they'd send a letter," said Melissa Moser, Johnson's older sister.

There are reasons that Air Force officials haven't contacted Johnson, said Dan Goure, the vice president of the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., a think thank that deals with military issues.

"Don't dismiss the Air Force as being a bunch of insensitive slobs,'' he said. "It may bureaucratic or it may even be legal.... In the United States, an apology may be a legal admission of guilt."

Defense analysts and military historians note that the Air Force has a strong history of investigations that hold its pilots accountable when warranted. Such investigations are especially sensitive when they involve the accidental bombings of American troops.

Johnson and Francis Michaud said they are ready for the investigation to be over.

"Hopefully, they can understand what happened, to save some future lives," Michaud said.

He is not worried about possible penalties against those whose errors may have cost his son's life.

"It doesn't change the outcome," he said.

Carrying scars

Johnson is settling back into civilian life now, splitting his days between therapy paid for by the government and time with his fiancee, Jamie Jenkins. He said that his doctors tell him that after more surgeries he should make as much as a 95 percent recovery. But getting there is hard.

Jenkins sometimes tries to help him handle his cutlery at meals, but he rebuffs her efforts, saying that he wants to do it himself. She cleans his wounds, and recently she pulled from his ear a piece of shrapnel that had worked its way to the surface.

He will carry several other pieces in his body the rest of his life, Johnson said.

He carries emotional scars as well, moments in which he said he is back inside the burning chopper, seeing the flames, smelling the gas and hearing the live ammo packed inside begin to explode.

Occasionally, he and his family talk about the bombing.

Patricia Johnson emphasizes that accidents happen, but said that "it reeks" that her son didn't get a medal for incurring his injuries. Seth Michaud was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, but there was no posthumous medal for him.

"Was he any less patriotic or dedicated or whatever than somebody who died due to enemy fire?'' Michaud's father asked. "He made the ultimate sacrifice, and is that lessened by the fact that it was friendly fire rather than enemy fire that killed him? I struggle with that. But I'm not sure that a medal would mean anything."

Several military scholars said that medals and awards should be reserved for combat.

Richard Kohn, a professor of military history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said that training deaths are a tragedy but "most of the time, we give awards for something positive happening."

Steven Johnson didn't know the crew of the B-52, which he said was probably flying from a base on the Indian Ocean. He doesn't get mad about the accident. But his best friend, Matthew Gobble of Concord, does.

Gobble, also a Marine corporal, said that friends of his were killed when the Air Force accidentally bombed them during a March 23 fight for a bridge in Nasiryah, Iraq.

Gobble, who was near that bombing, said he found it tough to look at Johnson and his wounds.

"It brought back some bad memories," he said. "It was hard.... I'd just lost friends to stupidity, pretty much."

Johnson is more reserved in talking about his bombing.

He said he believes in the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq and that it was worth all of his injuries to take part in that fight. Still, he can't help but wonder.

The training exercise in which he was bombed had been planned for at least a week, he said, so why couldn't the error have been anticipated and corrected?

"I mean, normally, they check and double-check these things two or three times," he said.

Nor is he sure that he is ready to forgive the bombers.

"If they feel remorse about it, yes," Johnson said. "If they're cold-hearted about it, no."

GRAPHIC: Journal photos by Ted Richardson , Steven Johnson visits with his fiancee, Jamie Jenkins. He is home after two months of treatment at a hospital in San Antonio.

1. Johnson begins therapy with Diane Wassum at Carolinas Medial Center in Charlotte. A8: Steven Johnson and Jamie Jenkins survey some of the leg burns he suffered while serving with the Marines in Djibouti.

2. Johnson and his mother, Patricia Johnson, go through some "welcome home" mail he has received since returning from a Texas hospital, where he was treated for burns and fractures.

3. Matthew Gobble of Concord visits with Johnson at Johnson's home in Kannapolis. Gobble served as a Marine in the war in Iraq.

How much longer can U.S. pretend it has no empire?

There is a very cunning after-dinner board game called SPQR that involves the defense of the Roman Empire at its height. The board itself is a map of Europe and the Mediterranean, showing Roman cities and ports and the military roads and sealanes that connect them. The game involves the "senators and populace" moving selected Roman legions (there were 27 of them in, say, 80 A.D.) along those internal lines in response to new threats, whether they arise from Syria, Scotland or across the River Danube. There were few places along the borders of the empire where one legion was further than a 10-day march from reinforcing another--which was just as well, since Rome's expansion had given it many enemies and a legion that was based in Sicily one year might find itself in the north of England, guarding Hadrian's Wall, the next.

I thought of SPQR while reading "Where Are the Legions? Global Deployments of U.S. Forces," published by Global Security, a nonprofit, nonpartisan policy research group based outside Washington, (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/global-deployments.htm). The message of the article is clear, and very disturbing: There may not be many U.S. troops coming home soon, perhaps not for a long time.

Currently, the United States has stationed military forces in about 130 countries, fighting in some of them, peacekeeping in others and training foreign militaries in yet others. One can hear former U.S. President George Washington spinning in his grave.

To be sure, the United States has had standing military commitments abroad since the end of World War II--the occupations of Germany and Japan, the Korean War and the global rivalry with the Soviet Union made sure of that. But when the Warsaw Pact collapsed, it was generally assumed that things would be different. Alas, that simply is not so. The fight against Al-Qaida, the war and guerrilla resistance in Iraq, the implosion of Liberia, the continued unrest in Afghanistan, instability on the Korean Peninsula and the need to reassure Japan of a strong U.S. presence in the western Pacific have all conspired against a drawdown of U.S. forces in the far corners of the globe. On the contrary, they have very much been "drawn up."

Using official statistics, the editors at Global Security report that there are 155 combat battalions in the U.S. Army. Before October 2001, only 17 of these were deployed on active combat service, presumably in Kosovo and a few other hot spots (garrison deployment in Germany and Japan is not regarded as active combat service). Today that figure stands at 98 combat battalions deployed in active areas. Even a nonmilitary expert can see that this is an impossibly high number to sustain over the longer term, which is why, in addition to the 255,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines and coast guard forces deployed in combat and peacekeeping missions abroad, we have sent an additional 136,000 troops from the national guard and reserves. Most of the ships belonging to U.S. carrier fleets are now back at their bases being refitted after the defeat of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, but we still have 40,000 sailors afloat and on mission. Meanwhile, U.S. Army generals are asking for more troops to be deployed to Iraq, and the Pentagon has just diverted three warships to the coast of Liberia. The U.S. Defense Department now has to play the game of SPQR.

These are not comfortable facts, and they should surely be giving our congressional representatives cause for thought. It is true that the Pentagon is putting immense pressure on any government that counts itself as a friend of the United States to send forces to Iraq, Afghanistan and Liberia, but the results so far are unspectacular. Really, the only ground troops with heft and logistical capacity are the British, and, given all their other peacekeeping commitments (from the Balkans to Sierra Leone), they are probably more overstretched than the United States. Poland has assumed responsibility for running a relatively quiet (so far) zone in Iraq, but as the Wall Street Journal reported July 28, had to go to 22 countries to drum up the 9,000 troops for that zone and will rely heavily on U.S. technical support to function there at all. One wonders what utility U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz really accord a battalion of Latvian grenadiers in central Iraq. And what happens when they become the targets of grenade attacks?

Militarily--and let's forget for a moment the political debate about whether we should have gone into these countries in the first place--these awkward facts point to two equally awkward conclusions:

First, given the military overstretch, the United States needs a few more heavy hitters, along with the British. It needs armies with substantial punch that could send 25,000 troops to southwest Asia. But of the 190 national armies of the world, you can count the substantial ones on the fingers of one hand. Israel cannot play; China and Taiwan won't play. South Korea is pinned down at home and remains a drain on U.S. troop deployments. Japan is too psychologically and constitutionally restricted. A Pakistani presence alongside the United States in Iraq might lead to massive internal convulsions. A large Turkish contingent would see a retaliatory Kurdish uprising. This leaves India, Russia, France and Germany, and perhaps Italy, but four of those five opposed the Iraq war in the first place, and if we need them now, there will be a price to pay. This is as obvious today as it should have been in September. Of course, the United States can always "go it alone," but it does so at some cost. Only U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., seems to have realized that.

Second, the U.S. services, and the U.S. Army in particular, must come up with some long-term rotation scheme. They may have to move to a sort of Cardwell System, which was devised in the late 19th century by then British War Secretary Edward Cardwell to deal with the constant calls upon troops to serve abroad. One battalion of the British regiment was rotated out, perhaps to Afghanistan or Mesopotamia, for two or three years; the second battalion stayed home in the regimental barracks, recruiting fresh volunteers until its turn came to go abroad. The system worked, just as the SPQR system worked, because both combined regular rotation (helping troop morale) and strategic flexibility. Occasionally, there were horrible reverses: for the Romans in the German forests or the British in the Khyber Pass. But the structure was strong enough to allow for recovery, often for further advances. These were empires that were in it for the long haul.

Is that the U.S. democracy's future, to have its troops stationed for an undefined time on the Northwest Frontier or in a disease-ridden port in West Africa? We frantically deny that we have imperial ambitions, and I believe those denials to be sincere. But if we increasingly look like an empire and walk like an empire and quack like an empire, perhaps we are becoming one just the same.


Kennedy is the Dilworth professor of history at Yale University and the author or editor of about 16 books, including "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers."

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'Six Flags Killer' Still At Large, Say Souvenir-Bedecked Police

"If you have any information that might lead to the capture of this vicious killer, please contact us immediately," a button-covered Gurnee Police Captain Jack Moynihan said at a press conference held in Carousel Plaza. "We have officers standing by on the Whizzer."

"Oh," Moynihan added. "And if you know where to get one of those blinking hats we've been seeing around, let us know."

Police began their search on Aug. 26, when ride operator Zack Lipton, 16, found a decapitated body behind the Fiddler's Fling control booth. Two days later, the remains of Six Flags employee Cory Reader were found in the bushes at the perimeter of the Yukon Territory, still inside his Wile E. Coyote suit.

Park-goers reported sightings of a blood-covered man in the vicinity of the crimes, leading police to believe that both murders were committed by the same 35- to 45-year-old Caucasian male.

Police have been combing the attraction for clues, thoroughly investigating every ride, game, snack bar, gift shop, and photo-sticker booth.

"We started our search in Yukon Territory and fanned out to Yankee Harbor and Orleans Place," Moynihan said. "We've got a whole squad on the Sky Trek Tower. If anything suspicious happens, we'll be sure to see it from our vantage point on the bridge by Splash Water Falls."

"I urge the public to cooperate with any officers forced to butt in line," Moynihan added, as he shifted his grip on a three-foot-tall, plush Bugs Bunny. "It's a lot of ground to cover in one day, as you all know."

Moynihan said his first priority is to ensure the safety of Great America employees and visitors. To that end, he has stationed an officer in the front car of every ride in the park.

"I have men working in shifts on rides, from 10 a.m. until the park closes at 8 p.m.," Moynihan said. "Officers from neighboring departments have volunteered to cover some of the more popular attractions, such as the American Eagle and Superman: Ultimate Flight."

Moynihan had to develop a unique system to oversee the patrol of a park as big and fun as Great America.

"We gather by the double-decker Columbia Carousel twice a day to compare notes, discuss leads, and eat funnel cakes," Moynihan said. "We also keep in constant radio contact with one another. Instead of the usual 'all clear,' we've been using an updated, site-specific check-in."

When pressed, Moynihan said, "The check-in signal is 'Wheeeeee!'"

Looking for a killer in a theme park has created its share of problems, Moynihan admitted.

"The crowds, the noise, and the overall jovial atmosphere have been distracting," Moynihan said. "We've limited our searches to weekdays, because on weekends, the lines here are nutso."

Cost has also hindered the daily patrols. The city of Gurnee bought season passes for 50 police officers, but the admission fee is far from the only expense the department incurs.

"We've been trying to stay within a budget," Moynihan said. "You'd think that once you paid admission, you'd be covered. But then there's parking, souvenirs, and game tickets. And food here is outrageous. Ten dollars for a burger and a Coke? If we didn't have to keep a constant presence in the park, our officers never knowing when or where the killer might strike next, we'd probably bring a cooler full of sandwiches and eat in the parking lot."

Moynihan said he hopes for a break in the case before the end of the season, but is willing to personally supervise the investigation through the Six Flags' Fright Fest, which begins Oct. 11.

"As adventure-filled as this investigation has been, we can't focus all of our man power on Great America," Moynihan said. "By now, the killer could be as far away as Magic Mountain."

Moynihan ended the press conference with an ultimatum, which was later broadcast over the park's public-address system.

"You will not get away with this," said Moynihan, shaking a fistful of cotton candy at the still-at-large assailant. "We will find you if we have to fingerprint every Skee-Lo game in the park."

Combat wounds proving less deadly

Soldiers in Iraq are surviving combat-related injuries at a markedly higher rate than in past wars, according to a review of casualty figures from Iraq and other recent US conflicts.

Roughly one in seven soldiers wounded in combat in Iraq has died, according to figures released by US Central Command. In previous conflicts dating to World War II, one in every three or four soldiers died after combat wounds.

Widespread use of lightweight body armor, improved battlefield medicine, and the lack of Iraqi artillery use have all contributed to the US survival rate, according to medical authorities and military specialists.

