USAF COUNTERPROLIFERATION CENTER

CPC OUTREACH JOURNAL

Maxwell AFB, Alabama

Issue No. 419, 30 March 2005

Articles & Other Documents:

Our Allies Were Not 'Misled' $30 Million Unfrozen For Arms Destruction Illegal Nuclear Deals Alleged Report On U.S. Weapons Intelligence Is Said To Be Critical Pakistani Hints He'll Turn Over Centrifuges In Iran Seoul Denies Report On NK-Libya Nuclear Deal Investigation Toxic Indifference To North Korea Biohazard Procedures To Change Many Missiles Missing In Iraq, Review Of Reports Storage Of Nuclear Spent Fuel Criticized Shows Saving Nonproliferation Panel's Report Assails C.I.A. For Failure On Iraq Weapons Anthrax Dumped Near Saddam Palace Pakistan Denies Access To Nuke Supplier

Welcome to the CPC Outreach Journal. As part of USAF Counterproliferation Center’s mission to counter weapons of mass destruction through education and research, we’re providing our government and civilian community a source for timely counterproliferation information. This information includes articles, papers and other documents addressing issues pertinent to US military response options for dealing with nuclear, biological and chemical threats and attacks. It’s our hope this information resource will help enhance your counterproliferation issue awareness. Established in 1998, the USAF/CPC provides education and research to present and future leaders of the Air Force, as well as to members of other branches of the armed services and Department of Defense. Our purpose is to help those agencies better prepare to counter the threat from weapons of mass destruction. Please feel free to visit our web site at www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/awc-cps.htm for in-depth information and specific points of contact. Please direct any questions or comments on CPC Outreach Journal Jo Ann Eddy, CPC Outreach Editor, at (334) 953- 7538 or DSN 493-7538. To subscribe, change e-mail address, or unsubscribe to this journal or to request inclusion on the mailing list for CPC publications, please contact Mrs. Eddy. The following articles, papers or documents do not necessarily reflect official endorsement of the United States Air Force, Department of Defense, or other US government agencies. Reproduction for private use or commercial gain is subject to original copyright restrictions. All rights are reserved

(Editor’s Note: Referenced story appeared in CPC Outreach #417.) Washington Post March 25, 2005 Pg. 18 Our Allies Were Not 'Misled' "U.S. Misled Allies About Nuclear Export," the March 20 front-page story about nuclear material exported to Libya, was flat wrong. Our allies were not "misled" by the United States about North Korea's proliferation activities. We provided an accurate account of the intelligence assessment of the most likely source of the nuclear material that was transferred to Libya through A.Q. Khan's network. The reporter asserted that "Pakistan was mentioned only once in the briefing paper, and in a context that emphasized Pyongyang's guilt." In fact, the Khan network was cited several times, but the key point is that the briefing made clear that the nuclear material transferred to Libya went through the Khan network. The U.S. government has no evidence that the transfer was authorized by Pakistan's government. Whether the intended recipient was the Khan network or Libya is irrelevant to our proliferation concerns regarding North Korea. The fact that nuclear material found its way out of North Korea to any destination is a source of serious concern for the United States and other participants in the six-party talks. That is why we brought the matter to their attention. SCOTT McCLELLAN, Press Secretary, White House, Washington http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64562-2005Mar24.html

(Return to Articles and Documents List)

Lexington (KY) Herald-Leader March 24, 2005 $30 Million Unfrozen For Arms Destruction Pays for preliminary work for next 6 months at Blue Grass Depot By Peter Mathews, Central Kentucky Bureau RICHMOND - The Defense Department released $30 million yesterday for design work and preliminary construction at the proposed chemical neutralization plant at Blue Grass Army Depot. The move will allow Bechtel Parsons Blue Grass, the contractor, to continue work through Sept. 30. An additional $40 million was released for the depot's sister site in Pueblo, Colo., and orders halting work on design and construction there were lifted. But one prominent critic, Craig Williams of the Berea-based Chemical Weapons Working Group, called the day's events a sign that the Pentagon has shifted its top priority from protecting the public to saving money. "Basically, this is life support," Williams said, describing the infusion of money this way: "You're buried alive in a 6-foot pit, and somebody drills a hole and puts a straw in it so you can breathe." A Pentagon spokeswoman could not be reached for comment last night. In a memorandum yesterday announcing the release of the funds, acting Undersecretary of Defense Michael Wynne called for a redesign to shave hundreds of millions of dollars off the projected cost of the Kentucky and Colorado plants. Wynne wants their costs brought in line with estimates from 2002, which were derived before any design work was done. Williams calls those figures "place-holders." "Nobody had enough information to plug a real number in there," he said. "Now they're saying it's a real number." Those 2002 estimates were $2 billion for Blue Grass and $1.5 billion for Pueblo. But after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Pentagon ordered that the destruction of chemical weapons be sped up. One way to do that is to build a bigger, costlier plant that can destroy the stockpiles more quickly. Three years later, both projects are running well over the 2002 preliminary estimates. The Pentagon has said Pueblo is about $1 billion over budget. Estimates of the cost of the Kentucky plant range from $2.2 billion to $2.4 billion. That plant would chemically neutralize the 523 tons of mustard and nerve agent the Army stores at the depot near Richmond. A treaty requires the destruction of the entire U.S. stockpile by April 2012. Officials pledged yesterday to keep working with the public as the project evolves. "We're looking at some pretty radical design changes," said Chris Midgett, project manager for Bechtel Parsons Blue Grass. As for whether the Pueblo plant can be built for $1.5 billion, he said, "It's going to be difficult to hit that number for Pueblo, but it's possible." The money released yesterday is part of about $400 million already appropriated by Congress but frozen by the Pentagon. Wynne also authorized the release of an unspecified portion of the $160.7 million appropriated this fiscal year for research and development at the plants. But the memo also indicates that the Pentagon intends to hold firm to the $31 million budget appropriation proposed by President Bush for next year, far below what had been anticipated earlier. Similar funding levels are proposed for the next four fiscal years. http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/news/11215907.htm

(Return to Articles and Documents List)

