"WHOOPS! I BOUGHT A MUSTANG!"

The many-faceted drama at the troubled Los Alamos National Laboratory has produced some strange moments. But this has to be the weirdest of them all:

Los Alamos equipment buyer Lillian Anaya thought she was ordering $30,000 worth of transducers. But she dialed a number that had been changed from an industrial equipment dealer to an auto parts shop, and wound up buying a Mustang with government money instead.

That's the assertion of Los Alamos and University of California investigators, who today cleared Anaya of any wrongdoing in a case that helped engulf the world's most important nuclear research center in a fog of scandal.

It's a move, lab critics said, that shows that the birthplace of the atomic bomb still hasn't come to terms with the problems of mismanagement and widespread fraud that have plagued it for years.

My Wired News story has more on this surreal moment.

MERCENARIES: MAKE US CONGO'S PEACEKEEPERS

A consortium of mercenary groups has made the UN a deceptively simple proposal: give us $200 million, and we'll help bring an end to the war in the Congo.

Is the offer a symbol of how bad things have gotten there? Sure. But could it be, in the words of one observer, the only solution "that might be successful?"

Check out my Tech Central Station article for answers.

DEFENSE TECH ON THE BEEB

I'll be on BBC TV tonite, around 9 pm EDT, to talk nuclear security.

PENTAGON BUILDING SNITCH DATABASE

When Attorney General John Ashcroft proposed last year that a civilian army be recruited to snoop on their neighbors, privacy advocates and Congressional leaders gagged.

Now, it seems, Ashcroft's Operation TIPS is back -- and now, it's being run by the Pentagon.

Brian McWilliams writes in Wired News:

To track domestic terrorist threats against the military, the Pentagon is creating a new database that will contain "raw, non-validated" reports of "anomalous activities" within the United States.

According to a Department of Defense memorandum, the system, known as Talon, will provide a mechanism to collect and rapidly share reports "by concerned citizens and military members regarding suspicious incidents."

Talon was described in a May 2 memorandum to top Pentagon brass from Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. In the memo, Wolfowitz directed the heads of military departments and agencies to begin producing Talon reports immediately.

SANDIA NATIONAL SECURITY CHIEF SACKED

Three months ago, we found out that investigators were told to "fake their investigation" into security lapses at Sandia National Laboratories, one of the world's most important weapons research facilities. Today, only after very public complaints from the Senate, has the Lab finally started to clean house.

Dave Nokes, vice president for national security, has been forced to resign. And Patricia Gingrich, who has been director of the Systems Assessment and Research Center, has been reassigned.

"Labs management," according to a Sandia statement, "is continuing to review...what additional personnel actions and policy changes may be appropriate" in light of the recent scandal.

SENATORS SNOOKERED ON MISSILE DEFENSE

Two Democratic Senators thought they had a deal: they'd vote for the Bush Administration's missile defense program, and the Pentagon wouldn't deploy new anti-missile systems until they were properly tested.

Now, it seems, the Senators, Michigan's Carl Levin on Michigan and Rhode Island's Jack Reed, were snookered.

Global Security Newswire reports:

(Levin and Reed) said they were assured by administration officials the system would be declared "fielded" and not "deployed" until the missile interceptors are proven to work under realistic conditions through operational testing.

Days after gaining key House and Senate committee approval for the initiative, however, the White House on May 20 issued a policy statement declaring its intention to "deploy" the systems by the deadline. In addition, a recently leaked copy of the Dec. 16, 2002 order, "National Security Presidential Directive 23," showed that Bush had directed the Pentagon to "deploy" the systems all along...

“It’s clear to me that they’re trying to slip something past the Congress and the American people,” said Joseph Cirincione, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“There is certainly some deception going on,” said Lisbeth Gronlund, a missile defense analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Last week, a key element of the anti-missile program, the ship-mounted Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense system, failed a test near Hawaii.

DARPA'S LITTLE COUSIN GETS ITS PROPS

"The Technical Support Working Group has been toiling against terror for years, but its technologically advanced work has been overshadowed by DARPA," Wired News says. "Now TSWG is stepping into the limelight."

TSWG has historically focused on short-term projects that create usable prototypes to solve real-world problems. The group's 2002 annual report points to the group's success in creating a better flat-panel X-ray machine to help bomb squads and a counterterrorism kit to help educate law enforcement and emergency workers how to recognize, by sight and smell, chemical, biological and radiological materials.

Chemical- and biological-weapon escape masks developed by TSWG have been ordered in the thousands by the Pentagon and Capitol Hill, according to Jeff David, deputy director of the Combating Terrorism Technology Support Office, which oversees TSWG.

Other current projects include a luggage irradiation machine that would destroy undetected biological and chemical weapons, better bomb disposal robots, bullet-detecting radar to prevent assassinations, a project to extract DNA from fingerprints, a cooling system for body armor and a mass transit surveillance camera system.

PILOTS BEGIN LASER TRAINING

Pilots at New Mexico's Kirtland Air Force Base don't have planes equipped with ray guns -- yet. But they'll soon have a new, F-16 simulator, to help them practice for the day that they do.

"The F-16 model is a smaller version of the airborne laser weapon already under development for use on a Boeing 747 for shooting down missiles," says the Albuquerque Tribune. "It could be ready for use in 2012, but before that happens, pilots will test the system in the simulator to see how useful it is and suggest ways it could be improved to help them in combat."

SENATOR: SANDIA SNUBS SECURITY SLIPS

In March, Energy Department officials promised to follow up on allegations of lax security at Sandia National Laboratories, one of the country's most important military research centers. Senate Finance Committee chairman Charles Grassley says the Department has welched on that promise.