But that survival rate also may disguise the day-to-day danger level that coalition forces face in Iraq. Since most attention focuses on deaths, particularly those from ambushes and other combat, the higher numbers of wounded in Iraq have drawn relatively little attention. Since President Bush declared major combat operations over on May 1, a US soldier has been killed roughly every other day. During the same time period, an average of 4.5 troops have been wounded in combat each day.

According to US Central Command, 1,111 US personnel have been wounded in action since the start of hostilities, including 561 since May 1. Over the same period, 178 have been killed in action, 66 since May 1. According to coalition officials in Baghdad, allied forces are attacked on average a dozen times a day.

"Body armor and helmets have been the very big winner on the battlefield this last go-round," said Robert Kinney, who heads the individual protection division at the US Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Mass. He added the Iraq war marks the first time the military used ceramic body armor -- lightweight plates inserted into the front and back of a soldier's combat vest -- on a mass scale.

That protection has translated into fewer immediately fatal injuries.

"We are seeing very few chest wounds and very few head wounds," said Colonel David W. Polly, chief of the Department of Orthopedic Surgery and Rehabilitation at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. Polly estimated about 80 percent of the wounds he and his staff have treated have been to arms and legs. He said the expected range in combat is between 60 and 80 percent.

"Patterns of injury were very different in Iraqi versus US soldiers," Major General Kenneth L. Farmer Jr., US Army deputy surgeon general, told Military Medical Technology magazine in June. "Iraqi soldiers experienced the whole spectrum of injuries: upper and lower extremities, chest, abdomen, and back. US soldiers have had predominantly upper and lower extremity injuries."

Troops also have benefited from decades' worth of improvements in combat medicine, not simply improved equipment but also better training. For example, Polly said, during the buildup to the war, the Army put its doctors through a course emphasizing techniques for saving arms and legs. "They tried to get every doctor going overseas to get that course before going," Polly said.

In Iraq the Army also made more widespread use of Forward Surgical Teams, -- small, mobile units that can move with troops, cutting down on the time between injury and treatment. Military doctors focus on the first hour after an injury, the so-called golden hour, as the critical time when treatment can make the difference between survival and death. Whereas in Vietnam helicopters carried wounded soldiers to medical bases far behind the front lines, Forward Surgical Teams can move more quickly to the troops.

Military physicians also deploy more modern medicine, including antibiotic beads that secrete highly concentrated medicine into wounds and genetically engineered bone morphogenetic proteins, which help heal bones without the need for bone grafts.

US forces also have benefited from the fact that most Iraqi attacks have involved small-arms fire, or at worst rocket-propelled grenades, rather than artillery, which has historically been the greatest cause of battlefield injuries.

"If your adversary's mainly using small arms . . . there's just a limited number of lethal pieces of metal that are coming at you," said John Pike, from GlobalSecurity.org, a think tank based in Alexandria, Va.

While attention has focused on the number of US deaths, critics of the war suggested the larger issue of total casualties is gaining urgency. Jamal Simmons, a spokesman for the presidential campaign of Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, said that in his campaign appearances Graham has been putting greater emphasis on the issue of US casualties because he increasingly gets asked about it.

Barry Posen, from the Security Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that despite the relatively low death rate, the ongoing incidence of casualties will become a problem because of the "morbidity version of the `six degrees of separation' hypothesis," which argues that any two people in the world are connected by no more than six levels of acquaintances. In this case, Posen said, people could increasingly hear about friends of friends getting wounded in Iraq.

In World War II, 30.3 percent of soldiers wounded in combat died. That percentage fell during the Korean War to 24.1 percent, and held steady through the Vietnam War (23.6 percent) and the Persian Gulf War (23.9 percent). But the number has declined sharply in Iraq, with 13.8 percent of battlefield wounds being fatal.

For American soldiers in Baghdad, the continuing attacks are no surprise -- they do not consider themselves to be in a postwar environment. The troops' uniforms still carry a backwards US flag patch, an indication of continuing conflict.

"You really have to be on your toes. No matter how hot it gets, no matter how tired you are," said Specialist Tristan Byars, 23, of San Diego. "When you get complacent, it's like putting a bull's-eye on your chest."

One soldier, Byars recalled, survived one attack and was sent back to his unit, only to be hit with a rocket-propelled grenade that took off both of his legs and an arm.

Daily, soldiers receive reports of deaths and injuries among colleagues, and many wonder whether they will be next, said Sergeant Nestor Rodriguez, 33, of Puerto Rico. "There are days some of us flip out and say, `I'm not going to make it here; we're going to die.' You just have to calm them down."

Susan Milligan of the Globe staff contributed to this report from Baghdad; Robert Schlesinger can be reached at schlesinger@globe.com.

Battered al-Qaeda relying on allies to keep up terror campaign

The al-Qaeda terror network has been forced to let smaller allies take up the war against the United States since its bases in Afghanistan were decimated in the military campaign unleashed after the September 11 attacks, US terrorism experts say.

The theory that Osama bin Laden's network needs increasing support from satellite groups has been confirmed by other groups claiming responsibility for recent attacks around the world, they added.

"Their infrastructure and capability are not at all what it was on September 10, 2001," the eve of the attacks against the World Trade Center in New York, and the Pentagon outside Washington, said Patrick Garrett of GlobalSecurity.org, a security consultancy.

"That's the reason they are more reliant on other groups," Garrett told AFP.

Al-Qaeda's infrastructure used to be based around camps in Afghanistan -- harboured by the former Taliban regime in the country -- which trained not only bin Laden's fighters but affiliates from dozens of other radical Islamist groups.

Garrett estimated that about 3,000 al-Qaeda members and their allies have been killed or captured in the US war on terrorism launched in around 100 countries after the September 11 attacks two years ago.

Marc Burgess, of the Washington-based Center for Defense Information (CDI) highlighted that US and Western intelligence services said the new scenario first came to the fore with the Bali bombing on October 12, 2002 that killed more than 200 people.

Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) claimed responsibility for that attack and its leaders are now on trial or being hunted.

According to Burgess, al-Qaeda has been forced to rely on such associates to cause damage even far away from the United States.

JI also claimed responsibility for the car bomb attack on the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta on August 5 which left 12 people dead.

Other extremists who follow the Wahhabi sect of the Sunni Muslim faith are beginning to infiltrate Iraq, analysts said.

The Takfir group operates in Europe and North Africa and is linked to hardcore factions of Algeria's Armed Islamic Group (GIA).

The head of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham, attributed responsibility for an attack on Israeli tourists and an attempted attack on an Israeli airliner in Mombasa, Kenya in November to the Somali-Kenyan group Al-Ittihad al-Islamiya (AIAI).

The group, whose name means the unity of Islam, is on the US wanted list.

Other fundamentalist Islamic groups linked to al-Qaeda are also known to be operating in the Caucasus and in south Asia.

"Al-Qaeda is not centralized as they were. They are more scattered so they may not be capable of carrying big attacks in the short term. How long is it going to be the case? We don't know," Burgess admitted.

But for Charles Pena of the CATO Institute, although that approach is well founded, it does present a number of risks.

"Even if they are weaker and less capable, we shouldn't operate under that assumption, but under the assumption that they are at least as capable as they were September 11, 2001," said Pena, noting that the organization is an "adaptive" one.

"Maybe they are using this time to rebuild and regenerate their organization. The fact it's not al-Qaeda doesn't mean they are not capable." Pena said.

And he suggested al-Qaeda might be saving its strength to "focus on something else more directly against the US."

The sole certainty is that al-Qaeda is still an inspiration and a source of finance for these groups, and that "their objectives are exactly the same" as they were.

In the ominous words of al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri, in a taped message dating from August 3, what the United States has seen so far is merely a foretaste of what is to come.

New attacks on planes 'inevitable'

Experts believe it is only a matter of time until there's another attempt to destroy a commercial jet using shoulder-fired missiles, and warn that little can be done to defend airports.

And they are not discounting the possibility of multiple strikes on different continents in an attempt to cripple an already wounded aviation industry.

"I think it's been a low-hanging fruit for some time," said John Pike, a former defence analyst with the Federation of American Scientists and now director of US-based GlobalSecurity.org.

"You do it on multiple airports on multiple continents and people won't fly."

Security forces have known for years about the threat to airliners from the missiles, known as man-portable air defence systems, or MANPADS.

But until recently, most of those were in remote war zones. That changed last year with a failed attack on an Israeli Boeing 757 in Kenya using weapons with serial numbers matching those launched against US warplanes in Saudi Arabia.

The problem, according to Mr Pike and others, is the availability of the weapons and the people willing to use them.

At least 24 terrorist organisations are believed to possess the missiles. Attempts to stamp out the black market in the missiles have proven unsuccessful. US reports suggest older-style missiles are available for as little as $US5000 ($7840), with more sophisticated models going for up to $US50,000.

Rigorous intelligence gathering is seen as the main obstacle facing terrorists trying to bring the missiles into Australia unnoticed. A good example of this was the arrest in New Jersey last month of British arms dealer Hemant Lakhani after a successful sting operation involving the FBI and Russian intelligence. Mr Lakhani had allegedly tried to buy a missile for an agent posing as a terrorist.

At less than 2m long and weighing less than 20kg, smuggling missile tubes through some remote section of coastline would not be difficult.

Airports such as Sydney woule be virtually indefensible, according to Jane's Defence Weekly Australian correspondent Ian Bostock.

Bostock said the background clutter of the urban environment made it impossible to detect these kinds of launch systems.

"You could literally open up the back of a panel van, step out and fire one of these things," he said.

The problem is further compounded by a shallow approach that means aircraft are in effective range of MANPADS, of up to 8km, for many kilometres.

Bostock believes it would be hard for a trained operator to miss a target as big as an airliner. "It's like a block of flats almost, it's hard to miss," he said. "As long as you keep your cool, and you're able to keep your sights on the target, most of the time you're going to get a hit on a civilian aircraft."

Attempts are now under way in the US and Israel to develop a system capable of knocking a a missile off course by shooting a laser or infrared beam at it. Australia's Defence Science and Technology Organisation is also asking the Government to fast-track a compact laser system called MURLIN, which is understood to have developed to the prototype stage.

But Bostock said an aircraft landing or taking off would get little warning of a missile streaking towards it at 1800km/h.

MANPADS

Man-portable air defence systems

* Launched from the shoulder, MANPADS such as the SA-7 are 1.4m long, weigh 14.5kg and take about 6secs to fire

* With an effective range of up to 5500m, maximum altitude of 4500m and a maximum speed of 1250km/h, the SA-7 uses infrared sensors to lock on to heat sources such as engines

* MANPADS can be fused to detonate on contact or when close to their target

* More advanced MANPADS have an effective range of 18km and top speed of 1800km/h

Brave new skies

If they had been there to discuss anything other than the Bush administration's latest anti-terrorism surveillance plan, the activists who met in Washington on Aug. 25 might have been at each other's throats. On healthcare, tax cuts, affirmative action, the war in Iraq, you name it, these people don't see eye to eye. But here was Hilary Shelton, the NAACP's Washington chief, agreeing with David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, and Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform -- two of the most influential conservatives in D.C. And here was Laura Murphy, the ACLU's legislative director, championing the work of "my good friend, former Congressman Bob Barr" -- the same Bob Barr who sponsored a resolution to impeach Bill Clinton in 1997, months before anyone knew anything about those trysts with the intern.

What could have motivated these ideologically disparate advocates to put aside their differences and join forces? The answer is CAPPS II, the air-passenger vetting protocols that the Transportation Security Administration hopes to deploy early next year. By electronically mining commercial and government databases, CAPPS II -- the "computer-assisted passenger prescreening system," version 2 -- will perform instant criminal background checks on everyone boarding an airplane in the United States. It's at once an Orwellian prospect and a potential gold mine for the travel industry: A database of the type envisioned by the government would allow hotels and airlines to get their hands on your lifetime itinerary.

Results of the background check are intended to be used to determine who gets to sail through airport screening, who is accorded greater scrutiny, and who is barred from flying at all. "CAPPS II will ensure that passengers do not sit next to known terrorists and wanted murderers," the TSA said in a recent press release. The agency also insists that CAPPS II won't be intrusive -- the system, it says, "reflects American values, and respects the rights and privacy of the traveling public."

But ever since the TSA first began contemplating CAPPS II, in January, its simple rationale for the system has won few supporters in the public or within the Washington policy establishment. Not even Congress has been happy with it; in a bill to fund the Federal Aviation Administration -- one of those must-pass appropriations bills -- lawmakers are set to order an investigation of the privacy rules in CAPPS II.

The TSA now appears to be on the defensive. On Aug. 1, in an attempt to assuage some concerns, the agency released what was meant to be an improved privacy outline for CAPPS II. The new proposal reduced the length of time the government would keep travel data on passengers and focused the system on stopping suspected terrorists and people wanted for assorted, non-terrorist-related "crimes of violence," rather than for just anybody who may have forgotten to pay a parking ticket. But it's a sign of how distasteful most critics consider CAPPS II that the new guidelines were seen by many as not very good, and to some as even worse than the rules TSA first proposed.

For CAPPS II to work, the system would need to know four bits of information about you -- your name, date of birth, home address and phone number. According to Bill Scannell, a journalist who now spends his time trying to thwart CAPPS II -- he is the man behind Boycott Delta and Don't Spy On.Us, two CAPPS II-protest sites -- once this data is associated with your itinerary, private firms (such as the airlines and hotels) will be able to keep lifetime dossiers of everywhere you travel. Every time you take a flight, every time you check into a hotel, every time you rent a car -- all your data will be entered into your permanent travel record, a file that would be available to travel-industry businesses (for marketing purposes) and to the government (for purposes even more nefarious than marketing).