Los Angeles Times March 26, 2005 Pg. 1 Illegal Nuclear Deals Alleged Investigators say Pakistan has secretly bought high-tech components for its weapons program from U.S. companies. By Josh Meyer, Times Staff Writer WASHINGTON — A federal criminal investigation has uncovered evidence that the government of Pakistan made clandestine purchases of U.S. high-technology components for use in its nuclear weapons program in defiance of American law. Federal authorities also say the highly specialized equipment at one point passed through the hands of Humayun Khan, an Islamabad businessman who they say has ties to Islamic militants. Even though President Bush has been pushing for an international crackdown on such trafficking, efforts by two U.S. agencies to send investigators to Pakistan to gather more evidence have hit a bottleneck in Washington, said officials knowledgeable about the case. The impasse is part of a larger tug-of-war between federal agencies that enforce U.S. nonproliferation laws and policymakers who consider Pakistan too important to embarrass. The transactions under review began in early 2003, well after President Pervez Musharraf threw his support to the Bush administration's war on terrorism and the invasion of neighboring Afghanistan to oust Pakistan's former Taliban allies. "This is the age-old problem with Pakistan and the U.S. Other priorities always trump the United States from coming down hard on Pakistan's nuclear proliferation. And it goes back 15 to 20 years," said David Albright, director of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. Albright, a former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, favors getting tougher with Pakistan. U.S. and European officials involved in nonproliferation issues say they recently discovered evidence that Pakistan has begun a new push to acquire advanced nuclear components on the black market as it tries to upgrade its decades- old weapons program. Current and former intelligence officials said the same elements of the Pakistani military that they suspected of orchestrating efforts to buy American-made products may also have worked with Abdul Qadeer Khan, the so-called father of the Pakistani nuclear program who supplied weapons know-how and parts to Iran, North Korea and Libya. Abdul Qadeer Khan and Humayun Khan are not related. The scheme U.S. investigators are trying to unravel involves Humayun Khan and Asher Karni, a South African electronics salesman and former Israeli army major. Aided by Karni, who pleaded guilty to violating export control laws and began cooperating with U.S. authorities shortly after his arrest 15 months ago, investigators have traced at least one shipment of oscilloscopes from Oregon to South Africa and on to Humayun Khan. The trail did not end there, however. According to recently unsealed Commerce Department documents, agents followed the shipment to the Al Technique Corp. of Pakistan, which had not been listed on any of the shipping or purchasing documents. Al Technique describes itself as a manufacturer of precision lasers and other military-related products. But for federal investigators, "it was a big red flag," one U.S. official said. "It's definitely a front for nuclear weapons, for their WMD project," the official said. The company is on a U.S. list of firms banned from buying equipment such as the special oscilloscopes that can be used to test and manufacture nuclear weapons. Like others interviewed for this report, the American official spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the political sensitivity of the case, the records of which have been sealed by a federal judge. The judge also has imposed a gag order on all participants. U.S. officials suspect that the Pakistani government was the customer behind another purchase they say Humayun Khan made from Karni: 200 U.S.-made precision electronic switches that can be used in detonating nuclear weapons. U.S. law prohibits the sale of equipment that can be used in nuclear weapons programs to Pakistan and some other countries as part of the effort to curb nuclear proliferation. Officials accuse Humayun Khan and Karni of conspiring to break those laws by concealing the nature of the transactions. Humayun Khan has not been charged with any crime, but the Commerce Department on Jan. 31 banned him from doing business in the U.S. for 180 days. Halting illegal transfers of nuclear weapons components is a cornerstone of the administration's Proliferation Security Initiative, and the departments of Commerce and Homeland Security moved quickly to pursue leads after Karni's arrest. His cooperation has allowed U.S. officials to significantly expand their investigation. As many as several dozen suspects are under scrutiny in Pakistan, India, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere, officials say. Humayun Khan's involvement in the deal aroused concern because he has been linked to several militant groups, including the All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference, a Pakistani party that allegedly supports fighters in the disputed territory of Kashmir. Last year, federal prosecutors used Karni's ties to Humayun Khan to argue successfully against the South African being released on bail while awaiting trial. "This case represents one of the most serious types of export violations imaginable," one prosecutor argued in a court filing. U.S. agents began gearing up for an investigative trip to Pakistan in early 2004. They had recently completed a mission to South Africa that produced a wealth of evidence. They hoped to question Humayun Khan and others, locate missing components and pursue further leads. But when the Commerce and Homeland Security departments asked the State Department to clear the investigators' trip, they did not get permission. Law enforcement officials complain that the delay has allowed the trail to grow cold. Several senior officials said that the United States had made high-level requests to Islamabad for cooperation in the case, but that none was made forcefully or publicly. Two State Department officials dealing with nonproliferation said the Bush administration voiced concerns about Pakistan's ties to the nuclear black market, most recently during private meetings Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had with Musharraf and other Pakistani leaders last week. Pakistan has refused to allow access to Abdul Qadeer Khan. Gary Milhollin, a nuclear nonproliferation expert, said the Bush administration could apply enough pressure on Pakistan to gain access for the investigators reviewing Humayun Khan's activities, tying cooperation to the $3- billion U.S. aid package, for example, and to the sale of F-16 fighter jets that the White House announced Friday. "But it seems bizarre that we are letting the Pakistanis get away with nuclear smuggling because we think they'll help fight terrorism," said Milhollin, who heads the Washington-based Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control. Humayun Khan, in a telephone interview from Islamabad, denied any involvement with the recent shipments, saying that "someone else" ordered the oscilloscopes and the switches, had them shipped to his office, then snatched them somewhere along the way. "It's very tragic," Humayun Khan said. "You don't know where these things are landing. They come through and they vanish." He said Washington has allowed dozens of black market companies to flourish in Pakistan and elsewhere by selectively enforcing its nonproliferation laws. "It's all about politics," Humayun Khan said. "If they don't want us to develop these things, they would do everything they can to stop it…. You [the American government] close one eye and open the other at particular times to these things that have been going on." He said dozens of front companies throughout South Asia and the Middle East were procuring such components from U.S. firms for questionable purposes. Humayun Khan said he had e-mailed detailed information to U.S. investigators about at least 10 Pakistani companies that he claimed routinely engaged in illicit schemes to buy goods from U.S. suppliers, including Tektronix Inc., the Oregon firm that allegedly sold him the oscilloscopes. U.S. officials will say only that Humayun Khan has provided evasive and contradictory answers about the case. Although they have talked to him by telephone, they say it is crucial to confront him in Pakistan, where they can do follow-up investigations. Humayun Khan said he assumed that, because U.S. investigators never showed up, they must have dropped him as a suspect. Pakistani authorities haven't questioned him, he said, because he and his father have done business with Islamabad's Defense Ministry for 40 years and would not do anything the government didn't approve of. "Nobody came to me. Why? They didn't bother," Humayun Khan said. "They know us like we were relatives." Alisha Goff, a spokeswoman for Tektronix said that the company was aware of the investigation, including the purchase of its oscilloscopes, but that it had not been implicated in any wrongdoing. She said the company had stopped all shipments to Humayun Khan, pending the outcome of the investigation. "Tektronix is cooperating fully with the government, and as such cannot provide any additional information on this matter," Goff said. U.S. investigators say they have become increasingly frustrated by the lack of support from the State Department because they see rising indications of Pakistani involvement in the nuclear black market. They cite evidence suggesting that Pakistan has increased its already extensive network of agents operating in the global market for nuclear and missile components. Foreign officials with the International Atomic Energy Agency say they believe Pakistan has set aside a huge budget for new black market components to upgrade its entire nuclear weapons program. Some of the equipment is part of a large program to expand Pakistan's nuclear arsenal with plutonium-based weapons, which are smaller and far more destructive than weapons using uranium, diplomats and investigators say. "Pakistan does need nuclear technology," said one European diplomat with ties to the South Asian country, noting that Islamabad's agents have been caught trying to make illicit purchases of specialized steel and aluminum, as well as nuclear triggers called krytrons. "We have the names of the companies and we have been talking to them," another diplomat said. Pakistani officials have repeatedly declined to discuss Karni's case and the investigation, and Al Technique did not return calls seeking comment. One senior Pakistani official said that his country did not intentionally violate U.S. nonproliferation laws, but it would continue to support and improve its nuclear weapons program as a deterrent to India, which he said also used the black market. The departments of Commerce, Homeland Security and Justice would not permit its officials to discuss the criminal case on the record, and the White House and State Department also had no formal comment. However, State Department officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the administration believed it had few options for pressuring Musharraf when his cooperation was crucial on several other fronts. "It's one thing for them to cooperate with us in efforts to stop [nuclear components] from going elsewhere, such as Iran," one said. "But they will never cooperate with us on efforts to stop things that they are trying to get. They've got their own program, which they're trying to keep." Times staff writer Douglas Frantz in Vienna contributed to this report. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-paknuke26mar26,1,1475439.story