The New York Times reports:

The two investigators who raised questions about security at Sandia, Pat O'Neill and Mark Ludwig, say they were transferred from an office building to a rodent-infested trailer, reassigned to noninvestigative work, and had their annual raises reduced, Mr. Grassley said.

The laboratory commissioned a former United States attorney, Norman Bay, to investigate problems. Mr. Grassley quoted from a summary of that report, which he received from the Energy Department. (He said he had obtained the whole report with difficulty but agreed to keep it secret.)

The letter from Mr. Grassley said the report covered investigations of 5 of 100 security problems identified by Mr. O'Neill and Mr. Ludwig.

(emphasis mine)

CHEMICAL AGENTS AT BALTIC'S BOTTOM

"American teams may be struggling to find chemical weapons and other poisonous materials in Iraq," the New York Times reports, "but tens of thousands of bombs and barrels filled with blistering agents and nerve gas lie scattered in the Baltic Sea and the eastern Atlantic."

American, British and Soviet military dumped them there after World War II. Entire ships full of weapons, most of them captured from Nazi Germany, were scuttled for disposal and forgotten. Now they have come back to haunt the environment.

Over time, scientists say, the weapon casings have corroded in the seawater and become brittle, allowing poisons like arsenic, lewisite, mustard gas and sarin to leach out. Scientists from the Baltic countries and Russia have found lethal material mixed in with sediments, and highly toxic sulfur mustard gas, transformed into brown-yellow clumps of gel, has washed ashore.

The problem is compounded by fishermen who have gone into risky areas to chase depleted fish stocks, using increasingly aggressive methods, including bottom tackle that snag the bombs. They routinely find mustard gas clumps among their catch and haul up whole or damaged chemical bombs in their nets.

SADDAM-ITES RULE IRAQI I.S.P.

Saddam's boys are still running Iraq's only Internet service provider, Brian McWilliams writes in today's Wired News.

THERE'S MORE: Slate tells us what EverQuest and other "virtual world" games can teach the world about rebuilding Iraq.

MISSILE DEFENSE TEST AT SEA FAILS

A crucial test of a sea-based missile defense system flopped yesterday. The USS Lake Erie was supposed to use the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) to knock down an Aries target missile over the Pacific Ocean, near Hawaii. But it missed, for the first time in four tries.

It's a setback for a program considered crucial by the Defense Department. With a sea-based system, there are no thorny issues about putting another American base on foreign soil, Victoria Samson, a missile expert at the Center for Defense Information, tells Defense Tech. And the defenses can be moved around to guard against whatever trouble spot happens to be inflamed at the moment.

The Aegis BMD is suppoed to take down short to intermediate-range missiles while they're taking off. But the system, as current configured, doesn't meet that goal, Samson says.

"It's not meant to intercept missiles during their boost phase - it's nowhere near fast enough," she adds. "To have a boost-phase capability, you'd have to build a whole new missile and reconfigure the ships to be able to carry them."

The problems faced by the Aegis BMD are to be expected, Samson continues. And they could be worked out over time -- if the Bush administration would allow it. Instead, the White House has insisted that 20 interceptors be added to three cruisers by the end of fiscal year 2004.

THERE'S MORE: Defense officials are already squabbling over why the test was a dud, reports the Washington Times' Bill Gertz.

AND MORE: Slate has a hilarious -- and disturbing -- send-up of the missile test, and the Pentagon flacks who are calling it a "success."

PLUTONIUM MISSING FROM LOS ALAMOS

A container with about 2 grams of weapons-grade plutonium is missing from Los Alamos National Laboratory, the watchdog group Project On Government Oversight (POGO) reports.

It's not nearly enough plutonium to make a bomb, POGO senior investigator Peter Stockton says. And far larger radioactive caches have disappeared in the past; in 1990, for example, investigators found 62 pounds worth of plutonium stuck in the air ducts of the Energy Department's now-closed Rocky Flats facility.

But even this small amount is more than enough to generate serious concerns about how the troubled lab accounts for its nuclear material.

According to a POGO press release:

The plutonium has been missing since 2001, but was only reported last week to Department of Energy (DOE) headquarters officials responsible for overseeing the Lab. DOE requires that any missing weapons-grade nuclear material a half-gram or more be reported.

The fact that the missing material was not reported is a violation of department policy and raises serious questions about the level of confidence in the DOE’s Material Control and Accountability system that tracks hundreds of tons of weapons grade nuclear material.

A former DOE official advised POGO that even these small quantities of missing plutonium are a potential threat to public health and safety and are taken very seriously. DOE headquarters normally dispatches a "tiger team" from headquarters to investigate what happened to the material and who was responsible. In fact, in the past when quantities even as small as a half-gram of missing nuclear material was reported missing from other Lab facilities, investigators have conducted detailed searches of buildings and even dug up trash heaps, the former official said.

In a statement, Los Alamos officials say that the material was found last week, and not in 2001, as POGO claims; that the plutonium mixture is not all that dangerous; and that all DOE reporting requirements were observed.

"This material has scientific and analytical research value, but is in a low hazard and threat category," Los Alamos Director George "Pete" Nanos says.

The samples, nuclear material mixed with other inert elements, were stored in glass vials, according to the Lab's statement. They were part of ongoing experiments on how to best store nuclear waste.

The vials were thrown out properly, Los Alamos contends -- put in transuranic waste drums. But the samples weren't Labeled right, and got mixed up in the Lab's databases.