At the August panel discussion Murphy, of the ACLU, described CAPPS II as being of the same stripe as Total Information Awareness, John Poindexter's now all-but-dead plan to spot the "signatures" of incipient terrorist attacks hidden in commercial databases. Both programs, Murphy said, represent the "logical outgrowth of a bureaucratic fixation on technological quick fixes to highly complicated international and domestic security problems." The words "quick fix" are important. In conversations with Salon, nearly all critics of the CAPPS II, and even some proponents, said that the TSA and its parent agency, Tom Ridge's Department of Homeland Security, do not appear to have fully considered the far-reaching political, social and technological implications of having the government watch everyone who flies.

Shelton, of the NAACP, says he fears that CAPPS II will single out minorities for greater scrutiny at airports. James Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, worries about "mission creep." The TSA says that CAPPS II will focus on international as well as domestic terrorists, but who's to say who's a domestic terrorist? "Some people would call antiabortion activists terrorists, and the FBI has called certain environmentalists terrorists," Dempsey says. Bob Barr worries about the intrusion of the federal government into state matters -- why will the Homeland Security Department act on local criminal warrants at airports? And they all say that -- unlike financial or medical data -- travel information is bound by precious few regulations; once the TSA starts mixing your name and birthday with your flight information, your individualized travel file will be available to virtually anyone with access to a computerized travel database -- not a small group.

All of this might be necessary, some critics say, if the TSA could show that CAPPS II will make a tremendous difference in the safety of air travel -- if the agency could prove that this is the only thing we can do to make flying safe. But that's not the case; on Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists exploited any number of holes in the national security apparatus, and the government would do well, critics of CAPPS II say, to first patch those holes. You could bolster foreign intelligence services, you could staff airports with more diligent screeners, you could fit planes with antimissile systems. (Or you could, as the Bush administration announced on Tuesday, expand the air marshal program.)

You could even put the United States on friendlier terms with the rest of the world. Anything's better, isn't it, than a massive surveillance program? "If Sept. 11 could have been avoided by four pilots with four .22s, why is the response to that to profile everybody?" Grover Norquist asks. "What's the deal with that?" The TSA's first public notice for CAPPS II, printed in the Federal Register on Jan. 15, appears now to be an invitation to disaster. Looking at it, you wonder how the agency thought it could ever get away with such a bold plan. The notice seemed to contemplate an all-powerful worldwide police force, a group responsible for moving into action whenever CAPPS II determined that there might be even a "potential violation" of "civil or criminal law." In the first notice, the government also said that it intended to keep records on some people for "up to 50 years," and because it seemed almost purposefully vague, some critics saw the notice as suggesting that the government would deny flights to people with bad credit records or too many unpaid parking tickets or other minor infractions. The TSA vehemently denied that the program was as bad as its privacy notice seemed to suggest, but, with Scannell launching a high-profile boycott of Delta, the first airline that agreed to test CAPPS II, the entire proposal was quickly embroiled in controversy.

Since then, the Homeland Security Department has moved to quell the storm. In April, the department hired Nuala O'Connor Kelly, a lawyer and a former executive at the Internet advertising firm Doubleclick, as its first privacy officer. (Kelly was unavailable for comment to Salon.) Critics of CAPPS II say that Kelly has reached out to them and tried, whether out of earnestness or for public relations, to address their fears. Recently, the TSA met privately with Barr and Keene to see what they disliked about CAPPS II. And in the agency's new privacy notice for CAPPS II, the TSA indicates that it read some of the many public comments that poured in and that it tried to address at least some of them.

"I have no doubt of the genuineness of the effort to grapple with these problems," says James Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology. "I think the first notice was a hide-the-ball notice" -- meaning that the agency seemed to be intentionally obfuscating the specifics of CAPPS II. "Now there's a genuine effort to say more or less what the thing is about."

But unfortunately for the TSA, the new, more specific notice -- published in the Federal Register on Aug. 1 -- also gave added ammunition to CAPPS II opponents. Before this notice, the TSA had not explained how it intended to get all of the data on travelers it needs to run CAPPS II. Was it going to get the information from airlines, or travel agents, or from individual travelers at the airport? All of that had been a mystery -- but now the whole thing is clear.

The TSA wants to tap into the four major worldwide databases that keep track of virtually all passenger records in the world. Most airline travelers have likely never heard of these systems, called computerized reservation systems, or CRSs, but they're vital for air travel -- as important as the planes themselves. The four databases are maintained by separate corporations: Sabre Holdings, which owns Travelocity.com; Galileo International, a subsidiary of the giant Cendant Corp.; Worldspan, a privately held American firm; and Amadeus, a Spanish company. If CAPPS II is imposed on the travel industry, these firms will need to make significant changes in their systems to accommodate the government's plans -- and critics of the proposed system say that the firms would accede to doing this only if they had the chance to somehow recoup their investment in CAPPS II. The theory is that after CAPPS II is implemented, these companies would make money by selling your travel data in much the same way that financial firms sell your credit history.

Edward Hasbrouck, a travel agent in San Francisco and the author of the "Practical Nomad" series of travel books, is an expert on the technology that keeps the travel industry humming. The system, he says, is both gargantuan and mind-numbingly complex; the worldwide constellation of airlines, travel agents, hotels, car rental agencies, cruise lines, travel Web sites and airports constitutes one of the largest computer networks in the world (until the mid-1990s, when it was overtaken by the Internet, it was the largest). It is also one of the most antiquated, depending on ages-old protocols to communicate between machines of varying sophistication. The TSA's proposal will require all these systems to integrate data that is not routinely collected -- when was the last time you gave your date-of-birth to book a flight? -- and will, consequently, cost the industry billions, he estimates.

But there could be a payoff. "The key impact of the proposal would be that it would enable the CRS to correlate previously separate reservations for trips into a lifelong history of your travel," Hasbrouck says. "That would mean that it would become very easy to investigate your travel history -- where you went, who you went with, did you stay in a gay resort, did you ask for one bed or two? It would be easy for them to use it for marketing data, and for the government to get it." Hasbrouck continues: "Are the CRSs now in a position to make a practice of selling to all comers what they'd like to know? 'We'd like to know who's rented a car in Cleveland for the last six months'? This is utterly unregulated. Many of the CRS firms don't even have any privacy policy -- and to the extent that they do, they the policies allow unrestricted affiliate sharing. Cendant, which owns Galileo, allows the sharing of data to affiliates" -- firms such as Avis, Budget, Travelodge, Howard Johnson, Century 21..."

In theory, says Hasbrouck, records collected by the CRS firms are kept forever: Although they are periodically "purged" from live databases, the CRSs keep them in archives for as long as possible. There is, in fact, no technical way to delete a single passenger record in a CRS database; the protocols are so old that, when the databases were built, nobody seems to have anticipated the need for a delete function. So every reservation you make, every reservation you cancel, everything piles up in the CRS database.

This, obviously, would be a gold mine for government snoops. And Hasbrouck says that CRS firms are always happy to cooperate with the government: "Every travel company privacy policy I've ever seen gives blanket permission to give any data in response to any request from the government" -- not a subpoena, but any informal request whatsoever.

On Aug. 11, Scannell read an article on CAPPS II in TravelAge West, a travel-agent industry trade publication, that contained this line: "Galileo has said it held limited discussions with the TSA and it will cooperate with testing." He says that this led him to check out some other sources, and he discovered that Galileo was working closely with the TSA on CAPPS II. On his Web site, he calls on passengers to book tickets with airlines that don't use Galileo, to boycott other Cendant products, and to sell off stock in the company. Scannell says that by working with CAPPS II, Galileo is helping to enable a de facto national I.D. card system and an "internal border-control" apparatus. "Is that the America we want?" Scannell asks. "Let's have a discussion about it. I'm personally against both, but let's have a national discussion, and let's not go through the back door."

Dawn Lyon, a spokeswoman for Cendant, said that there has been "a lot of confusion" over Galileo's role in CAPPS II. "Our involvement to date is that we have stated we will cooperate with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security during what they're classifying as a testing process," she said. The exact nature of that cooperation, though, has yet to be determined. Lyon also said that Galileo is not the only CRS cooperating with Homeland Security, though she did not say what the other firms were doing.

Lyon insisted that Galileo goes out of its way to ensure that the data it collects on travel is kept private and secure. "It's always at the forefront of our minds," she said. "We always comply with legal requirements that exist. The U.S. is just one country where we operate, and we've prided ourselves on working diligently to protect all customer data" and to make sure that it's not used for purposes other than the trip at hand. Lyon did not explicitly say that Galileo would never use the collected data for marketing. When asked about whether, after CAPPS II was implemented, she could see Galileo selling personal travel dossiers to anyone who paid, she said, "Our operating philosophy is that we will protect and work diligently to protect the privacy of customer data." Israel's national airline, El Al, is often said to have most terrorist-resistant air fleet in the world. On El Al, security is built into every design element of the airplane: Cockpit doors are (and have long been) locked, armed agents fly on every flight, passenger luggage is thoroughly inspected (by hand and by machine), and the planes are fitted with antimissile systems. El Al also makes extensive use of profiling. The airline checks passenger identities in criminal databases, and agents are trained to ask all passengers questions about their flight. Travelers who appear especially nervous -- or who are Arab; El Al admits to using ethnicity as a factor in its security decisions -- are singled out for much tougher questioning, and the airline routinely bars people from flying.

But for both practical and obvious political reasons, El Al's approach to profiling turns out to be a bad model for the United States, security experts say. "U.S. airlines fly a lot more planes and a lot more passengers over much shorter routes," explains John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org. Each day, El Al has only a few flights, while thousands take off in the United States. And El Al is a long-haul airline, which makes profiling easier. "If you're going to sit on one of those airplanes for six or eight or 10 hours, you might not think that an elaborate, robust interview process and physical security check is out of the question," Pike says. Most American passengers, however, people whose flights typically last less than a couple of hours, would balk at such procedures. Indeed, Pike says, "the level of security they have right now is on the verge of altering travel patterns. For most passengers, the experience is unbearable. I no longer fly between Washington and New York -- I'll either take the train or drive, because the annoyance of having to park far away from the terminal and to go through the whole rigmarole, it's too much to bear."

Pike's point is key to understanding the federal government's desire for CAPPS II. The U.S. aviation industry is suffering a historic downturn, and at least part of the reason is the peculiar psychology of American travelers: People are both too afraid to fly and too annoyed to fly. Americans want their planes to be as secure as El Al's, but they don't want to face the hassles of El Al. CAPPS II has to be seen as an effort to fit that bill: a profiling system meant to be as rigorous as El Al's, but automated, hidden and a hassle to only some of the passengers.

Capt. Steve Luckey, the chairman of the Air Line Pilots Association's flight security committee and a proponent of CAPPS II, says that critics of the plan fail to grasp this idea: "They don't realize that this is actually protecting the individual rights of most people by minimizing the scrutiny." What he means is that once CAPPS II is implemented, the vast majority of people will have an easier time at airports than they do now. CAPPS II will concentrate security resources on the most likely terrorist threats, Luckey says. For instance, if the computer clears someone of any potential mischief, his bags don't need to be very extensively checked by hand or with slow, expensive computer-topography screening systems. And that's good for all of us, because "right now, good people are being scrutinized. The wrong people are paying for 9/11. We need to utilize the tools to work smart rather than work harder."

But from a security standpoint, Luckey's idea does not make very much sense, critics of CAPPS II say. If you do your profiling by computer, rather than by in-person interviews, you're bound to miss all sorts of clues that could lead you in the right direction, and you could give too much weight to other clues that could lead you astray. Scannell notes that Timothy McVeigh had an Army security clearance -- he would presumably have passed through CAPPS II with no trouble. Shelton, of the NAACP, says, "The fastest-growing religion in the African-American community is Islam, and when many people in the African-American community become Muslim they change their name to an Arab name. You see Leroy Jones who has now changed his name to Muhammad Ali. You see Susan Washington who has changed her name to Kadida Muhammad." Under CAPPS II, are all these African-Americans going to be subject to extra screening while the John Walker Lindhs of the world make it through just fine?

The TSA itself has rejected some forms of profiling in part because of this potential for missing key threats. Since 9/11, many pundits have criticized the department for hassling senior citizens and children at airports, people who, the pundits cry, are obviously no threat to U.S. national security. But the TSA routinely finds contraband hidden on kids and old people. On July 12 at Orlando International Airport, for instance, screeners found a loaded .22 handgun stuffed inside a 10-year-old boy's teddy bear. (The bear had been given to the boy by another boy a few days before the flight. After questioning the child and his family at the airport, the FBI allowed them all to board the plane.) TSA agents have found knives hidden in senior citizens' prosthetic legs and in baby car seats. According to the agency, since February 2002, it has caught "1,437 firearms, 2.3 million knives and 49,331 box cutters," and James Loy, the agency's director, has said that such items don't come only from people who fit what most would guess is the profile of a terrorist. "The suggestion that our screeners should pay less attention to grandmas and babies is like giving a free pass to terrorists," Loy said in a statement on July 18. (For pictures of items in which people have "artfully concealed" weapons, see this TSA gallery.)

Because the agency will still need to look closely at kids and grandmothers, not to mention everyone else, it's not clear that CAPPS II will decrease the scrutiny, and the hassle, most of us face at the airport -- yet it will certainly increase the scrutiny and hassle some of us face. Some number of these hits will be false positives; and even if it's a small rate, just 1 or 2 percent, that's still millions of people falsely identified as potential terrorists every year.