(Return to Articles and Documents List)

New York Times March 26, 2005 Report On U.S. Weapons Intelligence Is Said To Be Critical By Scott Shane WASHINGTON, March 25 - A presidential commission that has spent a year studying American intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and other countries will be sharply critical of the performance of several agencies, a government official briefed on the commission's report said Friday night. "It makes some tough calls," the official said. "It's going to be quite critical of a number of agencies." He spoke on condition of anonymity and gave few details because the report by the commission headed by Laurence H. Silberman and Charles S. Robb will not be released until next week. The report has already been circulated to the intelligence agencies, which were given an opportunity to correct factual errors and make other comments. Though the full report is classified, an unclassified version has been prepared for public release, the official said. Porter J. Goss, director of central intelligence, sent an e-mail message to all C.I.A. employees on Friday to alert them to the report, which is due to be received by President Bush on Thursday. An official who saw the message said it did not characterize the report, which is expected to fault the C.I.A.'s performance, but was intended to avoid surprises and keep up morale. Formally known as the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, the nine-member panel was appointed by Mr. Bush in February 2004 and began meeting about a year ago. It was created after a team of American experts known as the Iraq Survey Group failed to find in Iraq the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons and the active nuclear weapons program that the C.I.A. and other agencies had reported were there under Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi dictator. The commission was given the task of assessing not only that prewar intelligence failure but also the quality of current American knowledge of weapons programs in Iran, North Korea and other countries. Officials who have been briefed on the panel's work told The New York Times this month that intelligence on Iran's weapons program was inadequate. The administration has expressed serious concern about Iran's quest for nuclear weapons and has been pressuring North Korea to give up its nuclear devices. The commission was assigned to compare reporting on weapons in Libya and Afghanistan with what was found after those countries were opened to American experts, after the ouster of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the decision of the Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi to give up his weapons programs. Led by Mr. Silberman, a retired federal judge, and Mr. Robb, a former Virginia governor and senator, the panel is also expected to propose adjustments to the intelligence reorganization recently engineered by legislation. The law created a director of national intelligence to oversee and coordinate all 15 intelligence agencies, which have a total budget estimated at $40 billion. President Bush has appointed John D. Negroponte, who served most recently as ambassador to Iraq, to the job. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/26/politics/26weapons.html?

(Return to Articles and Documents List)

New York Times March 26, 2005 Pakistani Hints He'll Turn Over Centrifuges In Iran Investigation By Somini Sengupta NEW DELHI, March 25 - President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan says he will consider turning over centrifuges to the international nuclear watchdog agency to aid in its investigation of Iran's nuclear program. The centrifuges could help the group, the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, determine whether the traces of highly enriched, weapons grade uranium found on nuclear equipment in Iran originated in Iran or, as Tehran maintains, arrived in a contaminated shipment of centrifuges from Pakistan. Earlier this month, Pakistan acknowledged for the first time that Dr. A. Q. Khan, the country's most celebrated nuclear scientist and a one-man nuclear black market, had sold centrifuges to Iran, but said he had done so independently and without the consent of the government. International diplomats have said that Pakistan privately agreed months ago to turn the centrifuges over to the agency but had been dragging its feet. In an interview broadcast Thursday on a private television network called Aaj, General Musharraf seemed to say the delays would stop. "To end the issue once and for all we want to send nuclear centrifuges to Vienna for inspection, and the matter is under consideration," he was quoted as saying in a report on the interview published Friday in an English-language daily, Dawn. Centrifuges are used to enrich uranium, which may then serve as a source of fuel for nuclear power plants or for weapons, though weapons-grade uranium is far more concentrated. Iran has maintained that it has the right to enrich uranium for use in power plants, but Washington contends that it is using its peaceful nuclear activities to obscure its weapons-making program. Pakistan, a key ally in the United States' war on terror, has in the past acknowledged that Dr. Khan smuggled nuclear secrets to North Korea, Iran and Libya. On television last year, Dr. Khan admitted to having spread Pakistan's nuclear technology, issued an apology but offered no details on what he had sold to whom. Pardoned by General Musharraf, he now lives in a closely guarded house in the capital. Bush administration officials, as well as the Musharraf government, say they believe Dr. Khan's illicit network has been dismantled. "Dr. A. Q. Khan was involved in nuclear proliferation to Iran," General Musharraf said in the interview. "It is unfortunate. But now he is living a quiet life and in no way involved in any network." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/26/international/asia/26pakistan.html

(Return to Articles and Documents List)

Korea Times March 25, 2005 Seoul Denies Report On NK-Libya Nuclear Deal By Ryu Jin, Staff Reporter South Korea denied a news report yesterday that it was informed by the United States earlier this year of the intelligence that North Korea had been paid by Libya after exporting nuclear material via Pakistan. The Dong-A Ilbo, one of the country's major conservative dailies, reported in its morning edition that Washington delivered the information to Seoul through a diplomatic channel last month right after U.S. National Security Council (NSC) officials' visit to Seoul on Feb. 2. Since the Washington Post reported Sunday that it was not North Korea, but Pakistan which had sold uranium hexafluoride (UF6) to Libya, there has been growing speculations here that the U.S. might have misled its allies in Asia with false intelligence to pressure the North. Senior NSC officials Michael Green and William Tobey made the rounds to Seoul, Tokyo and Beijing in February to share the information related to the deal between North Korea and Libya, omitting the part relating to Pakistan, which is a crucial U.S. ally in its war on terror, according to the Post. Quoting unidentified ``senior officials,'' Dong-A Ilbo reported that the U.S. at the time briefed Seoul officials that North Korea exported 1.8 tons of UF6 to Libya through a ``black market organization'' in Pakistan and later provided more details on the secret transaction. ``We have not been informed about transaction details,'' a government spokesman said in response to reporters' question. ``We are not in a stage where we can conclude there was a financial transaction between North Korea and Libya.'' Earlier this week, the U.S. State Department refuted the Washington Post claim, saying the U.S. informed its allies of the ``intelligence community's assessment of the most likely source'' of the nuclear material transferred to Libya. It argued that the fact that such nuclear material was transferred is a ``source of significant concern'' for the U.S. and other participants in the six-party talks. http://search.hankooki.com/times/times_view.php?terms=Nuclear+code%3A+kt&path=hankooki3%2Ftimes%2Flpa ge%2Fnation%2F200503%2Fkt2005032517274611980.htm