THERE'S MORE: Even non-weapons grade plutonium 239 can be a danger, a recent General Accounting Office report concludes:

If these sealed sources fell into the hands of terrorists, they could use them to produce a simple and crude, but potentially dangerous, weapon by packaging explosives, such as dynamite, with the radioactive material, which would be dispersed when the bomb went off...

Depending on the type, amount, and form (powder or solid), the dispersed radioactive material could cause radiation sickness for people nearby and produce serious economic costs and psychological and social disruption associated with the evacuation and subsequent cleanup of the contaminated area.

NORTH KOREA'S SWISS CHEESE BLOCKADE

When is a blockade not a blockade?

The Bush Administration has finally started taking some rudimentary steps towards keeping North Korea's nuclear weapons from spreading. The U.S. is leading a group of eleven countries in a program to "monitor and perhaps intercept shipments of nuclear materials and rockets" going in an out of North Korea, according to the New York Times.

Sounds good, at first. But take a look at the 11 countries involved in the effort: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Australia, and the U.S. It's notable for who's not on the list. No China, no South Korea. Neither of North Korea's immediate neighbors is included. And how effective can a blockade be without those two?

"STEALTH IN REVERSE" FOR NEW DECOY DRONE

"A decoy drone being developed through an $88 million, five-year demonstration project will feature stealth in reverse," the Associated Press reports. The hope is "that enemy anti-aircraft batteries will target it and reveal their position."

Instead of trying to evade radar like a stealth fighter or bomber does, the decoy — only 9½ feet long and weighing 200 pounds — will use electronic signals to project a larger-than-life image.

The Miniature Air Launched Decoy, of MALD, is intended to fool enemy radar operators into believing it is a real airplane, say engineers with the Air Armament Center at this Florida Panhandle base.

The ruse is designed to prompt an enemy response that may include turning on radars that guide anti-aircraft artillery and missiles. U.S. warplanes trailing the drones then could fire missiles that home in on such radars to knock out the air defenses.

THERE'S MORE: "Stealth is reverse" is an old, old tactic, notes Defense Tech pal Wyatt Earp. The Brits, the Israelis, and the Americans have done it for years.

"PROJECT BIOSHIELD": CLUELESS

Project BioShield is President Bush's $6 billion proposal for helping pharmaceutical firms develop drugs to beat bioterror agents. And it is, simply put, a complete mess, National Journal reveals.

Paul Redmond had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day recently. It was the day that Redmond, assistant secretary for information analysis at the Homeland Security Department, testified before the House Select Homeland Security Committee about Project BioShield...

Redmond didn't have an opening statement. He admitted he has only one person working under him to assess the bioterror threat. He said he isn't getting the information he needs from the intelligence community. His description of the bioterror threat was nothing more than what lawmakers had already read in the newspapers. And he wasn't prepared to brief them in a closed session. Redmond eventually made a plea for sympathy: "I'm trying to do my best at this point."

Redmond's lack of preparedness on BioShield is evidence of a potentially grave weakness: Redmond's intelligence cupboard is largely bare, yet the department appears to have no trouble launching big expensive programs without having assessed what the country's highest-priority threats are.

Despite this keystone kop approach, Project BioShield is "cruising through the House," according to the magazine.

SUPPORT FOR NANOBOTS SHRINKING

This should be Eric Drexler's moment in the sun. Instead, his colleagues are treating him like the crazy uncle in the attic.

Nanotechnology, the field Drexler helped kick start, has become a far-flung, multibillion-dollar discipline, sparking innovations in medicine, consumer products and pure science. But most of today's nanotech specialists say Drexler's vision of molecule-sized robots is science fiction, not science fact. Others predict disaster if Drexler's dream ever comes to pass.

At stake is more than just academic bragging rights. Businesses, governments and universities have wagered enormous sums of money on nanotech research and development. But no sizable bet has been placed on Drexler's nanobot notion.

"I don't rule out anything that might happen in the 22nd or 23rd century," said Kevin Ausman, executive director of Rice University's Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology. But Drexler's itty-bitty robotics "isn't nanotechnology that anyone is working on experimentally, or even has the beginning of a coherent plan to achieve."

My Wired News article has more.

NORTH KOREA SENDING IRAN MISSILES?

AFP, quoting a South Korean paper, says that Pyongyang is using cargo planes to ship mid-range Rodong missiles to Tehran.

The report comes on the heels of the arrests last week of the president and four employees of a Tokyo manufacturing company, Seishin Enterprise Co. Ltd. The five are suspected of "illegally exporting to Iran equipment that could be used to develop solid fuel for missiles," according to AFP.

"NANO" A GIGANTIC LABEL

Nanotechnology has become one of the hottest areas in scientific research, pulling in billions of dollars in government, corporate and foundation cash. But the scientist who coined the term "nanotechnology" says a lot of what passes for nano is just plain ol' science, gussied up with a fancy name to rake in the bucks.

"'Nanotechnology'" has now become little more than a marketing term," said Eric Drexler, founder of the Foresight Institute, the leading nanotech think tank. "Work that scientists have been doing for decades is now being relabeled nanotechnology."

For good reason. Congress recently earmarked $2.4 billion for a National Nanotechnology Initiative. In May, South Korea announced its own $2 billion nanotechnology development program. The National Science Foundation sees a $1 trillion nanotech market by 2015.

Little, if any, of this money is going to fund the kind of projects Drexler envisioned when he came up with, and popularized, the word "nanotechnology" in the '80s. Based on the theories of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, nanotechnology was supposed to be a discipline in which individual atoms and molecules are manipulated to make ultrasmall machines. One day, Drexler and others speculated, robots could swim in human bloodstreams to zap cancer cells, chew up pollution and construct materials from the atom up.