Given this difficulty of spotting terrorists, many critics of CAPPS II wonder why the TSA says that it wants to use the system not just for terrorism but also for other violent crimes. "If a person's not a terrorist and they just assault someone with a deadly weapon at a bar, I'm not worrying about them sitting next to me on the airplane," says Dempsey. "I don't think we should use the gate at the airplane to catch them. I think resources are being diverted from air safety. But there are clearly some in Homeland Security who want to make it a general all-purpose law-enforcement agency." A few of the critics of CAPPS II said they would be satisfied if the TSA made it clear that the system would be used only to make sure that a given passenger was not on a known terrorist watch list. "My view is that having a database that is comprised of terrorists and known associates of terrorists, and which is updated and based on sound intelligence, is not at all problematic," Barr says. It is worth noting that a system like this is currently in place, and was in place on 9/11 as well -- the only problem was that the watch lists didn't include the names of the known terrorists.

Because the problems with CAPPS II are so glaringly obvious, many critics seem confident that the proposal will have a hard time surviving without significant changes. A system called CAPPS II might eventually come into use, but if the public loudly objects, it won't be the system the TSA is now putting forward. Barr says that Americans have now started to see that the fight against terrorism is costing them civil rights, and he believes they're beginning to fight back. "I think the public is expressing their concerns to their members of Congress, and that's why we are starting to see Congress starting to wake up to these kinds of programs," he says. For example, on July 22, the House passed the Otter Amendment, which prohibits law enforcement agencies from engaging in "sneak and peek" activities -- surreptitiously searching the homes of suspected terrorists.

While there's no doubt that he's an ardent civil libertarian, Barr still seems somewhat reluctant to criticize the president. Asked if he believed that the White House, like the Congress, was starting to concern itself with privacy rights, he started to say, "They don't care at all," but then caught himself. "They don't seem to be focused on that at this point," he ended up saying. "The response by the Justice Department to the Otter Amendment a few weeks ago was, 'The sky is falling, the sky is falling, if this goes into law it will gut our war against terrorism.'"

But Barr believes that the administration may come around. "On the one hand it's a good sign that the attorney general felt the need to go on this whistle-stop tour defending the PATRIOT Act," Barr said. "At least they're feeling the heat to the extent that they think they need to defend themselves." But whether the pressure makes the White House enact real changes in its policies, Barr can't say. "If they don't, hopefully Congress will do its job."

Was reading the Onion today along with these other sites that others very seldom dare approach to visit due to keeping or not wanting to change their profiles...Pacific Command...Councila on Foreign Affairs...Green Peace...Move On...Federation of American Scientist...Republican GOP...The Acronym...Crisis Web ... Enjoy your weekend and have fun reading!

Classified Spending On the Rise; Report: Defense to Get $23.2 Billion
"Black," or classified, programs requested in President Bush's 2004 defense budget are at the highest level since 1988, according to a report prepared by the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

The center concluded that classified spending next fiscal year will reach about $ 23.2 billion of the Pentagon's total request for procurement and research funding. When adjusted for inflation, that is the largest dollar figure since the peak reached during President Ronald Reagan's defense buildup 16 years ago. The amount in 1988 was $ 19.7 billion, or $ 26.7 billion if adjusted for inflation, according to the center.

"It's puzzling. It sets the mind to wondering where the money's going and what sort of politically controversial things the administration is doing because they're not telling anybody," said John E. Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a research group in Alexandria that has been critical of the administration's defense priorities.

Pike said part of the surge in the classified budget probably can be explained by increases for the Central Intelligence Agency's covert action programs, which are central to the war on terrorism. Traditionally, Pike said, much of the funding for the CIA is hidden in Air Force weapons procurement accounts.

But unlike the 1980s, when it was widely known that the "black" budget was going to the development of stealth aircraft such as the B-2 bomber and F-117 fighter, the uses of the classified accounts today are far murkier, Pike said.

The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments is a Washington research group that analyzes many aspects of the defense budget. Steven Kosiak, who prepared the report on classified spending, said he reached his conclusions by comparing sums requested for "open," or nonclassified, programs with the total Defense Department request for fiscal 2004.

Some black spending in the Pentagon budget is designated for code-named programs such as the Army's "Tractor Rose" and the Navy's "Retract Larch." But sources said some names may be accounting fictions that do not stand for actual programs.

Other classified spending is accounted for under such bland headings as "special activities."

Officials at the Pentagon and in Congress declined to comment on the center's report, which was compiled earlier this summer. Key congressional defense committees will meet in the next several weeks to resolve differences over the 2004 Pentagon spending plan, including those involving classified programs.

According to the Kosiak analysis, the Air Force's classified weapons procurement budget has jumped from $ 7 billion in 2001 to almost $ 11 billion as requested for 2004. In dollar terms, total classified spending in the Pentagon budget request has almost doubled since the mid-1990s, according to tables provided by Kosiak.

Kosiak said in his report that performance in the classified programs has been mixed. He noted that highly successful weapons systems such as the F-117 and the B-2 were initially developed within the classified budget. But so was the Navy's A-12 medium attack plane, which was canceled in 1991 after a series of technical problems and cost increases.

After it was canceled, manufacturers complained that secrecy in the program kept them from acquiring critical data needed to head off some of the problems.

"Restrictions placed on access to classified funding have meant that the Defense Department and Congress typically exercise less oversight over classified programs than unclassified ones," Kosiak wrote.

In the case of the new defense budget, it is anybody's guess where most of the classified money is going, Pike said. But he said it is a good bet that some of it is going to programs that the administration is known to strongly favor, such as missile defense and the development of hypersonic planes that can fly beyond Earth's atmosphere.

"This is an administration that likes to play I've got a secret," he said. "The growth of the classified budget appears to be part of a larger pattern of this administration being secretive."

Selling bombs along with soap?
Defense contractors usually stay out of the mass market because they have only one customer to persuade -- the Pentagon.

Lately, however, some companies have been using classic, consumer-behavior-altering advertising campaigns -- both in the broadcast and print media and on the Internet -- to persuade opinion influencers, who are the key constituents of decision-makers affecting major military procurements.

Media psychologists -- who track the impact of media perceptions on human consciousness -- say these defense firms are taking a page from the playbook of major prescription drug manufacturers. Just as makers of prescription medications have done in recent years, weapons makers have begun targeting individuals who can influence the federal government's buying decisions, hoping to generate subtle pressure to purchase their products.

"This a new trend," Stuart Fischoff, a professor of psychology at the Fielding Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, Calif., and founding president of the American Psychological Association's media psychology division, told United Press International. "This is like what the pharmaceutical companies have done -- going directly to consumers, rather than doctors. That worked very well for the drug companies, some of whom increased their sales by 40 percent for advertised prescription drugs."

Personnel in the policymaking world and in the contracting community, upon hearing or seeing ads from defense contractors, talk about them -- and the novelty of the firm being on the airwaves. This creates chatter, or buzz, in the offices at the Department of Defense, which others pick up on. "This is called an elaboration of the ad, which is what the marketer wants," Fischoff said.

Senior Pentagon personnel, involved in final decisions on contracts, may have heard the ads, too, and been directly influenced by them. If not, the office chatter raises the profile of the company being marketed.

"By widening the target of the ad, the government contractor gets out its message to people who may be important in the process down the road," Paul Levinson, chairman of the department of communication and media studies at Fordham University in New York City, told UPI.

There is an array of ads touting Pentagon contractors in the media today. Some examples:

--Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defense contractor, took to the airwaves recently with a radio campaign in the Washington D.C. metro market to promote its small-diameter bomb.

--Pratt & Whitney, the aircraft engine manufacturer associates itself in magazine ads with the USO and its mission of helping America's armed forces.

--SAS, a consulting firm, is advertising its public sector services via the online edition of The Washington Post, providing hot links to case studies detailing the savings its software provided for the U.S. Marine Corps.

In the past, savvy advertisers would have dismissed such spending as frivolous. The majority of the audience reached through the ads, they would have argued, would not include decision-makers for military goods and services. Therefore the ads would be, in industry parlance, a lot of wasted space.

Now, sophisticated marketers are reaching beyond the conventional wisdom.

"One message advertised can be worth 1,000 research reports, since people have a tendency to believe what they see, especially if they see it often enough and the message content is presented in an authoritative fashion," Robert Butterworth, a media psychologist in private practice in Los Angeles, told UPI. "You create the reality by the perception of the advertisement."

Rather than rely on its contacts throughout the Pentagon bureaucracy to land the hotly contested, small-diameter bomb contract, Lockheed Martin of Bethesda, Md., has taken the unconventional step of purchasing local radio ads, said Donald McClain, a spokesman for the defense contractor. The reason is simple: "We're in the middle of a competition for the contract," McClain told UPI.

The 15-second and 60-second ads, produced by the Keiler & Co. advertising agency in Farmington, Conn., tout Lockheed Martin's small-diameter bomb solution for the Air Force, said McClain, and its all-weather ability to strike moving targets with twice the accuracy of traditional global positioning system devices.

The bomb is 6 inches in diameter, 6 feet long, and weighs 250 pounds, containing 50 pounds of explosives and a steel case for penetration. The bomb uses differential GPS and is accurate within a 3-meter circular area. The bomb is half the weight of the Mark 82, the smallest bomb the Air Force uses today.

Lockheed Martin's key competitor is Boeing Co., said John Pike, a military analyst at GlobalSecurity.org, a think tank in Washington.

"Lockheed is advertising the fact that they build smart bombs as a way of off-setting all the good, earned media coverage that Boeing got with JDAM -- or Joint Direct Attack Munitions -- stories during the last several wars," Pike told UPI.

Both Boeing and Lockheed Martin have worked on the design of laser-guided "smart bombs" for the Pentagon during the last few years and the Bush administration has requested more than $54 million in the fiscal year 2004 budget for the further development of the bomb, according to research by GlobalSecurity.org.

The radio advertising by Lockheed communicates "very specific messages to anyone who is a stakeholder of any sort with the company," Pike explained. "A big contract is soon to be awarded and the company is trying to influence the decision process."

The subtle influencing of decision-making works through a psychological technique known as "the availability heuristic," said Fischoff. A heuristic is a carefully constructed mnemonic designed to assist the memory.

"They're making their name available in the mind of people, so that when the time to solve a problem arises -- the time to buy arrives -- their name jumps into everyone's mind," he said. "This gives them a higher probability of being considered than if there was no advertising at all."

Though defense contractors advertised heavily in trade publications in the past, this kind of marketing might not be as effective as it once was.

Fischoff said the mass media ads were more effective because they acted as a "time-release capsule" that worked on the unconscious minds of the prospective buyers and their colleagues and subordinates -- and even outsiders, such as the media and academics, at a time in the future.

Psychological research attests to the value of such messages, and their impact on such opinion leaders.

"Ultimately, a great deal of research suggests that people are more influenced by interpersonal, rather than mediated, communication," May Beth Oliver, an associate professor of communications at the Penn State University in University Park, told UPI. "As a consequence, if some individual who is in contact with a decision-maker is persuaded by a media campaign, the interpersonal communication between the two would likely be more influential than if the decision-maker simply saw the information in a trade publication."

Using the prescription drug companies' experience marketing prescription drugs on TV as a metaphor, Butterworth added: "If enough people talk about something working, such as the medication advertised, people will demand that medication of their physician, regardless of the reality of their specific needs."

Maj. Greg Gutterman, the Pentagon's spokesman for the small-diameter bomb contract office, did not return UPI's phone calls seeking comment on the Lockheed Martin advertising campaign.

There is no doubt, however, Lockheed Martin is eager that the bomb messages hit their targets soon.

"We're right in the middle of that contract competition," said McClain. "They haven't given us an exact date when the award will be announced, but it is coming up soon."

'SoBig' e-mail virus foiled
Worm was poised to spread new orders to 100,000 computers

A powerful e-mail virus known as SoBig was thwarted Friday as it attempted to change itself, possibly into a more destructive force.

A coordinated defense by commercial and government computer experts illustrates the growing arms race between Internet miscreants, and public and private authorities.

For days, commercial antivirus wizards and Department of Homeland Security investigators had been working to stop the self-replicating virus, or worm, from infecting computers. But just as the epidemic seemed to be coming under control Wednesday and Thursday, researchers at various antivirus firms discovered a surprise when they cracked the worm's code and took a look inside.

The worm was set to rendezvous at noon Friday with 20 preselected computers in the United States, in Canada and possibly in South Korea. These computers, which researchers believe are ordinary home systems using DSL or cable Internet hookups, were probably hacked by SoBig's author some time ago.

At noon, all computers worldwide that were infected with SoBig -- more than 100,000, according to Santa Clara antivirus firm Network Associates -- were to make contact with these 20 computers, where experts believe the worm was evidently destined to download more instructions. What those instructions would be, no one knew.

According to Jimmy Kuo, a research fellow at Network Associates McAfee antivirus lab, the speculation was that the worm would pick up software, known as a backdoor program, that would allow its creator to circumvent the security systems on the 100,000 computers.

"The result of that would be to make those machines accessible from the outside," Kuo said. That way, SoBig's author could spy on computer users and perhaps steal information or take control of their computers.

A previous version of SoBig was designed to pick up a backdoor program in this way, from just one computer. It didn't take long for the antivirus experts to shut down that one download site.