(Return to Articles and Documents List)

Washington Post March 26, 2005 Pg. 15 Toxic Indifference To North Korea By Abraham Cooper A day after Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 8, 1941, German death squads in the Polish village of Chelmno gassed Jews in specially equipped vans for the first time. Far from generating banner headlines, the story did not appear in the New York Times until nearly seven months later, on Page 6. Like the Allied powers, the Times consistently ignored or buried such reports until it was too late for 6 million European Jews. In 2005, the civilized world seems to be deploying the same dismissive, deadly strategy again. I recently returned from debriefing North Korean defectors in Seoul who told me of their involvement in the Pyongyang regime's gassing of political prisoners, dating back to the 1970s and continuing into the 21st century. I traveled to South Korea after officials in Seoul refused to grant a visa to Dr. Lee Byom-Shik (a pseudonym) to come to the United States to serve as a key witness about alleged murders by gassing in North Korea. He was to testify at a Simon Wiesenthal Center conference on human rights abuses in North Korea. Dr. Lee, 55, is a chemist who told me of his important "achievements" in serving the North Korean regime since the 1970s. He worked with one team that produced bogus Japanese diplomatic passports used by agents to smuggle aboard the bomb that brought down Korean Airlines Flight 001. He helped produce counterfeit $100 bills used by diplomats traveling abroad. It took an hour into our debriefing for Dr. Lee to get around to the fact that he helped develop deadly agents at a secret underground poison and toxin research institute. In that connection, he matter-of-factly described how, in 1979, he was in charge of gassing two political prisoners. The victims' suffering was documented by scientists, who took notes outside glass-encased gas chambers that were also wired for sound. One prisoner died after 2 1/2 hours, the other after 3 1/2 hours of agony. Then a young scientist, Dr. Lee was rewarded with a medal and promotions for his role in these successful experiments. Twenty-five years later, he expressed no remorse, but his recall of details and dates make him a credible, if frightening, witness. Another North Korean defector I interviewed was 31-year-old Chun Ji Suang (also a pseudonym). In 1994, while attending a prestigious scientific institute, he was selected to be part of two teams researching various types of gassing -- from slow-acting, untraceable poisons to be used for assassinations to those that would cause instantaneous death. For eight years these scientists constantly moved their base of operations throughout the North Korean gulag. He belonged to Team A, which experimented exclusively on animals. When they successfully concluded an experiment, Team B then used those results on human guinea pigs. Unlike Dr. Lee, this young man is very remorseful. His escape from North Korea was facilitated by a supervisor and other secret sympathizers who urged him to expose Kim Jong Il's atrocities. Since 2002, defectors among the flood of refugees from North Korea have detailed firsthand accounts of systematic starvation, torture and murder. Enemies of the state are used in experiments to develop new generations of chemical and biological weapons that threaten the world. A microcosm of these horrors is Camp 22, one of 12 concentration camps housing an estimated 200,000 political prisoners facing torture or execution for such "crimes" as being a Christian or a relative of someone suspected of deviation from "official ideology of the state." Another eyewitness, Kwon Hyuk, formerly chief manager at Camp 22, repeated to me what he asserted to the BBC: "I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber. . . . The parents were vomiting and dying, but until the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing." So why no worldwide outrage? For now it appears that realpolitik trumps distant horrors. Despite heroic efforts by Christian activists on both sides of the Pacific to sound the alarm, the South Korean government views these accusations as unwelcome complications to its problematic and complex relations with the North. Indeed, a foreign ministry official whom I met did not deny that North Korea gassed political prisoners to further its program to develop weapons of mass destruction. He politely stated that Seoul was focusing exclusively on the threat from Pyongyang's nuclear program in the context of the six-nation peace talks. Meanwhile, most South Korean nongovernmental organizations are so committed to the idyllic vision of a reunified Korean Peninsula that they have turned a deaf ear to the horrors inflicted on their own people north of the 38th parallel. The Western media haven't exactly ignored this story. Instead, they have generally treated it in an offhand manner chillingly reminiscent of how the Holocaust was reported during World War II. For example, the Pentagon just recently sought emergency authority to resume administering the anthrax vaccine to U.S. troops stationed on the Korean Peninsula as well as in the Persian Gulf because of "a significant potential for a military emergency involving a heightened risk to United States military forces of attack." The limited coverage of the story focused not on the threat posed by North Korean chemical and biological weaponry but on the controversy over the safety of inoculating the troops. North Korea's Mengele-style experimentation with killer agents such as anthrax has not escalated into a mass- murder campaign against the regime's own population, the Allied troops stationed in the Korean DMV or North Korea's neighbors -- not yet. But beyond the nuclear threat, the world has reason to be deeply concerned over how much of this deadly know-how has been transferred to terrorist states or entities. It isn't necessary to insist on "regime change" as a precondition of dialogue. But the world community -- with the United States, Japan, China and Russia in the lead -- must insist on behavioral change, ameliorating the North's human rights pathologies, before making diplomatic concessions. We should start by identifying -- by name -- those involved in crimes against humanity against their own people, and warning these criminals that eventually they will be held accountable before the bar of justice. The writer is associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and a member of the North Korean Freedom Coalition. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2214-2005Mar25.html

(Return to Articles and Documents List)