Instead of that pursuit, scientists are doing small-size chemistry, biology and materials science and "using the name 'nano' -- dressing (their research) up," said Mark Ratner, author of Nanotechnology: A Gentle Introduction to the Next Big Idea.

My Wired News article has more on the nanotech debate.

ALL "DAVID NELSONS" TERROR SUSPECTS

"Across the country, men named David Nelson report they have been harassed, questioned by FBI agents, pulled off airplanes, searched and then searched again when attempting air travel," says the L.A. Daily News.

"Apparently caught up in a nationwide dragnet for a terrorist by that name, David Nelsons everywhere are being told their names raise red flags on airline screening software. The government, however, maintains that the problem is essentially a computer glitch the airlines must solve."

(via Drudge)

GITMO EYES POSSIBLE EXECUTION CHAMBER

The Associated Press reports, "Guantanamo officials are ready to provide a courtroom, a prison and an execution chamber if the order comes to try terror suspects at the base in Cuba, the mission commander said."

Although no new directive has been given and no plans have been approved, a handful of experts are looking at what it will take to try, imprison and, if need be, execute detainees accused of links to Afghanistan's fallen Taliban regime or to the al-Qaida terror network...

Last month, officials named Army Col. Frederic Borch III the chief prosecutor and Air Force Col. Will Gunn as chief defense lawyer for the proposed trials. The Pentagon has listed 18 war crimes and eight other offenses that could be tried, including terrorist acts, and has issued rules for the tribunals.

Borch said he was looking at prosecuting at least 10 possible cases before a tribunal.

Some 680 detainees from 42 countries are in Guantanamo, categorized as unlawful combatants by the U.S. government. It has refused demands from human rights organizations to recognize them as prisoners of war. They have no constitutional rights as non-U.S. citizens being held outside U.S. territory, and none have been formally charged or allowed access to attorneys.

The cases would be decided by a panel of three to seven military officers who act as both judge and jury. Convictions could be handed down by a majority vote; a decision to sentence a defendant to death would have to be unanimous.

COAL-MINE CANARIES ON A CHIP

"Hundreds of subways riders and stadium spectators may one day owe their lives to the death of a single cell," Erik Baard writes in today's Wired News.

Engineers at the University of California at Berkeley have merged a living cell with an electrical circuit so that in a chemical attack the cell's death would trip an alarm.

The bionic chip, made by Boris Rubinsky and Yong Huang, updates the 19th-century coal miners' trick of bringing canaries down into shafts. When the delicate birds died from inhaling poisonous gases, the workers knew to evacuate.

The Berkeley bionic chip works by gauging the electrical resistance of a cell membrane. In the cell's death throes, that resistance spikes, and then plummets.

"Most current security systems work by detecting specific pathogens and toxins, so if an attacker uses a more exotic agent, it could slip by unnoticed," Rubinsky wrote in an e-mail. "Our system will detect anything that has the ability to kill a cell -- even when not expected."

NUKE INSPECTORS BOLT FROM IRAN

This is bad. Very, very bad:

"Iran denied a team of experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) access to some of its nuclear facilities, increasing tensions with the U.S., Russia and other nations that have been pressuring the country to prove it doesn't have a nuclear weapons program," the Wall Street Journal reports.

"The inspectors, who arrived Saturday in Iran , left abruptly Wednesday after Iranian officials refused to let them visit the Kalaye Electric Co. nuclear power plant in Tehran, people familiar with the matter said. The move comes amid efforts by the Bush administration to push Iran to provide evidence that it isn't violating its obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty."

Iran is denying that the inspectors were barred from going anyhwere, of course. An IAEA spokesman declined to comment on the matter.

(via Global Security Newswire)

DEFENSE: DEMS' OPTIONS FOR '04

The Democrats are toast in 2004 unless they can stand toe-to-toe with George W. Bush on national security. But listen to most of their presidential candidates talk, and you'd think the Democrats have only two options: morph into junior Rumsfelds, or make tracks to the nearest Rainbow Gathering, keeping as far away as possible from anything having to do with American power.

Neither is going to get a Democrat elected, of course. So what stances can they take to make themselves credible on defense? My Tech Central Station article has four ideas.

THERE'S MORE: Lots and lots of feedback on this story, much of it along the lines of this note:

All good ideas... Problem is, the Democrats just aren't credible on national security, and that goes all the way back to Carter. So if a candidate were to try your approach now, I think it would come off as (and probably be) highly disingenuous. Since they don't have their own record of success to point to, it could be written off as partisan sniping...

There's a lot of rot in the party that has to be swept out before they can be taken seriously on this issue, and that'll take a long time. Maybe by 2008? 2012?

Many readers agree that homeland security is a potential goldmine for the Democrats in '04. But several of these readers recommend a clampdown on illegal immigration that's more draconian than any Democrat -- even the most hawkish one -- would endorse.

Open a 90 day window during which all illegal aliens can apply to remain in the United States. Subject to a background check, those who pass get to remain... All illegal aliens found through any government agency (includes fed, state, local, schools) after that 90 day period will be immediately, and without recourse removed from the country.

BLOOD CLOTTER FLOPPED IN IRAQ, SOLD AT HOME

A new blood-clotting agent was tried out by the Marines during Gulf War II -- and flopped. So why is the product now being rolled out to consumers?

Developed by Newington, CT-based Z-Medica with funding from the Office of Naval Research, "QuickClot" is designed to stop heavy, uncontrolled bleeding. It does this by "absorbing all the liquid in the blood, and leaving behind the clotting factors," according to a Navy press release. In tests, the powder supposedly helped turn " wounds that once were 100 percent fatal into wounds that were 100 percent nonfatal."