COORDINATED ATTACK PLANNED
Conceivably, the 100,000 infected computers could have downloaded a program that would order them to attack certain Web sites by accessing them over and over, the same kind of attack that brought down Yahoo, EBay and other popular sites in 2000. With so many computers in on an attack, the failures this time around could have been much more widespread.

Whatever the virus writers' intentions, they never came to pass. The antivirus forces were able to stop the worm's progress.

"One of the first things we did was contact the Internet service providers (supplying access to the 20 target computers) and the FBI so they could work in conjunction with one another to get these servers off the Internet," said Tony Magallanez, a systems engineer at the San Jose office of antivirus firm F-Secure, which is based in Helsinki, Finland.

Other security companies, including Cupertino's Symantec, went through the same process of contacting the Internet service providers and law enforcement. Each company has a team of researchers analyzing new worms, and most of these teams seem to have discovered SoBig's secret sometime late Thursday.

By noon Friday, 18 or 19 of the computers had been taken off the Internet by the Internet service providers, according to reports from various antivirus companies. The remaining ones were providing no instructions anyway. Earlier Friday, one computer had been sending out the address of a pornographic Web site, which Symantec researchers said included no instructions that SoBig could use. But by noon, even that computer had fallen silent.

ON TRAIL OF WORM AUTHOR
Meanwhile, the FBI reportedly made significant progress in trying to find the author of the SoBig virus, tracing it through an Internet service provider in Phoenix, according to the Los Angeles Times.

"It looks like the original variant was posted through us" on Monday afternoon, Michael Minor, the chief technology officer of Easynews Inc., told the Los Angeles Times.

Some experts had feared that even though the target computers had been taken down, the traffic created by so many infected computers worldwide trying to contact the 20 targets would clog the Internet. Past viruses, like the Slammer worm that hit in January, had indeed caused Web site disruptions by generating large volumes of Internet traffic.

But people trying to use the Internet on Friday experienced few to no delays, according to San Mateo Net measurement firm Keynote Systems.

The FBI opened an investigation to track down SoBig's author or authors on Wednesday, according to Network Associates' Kuo. The FBI did not immediately return calls.

Friday, the FBI issued a grand jury subpoena to an Internet service provider that may have inadvertently helped SoBig get its start, according to the Washington Post. Minor, of Easynews.com, told the Post that someone may have used a stolen credit card number to open an account on his service, then quickly released the worm into the wild.

NOT FIRST-TIME OFFENDER
Whoever created this virus is not a first-time offender; the current version of SoBig is the sixth iteration to be released this year, and experts believe they were all written by the same hand.

Originally, SoBig appeared to be nothing more than an unusually effective version of a common online bug: the mass mailer, which annoys people by flooding e-mail boxes worldwide with copies of itself, but which does no real damage to hardware. Now that the SoBig worm turns out to be more complex, some experts believe its creator is much more sophisticated than the youths who release garden-variety worms on a daily basis.

"Looks like organized crime to me," said Mikko Hypponen, F-Secure's director of antivirus research, in a prepared release.

Not everyone agrees.
"If he's caught, everyone will probably be startled at how sweaty and dull he turns out to be," said George Smith, a senior fellow with Alexandria, Va., think tank GlobalSecurity.org. "The virus writer miscalculated badly. . . . Since the presence of SoBig was so heavy, it guaranteed whatever plans he had would be short-circuited by the attention it garnered."

SoBig is programmed to keep trying to contact its 20 target computers every Friday and Sunday for a few weeks. But now that they've been shut down, no one expects the target computers to become available again, at least not with the same addresses.

The development came at the end of a two-week virus wave that disrupted businesses, including Air Canada, whose check-in system stalled because of a worm known as Blaster. Friday, the New York Times suffered a computer failure consistent with a virus attack, although the company would not confirm whether a virus was the cause.

NEW YORK TIMES HIT
Just after noon Eastern time, employees at the New York Times in Manhattan noticed a slowdown in accessing Internet sites. Soon, they were told to shut down their computers, and they had to get out notebooks and report the old-fashioned way while technical staff brought the computers back online, one at a time.

By late afternoon, most workers were back online, and the paper's production was not affected, said spokesman Toby Usnik. The overall system was never down, and neither was the newspaper's Web site.

Experts say that in order to avoid falling victim to an Internet virus, computer users should keep their operating system updated by downloading any patches as they become available. Many people also use commercial antivirus software to screen out threats, and this too must be updated on a regular basis. Users can also protect themselves by not opening any unexpected e-mail attachments.

----------------------------------------------

SoBig worm
A new computer worm, SoBig, is already being blamed for slowing or shutting down e-mail systems worldwide. The worm began infecting Windows machines Tuesday. Here are tips to remove the worm:

What is it?
SoBig is a computer worm, like the "Blaster" worm that affected computers last week. Worms are malicious programs that spread themselves from computer to computer, usually via e-mail.

How does it work?
SoBig spreads through e-mail networks by sending massive amounts of mail with these characteristics:
-- The "From" field is filled with an address found on the infected computer. If no addresses are found, it will use "admin@internet.com."
-- The "To" field is filled with an address from the infected system.
-- The "Subject" field can be any from this list:
Re: Thank You! Thank You! Your details Re: Details Re: Re: My details Re: Approved Re: Your application Re: Wicked screensaver Re: That movie
-- In the "body" field it chooses from the follow lines:
See the attached file for details
Please see the attached file for details.
-- Attachment names can be any from this list:

your_document.pif document_all.pif thank_you.pif your_details.pif details.pif document_9446.pif application.pif wicked_scr.scr movie0045.pif

Deactivation routine The worm will stop spreading on Sept. 10, 2003. From this date onwards the worm will exit immediately when executed. 343 Removal instructions can be found at f-secure.com

Source: Symantec, f-Secure.com

ESPI

Xspedius Communications ("Xspedius") has been a pioneer in the telecommunications industry, both locally and nationwide. Like most big families, our history can get a little confusing, but it's definitely worth reading about.
We are one of the few companies that can integrate landline telephone and Internet services for the business community. We've grown in size and innovation over the past several decades, from launching the nation's first dial-up mobile phone service in 1958 and the introduction of an Integrated Service Platform in 1998 to a strategic acquisition in 2002 which significantly expanded the reach of our services.

It all started when Cameron Telephone Company was established in 1928. Southwest Louisiana needed telephone service and South Central Bell refused to travel in the marshy terrain of Cameron Parish. The original founders of the company recognized the need of the local people and ran the first lines from Sulphur to Hackberry. Their philosophy has continued to influence how we do business today - "Always do the most you can for your customers."

The growth of Cameron Telephone spawned several other affiliate companies, including US Unwired, formerly Mercury Cellular & Paging. US Unwired followed in Cameron Telephone's footsteps and grew at a phenomenal speed, with several divisions and affiliations within itself. One of US Unwired's pioneer divisions was CLEC/Internet. The success of CLEC/Internet inspired the independent launch of Xspedius.


On August 30, 2002, Xspedius made a strategic acquisition purchasing substantially all of the assets of Virginia-based e.spire Communications and its subsidiary, ACSI Network Technologies ("ACSI"). e.spire, originally established in 1993, was also an integrated communications provider offering customers local and long distance services, dedicated Internet access, and advanced data solutions. ACSI, now known as Xspedius Fiber Group, provides network infrastructure, in the form of dark fiber and conduit, and network design and construction services to organizations deploying metropolitan network systems in the United States.

Adding e.spire to the fold, we now have an operating footprint in 52 markets spanning 24 states, plus the District of Columbia, as well as more than 3,500 route miles of fiber. And, to top it off, we gained fiber and conduit inventory in Atlanta, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Houston, Fort Lauderdale/Miami/West Palm Beach, Tampa, and Washington, DC/Northern Virginia thanks to our new subsidiary, Xspedius Fiber Group.

The history of Xspedius comes down to one thing -- growth. Through this growth, we have added more and more services and strategic assets to our portfolio and have become your best resource for Integrated Communication Services. We are committed to providing the benefits of doing business with a great local company offering leading-edge communications technology.

Now Remember It's Friday & Take Business B4 Lunch... Enjoy The Weekend!

A subdued preholiday session on Wall Street yesterday finished with moderate gains after a last-hour surge of buying. Two leading market gauges, the Nasdaq composite index and the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, closed above numerical benchmarks.

Despite two upbeat economic reports, prices fluctuated in a narrow range for most of the session. Analysts attributed the market's tentativeness to concerns that an improving business climate had already been factored into higher stock prices.

"The market is the greatest forecasting tool out there," said Gary Kaltbaum, market technician for Investors' Edge Partners, a money management firm in Orlando, Fla. "Stocks have been forecasting these results."

Volume, though again low, was modestly higher. A total of 1.17 billion shares were traded on the New York Stock Exchange, compared with 1.07 billion on Wednesday.

Many traders and investors were on vacation. "This week usually is just dismally slow," said Thomas F. Lydon Jr., president of Global Trends Investments in Newport Beach, Calif., referring to the period leading up to Labor Day. "Trying to make something exciting about this week is tough."

Nonetheless, the Nasdaq index closed up 18.05 points, or just over 1 percent, at 1,800.18, a 16-month high. And the S.& P. 500 again breached the 1,000 level, rising 6.05 points, or 0.61 percent, to 1,002.84.

The blue-chip Dow Jones industrial average advanced 40.42 points, or 0.43 percent, to 9,374.21.

Market breadth was positive, with advancing issues outnumbering decliners on the New York Stock Exchange by more than 2 to 1.

It was the fourth consecutive day of gains for the S.& P. and the third for the Nasdaq index, something that analysts found encouraging. When traders return from vacation, analysts said, the market could have greater momentum.

As investors "come back from a long weekend and get re-engaged with their portfolios," Mr. Lydon said, "they will realize the Nasdaq is at 16-month highs."

With the Nasdaq index moving higher, the Dow has lagged by comparison as traders moved assets into riskier, growth-oriented sectors.

Among yesterday's economic data, the Commerce Department issued revised figures indicating that the economy grew at a 3.1 percent annual pace in the second quarter, stronger than the 2.4 percent it estimated a month ago. It was the economy's best performance since the third quarter of 2002.

In a separate report, the Labor Department said new claims for jobless benefits rose by a seasonally adjusted 3,000 last week, to 394,000. But the fact that claims remained below 400,000, a level associated with a weak job market, offered hope that the pace of layoffs was stabilizing.

Better-than-expected earnings and the upgrading of individual stocks by brokerage firms also contributed to yesterday's market gains.

Dollar General rose $1.60, to $22.52, after reporting second-quarter earnings that surpassed analysts' expectations by 4 cents a share.

Kirkland's, a home decor retailer, climbed $1.40, to $18.55, after US Bancorp Piper Jaffray raised its rating on the stock to strong buy from outperform.

Among technology issues, the disk drive maker Western Digital advanced $1.98, to $11.48, on heavy volume. Broadcom rose $1.50, to $27.45. Intel, a recent gainer, added 28 cents more, closing at $28.30.

Treasuries Strongly HigherBy Bloomberg News

United States Treasury issues had their biggest gain in three weeks after the Labor Department's report on unemployment claims and another report indicating that inflation remained muted.

The benchmark 10-year Treasury note gained 2932, to a price of 982132. The note's yield, which moves in the opposite direction from the price, declined to 4.41 percent from 4.53 percent on Wednesday. The price of the 30-year Treasury bond jumped 11832, to 1021632. The bond's yield dipped to 5.20 percent from 5.31 percent on Wednesday.

Results of Wednesday's Treasury auction of two-year notes:

(000 omitted in dollar figures)

High Price | 99.922

High Yield | 2.04%

Low Yield | 1.95%

Median Yield | 1.998%

Accepted at low price | 0.9%

Total applied for | $48,731,474

Accepted | $30,589,929

Noncompetitive | $836,794

Interest set at | 2

The two-year notes mature on Aug. 31, 2005.

Target: Air Force One

THE target was Air Force One, the US President's plane, and the planned date for the attack was Sept 11, to mark the strikes on the World Trade Center in New York.

This scenario emerged as a possible terror plot that a London dealer had in mind when he sold a missile to a man he believed was a Muslim terrorist.

BBC correspondent Tom Mangold, who broke the story of the sting operation which nabbed the arms dealer, reported: 'The man behind the operation was looking for terrorists who would fire the missile at Air Force One - the President's plane.'

The suspect, a British citizen, was arrested in Newark, New Jersey, for trying to smuggle a Russian-made surface-to-air missile (SAM) into the United States.

A law enforcement source told the Sydney Morning Herald: 'The guy was trying to sell shoulder-fired SAMs to people that he thought were terrorists interested in shooting down commercial American airliners.'

Western intelligence said he believed he was selling the Igla missile to a Muslim extremist.

But his 'contact' turned out to be a man from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the missile was inert. It had been supplied by the FBI as well as the British and Russian authorities in a global sting operation to nab the man.

An actual Igla 18 could bring down Air Force One, the B74 the US President uses as his personal jet, defence analysts told the BBC.

It is a state-of-the-art weapon belonging to a group of surface-to-air missiles known as SAM Sevens.

Security analyst Chris Yates of Jane's Aviation told BBC News 24: 'We have the potential for a missile strike reportedly on Air Force One or another aircraft carrying US or UK citizens. It is a worrying development.'

It could destroy anything flying up to 3km, he said.

But the FBI has dismissed reports of a plot to kill President George W. Bush.

FBI spokesman Bill Evanina said: 'There was no danger or suggestion that Air Force One was being targeted or even thought of as a target.'