Washington Post March 27, 2005 Pg. C1 Biohazard Procedures To Change Defense Officials Admit Anthrax Scare Missteps By Spencer S. Hsu, Washington Post Staff Writer The Defense Department is changing how it handles biohazard threats, acknowledging that internal breakdowns delayed its response to a March 14 anthrax scare at the Pentagon and nearby office buildings, confused the rest of the federal government and alarmed state and local public health workers, officials said. Under fire for gaps with civilian bioterrorism detection and response systems, military officials said they will quicken reporting of test results from biological sensors around their Arlington headquarters to no more than 24 hours and shift away from using contract laboratories. It took three days to get results from a contractor after the March 14 incident. Defense officials acknowledged the need to align laboratory testing protocols with those used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They also agreed that they should coordinate with local health officials when ordering emergency medical treatment for defense workers. Pentagon representatives discussed the steps Friday during an "after-action" review chaired by Thomas J. Lockwood, national capital region coordinator for the Department of Homeland Security. Representatives from the White House, FBI, Health and Human Services Department and U.S. Postal Service, as well as state and local officials, were present. Officials described preliminary results on condition of anonymity because the review is not complete and because multiple agencies are involved. One participant said the two-hour meeting evolved from a "tense" set of exchanges to "a real air of candid . . . open sharing of information." Valerie Smith, spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said: "Federal, state and local agencies involved in [the] mail facility situation had an after-action review meeting [Friday] to discuss the event and analyze protocols, coordination and response. Meeting to discuss these issues gives all parties the opportunity to learn from past experience." Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff ordered the review after alerts in two military mailrooms shut the main delivery center at the Pentagon, disrupted mail delivery to U.S. government offices and put 900 workers in several buildings on antibiotics for three days. Although the presence of anthrax bacteria in one of four samples taken March 10 from the Pentagon's Remote Delivery Facility was confirmed by three laboratories, subsequent testing found no trace of the toxin. Senior military officials said the most plausible explanation was contamination by the original contractor laboratory, Commonwealth Biotechnologies Inc. of Richmond, which has said a subsequent review produced no evidence of surface, air or sample contamination. Another March 14 airborne alert at a mailroom in the Skyline office building complex in Baileys Crossroads -- whose defense contractor employees receive mail from the Pentagon facility -- turned out not to signal the presence of any hazardous substance and apparently was a coincidence. About 800 workers were locked down for six hours in that case. Overall, national bioterrorism experts inside government and out say the episode revealed lingering problems in achieving a coordinated emergency response since the area's anthrax attacks through the mail in 2001. Virginia and District leaders have said they were kept out of the loop early in the recent incident, potentially endangering the public. Local elected officials as well as members of Congress have called for reviews. Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, plans to lead an April 4 hearing into national anthrax testing policies. On Friday, military representatives said the Pentagon was making "substantial improvements," including requiring contract labs to report test results in 24 hours. In the recent incident, Commonwealth Biotechnologies Inc. reported the result of its March 10 test the next day, a Friday, to prime contractor Vistronix Inc. of McLean. Senior defense officials said they took immediate action, including contacting emergency responders, upon learning of the results Monday, March 14. "Clearly a sample was taken to their lab Thursday," one federal official said. "Especially over a weekend, it apparently can take much more than 24 hours, maybe three days." Timing is critical because scientists believe that healthy people exposed to anthrax bacteria can die in seven days, another federal official said. If a letter had been the source of the anthrax found in the sample, it could have been mailed March 4, given the time it takes mail to move through the postal system and reach the Pentagon, the official said. The review group also reached preliminary agreement that government agencies should rely on the CDC's bioterrorism Laboratory Response Network, which includes 140 specially certified labs, to test for such incidents instead of contract facilities, two officials said. The review group also agreed that federal agencies should coordinate with state and local public health agencies before ordering antibiotic treatment solely for federal employees. Pentagon officials included a representative of the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Army Col. Armondo Lopez, head of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency's chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear directorate. Spokesmen with the Pentagon's public affairs office did not return e-mail and telephone requests for comment. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3674-2005Mar26.html

(Return to Articles and Documents List)

Boston Globe March 27, 2005 Many Missiles Missing In Iraq, Review Of Reports Shows By Charles J. Hanley, Associated Press NEW YORK -- Dozens of ballistic missiles are missing in Iraq. Vials of dangerous microbes are unaccounted for. Sensitive sites, once under UN seal, stand gutted today, their arms-making gear hauled off by looters, or by arms makers. The world now knows that Iraq had no threatening WMD programs. But two years after US teams began their futile hunt for weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has something else: a landscape of ruined military plants and of unanswered questions and loose ends, some potentially lethal, a review of official reporting shows. The chief UN arms inspector, Demetrius Perricos, said that outsiders are seeing only a ''sliver" of the mess inside Iraq. He reports that satellite images indicate at least 90 sites in the old Iraqi military-industrial complex have been pillaged. The US teams paint a similar picture. ''There is nothing but a concrete slab at locations where once stood plants or laboratories," the Iraq Survey Group said in its final report. But that report from inside Iraq, 986 pages thick, is at times thin on relevant hard information and silent in critically important areas. Days after the report was issued last fall, for example, news leaked that tons of high-grade explosives had been looted a year earlier from the Iraqi complex at Al-Qaqaa. It was a potential boon to Iraq's car bombers, but the US document did not report this dangerous loss. Similarly, the main body of the US report discusses Iraq's al-Samoud 2, but it does not note that many of these ballistic missiles have not been found. Only via an annex table does the report disclose that as many as 36 Samouds may be unaccounted for in the aftermath of the US-led invasion. Seventy-five of the 26-foot-long, liquid-fueled missiles were destroyed under UN oversight before the war, because they too often exceeded the 93-mile range allowed for Iraqi missiles under the 12-year-old UN inspection regime. After the UN inspectors were evacuated on the eve of the US invasion, they lost track of the remaining missiles. The Iraq Survey Group, which ended its arms hunt in December, says a complete accounting of the Samoud missiles ''may not be possible due to various factors." Besides the al-Samouds, as many as 34 Fatah missiles, a similar but solid-fueled weapon, are also unaccounted for. More than 600 missile engines may be missing; the US document does not report their status. Perricos, in an interview at his New York headquarters, expressed concern about the missiles. ''If they have been destroyed, somebody should know they've been destroyed or not. Have they gone somewhere?" he asked. The worry is not that Iraqi insurgents might field the missiles, he said, but that advanced Samoud or Fatah parts might secretly boost missile-building programs elsewhere in the region or beyond. ''The engines can easily be sold for a lot of money for the insurgency," he said. Asked about gaps in Iraq Survey Group reporting -- specifically the silence on the Qaqaa explosives -- a CIA official replied, ''Our focus and goal was to find WMD, not conventional explosives." The official spoke on condition of anonymity. Led by CIA special adviser Charles A. Duelfer, the Iraq Survey Group discredited Bush administration claims of an Iraqi WMD threat by determining that Baghdad's programs to build nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons were shut down in 1991 under UN inspection. But paperwork discrepancies and stray pieces from past programs -- from artillery shells to test tubes -- have left a ''residue of uncertainty," as the latest UN inspectors' report put it. On top of that, the disorder following the US-led invasion exposed dangerous material and equipment, previously under UN seal, to theft. Samouds and Fatahs are only the biggest items on the ''unaccounted-for" list. The smallest are bits of bacterial growth for biological weapons. The Iraqis said this bioweapons material was destroyed years ago, but not all is documented. Inspectors simply don't know whether vials of seed stock -- including deadly anthrax and botulinum A bacteria -- may have been used to nurture more batches that are unaccounted for. ''From bits in these original vials, you can create a hundred others, and we just want to know, has all this been traced?" Perricos asked. The Iraq Survey Group lists the fate of bioweapons seed stocks under ''Unresolved Issues." The US arms hunters' findings further cloud the picture on another item, 155mm mustard-gas shells, which has a paperwork trail that leads to a dead end. At least 13,000 shells filled with mustard were destroyed under UN supervision in the 1990s, but 550 were never found. Iraqis told UN inspectors they were destroyed in a fire. His account, otherwise unconfirmed, raises the prospect of the mustard, an incapacitating blistering agent, falling into the hands of the anti-US insurgency in Iraq. http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2005/03/27/many_missiles_missing_in_iraq_review_of_reports_shows/