On the battlefield, however, QuickClot didn't hold up as well. Members of the 1 Marine Expeditionary Force, serving in central Iraq, reported that QuickClot was "ineffective" in treating wounds, and keeping people alive.

A field report, prepared by Marine Corps Systems Command, detailed some of their complaints with the agent:

- Wounded Iraqi civilian. Shot near brachial artery. QuikClot was applied per the instructions. The substance dried but was flaking off. Standard direct pressure applied by corpsman proved more effective on the patient.

- Iraqi civilian shot in back with punctured spine. QuikClot applied to severe bleeding. Pressure from bleeding sprayed QuikClot away. According to LT Webb, “QuikClot was everywhere but the wound”.

- Iraqi civilian, female, shot in femoral artery. She suffered severe arterial bleeding. Patient bled out. QuikClot unable to be applied effectively due to pressure of blood flow from wound. Patient died.

- An LAR Marine was shot in the femoral artery. Quick Clot was applied to the heavily bleeding wound. The pressure from the blood soon caused the QuickClot to be pushed out of the wound and rendered ineffective. A tourniquet was applied instead. The patient died.

Despite these failures, QuickClot is already being marketed to firemen, emergency medical technicians, cops -- even veterinarians. In the next few months, the powder will be introduced to the larger consumer market, for home first aid. According to the Navy, Z-Medica is pushing ahead with trials to show that QuickClot could help "the particular bleeding problems of diabetics, hemophiliacs, and (blood-thinning medicine) coumadin users."

Now, the Marines' report does say that other units had different opinions of QuickClot. So maybe it worked better elsewhere in Iraq. But with such conflicting data, you'd think that Z-Medica would take a pause before asking the public to trust their lives to QuickClot.

THERE'S MORE: "The folks at Z-Medica are well aware of this report," a spokesperson says in an e-mail. "It was from a particular unit that either was not adequately briefed about how to use QuikClot or did not follow instructions properly, though they may have thought they were. The Navy and Marines also have numerous confirmed cases of QuikClot saving lives in the Iraqi theatre. It does work and is continuing to be included in the new Marine first aid kit."

AN ARTICLE SO NICE, THE TIMES RAN IT TWICE

Maybe it has nothing to do at all with the current upheaval going on at the New York Times. But it seems hard to believe that an oversight like this would've happened during a quieter time:

On February 4th, the Science Times printed a short review of the new book by Defense Tech's mom, Carol Guber's Type 2 Diabetes Life Plan. Today, the Gray Lady's science section ran the same review -- just 93 words shorter.

Now, both Mom and I appreciate all the attention for her book (out now in paperback). But this is pretty weird.

U.S. WMD-HUNTERS OUT OF TARGETS

The Associated Press reports, "U.S. military units assigned to track down Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have run out of places to look and are getting time off or being assigned to other duties, even as pressure mounts on President Bush to explain why no banned arms have been found.

After nearly three months of fruitless searches, weapons hunters say they are now waiting for a large team of Pentagon intelligence experts to take over the effort, relying more on leads from interviews and documents.

"It doesn't appear there are any more targets at this time," said Lt. Col. Keith Harrington, whose team has been cut by more than 30 percent. "We're hanging around with no missions in the foreseeable future."

Over the past week, his and several other teams have been taken off assignment completely. Rather than visit suspected weapons sites, they are brushing up on target practice and catching up on letters home.

(via Cursor)

THERE'S MORE: A former senior Iraqi brigadier general says that, in 1996, Saddam began putting together teams of scientists and mobile labs to someday rebuild his stockpile of illict weapons. But the program "did not produce any illegal arms and that none now exist in Iraq," according to the Los Angeles Times.

However, the officer insists that the teams did put plans on paper "to quickly develop weapons of mass destruction if U.N. sanctions against Iraq were lifted," the paper reports.

"We could start again anytime," said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he said he fears for his life. "It's very easy. Especially biological."

"The point was, the Iraqis kept the knowledge," he explained during a lengthy interview Friday in which he offered tantalizing details of secret programs. But U.S. weapons hunters "will never find anything here. Only oil..."

The intelligence officer's account, parts of which could not be independently verified, gives ammunition to both sides of the controversy (over whether or not Iraq had banned weapons). He said that U.N. sanctions and inspections in the 1990s crippled Iraq's ability to build illegal weapons and that Hussein's chemical, biological and nuclear programs were effectively eliminated in the mid-1990s.

But his description of an ongoing effort to prepare for illicit weapons production programs in the future suggests that Hussein would have remained a serious threat if U.S.-led forces had not ousted the dictator.

NEW DEM GROUP "DRAGGING" PARTY INTO SECURITY STANCES

Wimps. UN-lovers. Dixie-Chick-listening, flag-burning, Susan Sarandon wannabes.

That's the popular image of the Democratic party, says former Clinton State Department staffer Tim Bergreen. And unless it changes, fast, George Bush is going to pummel the Democratic presidential candidate almost as badly as he hammered Saddam.

After dominating the '02 elections, national security is poised to become the biggest issue in the '04 campaign. And when voters were asked in a recent poll which party they trust to "make sure U.S. defenses are strong," they give the GOP a 57-17% advantage.

Bergreen and former National Security Council humanitarian affairs director Steven J. Naplan have assembled a small band of young, ex-Clintonites devoted to countering this view, and to carving out pro-defense positions for the Democrats.

But before they can begin wrestling with Republicans on national defense, Bergreen, Naplan, and the Democrats for National Security have to pick a fight in their own party.