But Mr Mangold said: 'If you can get the missile into the US, you have a reasonable chance of hitting Air Force One in its vulnerable take-off or landing mode.'

Mr John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a non-profit defence policy group, told Reuters that the Igla was a 'Russian version of the Stinger'. He was referring to the small US shoulder-launched missile designed for attacking aircraft at low altitudes - possibly during take-off or landing. 'It has a longer range and a more sophisticated heat-seeking sensor,' he said.

Defence analyst Paul Beaver also told the BBC that a missile like the one the dealer was trying to sell could bring down Air Force One, but it would more likely be damaged.

'They are difficult to counter-measure unless you have the right equipment, because they are very good at locking on to the heat signature of an aeroplane,' he said.

'We don't know what counter-measures Air Force One might have on it because obviously they're secret, but this is a really coherent threat.'

International sting leads to arms dealer's missile arrest

A suspected arms dealer who thought he was selling a shoulder-fired missile to a Muslim terrorist bent on shooting down an airliner was actually the target of an international sting operation that resulted in three arrests, officials say.

All three are expected to appear Wednesday at 10 a.m. in federal court in Newark, officials said. Their names have not been released because the arrests and charges are under court-ordered seal.

However, CNN identified the suspect as Hekmat Lakhani.

Lakhani, a British citizen of Indian descent, is an independent arms dealer who has sold weapons to terrorist cells, Muslim extremists, and "rogue nations," a source close to the investigation told CNN.

Authorities in the USA, Britain and Russia cooperated in the investigation, which began months ago with a tip that the dealer was seeking weapons to buy in St. Petersburg, Russia, said several U.S. law enforcement officials speaking on condition of anonymity.

The probe culminated Tuesday in the arrest of a British arms dealer at a hotel in Newark, N.J., where, officials said, he had flown from London to close the deal on a sophisticated Russian SA-18 Igla missile capable of bringing down commercial airliners. (Related story:'Threat is no longer theoretical')

The terrorist buyer turned out to be an undercover FBI agent and the weapon was an inoperable copy brought from Russia to the United States aboard a ship to make the deal seem real, officials said.

Defense expert John Pike, quoted by Reuters, said the Igla missile is an improved version of earlier Russian-made shoulder-fired rockets. "It has a longer range and a more sophisticated heat-seeking sensor," said Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense policy organization.

The British suspect, who is of Indian descent, did not appear to be connected to al-Qaeda or any other known terrorist group. Authorities also stressed that there was no specific, credible threat to shoot down an airliner in the United States. But one official said the understanding between the Briton and the undercover FBI agent who agreed to purchase the weapon was that the missile needed to be capable of bringing down a commercial airliner.

Two other men, believed to be involved in money laundering, were apprehended about the same time at a gem dealership on Fifth Avenue in New York City.

Two New Jersey newspapers, The Star-Ledger of Newark and The Record of Bergen County, said the British suspect would be charged with material support of terrorism and weapons smuggling.

Justice Department officials had no immediate comment on the case. The Star-Ledger, citing a law enforcement source, reported that evidence against the Briton was expected to include audio and videotapes in which he speaks favorably of Osama bin Laden and refers to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as "a good thing."

The Russians passed on their tip about the reputed arms dealer's activities to the FBI, which was permitted to work inside Russia, U.S. officials said. British officials, including the MI5 domestic intelligence agency, helped track the man's whereabouts.

The investigation also involved the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Secret Service.

The chief spokesman for Russia's Federal Security Service or FSB, the main successor of the KGB, said the operation was a result of close cooperation among the secret services of the United States, Russia and Britain, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

"This action marks a new stage in the development of cooperation between the special services of these countries," ITAR-Tass quoted FSB spokesman Sergei Ignatchenko as saying in Washington. He said it was the first such operation since the Cold War.

Concerns about terrorists using shoulder-fired missiles to shoot down commercial airliners increased in November when two SA-7 missiles narrowly missed an Israeli passenger jet after it took off from Mombasa, Kenya. Officials concluded that al-Qaeda probably was behind the attack, which coincided with a bomb blast at a nearby hotel.

Hundreds and perhaps thousands of shoulder-fired missiles — heat-seeking rockets that can hit low-flying aircraft within three miles — are said to be available on the worldwide arms market. Older missile launchers can be bought for as little as several thousand dollars.

Chechen rebels have used Igla shoulder-fired missiles against Russian military aircraft. Last week they used a missile to shoot down a Russian helicopter, killing three of the crew. And last year the rebels shot down a Russian troop-carrying helicopter, killing more than 100 people.

The Homeland Security Department has asked U.S. high-tech companies to look into developing anti-missile technology for commercial planes.

Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., chairman of the House aviation subcommittee, said Wednesday the technology is available to provide a defensive system "at a fairly reasonably cost and we have moved that program forward."

"We don't have to put it on every plane, but we should have a system that's converted to commercial use," he said on CBS' The Early Show, noting that a single piece of baggage screening equipment can cost almost $1 million "and we're talking about $800,000 to $1 million" per plane for a defense system.

"It should be on all new aircraft and some select other planes that carry large numbers of people, just like we do (with) air marshals," said Mica. "Unfortunately, that's the kind of world we live in today. ... We have to look at all the risks."

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., is backing a bill introduced by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., that calls for outfitting all of the roughly 6,800 planes in the U.S. commercial fleet with anti-missile defenses. The cost is estimated at $10 billion.

"The danger of an airliner being shot down by one of these missiles is now staring the Homeland Security Department in the face," Schumer said. "The fact that DHS is planning to take at least two years to develop a missile defense prototype to outfit the U.S. commercial fleet verges on the dangerous."

The United States has sent experts to domestic airports as well as to airports in Iraq and major capitals in Europe and Asia to assess security. The investigators are trying to determine whether the airports can be defended against shoulder-fired missiles.

World leaders meeting in Evian, France, in June acknowledged the threat posed by shoulder-fired missiles and adopted a plan to restrict sales of the weapons.

Plot to smuggle missile into U.S. to shoot jet foiled: International sting operation nabs British arms dealer

British arms dealer has been arrested in the United States for trying to sell a surface-to-air missile capable of bringing down a passenger plane to a person he thought was a Muslim extremist.

British and Russian law enforcement agencies worked with the FBI for months, tracking the man's movements and snaring him in a sting operation.

U.S. authorities said the Briton believed he was selling missiles to would-be terrorists but the buyer was an undercover FBI agent. The arms dealer's voice is heard on tape saying he wanted the missile to be used to shoot down a large passenger plane. One report said the purported target for the shoulder-fired missile was the U.S. President's Air Force One, but the FBI denied this.

The British Broadcasting Corporation, which first reported the story with ABC News, said the suspect successfully imported a Russian Igla missile into the U.S. and believed he was selling it to a Muslim extremist.

The Igla missile has a four-kilometre range and infrared capability and is believed to have been responsible for the downing last year in Chechnya of a Russian troop-carrying helicopter.

The Briton was arrested in Newark, N.J., and two others were later arrested in New York, officials in Washington said.

The arms dealer, believed to be a middle-aged man of Indian descent, was first spotted five months ago in St. Petersburg and Moscow. He bought one missile for $85,000 from corrupt middle management at a Russian factory and had been promised another 50, a source told a BBC correspondent.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, authorized the FBI to have an undercover agent sent to Russia to work with the Russian secret service, FSB.

On Sunday, the arms dealer flew to New York with his wife on a British Airways flight from London but was arrested after he collected a package marked "medical supplies," the BBC said.

The FBI said it knew the missile, disguised as medical equipment, was shipped from Russia to Baltimore, Md., the BBC reported.

However, a law enforcement source told CNN the missile was successfully smuggled in on a ship that went from Russia to New Jersey. The source said the man was in the United States to complete the transaction and pick up his payment.

Defence expert John Pike called the Igla a "Russian version of the Stinger," referring to the small U.S. shoulder-launched missile designed for attacking aircraft at low altitude -- possibly during take-off or landing. Mr. Pike said the Igla is an improved version of earlier Russian-made surface-to-air missiles and would have a better chance of bringing down a passenger jet than its predecessors.

"It has a longer range and a more sophisticated heat-seeking sensor on it," said Mr. Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, a non-profit defence policy group.

Concerns about terrorists using shoulder-fired missiles to take down commercial airlines intensified in November after an unsuccessful attack on a chartered Israeli jet in Mombasa, Kenya. The incident coincided with a suicide bombing at a nearby hotel. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for that attack.

A spokeswoman for the FBI's national press office refused to give details about the case yesterday, saying the court records were sealed.

Arms dealer of Indian origin held in US missile smuggling plot

U.S. authorities arrested three people on Tuesday in a sting operation that foiled a plot to smuggle a missile into the United States that could be used to shoot down a commercial airliner, officials said.

One suspect, a British citizen, was arrested in Newark, New Jersey, trying to smuggle the Russian-made surface-to-air missile into the country. Two others were arrested in New York, officials in Washington said.

The Briton believed he was selling missiles to would-be terrorists, but he was nabbed in the international sting by the FBI, British and Russian authorities, officials said.

The man is an established arms dealer, thought to be a middle-aged man of Indian origin, who lives in London, it said.

The British Broadcasting Corporation, which first reported the story with ABC News, said the suspect was a British arms dealer who successfully imported a Russian Igla missile into the United States and believed he was selling it to a Muslim extremist.

The buyer was in fact an undercover FBI agent and the arms dealer's voice is heard on tape saying he wanted the missile to be used to shoot down a large passenger plane. The FBI said it knew the missile, disguised as medical equipment, was shipped from Russia to Baltimore, Maryland, the BBC reported.

Officials at the FBI in New York and in Newark did not return calls seeking comment on the report.

The arms dealer, first spotted five months ago in St. Petersburg and Moscow, flew to New York with his wife on Sunday on a British Airways flight from London. He was followed by an FBI agent and arrested in New Jersey after he collected a package marked "medical supplies," the BBC said.

In November 2002 two shoulder-launched missiles were fired at an Israeli passenger plane taking off from Mombasa, Kenya, but did not hit the aircraft.

Defense expert John Pike called the Igla a "Russian version of the Stinger," referring to the small U.S. shoulder-launched missile designed for attacking aircraft at low altitude -- possibly during take-off or landing.

Pike said the Igla was an improved version of earlier Russian-made surface-to-air missiles and would have a better chance of bringing down a passenger jet than its predecessors.

"It has a longer range and a more sophisticated heat-seeking sensor on it," said Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, a non-profit defense policy group based in suburban Washington.

New York Sen. Charles Schumer said the incident illustrated the need for the U.S. Homeland Security Department to speed up its two-year plan to develop a missile defense prototype for commercial airplanes.

"The threat facing commercial airliners from shoulder-fired missiles here in the United States is no longer theoretical," Schumer said in a statement.

"The White House ought to be providing homeland security with the money it needs to begin protecting civilian aircraft with jamming devices immediately, before it's too late."

Floating a Spy in the Sky

Military Develops High-Tech Spy Blimp

Think of a blimp and what comes to mind is that slow-moving billboard in the sky, floating overhead at a sporting event. But soon these airborne dinosaurs could be transformed from lowly airship to high-tech floating surveillance system.

That's the aim of military researchers at the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research in Arlington, Va., which is now working with engineers at Honolulu-based Science and Technology International, or STI, on a blimp known as the Skyship 600.

The Skyship 600, built by Global Skyship Industries, is outwardly no different from the airships seen at sporting events or large public venues. But what sets the 200-foot-long craft apart is the suite of sophisticated electronics called the Littoral Airborne Sensor Hyperspectral, or LASH.

The equipment, installed in the craft's gondola, is a set of sophisticated digital cameras with highly sensitive color detectors connected to a computer with specially developed software algorithms.

The cameras are designed to capture a wide variety of the light spectrum — ranging from the invisible infrared and ultraviolet to colors visible to the human eye — all reflected from objects below.

Sophisticated Eye: LASH
Greg Plumb, an STI researcher working on the project, says LASH works on the principle that all objects reflect light differently, creating unique light patterns — especially in the invisible infrared and ultraviolet parts of the spectrum.

The LASH cameras capture those signals and sends them to the computer for analyzing.The visual patterns from all the sensors are compared so that abnormal signals stand out.

"Camouflage netting might looks like the green leaves of the nearby forest to the naked eye," explains Plumb. "But there are minute spectral differences that make it stick out from the natural foliage. It just doesn't reflect light in the same way."

Once the computer has determined such a spectral anomaly exists in the images it's capturing, the system alerts an on-board operator to take a closer look. The information could also be instantly shared with command centers on land using a wireless data network.

Slow and Steady
Originally developed to detect submarines hidden in the littoral or coastal areas, the LASH system has already been tested and approved for use in other aircraft such as Navy helicopters and planes.

But by adding a LASH system to a blimp, Plumb and other researchers say the military would have an ideal tool for a variety of surveillance duties, such as hunting for terrorist divers, underwater mines in harbors, or even search-and-rescue.

Steve Huett, a program manager of the project with Office of Naval Research, says the blimps themselves haven't changed much from those used by the Navy during World War II. But they have their advantages.

"Helicopters shakes and planes have to keep moving in forward motion," explains Huett. "But the advantages of a blimp are that the g-loadings [on the electronic equipment] are not harsh and it goes slow."

In other words, airships provide a steady platform for spying. And unlike planes or even unmanned spy planes, can loiter and provide an uninterrupted view of an area for up to 12 hours a flight.