(Return to Articles and Documents List)

Washington Post March 28, 2005 Pg. 1 Storage Of Nuclear Spent Fuel Criticized Science Academy Study Points to Risk of Attack By Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post Staff Writer A classified report by nuclear experts assembled by the National Academy of Sciences has challenged the decision by federal regulators to allow commercial nuclear facilities to store large quantities of radioactive spent fuel in pools of water. The report concluded that the government does not fully understand the risks that a terrorist attack could pose to the pools and ought to expedite the removal of the fuel to dry storage casks that are more resilient to attack. The Bush administration has long defended the safety of the pools, and the nuclear industry has warned that moving large amounts of fuel to dry storage would be unnecessary and very expensive. The report was requested by Congress after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as homeland security officials sought to understand the potential consequences of a Sept. 11-scale attack on a nuclear facility. Because the report is classified, its contents were not made public when it was delivered to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) last summer. Even a stripped-down, declassified version has remained under wraps since November because the commission says it contains sensitive information. However, the commission made excerpts of the report public when Chairman Nils Diaz sent a letter to Congress on March 14 rebutting some of the academy's concerns. His letter also suggested that the academy had largely backed the government's views about the safety of existing fuel storage systems. E. William Colglazier, executive officer of the academy, said the letter was misleading and warned that the public needs to learn about the report's findings. "There are substantive disagreements between our committee's views and the NRC," he said in an interview. "If someone only reads the NRC report, they would not get a full picture of what we had to say." Although the commission said it is keeping the report under wraps for security reasons, some officials who have seen the document suggest that the NRC is merely suppressing embarrassing criticism. "At the same time that the NRC is saying that the National Academy's study is classified and not releasable to the public, it has somehow managed to send a detailed rebuttal of the report's conclusions to Congress in unclassified form," said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), who has seen the report. "I am concerned that the totality of the Commission's actions reflect a systemic effort to withhold important information from . . . the public, rather than a genuine effort to be protective of national security," Markey said in a March 21 letter to the commission's inspector general. NRC spokesman Eliot Brenner countered that the commission is "a very open agency" and that regulators are working with the academy to make the report public. "Our core concern is making sure that information that could reasonably be expected to be available to a terrorist is not publicly available," he said. "We are continuing to work with them on finding the right balance." The report was solicited by Congress to study how best to store spent nuclear fuel -- tons of rods containing radioactive byproducts of nuclear fission reactions are produced each year by the nation's 103 electricity-generating nuclear reactors. Spent fuel rods generate intense heat and dangerous long-term radiation that must be contained. Most of the spent rods are stored in large swimming-pool-like structures called spent fuel pools, said David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer at the science and advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists, who has worked at several plants. The pools are about 45 feet deep and 40 feet square and are filled with about 100,000 gallons of circulating water to remove heat and serve as a radiation shield, he said. After cooling for about five years, the rods can be moved to dry storage -- heavy casks of lead and steel. But the casks are expensive, and commercial reactors have elected to leave the rods in the pools until the pools fill up. Lochbaum said some pools hold 800 to 1,000 tons of rods. In the event of a terrorist strike, Lochbaum said, the dry casks would be much safer, because explosions could drain the pools and set off fire and radiation hazards. The nuclear industry wants the fuel moved to a storage site in Nevada, but that project has long been plagued by delays and opposition. Steven Kraft, director of waste management at the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group, said studies had shown that the pools are as safe as the dry casks -- the same position adopted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Kraft said that the risk of catastrophic attacks is minuscule and that modeling analyses have shown that even plane crashes are unlikely to affect the pools' integrity. And even if they did cause damage, he added, there would not be catastrophic consequences because of safety systems already in place. "If the pool is safe and the casks are safe and they both meet the requirements, there is no justification for going through what is a huge amount of expense and worker exposure" to move the rods to dry storage, he said. In his letter to Congress, Diaz said the academy's recommendation to move fuel to dry storage was based on "scenarios that were unreasonable." But Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear engineer with the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization that supports underground dry storage of the rods, said the commission had been lax. "There is no question that any terrorist who wants to know about spent fuel has plenty of information already," he said of the withheld report. "Publication of a report on security will not help terrorists. The only thing it is hindering is discussion of public safety." Diaz's letter to Congress shows that the academy recommended that the government conduct additional analyses to evaluate "the vulnerabilities and consequences" to storage pools of "attacks using large aircraft or large explosives." The academy also called for a review and upgrade of security measures to prevent theft of spent fuel rods by insiders and an assessment of security by "an independent organization." The commission letter defended measures it has in place and said that "the likelihood an adversary could steal spent fuel . . . is extremely low." The letter said the additional analysis demanded by the academy study was "more than is needed" and rejected the call for an independent security analysis, saying the commission's own assessments were "sound and realistic." To keep the report secret, the federal agency used a classification called "Safeguards Information" that it applies to data that are unclassified but reveal sensitive details about nuclear facilities and security procedures. Brenner, the spokesman, emphasized that the academy's report and the commission's response had been seen by the Department of Homeland Security and members of Congress charged with oversight. "The full report is there with those with the appropriate clearances," he said. The academy's Colglazier said the science organization had produced many classified reports but had never encountered such hurdles in creating a public version. "We don't want to provide information in our report that could be used by terrorists to exploit vulnerabilities," he said. "But we also want the public and decision makers to know what things need to be addressed." The scientist also rejected Brenner's reassurance that the classified report had been seen by relevant decision makers. Governors of states with nuclear plants need to see the report, he said, and the public had an important role as well. "The way our political system works, when politicians hear from their constituents, they are motivated to take action that they don't when the public is unaware," he said. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5408-2005Mar27.html

(Return to Articles and Documents List)