Bergreen says, "We're going to have to drag Democrats kicking and screaming into understanding" defense issues.

Read more about the challenges Bergreen and Naplan face in my latest article for Tech Central Station.

D.I.Y. CRUISE MISSILE

"A handyman with a passion for jet engines says he is building a cruise missile in his backyard using parts and technology freely available over the Internet," Reuters reports from Wellington, New Zealand.

"Bruce Simpson, a 49-year-old Internet site developer... says he was prompted to build the missile because so many people had told him it could not easily be done," the wire service continues.

On his web site, Simpson claims the missile can fly up to 100 miles, and carry a warhead of 22 pounds. He says the whole package costs less than $5,000 to put together. Step-by-step instructions on how to build the missile are coming soon, he promises.

SENATE ORDERS DARPA INVESTIGATION

The Senate Armed Services Committee has ordered an investigation into the research efforts of America's military labs, including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

According to a Senate source, the Committee is concerned that money for basic research -- studies that "increase fundamental knowledge and understanding," according to Pentagon regulations -- is "being raided… to fund near-term goals."

DARPA has long been the military's center for "pie in the sky" inquiries. And these efforts have generated stunning successes -- not the least of which is the ARPANET, the Internet's precursor.

But, at times in its history, DARPA has tried to justify its existence by wandering into the realm of the concrete, Duke University military history professor Alex Roland tells Defense Tech.

"The biggest criticism that can be leveled at DARPA from the mid-1990s on is their telescope receded from distant galaxies to the nearby planets," Kenneth Flamm, who oversaw technology Defense Department projects during the Clinton era, told Technology Review in 2001. During the Clinton administration, he said, DARPA acceded to "pressure to show more military relevance."

In 1983, basic research was close to 20 percent of Defense Department science and technology spending, notes Coalition for National Security Research co-chair Elaine McCusker. Now, that's down to about 12 percent.

The National Academy of Sciences has been asked to conduct the investigation. Information technology programs are considered particularly suspect, our Senate source says. But controversial DARPA projects in this area, like Total Information Awareness and LifeLog, will not be the focus on the inquiry.

TOUGH TALKING FOR MARINES IN IRAQ

Don't tell the members of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force about information overload. They already know all about it.

During Gulf War II, members of the force often had to use a helmet headset, four radios and two laptops at once to communicate with their comrades and commanders -- all while crammed into light armored vehicles crawling across the Mesopotamian desert.

An analysis of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force's experience in central Iraq has yielded a number of important lessons about what gadgets worked and what high-tech equipment flopped in Gulf War II.

The primary finding, according to the field report by Marine Corps Systems Command: "Marines were overwhelmed with the high number of varied communications equipment they were expected to use."

During the war, U.S. chieftains and military analysts talked with wide-eyed wonder about how quick and how perfectly seamless communications between U.S. troops had become. In a matter of minutes, they crowed, a tip about Saddam Hussein's location became an assault on a Baghdad restaurant.

Now, it seems, that flawless network is at least equal parts Rube Goldberg and Henry Ford.

"They had a communication system for every eventuality, and for every issue," said Patrick Garrett, an analyst with the defense think tank Globalsecurity.org. "But they really didn't integrate them all together."

My Wired News story has more on the Marine's communications woes.

THERE'S MORE: This story is unfair, one Defense Tech reader complains. The military identified these gaps long ago, and has been steadily working to fix them. The Joint Tactical Radio System ("JTRS"), when it's finally ready, promises to solve most of these shortcomings.

All true. But, in many cases, the Marines' inability to talk had nothing to do with technology. It was a matter of logistics. Marine units often received radios that were incompatible with one another. If all of 1 MEF had been outfitted with a common set of radios, their problems in this area would have been largely solved.

DOUBTS ON IRAQI BIOTRAILERS

"American and British intelligence analysts with direct access to the evidence are disputing claims that the mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making deadly germs," reports the New York Times' Judith Miller and William Broad. "In interviews over the last week, they said the mobile units were more likely intended for other purposes and charged that the evaluation process had been damaged by a rush to judgment."

"Everyone has wanted to find the 'smoking gun' so much that they may have wanted to have reached this conclusion," said one intelligence expert who has seen the trailers and, like some others, spoke on condition that he not be identified. He added, "I am very upset with the process."

The Bush administration has said the two trailers, which allied forces found in Iraq in April and May, are evidence that Saddam Hussein was hiding a program for biological warfare. In a white paper last week, it publicly detailed its case, even while conceding discrepancies in the evidence and a lack of hard proof.

Now, intelligence analysts stationed in the Middle East, as well as in the United States and Britain, are disclosing serious doubts about the administration's conclusions in what appears to be a bitter debate within the intelligence community. Skeptics said their initial judgments of a weapon application for the trailers had faltered as new evidence came to light.

This story is significant both for what it says, and for who is saying it. For months, Miller has been the media's lead cheerleader on Iraq's WMD programs. Under a highly unusual arrangement with the U.S. military, which gets to vet her stories, she's passed along rumors fed to her by Iraqi National Congress chief Ahmad Chalabi. Miller's stories are still getting the military once-over. But now, she has new sources -- ones in American and British intelligence.

THERE'S MORE: "In (a) report last September, the Defense Intelligence Agency said it could find no reliable information to indicate that Iraq had any chemical weapons available for use on the battlefield. But the agency also said Iraq probably had stockpiles of banned chemical warfare agents," according to the Associated Press.

AND MORE: In a separate article, the AP says, "The Bush administration distorted intelligence and presented conjecture as evidence to justify a U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a retired intelligence official who served during the months before the war."