Blimp Busting
Some are skeptical military surveillance blimps will take off in a really big way.

Patrick Garrett, a defense analyst with GlobalSecurity.org in Alexandria, Va., admits having an around-the-clock aerial surveillance platform would be a great asset to homeland defense. But he wonders if such airship platforms would run afoul of legal constrains on domestic spying.

And blimps aren't exactly hardened for combat roles, either.

"They're not durable and it's not like you can hide it while it's in the sky," says Garrett. "All you have to do is point and shoot and that's all she wrote."

Still, ONR's Huett says the LASH blimp has already been put to good use. Earlier this year, it was used to help track migrating right whales. The information was sent in real-time to biologists and oceanographers keeping tabs on the endangered species.

And researchers with the program say that they hope to tweak the LASH blimp a bit further this year. With roughly $3.7 million in further funding for the rest of the year, STI says the blimp is currently on its way to San Diego. Once there,

STI and ONR will work with U.S. Navy SEALs to see if LASH is powerful enough to detect underwater mines such as ones that would be planted in shipping harbors by enemy divers.

CIA warned administration of postwar guerrilla peril

In February, the CIA gave a formal briefing to the National Security Council, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and President Bush himself: ''A quick military victory in Iraq will likely be followed by armed resistance from remnants of the Ba'ath Party and Fedayeen Saddam irregulars.''

The administration seemed unmoved. In the weeks leading up to the Iraq war, top Bush administration officials made glowing predictions that Iraqis would welcome US troops with open arms, while behind the scenes they did little to prepare for a guerrilla war.

''My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators,'' Cheney said on NBC's ''Meet the Press'' on March 16. ''I've talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several months myself, had them to the White House.''

''I imagine they will be welcomed,'' Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, a key architect of the White House's Iraq strategy, said in an interview April 3, two weeks into the war, with CBS's ''60 Minutes II.''

''I think there's every reason to think that huge numbers of the Iraqi population are going to welcome these people ... provided we don't overstay our welcome, provided we mean what we say about handing things back over to the Iraqis,'' Wolfowitz said.

The February report was not the only warning Bush received that a guerrilla war was in the offing. According to US intelligence officials who compiled or contributed to the reports, and provided excerpts to the Globe, on multiple occasions in the months before the war the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency warned that fighting would probably continue after the formal war. The assessments went so far as to suggest that guerrilla tactics could frustrate reconstruction efforts.

But intelligence officials, former military officers, and national security specialists say the administration instead clung to the optimistic predictions of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group headed by Ahmed Chalabi, who left Iraq in 1958. Chalabi, who is now a member of Iraq's US-backed Governing Council, is a close Rumsfeld and Cheney ally who had the ears of top administration officials in the months before the war.

''I think there was a general sense of how the postconflict phase would go, and it didn't work out that way,'' said a former deputy defense secretary, John J. Hamre, who recently returned from a Pentagon fact-finding mission to Iraq. ''That general sense probably caused them to pass over intelligence assessments that differed from expectations.''

''The obvious critique is that they ignored this beforehand because it didn't fit their expectations,'' Hamre said. But he cautioned against definitive conclusions about the warnings. ''The great problem I see these days is a tendency to take a single report or document and use it as proof to make a point,'' he said. ''When it comes to the world of intelligence, you have to take a much wider sampling of many inputs and make a reasoned judgment.''

The National Security Council did not respond to a request for a comment.

Last month, Wolfowitz defended the administration's planning for the aftermath of the war. ''There's been a lot of talk that there was no plan,'' he said. ''There was a plan, but as any military officer can tell you, no plan survives first contact with reality. Inevitably, some of our assumptions turned out to be wrong.''

Wolfowitz acknowledged that the administration had expected Iraqi military units to defect. ''No army units, at least none of any significant size, came over to our side so that we could use them as Iraqi forces with us today,'' he said. ''Second, the police turned out to require a massive overhaul. Third, and worst of all, it was difficult to imagine before the war that the criminal gang of sadists and gangsters who have run Iraq for 35 years would continue fighting.''

Yet the CIA in particular forewarned policymakers of some of the problems likely to arise, according to one intelligence official who asked not to be identified. The reports, for example, predicted that armed insurgents would attack coalition forces. One prewar report, he said, forecast that after the war ''things would get worse before they get better'' and that there would be a high likelihood of ''backsliding'' - progress followed by setbacks.

In the early days of the war, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon's internal spy agency, warned that Ba'ath Party loyalists - many of whom escaped the major invasion - were showing signs of regrouping, said an intelligence official who asked not to be identified. ''We wrote in early April that we were picking up hints of guerrilla forces gearing up,'' the official said.

Since President Bush declared an end to major hostilities on May 1, at least 118 US soldiers have been killed, nearly half of them in ambushes, sniper and rocket attacks, and by improvised explosives. Nearly half of the 256 US soldiers who have died since the war began on March 20 have been killed since major hostilities ended.

Still, many Iraqis have expressed relief to see the brutal dictatorship of Hussein recede into history. News dispatches from Iraq focus on US troop casualties, and therefore do not always reflect the progress and milestones reached, according to a government consultant who returned recently from Iraq. The consultant pointed to the local city councils that are up and running in many parts of the country and the relative stability in the Shi'ite Muslim regions of southern Iraq.

But the precarious security situation in the so-called Sunni Triangle - which has been a drag on efforts to restore water, electricity, and other basic services - raises questions about whether the Bush administration could have been better prepared to address what its own spies said American forces might have to contend with, according to specialists.

''I think that what you might have done differently would have been to put more civil affairs units, more military police, and the training of the Iraqi police forces in place much faster,'' said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, a think tank based in Alexandria, Va. He said US officials had a model: the NATO war against Serbia in 1999, which placed early emphasis on deploying civil affairs and police units into the province of Kosovo to fill the void.

''I would have thought that they would have had every military police unit in the Guard and Reserve just sitting and waiting to go in'' to Iraq, Pike said.

Hamre, who as president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies last month completed a report for the Pentagon on postwar challenges, said that his assessment was that the troops in Iraq feel they were not sufficiently prepared to tackle the postwar problems. ''The reaction over there from folks closer to the ground was that they were not given very good preparation for what they encountered,'' he said.

A senior Pentagon official, who asked not to be identified, bristled at the suggestion that Bush administration leaders had ignored the intelligence about postwar challenges, noting that they had bigger things on their minds. ''We worried about the catastrophic stuff,'' he said, including the fear of massive oil fires, the use of weapons of mass destruction by Iraqi forces, and a widespread humanitarian disaster. ''None of those things happened.''

Four months after the US invaded Iraq, the guerrilla attacks, amid growing concerns that terrorists are going on the offensive, have tempered the views of administration officials, who are now describing the US commitment to Iraq as requiring many years of work.

The national security adviser, Condoleeza Rice, on Thursday likened the rebuilding of Iraq and the Middle East region to the postwar efforts in Europe after World War II.

''The historical analogy is important,'' she said in a speech to the National Association of Black Journalists in Dallas. ''We must have the patience and perseverance to see it through.''

This story ran on page A25 of the Boston Globe on 8/10/2003.

US admits it used napalm bombs in Iraq

American pilots dropped the controversial incendiary agent napalm on Iraqi troops during the advance on Baghdad. The attacks caused massive fireballs that obliterated several Iraqi positions.

The Pentagon denied using napalm at the time, but Marine pilots and their commanders have confirmed that they used an upgraded version of the weapon against dug-in positions. They said napalm, which has a distinctive smell, was used because of its psychological effect on an enemy.

A 1980 UN convention banned the use against civilian targets of napalm, a terrifying mixture of jet fuel and polystyrene that sticks to skin as it burns. The US, which did not sign the treaty, is one of the few countries that makes use of the weapon. It was employed notoriously against both civilian and military targets in the Vietnam war.

The upgraded weapon, which uses kerosene rather than petrol, was used in March and April, when dozens of napalm bombs were dropped near bridges over the Saddam Canal and the Tigris river, south of Baghdad.

"We napalmed both those [bridge] approaches," said Colonel James Alles, commander of Marine Air Group 11. "Unfortunately there were people there ... you could see them in the [cockpit] video. They were Iraqi soldiers. It's no great way to die. The generals love napalm. It has a big psychological effect."

A reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald who witnessed another napalm attack on 21 March on an Iraqi observation post at Safwan Hill, close to the Kuwaiti border, wrote the following day: "Safwan Hill went up in a huge fireball and the observation post was obliterated. 'I pity anyone who is in there,' a Marine sergeant said. 'We told them to surrender.'"

At the time, the Pentagon insisted the report was untrue. "We completed destruction of our last batch of napalm on 4 April, 2001," it said.

The revelation that napalm was used in the war against Iraq, while the Pentagon denied it, has outraged opponents of the war.

"Most of the world understands that napalm and incendiaries are a horrible, horrible weapon," said Robert Musil, director of the organisation Physicians for Social Responsibility. "It takes up an awful lot of medical resources. It creates horrible wounds." Mr Musil said denial of its use "fits a pattern of deception [by the US administration]".

The Pentagon said it had not tried to deceive. It drew a distinction between traditional napalm, first invented in 1942, and the weapons dropped in Iraq, which it calls Mark 77 firebombs. They weigh 510lbs, and consist of 44lbs of polystyrene-like gel and 63 gallons of jet fuel.

Officials said that if journalists had asked about the firebombs their use would have been confirmed. A spokesman admitted they were "remarkably similar" to napalm but said they caused less environmental damage.

But John Pike, director of the military studies group GlobalSecurity.Org, said: "You can call it something other than napalm but it is still napalm. It has been reformulated in the sense that they now use a different petroleum distillate, but that is it. The US is the only country that has used napalm for a long time. I am not aware of any other country that uses it." Marines returning from Iraq chose to call the firebombs "napalm".

Mr Musil said the Pentagon's effort to draw a distinction between the weapons was outrageous. He said: "It's Orwellian. They do not want the public to know. It's a lie."

In an interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune, Marine Corps Maj-Gen Jim Amos confirmed that napalm was used on several occasions in the war.

Navy Shortage?

The United States might have scored an overwhelming victory in Iraq, but some people think it still needs more aircraft carriers.

Five of these massive cities on the waves were called to duty in Operation Iraqi Freedom — but that left only three others deployable elsewhere.

The worry is that as the sole remaining superpower, the United States might not have enough carriers if too many of the world's simmering hotspots boiled over.

Policymakers feared a conflict in North Korea could have erupted at the same time as the Iraq War, but crises surrounding Taiwan, Pakistan or Israel might have also called for an American presence. The United States military is increasingly being drawn into smaller conflicts as well, like the one currently unfolding in Liberia.

The United States has more carriers by far than anyone else in the world. Britain has three, and Russia, France, Spain, India, Italy, Brazil and Thailand have one.

But John Birkler, a military analyst for Santa Monica think tank RAND, says the current United States carrier fleet may not be enough. There's a saying in the Navy, he said: "In national security matters having too much capability is a misdemeanor, but too little is a felony."

However, retired U.S. Gen. William Nash, said the American military always needs more of everything, since it's so small relative to its duties around the globe.

"The problem in all of this is when you discuss these issues it's seldom an either/or issue," said Nash. "It's how much of each, how do you find the right mix."

"You're looking for balances that give you a maximum capability at a reasonable cost."

Power Projection Problem
The United States' involvement in global affairs is only one reason for the increased interest in carriers.

Several of America's most recent conflicts have taught Washington it may have problems projecting power in the future — in part, due to rising anti-American sentiment.

NATO's assault on the Balkans in the late 1990s was at times stifled by native anti-war protesters approaching air bases in Greece.

Turkey frustrated Washington's desire for a northern front in the most recent Iraq war by refusing coalition ground troops or use of Incirlik air base.

Before the war, peace activists even sabotaged several U.S. aircraft at Ireland's Shannon Airport, which was being used as a stopover point by the Air Force.

Saudi Arabia also refused to let the United States use long-standing Prince Sultan Air Base to launch air strikes during Operation Iraqi Freedom. After the war, U.S. forces abandoned the base.

The United States used to have more than 100 land bases on foreign soil, Birkler said. "Now it's something like 20-plus and will probably continue to decline." Plus, he added, much of the areas where the United States is focusing now hardly have the infrastructure to support land-based aircraft.

Non-Alternatives
With the cost of a carrier coming to around $6 billion each though, American lawmakers are hard-pressed to give any more money to shipbuilders.

"It's a big ticket item," said Nash. "And by the way, you have to buy aircraft for them." Each carrier also comes as part of a battle group, which means up to a dozen additional ships, he said.

Washington may find itself with more responsibilities nowadays — but advances in technology also give it more options.

Military planners have long considered using mobile platforms — fixed constructs that look like oil rigs, placed in international waters — to take the place of aircraft carriers.

The advent of long-range bombers, which can launch from bases in the United States or one of its allies and strike anywhere in the world also raises questions over the need for more carriers.

Paul Bracken, a Yale professor who has studied management aspects of the military, said the idea of mobile platforms has "comes up every once in awhile," but has attracted very little attention.

Birkler said that's because deploying the mobile platforms would take months. "Plus there are concerns about this technology. We have not built these structures before and, I suspect, there will be lots of technical surprises," he said.

The aircraft carrier also has a special role that few other manners of projecting power can beat, Bracken said. "Washington likes the signaling effect of putting aircraft carriers forward because you don't have to pull the trigger," he said.