Washington Post March 28, 2005 Pg. 17 Saving Nonproliferation By Jimmy Carter Renewal talks for the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) are scheduled for May, yet the United States and other nuclear powers seem indifferent to its fate. This is remarkable, considering the addition of Iran and North Korea as states that either possess or seek nuclear weapons programs. A recent United Nations report warned starkly: "We are approaching a point at which the erosion of the non-proliferation regime could become irreversible and result in a cascade of proliferation." A group of "Middle States" has a simple goal: "To exert leverage on the nuclear powers to take some minimum steps to save the non-proliferation treaty in 2005." Last year this coalition of nuclear-capable states -- including Brazil, Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden and eight NATO members -- voted for a new agenda resolution calling for implementing NPT commitments already made. Tragically, the United States, Britain and France voted against this resolution. So far the preparatory committee for the forthcoming NPT talks has failed even to achieve an agenda because of the deep divisions between nuclear powers that refuse to meet their own disarmament commitments and the nonnuclear movement, whose demands include honoring these pledges and considering the Israeli arsenal. Until recently all American presidents since Dwight Eisenhower had striven to restrict and reduce nuclear arsenals -- some more than others. So far as I know, there are no present efforts by any of the nuclear powers to accomplish these crucial goals. The United States is the major culprit in this erosion of the NPT. While claiming to be protecting the world from proliferation threats in Iraq, Libya, Iran and North Korea, American leaders not only have abandoned existing treaty restraints but also have asserted plans to test and develop new weapons, including anti-ballistic missiles, the earth- penetrating "bunker buster" and perhaps some new "small" bombs. They also have abandoned past pledges and now threaten first use of nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states. Some corrective actions are obvious: *The United States needs to address remaining nuclear issues with Russia, demanding the same standards of transparency and verification of past arms control agreements and dismantling and disposal of decommissioned weapons. With massive arsenals still on hair-trigger alert status, a global holocaust is just as possible now, through mistakes or misjudgments, as it was during the depths of the Cold War. We could address perhaps the world's greatest proliferation threat by fully securing Russia's stockpiles. *While all nuclear weapons states should agree to non-first use, the United States, as the sole superpower, should take the lead on this issue. *NATO needs to de-emphasize the role of its nuclear weapons and consider an end to their deployment in Western Europe. Despite its eastward expansion, NATO is keeping the same stockpiles and policies as when the Iron Curtain divided the continent. *The comprehensive test ban treaty should be honored, but the United States is moving in the opposite direction. The administration's 2005 budget refers for the first time to a list of test scenarios, and other nations are waiting to take the same action. *The United States should support a fissile materials treaty to prevent the creation and transport of highly enriched uranium and plutonium. *Curtail U.S. development of the infeasible missile defense shield, which is wasting huge resources, while breaking our commitment to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty without a working substitute. *Act on nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, an increasing source of instability in that region. Iran has repeatedly hidden its intentions to enrich uranium while claiming that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only. This explanation has been given before, by India, Pakistan and North Korea, and has led to weapons programs in all three states. Iran must be called to account and held to its promises under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. At the same time, we fail to acknowledge how Israel's nuclear status entices Iran, Syria, Egypt and other states to join the community of nuclear weapons states. These are vital questions, and the world will know the answers during the NPT conference in May. Former president Carter is founder of the Carter Center in Atlanta. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5754-2005Mar27.html

(Return to Articles and Documents List)

New York Times March 29, 2005 Pg. 1 Panel's Report Assails C.I.A. For Failure On Iraq Weapons By David E. Sanger and Scott Shane WASHINGTON, March 28 - The final report of a presidential commission studying American intelligence failures regarding illicit weapons includes a searing critique of how the C.I.A. and other agencies never properly assessed Saddam Hussein's political maneuverings or the possibility that he no longer had weapon stockpiles, according to officials who have seen the report's executive summary. The report also proposes broad changes in the sharing of information among intelligence agencies that go well beyond the legislation passed by Congress late last year that set up a director of national intelligence to coordinate action among all 15 agencies. Those recommendations are likely to figure prominently in April in the confirmation hearings of John D. Negroponte, whom President Bush has nominated to be national intelligence director and who is about to move to the center of the campaign against terror. The report particularly singles out the Central Intelligence Agency under its former director, George J. Tenet, but also includes what one senior official called "a hearty condemnation" of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. The unclassified version of the report, which is more than 400 pages long, devotes relatively little space to North Korea and Iran, the two nations now posing the largest potential nuclear challenge to the United States and its allies. Most of that discussion appears only in a much longer classified version. In the words of one administration official who has reviewed the classified version, "we don't give Kim Jong Il or the mullahs a window into what we know and what we don't," referring to the North Korean leader and Iran's clerical leaders. Mr. Bush is expected to receive the report officially on Thursday. As early copies of the report circulated inside the government on Monday, officials said much of the discussion of Iraq went over ground already covered by the Senate Intelligence Committee and by the two reports of the Iraq Survey Group, which was set up by the government to search for prohibited weapons after the Iraq invasion, and came up basically empty-handed. After Iraq's defeat in the Persian Gulf war in 1991, international inspectors dismantled an active nuclear program - which had not produced a weapon - along with biological agents and chemical weapons. Much of the flawed intelligence was based on a series of assumptions that Mr. Hussein reconstituted those programs after inspectors left the country under duress in 1998. But in retrospect, those assumptions by American and other intelligence analysts turned out to be deeply flawed, even though some of Mr. Hussein's own commanders said after they were captured in 2003 that they also believed the government held some unconventional weapons. It was a myth Mr. Hussein apparently fostered to retain an air of power. The discovery of the false assumptions forced Mr. Bush to appoint, somewhat reluctantly, the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, which has operated largely in secret under the direction of Laurence H. Silberman, a senior judge on the United States Court of Appeals, and former Governor Charles S. Robb of Virginia. According to officials who have scanned the document, the unclassified version of the report makes a "case study" of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, the major assessment that the intelligence agencies produced at the White House's behest - in a hurried few weeks - in 2002. After the Iraq invasion in March 2003, the White House was forced to declassify part of the intelligence estimate, including the footnotes in which some agencies dissented from the view that Mr. Hussein had imported aluminum tubes in order to make centrifuges for the production of uranium, or possessed mobile biological weapons laboratories. The report particularly ridicules the conclusion that Mr. Hussein's fleet of "unmanned aerial vehicles," which had very limited flying range, posed a major threat. All of those assertions were repeated by Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior officials in the prelude to the war. To this day, Mr. Cheney has never backed away from his claim, repeated last year, that the "mobile laboratories" were probably part of a secret biological weapons program, and his office has repeatedly declined to respond to inquiries about whether the evidence has changed his view. One issue the commission grappled with is whether the intelligence agencies failed to understand what was happening inside Iraq after the inspectors left in 1998, a period that David Kay, the first head of the Iraq Survey Group, referred to last year as a time when the country headed into a "vortex of corruption." Mr. Kay, who also testified before the commission, said Mr. Hussein's scientists had faked some of their research and development programs, and Mr. Hussein was reported by his aides to be increasingly divorced from reality. One defense official who had been briefed on an early draft of the report said Monday that one of its conclusions was that "human intelligence left a lot to be desired" in the global war against terror. The official also indicated that there was already considerable anxiety about the final report and its recommendations. "We're all wondering what it will say," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the report had not been publicly released yet. "We all know there were shortcomings before 9/11," the official said. "Will this report take into account what we've done since then?" The commission's mandate was to examine the intelligence agencies' ability to "collect, process, analyze and disseminate information concerning the capabilities, intentions and activities of foreign powers." Besides Iraq, Iran and North Korea, that mandate covered terrorist groups and private nuclear black market networks created by Dr. A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist. The classified version of the report is particularly critical of American failures to penetrate Iran's program, and notes how much of the assessment of the size of North Korea's suspected nuclear arsenal is based on what one official called "educated extrapolation." Officials and outside experts who were interviewed by the commission or its staff said they had been asked at length about the absence of reliable human intelligence sources inside both countries. The commission's conclusions, if made public, may only fuel the arguments now heard in Beijing, Seoul and the capitals of Europe that an intelligence system that so misjudged Iraq cannot be fully trusted when it comes to the assessments of how much progress has been made by North Korea and Iran. North Korea has boasted of producing weapons - but has never tested them - and Iran has now admitted to covering up major elements of its nuclear program, even though it denies that it is building weapons. The nine-member commission has met formally a dozen times at its offices in Arlington, Va., and in November visited Mr. Bush at the White House to speak with him and his staff. It had formal meetings with most top administration intelligence and foreign policy officials and interviewed former C.I.A. directors and academic experts on weapons proliferation. The commission, which has a professional staff of more than 60 people, mostly longtime mid-level intelligence professionals, has had access to even the most secret government documents. All the sessions have been closed to the news media and the public, and the commission members and staff have been tight-lipped about the contents of their report. "We and the staff have made a commitment in blood not to discuss the report in advance," said Walter B. Slocombe, a former defense official and member of the commission. David Johnston and Anne E. Kornblut contributed reporting for this article. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/29/politics/29weapons.html