AND MORE: One Defense Tech reader -- who works in military intelligence -- thinks that the story above is disingenuous.

"You can usually always find one analyst who will disagree with official and published analytical reports," he writes. "It bothers me that the media seems to be searching out those dissenters and presenting them as a 'Gotcha', which leads me to believe that perhaps they have an agenda at work (i.e. Making Bush look bad)."

Even the "retired intelligence official" quoted in the article "thought there were WMD to be worried about," he notes.

Thielmann said he had presumed Iraq had supplies of chemical and probably biological weapons. He particularly expected U.S. forces to find caches of mustard agent or other chemical weapons left over from Saddam's old stockpiles.

"We appear to have been wrong," he said. "I've been genuinely surprised at that."

AND MORE: The Guardian breaks down the reasons why these trailers, at least, weren't for biowar.

WORLD WAR II FOLLY: BRITS' ICEBERG SHIPS

As the Allies prepared to invade occupied Europe in 1942, a truly nutty idea swept through the British military hierarchy: build giant aircraft carriers made of ice.

The ships could be made cheaply, they figured. And, maybe, they could be constructed tough enough to withstand bullets and torpedoes.

With Churchill's blessing, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations, began the task of developing "berg-ships" up to 4,000 feet long, 600 feet wide and 130 feet in depth.

His task seemed to get easier when, in early 1943, "two American professors discovered that a very tough material could be produced by adding a small amount of wood pulp to water before freezing. They called this material pykrete, in honour of (Mountbatten's scientific advisor) Geoffrey Pyke," Combinedrops.com says.

Lord Mountbatten had a block of pykrete prepared by a Canadian engineering company, and took this block to the Quebec Conference in the fall of 1943. As it appeared that "Habbakuk" would run into supply and technical problems, not to mention the high costs ($100 million for the first ship), it was Mountbatten’s aim to get the Americans to take over the project. It is reported that he fired a revolver at the pykrete block during a coffee break, and the bullet bounced off and struck one of the senior officers who were present - thankfully without serious injury!

Defense Tech Dad Tom Shachtman wrote about this folly in Laboratory Warriors : How Allied Science and Technology Tipped the Balance in World War II (out now in paperback). Take it away, Pop:

To my mind, the major interest of the story of this absurd enterprise is how far it went before the bubble was burst. This was a loony idea all along, and its premise was easily refuted by science and even easier by mathematics -- you just had to compute how much of the stuff would be needed to make a floating airfield, plug in a few figures about the output of wood from Canadian forests, and realize that it would take the entire country's forests to make one field.

But because the idea had powerful patrons, Churchill and Mountbatten, who were not scientists but politicians whose authority could direct the spending of millions of taxpayer dollars, millions of dollars were spent on it. It reminds us that Star Wars is not the only science-fiction fantasy to enchant the mind of a leader of the Western world.

(via Boing Boing)

THERE'S MORE: Defense Tech buddy Wyatt Earp points us to great pictures and diagrams of the berg-ships here and to a longer essay on the subject here.

AND MORE: Another Defense Tech pal says Mountbatten's effort wasn't "really the folly that it seems."

The coast guard long ago gave up trying to destroy icebergs and they are simple fresh water bergs, not pykrete. Given the other advances dreamt up by the British that made carrier-based jet aviation practical (and safer) like the angled flight deck and steam catapults it's not necessarily something to be dismissed out of hand. RULCCs (REALLY Ultra Large Crude Carriers) made of ice just might turn out to be structurally stronger and more damage resistant than the current crop of aging ULCCs rusting their way along the seaways today. Toss in built-in obsolescence and easy recycling...

RIDGE: TERROR ALERT SYSTEM NEEDS FIXING

Tom Ridge has finally figured out what we've all known for months: that he needs to take his cockamamie terror alert system back to the shop for major repairs.

"We worry about the credibility of the system," Ridge told Reuters. "We want to continue to refine it because we realize it has caused some anxiety."

Ridge said the system, based on information from various intelligence agencies, relies heavily on the intelligence that is "fairly generic."

But as the intelligence related to potential terror attacks becomes more detailed, Ridge expects to have more specific information that will give the government flexibility in predicting the target of a potential terror attack.

"Hopefully in time we can be much more specific with the alerts so we don't have to ask communities and states to enhance their security with the accompanying expense when we really don't think they have to," he said.

SAFIRE LATEST ON LIFELOG TRAIN

The big time, I suppose. New York Times columnist William Safire is now writing about LifeLog -- sixteen days after my Wired News story on the DARPA program.

BOB GRAHAM: LIFELOGGER?

If the Pentagon is looking for volunteers for its LifeLog uber-diary project, they may want to think about giving Florida Senator (and Democratic presidential hopeful) Bob Graham a ring.

Since 1977, Graham had meticulously documented his life -- from the cereal he eats to the television interviews he gives.

The New York Times has a sample page from Graham's diaries here.

CITIES IGNORING FEDS' TERROR ALERTS

Code Orange is becoming increasingly meaningless.

State and local police forces -- the lynchpins of homeland defense -- are getting burnt out by Tom Ridge's constant switching of the "terror alert" level. The cops are now ignoring Washington's calls for increased vigilance, the Christian Science Monitor reports.

On May 20, when the nation went to Code Orange - the second-highest level in the national terror alert system - the US Capitol and the sidewalk in front of the White House remained open to visitors...

Justin Risly, spokesman for the Sacramento Police Department, says his department does not change its security procedures during a federal orange alert.