Technological Loopholes
While technology won't negate the need for carriers, it does suggest alternatives. Carriers and their jets were once considered obsolete, until improvements in technology allowed each jet to strike three or four targets instead of just one, Bracken said. It's possible that one carrier-based aircraft might even be able to tackle more targets in the future.

Military designers are also already dreaming up blueprints for carriers for UAVs — unmanned aerial vehicles, like the Global Hawk and Predator. With a reduced need for manpower, such carriers could be much cheaper and smaller than aircraft carriers.

The United States' central position in a multi-polar world will also affect the kind of ships it needs. Most of the conflicts going on in the modern world are small-scale, and largely internal.

"All the ships we've got now are designed to defeat Japan or defeat the Soviets," said John Pike, director of Washington thinktank Globalsecurity.org. "Modern security requirements are different."

Amphibious assault ships and maritime preposition ships, used by the Marines, might be higher priorities, he said. These ships are smaller and can move forces more quickly, can house strike units, provide reconnaissance, put soldiers in the area, and serve as a base for special operations forces.

They provide an "integrated power projection solution," he said.

Crystal (Cannon)ball
One way to bridge the carrier shortage may be to change the schedules by which carriers operate.

The United States actually has 12 deployable carriers, but at the time of Operation Iraqi Freedom, only eight were deployable because of the way they're scheduled.

A new deployment schedule "will get you one to two more carriers," Bracken said. "Maybe three depending on condition."

"We have to change the mindset from peacetime to war time. Lots of things are possible in wartime than in peacetime," said Pike.

The new geopolitical climate calls for a "surge" deployment rather than a "rotation" deployment, Bracken said — keeping crews at home and well-rested until they are called upon, and moving them en masse when they are.

Military planners are also moving to capabilities-based planning as opposed to threat-based planning, he said — which means an emphasis on flexibility, rather than programming against a defined enemy, as the United States did during the Cold War.

Another consideration is that although the United States faces a number of hotspots today, few of them will last long enough for military manufacturers to respond to, said Pike.

The war after the Cold War "is a come as you are party. It will be a short war," he said. "It'll be over before we build anything new."

Arms Plan for Iraqi Forces Is Questioned

In a nation awash with hundreds of thousands of AK-47 assault rifles, the U.S.-led occupation authority is planning to buy and import 34,000 more of the ubiquitous weapons to equip a new Iraqi army.

The plan has baffled some observers, not only because U.S. forces in Iraq have already seized and stockpiled thousands of the rifles since April, but because defense analysts have strongly recommended that the new Iraqi army be equipped with more modern, U.S.-made weapons.

The AK-47, designed by Russians shortly after World War II, is manufactured almost exclusively in former Soviet Bloc countries and China. Among the possible beneficiaries of such an unlikely U.S. order: Poland, where the assault rifles are made and support for the war in Iraq has been strong.

With a bidding deadline today, the Coalition Provisional Authority now running Iraq is quietly seeking the best deal on the arsenal from U.S.-licensed arms dealers, asking that they deliver the assault weapons to the Taji military base north of Baghdad by Sept. 3. The plans were spelled out on its official Web site this week.

A spokesman for the Coalition Joint Task Force, which commands the military occupation in Iraq, was unaware of the request for bids and questioned it.

"That's surprising," said Army Capt. Jeff Fitzgibbons, a task force spokesman in Baghdad. "It would seem to me odd that we're out there looking to buy more weapons for a place where we've already captured and set aside so many of them. It would raise a red flag for me, that's for sure."

But an official with the occupation authority in Baghdad, who asked not to be named, confirmed the plans and said the AK-47s would be used to equip a new Iraqi army being formed to replace the 400,000-strong military that was formally disbanded in May.

The U.S. Army and private American defense contractors, led by Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman, have begun to train the first Iraqi army recruits in Kirkuk under a $48-million Pentagon contract, and the Taji base is the supply point for that northern Iraqi city. The new force is expected to number 12,000 at the end of this year and 40,000 in three years.

In its Internet solicitation for the 34,000 weapons and accessories, technically called a request for proposals, the occupation authority specified that it wanted to buy "brand-new, never-fired, fixed-stock AK-47 assault rifles with certified manufacture dates not earlier than 1987."

The authority wants a new shipment of the weapons from a single source "so that they're all of the same standard, and they're all new and ready to use," the official said. He declined to speculate on the cost of the weapons or the source of the funds that will be used to buy them, adding, "We're looking for a product that works, and we're looking for value."

Individual AK-47s are advertised on the Internet for several hundred dollars apiece. Although it was unclear what the per-rifle cost would be under such a large purchase, the total order would presumably exceed $1 million.

But the U.S. forces who seized control of Iraq in April have since discovered vast stockpiles of new, never-fired AK-47s, which U.S. military officials said have been deliberately warehoused for a future Iraqi army.

At one compound of eight concrete warehouses that a company of the 10th Engineer Battalion found in central Baghdad in mid-April, Times reporters watched soldiers form a human chain to fill a truck bed with AK-47s so new the soldiers' hands turned orange from the packing grease.

One officer on the scene at the time called the arms cache a "mother lode." Another said there were so many weapons he'd lost count. First Lt. Matt Miletich, who was in charge of the company, said then that the weapons would be held and guarded until a new Iraqi government and army were ready to receive them.

The following day, U.S. Marines who were securing the city of Tikrit north of Baghdad announced that they had found 100,000 AK-47s there, 80,000 of them in a hospital. And in the months that have followed, there have been almost daily reports of U.S. military units seizing quantities of AK-47s both large and small, new and used.

"We've been designating a lot of these captured weapons specifically for the new Iraqi army and police organizations we're setting up," Fitzgibbons said, although he acknowledged that many of the weapons were old.

The civil authority official, however, asserted that the makes and models of the new weapons seized have "slight differences" depending on the nation where they were made, and that the goal of the agency's AK-47 purchase is to standardize the arms.

He added that the agency decided to order AK-47s rather than another weapon made in the U.S. or another Western country not only because the Iraqi recruits are familiar with it but because "the AK-47 is the easiest weapon to teach, and it's the easiest to use."

Designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov in 1947, the AK-47 is manufactured largely in former Soviet Bloc nations. It was standard issue for the Iraqi army and security services under the Saddam Hussein regime, which handed out well over a million of them to soldiers and civilians and warehoused tens of thousands more.

To some U.S. defense analysts, that is scant justification.

"Basically, they would be equipping the new and improved Iraqi military with un-American weapons. If you've decided to start all over again from the beginning, it would make sense to equip the new Iraqi military with American equipment," said John Pike, who heads the Virginia-based, nonprofit GlobalSecurity.org defense policy group.

"It raises a lot of interesting questions that will continue to be raised as they rebuild the Iraqi military ... If played right, this could be a real bonanza for American armament companies."

Pike and his group say that the purchase, presumably the first of many for the new Iraqi army, potentially has multibillion-dollar implications.

"What about tanks? How many tanks does Iraq need?" Pike asked. "Does Iraq need fighter planes? Are they going to buy Swedish fighter planes?"

A recent study by GlobalSecurity.org on rebuilding the Iraqi military said: "It is important for the United States to monitor and supervise Iraq's military reconstruction, as the U.S. has an interest in reequipping Iraq with U.S. military equipment. The use of U.S. systems would require significant training and allow the U.S. to have continued military influence in the country long after significant U.S. units had departed.

"Likewise, if left to its own accord, Iraq would likely turn to other available systems on the open arms sales market, most likely Russian or Russian- derivative arms that the Iraqi military already has experience in using."

The coalition authority's request for the rifles does specify that its supplier have "required licenses and credentials" that include an official registration with the State Department as a "broker" of defense products and a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Class III "license for U.S. companies," which permits the manufacture or sale of fully automatic assault weapons.

Such a license permits a U.S. company to sell the weapons only to U.S. law enforcement agencies. But if the company also is registered with the State Department's Defense Trade Controls Office, it can broker the sale of those weapons from a foreign manufacturer to another foreign buyer.

Independent analysts added that, given those specifications, the coalition's winning bidder probably would be a licensed U.S. arms broker or dealer who arranges the shipment to Iraq from a former Soviet Bloc country that makes AK-47s.

Washington's Pax Americana smacks of Roman power game

The US emphatically denies it has worldwide imperial ambitions, but the global spread of its military commitments suggests otherwise, writes Paul Kennedy

THERE is a cunning after-dinner board game called SPQR which involves the defence of the Roman Empire at its height. The board is a map of Europe and the Mediterranean, showing Roman cities and ports and the military roads and the sea lanes between them. The game involves the "senators and populace" moving selected Roman legions (there were 27 of them in, say, 80AD) along those internal lines in response to new threats, whether they come from Syria, Scotland or the Danube.

There were few places along the borders of the empire where one legion could not reinforce another within 10 days' march -- which was just as well, since Rome's expansion had given it many enemies, and a legion that was based in Sicily one year might find itself in the north of England the next, guarding Hadrian's Wall.

I thought of SPQR while reading Where Are the Legions? Global Deployments of US Forces, published by Global Security, the nonprofit and nonpartisan policy research group based outside Washington (www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/global-deployments.htm). The message is clear, and very disturbing: there may not be many US troops coming home soon, perhaps not for a long time.

Washington now has military forces in about 130 countries, fighting in some of them, peacekeeping and training foreign military units in others. You can hear George Washington turning in his grave.

To be sure, the US has had standing military commitments abroad since the end of the World War II -- the occupations of Germany and Japan, the Korean War and the global rivalry with the Soviet Union made sure of that.

But when the Warsaw Pact collapsed, it was generally assumed things would be different. Alas, that simply is not so. The fight against al-Qa'ida, the war and guerrilla resistance in Iraq, the implosion of Liberia, the continued unrest in Afghanistan, instability on the Korean peninsula and the need to reassure Japan of a strong US presence in the western Pacific have all conspired against a draw-down of US forces in the far corners of the globe. On the contrary, they have very much been drawn up.

Using official statistics, the editors at Global Security report there are 155 combat battalions in the US army. Before October 2001, only 17 of those were deployed on active combat service, in Kosovo and a few other hotspots (garrison deployment in Germany and Japan is not regarded as "active combat" service). Today, that figure stands at 98 combat battalions deployed in active areas.

Even a non-military expert can see this is an impossibly high number to sustain over the longer term, which is why, in addition to the 255,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guard forces deployed in combat and peacekeeping missions abroad, the US has sent another 136,000 troops from the National Guard and Reserves.

Most of the US carrier fleet are now back in their bases, being refitted after the defeat of Saddam Hussein, but Washington still has 40,000 sailors afloat and on mission. Meanwhile, the US generals are asking for more troop deployments in Iraq, and the Pentagon has just diverted three warships to the coast of Liberia. The US Defence Department now has to play a real-life game of SPQR.

These are not comfortable facts, and they should surely be giving US congressional representatives cause for thought. It is true the Pentagon is putting immense pressure on any country that counts itself a friend of Washington to send forces to Iraq, Afghanistan and Liberia, but the results so far are unspectacular.

Really, the only ground troops with heft and logistical capacity are the British, and, given all their other peacekeeping commitments -- from the Balkans to Sierra Leone -- they are probably more overstretched than the US is. Poland has assumed responsibility for running a relatively quiet (so far) zone in Iraq. But as the Wall Street Journal reported, Washington had to go to 22 countries to drum up the 9000 troops for that zone, and they will rely heavily on US technical support to function at all.

You wonder what utility Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz really accord a battalion of Latvian grenadiers in central Iraq. And what happens when they become the targets of grenade attacks?

Militarily -- and let's forget for a moment the debate about whether the US should have gone into these countries in the first place -- these awkward facts point to two equally awkward conclusions:

First, given the military overstretch, the US needs a few more heavy hitters, along with the British. It needs armies with substantial punch that could send 25,000 troops to southwest Asia. But of the 190 national armies of the world, you can count substantial ones on the fingers of one hand. Israel can't play, China and Taiwan won't play. South Korea is pinned down at home and remains a drain on US troop deployments. Japan is too psychologically and constitutionally restricted. A Pakistani presence alongside the US in Iraq might cause massive internal convulsions. A large Turkish contingent would cause a retaliatory Kurdish uprising.

This leaves India, Russia, France and Germany, and perhaps Italy, but four of those five opposed the war on Iraq in the first place, and if the US needs them now, there will be a price to pay. This is as obvious today as it should have been last September. Of course, the US can always "go it alone", but it does so at some cost.

Second, the US miliary services, and the army in particular, must come up with some long-term rotation scheme. They may have to move to a sort of Cardwell System, which was devised in the late 19th century by the then British secretary for war, Edward Cardwell, to deal with the constant calls on troops to serve abroad. One battalion of the British regiment was rotated out, perhaps to Afghanistan or Mesopotamia, for two or three years, the second battalion stayed home in the regimental barracks, recruiting fresh volunteers until its turn came to go abroad.

The system worked, just as the SPQR system worked, because both combined regular rotation (helping troop morale) and strategic flexibility. Occasionally, there were horrible reverses: for the Romans in the German forests or the British in the Khyber Pass. But the structure was strong enough to allow for recovery, often for further advances. These were empires that were in it for the long haul.

Is this the US future -- to have its troops stationed for an undefined time on the Northwest Frontier or in a disease-ridden port in West Africa or some other outpost?

Washington frantically denies it has imperial ambitions, and I believe those denials to be sincere. But if the US increasingly looks like an empire, walks like an empire and quacks like an empire, perhaps it is becoming one just the same.