(Return to Articles and Documents List)

Washington Times March 29, 2005 Pg. 1 Anthrax Dumped Near Saddam Palace Fearful Iraqi scientist didn't tell inspectors By Charles J. Hanley, Associated Press An Iraqi scientist has told U.S. interrogators that her team destroyed Iraq's stock of anthrax in 1991 by dumping it practically at the gates of one of Saddam's main palaces, but never told U.N. inspectors for fear of angering the dictator. Rihab Rashid Taha's decision in 2003 to remain silent stoked suspicions of those who contended Iraq still harbored biological weapons, contributing to the U.S. decision to invade Iraq two years ago this month. "Whether those involved understood the significance and disastrous consequences of their actions is unclear," the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group says of Mrs. Taha and colleagues in its final report on the search for Iraq weapons. "These efforts demonstrate the problems that existed on both sides in establishing the truth." The anthrax mystery had bedeviled U.N. inspectors since the 1990s, when Iraqis said that they had made 2,191 gallons of the bacterial substance before the 1991 Gulf War. Anthrax is considered highly suited for biowarfare because its spores are easily produced, durable and deadly when inhaled. The Iraqis said they destroyed all of the anthrax in mid-1991 at their bioweapons center at Hakam, 50 miles southwest of Baghdad. The U.N. specialists, who scoured Iraq for banned arms from 1991 to 1998 and again in 2002 and 2003, confirmed anthrax had been dumped at Hakam. But they also found indications that Iraq had produced an additional, undeclared 1,800 gallons of anthrax. In early 2003, chief inspector Hans Blix put the seeming discrepancy high on his list of Iraq's "unresolved disarmament issues," complaining that Iraqis must be withholding information. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell dwelled on an anthrax threat in his February 2003 speech seeking U.N. Security Council authority for war. But the mystery of the missing anthrax appears to have been resolved in a little-noted section of the Iraq Survey Group report, a 350,000-word document issued Oct. 6. The British-educated Mrs. Taha, who ran the Hakam complex in the 1980s, told interrogators her staff carted off anthrax from Hakam in April 1991 and stored it in a bungalow near the presidential palace at Radwaniyah, 20 miles west of Baghdad, the U.S. teams report. Later that year, the crew dumped the chemically deactivated anthrax on grounds surrounded by a Special Republican Guard barracks near the palace, the report says. Australian microbiologist Rod Barton, who took part in Iraq Survey Group interrogations, said in a recent Australian Broadcasting Corp. interview that the disposal was carried out in July 1991, when Iraqi orders were issued to destroy all bioweapons agents immediately. Then, through the years, Mrs. Taha and other Iraqi officials denied the "missing" anthrax ever existed. "The members of the program were too fearful to tell the regime that they had dumped deactivated anthrax within sight of one of the principal presidential palaces," the Iraq Survey Group says. http://www.washtimes.com/world/20050329-125828-2605r.htm

(Return to Articles and Documents List)

Washington Times March 30, 2005 Pg. 4 Pakistan Denies Access To Nuke Supplier U.S. to get other sources on covert network By Bill Gertz, The Washington Times Pakistan will not grant U.S. requests for direct access to pardoned nuclear supplier Abdul Qadeer Khan, but instead offered alternatives for getting information about his covert network, Pakistan's ambassador told the United States yesterday. "The U.S. and Pakistan have been in continuous contact on this particular issue," Pakistani Ambassador Jehangir Karamat told reporters and editors of The Washington Times. "And in response to the U.S. demand for access to Dr. A.Q. Khan, we have offered alternatives." Mr. Karamat also said Pakistan agreed to examine Iranian nuclear components believed to have been supplied by the Khan network. The equipment will be sent from Iran and checked for "signatures" to determine if it originated from the Khan network, he said. The ambassador said that while he has not had access to debriefing reports from Mr. Khan, "we have reached a conclusion that centrifuges, or centrifuge designs or parts" were obtained by Iran from Mr. Khan's supplier network. Mr. Karamat said Pakistan rejected requests for U.S. intelligence officials to question Mr. Khan directly, based on a plea agreement reached with the technician, who is considered the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb and who enjoys popular support in the country. "We have explained our point of view, and we have suggested alternatives for meeting every single U.S. requirement for information, which is being met," he said. In 2003, it was revealed that Mr. Khan headed a covert network that provided nuclear weapons-related technology in places ranging from Malaysia to Pakistan to Germany. The group provided centrifuge designs and components used in enriching uranium for nuclear weapons. Libya, Iran and North Korea were buyers of Mr. Khan's equipment and technology. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf pardoned Mr. Khan in February 2004 for illegally selling the nuclear goods. Mr. Karamat said yesterday the pardon was given in exchange for a U.S. requirement that Mr. Khan provide full details and continued cooperation in breaking up the supplier network. "I think the U.S. has been satisfied generally with every requirement being met by Pakistan on the international network," Mr. Karamat said. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice discussed the Khan network with Gen. Musharraf during her recent visit to Pakistan, according to a senior Bush administration official who said the United States is "getting all the cooperation we need and have asked for." CIA Director Porter J. Goss said last month that investigators have learned new information in recent months about the Khan network, but have not "got to the end of the trail" in learning everything. Mr. Karamat dismissed a March 16 report by Reuters news agency from Vienna, Austria, where the International Atomic Energy Agency has its headquarters, that quoted officials as saying Pakistan has found new illicit channels to support its nuclear program. "The only comment I can offer is that Pakistan would have to be very unmindful of the environment if it were to continue anything under the present circumstances," he said. http://www.washtimes.com/national/20050329-115944-5349r.htm

(Return to Articles and Documents List)