"The bottom line for us is, unless we have a specific threat, we don't do much of anything differently," says Mr. Risly.

New Haven mayor John DiStefano adds, "For cities, everyone's pretty much freelancing on responses."

(via Global Security Newswire)

ANTI-TERROR ANSWERS BLOWIN' IN THE WIND

Scientists have a pretty good idea how wind rushes in between mountains, and over the plains. But the paths air takes in the urban canyons of New York City are more of a mystery.

So researchers from Brookhaven National Laboratory and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration plan to put wind monitors on rooftops throughout Midtown Manhattan and the West Village -- just down the street from Defense Tech world headquarters.

Supposedly, this Urban Atmospheric Observatory project will boost terrorism preparedness in the City. Figuring out how air flows should help determine where to put radiation detectors and air filters, like the ones being used in Tom Ridge's "Bio-Watch" initiative.

Once the sensors are in place this summer, the Daily News reports, scientists plan to release harmless gases in Manhattan and use the devices to track them.

Why the West Vilage? The Daily News calls my former neighborhood a "potential terrorist target." Maybe -- if the bad guys are looking to disrupt the City's supply of antiques and men's bikini briefs.

LIFELOG BANDWAGON ROLLS ON

The AP's Mike Sniffen has taken my suggestion and done a story of his own on LifeLog, the creepy Pentagon "diary" effort.

In Sniffen's piece, James X. Dempsey, of the Center for Democracy and Technology, sees a "silver lining" in the otherwise black program:

"If government weren't doing this, it would still be done by companies and in universities all over the country, but we would have less say about it." Because the government is involved, "you can read about it and influence it."

Peter Coffee, over at eWeek, writes about LifeLog's technical and business implications:

Declining costs of data collection, storage and analysis form a seductive force that encourages us to hope that we'll understand more if we collect more. But knowledge of your customer, and insight into customers' needs, has not suddenly become a proposition of quantity rather than quality.

DARPA's goals for LifeLog are only superficially similar to your goals in building a business intelligence system. Follow DARPA's example, and you'll be able to draw on the masses of data that tomorrow's technologies will allow you to collect—but unless that collection effort is guided by a creative vision of your business, the results will be either irrelevant or misleading. And it will be a futile exercise to try to apply your business vision after the fact to an indiscriminate archive.

DEFENSE TECH ON CNN

I'm scheduled to talk LifeLog on CNN's NewsNight with Aaron Brown. Watch me make a fool of myself sometime around 11 pm EDT.

THERE'S MORE: The interview's transcript is here (scroll down, almost to the bottom).

WMDs, PLEASE

Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News all have big stories on the so-far fruitless search for Iraq's banned weapons. And all of 'em have juicy tales from the previously-behind-the-scene fights over the accuracy of America's WMD intelligence.

U.S News:

On the evening of February 1, two dozen American officials gathered in a spacious conference room at the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Va. The time had come to make the public case for war against Iraq. For six hours that Saturday, the men and women of the Bush administration argued about what Secretary of State Colin Powell should--and should not--say at the United Nations Security Council four days later. Not all the secret intelligence about Saddam Hussein's misdeeds, they found, stood up to close scrutiny. At one point during the rehearsal, Powell tossed several pages in the air. "I'm not reading this," he declared. "This is bulls- - -."

Time:

Several current and former military officers who saw all the relevant data through this spring charge that the Pentagon took the raw data from the CIA and consistently overinterpreted the threat posed by Iraq's stockpiles. "There was a predisposition in this Administration to assume the worst about Saddam," a senior military officer told TIME. This official, recently retired, was deeply involved in planning the war with Iraq but left the service after concluding that the U.S. was going to war based on bum intelligence. "They were inclined to see and interpret evidence a particular way to support a very deeply held conviction," the officer says.

Newsweek:

As the military began to gear up for an invasion, top planners at Central Command tried to get a fix from the CIA on WMD sites they could take out with bombs and missiles. After much badgering, says an informed military source, the CIA allowed the CENTCOM planners to see what the agency had on WMD sites. "It was crap," said a CENTCOM planner. The sites were "mostly old friends," buildings bombed by the military back in the 1991 gulf war, another source said. The CIA had satellite photos of the buildings. "What was inside the structures was another matter," says the source. "We asked, 'Well, what agents are in these buildings? Because we need to know.' And the answer was, 'We don’t know'," the CENTCOM planner recalled.

When the military visited these sites after the war, they found nothing but rubble. No traces of WMD. Nor did Special Forces find any of the 20 or so Scud missiles, possibly tipped with chem-bio warheads, that were said by the CIA to be lurking somewhere in the Western Desert.

DECONTAMINATION STILL LAGS

Thank God there were no chemical weapons used in Iraq. Because the U.S. Army is still using toxic, 40 year-old agents to decontaminate soldiers and their gear, National Defense reports.

Decontamination agents in use today, such as high test hypochlorite (HTH), super tropical bleach (STB) and decontamination solution 2 (DS-2)... can damage equipment, pollute the environment and cause personal injury, according to experts. Many of them also are flammable and, therefore, can’t be used on ships, new high-performance aircraft and non-hardened equipment.

The Pentagon has proposed $52 million for decontaminant research in 2004. One of the ideas being examined: a group of enzymes that could wipe out both chemical weapons, like nerve agents, and biological threats, like anthrax spores. According to a paper published by the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, "catalytic enzymes are highly efficient, detoxifying many times their own weight of agent in seconds or minutes."

The enzymes are, suppsedly, non-corrosive, non-flammable and environmentally safe, too. According to National Defense, the enzymes would come as a dried powder, to be added to a water-based spray or foam system.