Definition I:  Sept. 11 Case Tests Law

By David Ruppe

Global Security Newswire

Like most of the U.S. government, the U.S. Congress apparently never anticipated that a commercial aircraft loaded with fuel could be used as a weapon of mass destruction.

That could have implications for suspected Sept. 11 attack conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, whom the Justice Department indicted last week on six counts.

In their fourth count against Moussaoui, prosecutors charge that he and his al-Qaeda associates conspired to use “weapons of mass destruction,” namely, “airplanes intended for use as missiles, bombs, and similar devices.”

The hijackings and the subsequent attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are believed to have killed about 3,000 people.  Some legal experts say, however, that the applicable federal statute, Title 18, Section 2332a(a), appears to preclude defining aircraft as weapons of mass destruction.

“When you turn an airplane that has how many thousand gallons of fuel into an inferno,” said Robert Kogod Goldman, an American University law professor, “it has the effect as though it were [a weapon of mass destruction], but ‘as though it were’ is not the same as ‘it is,’ as defined by the statutory requirements.”

Conventional Weapons

In part, the statute defines weapons of mass destruction traditionally, as nuclear, biological or chemical weapons (see related GSN story, today).

In addition, the statutory definition, passed in the wake of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, broadly includes conventional “destructive devices” that can be used to create mass destruction. The perpetrators in the 1993 bombing attempted to do so by placing explosives in the garage beneath one of the towers.

“Destructive device” is defined elsewhere in the title (see Section 921) as an explosive or incendiary device or poison gas—bombs, grenades, rockets, missiles, mines, guns with barrels more than one-half inch in diameter (though not shotguns) or any equipment that can be made into such explosive or gun-like weapons.

Under that definition, and particularly the final part, the commercial aircraft used on Sept. 11 would appear to qualify as weapons of mass destruction, since they were essentially made into missiles and incendiary devices by the way they were used by the hijackers.

Exclusionary Language

Section 921 also specifies, however, that “destructive devices” can only be items that were “designed or redesigned” for use as weapons, such that items “not likely to be used as a weapon” would not be included.

“If a weapon of mass destruction is defined as any device that can be used to kill large numbers of people, then you have a criminal provision that would essentially swallow a host of other criminal provisions,” said Jeffrey Turley, a professor at the George Washington University School of Law.

Obviously, commercial jets were not designed to be terrorist weapons, so the statute appears to preclude them as weapons of mass destruction, he said.

“The exclusionary language of ‘destructive device’ would seem to place an airplane outside of that definition,” said Turley. “If the government argues that an airplane is a destructive device under the meaning of the statute, it would manifestly change the language by Congress.”

Oklahoma City As Precedent?

Rental trucks were not designed as weapons either, but Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, defendants in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, were charged and convicted with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction.

Law professor Steven Saltzburg, also at George Washington and serving on the American Bar Association’s Terrorism and Law Task Force, believes that precedent could support the prosecution in the Moussaoui case.

“The law language of this statute represents an expansive view of the term weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “It’s meant to capture anything that would result in the death of other people or the substantial injury to property.”

An important distinction from the Sept. 11 case, however, may be that McVeigh and Nichols designed and constructed a “truck bomb” by adding explosive components to the truck, in contrast to the Sept. 11 hijackers who used unmodified airliners.

An Expanded Meaning?

The prosecution might argue that the aircraft were “designed or redesigned” to be missiles by virtue of how they were used.  In other words, although they were not made to be incendiary devices, they were used as such, which made them such.

A prosecution source suggested that line of argument, telling Global Security Newswire the prosecutors believe the terrorists effectively redesigned the aircraft into weapons of mass destruction by selecting jets loaded with fuel, commandeering them, and using them as they did.

“One doesn’t generally think of a plane as a weapon,” said Goldman. “On the other hand, I think it would be not a stretch for a good prosecutor to say, “you take an airplane filled with fuel and you direct that thing…” and it becomes one.

Still, that might appeal to Moussaoui’s jury, it may be a tough argument to make before a federal judge, who might grant a motion to dismiss the count, experts said.

“When it comes to defining a criminal act, the courts view that as the sole function of Congress and tend to hold the line in efforts to expand meanings beyond the most incremental,” said Turley. “This is an area where the government is not given a great deal of deference by the courts.”

Allowing an expanded definition of the phrase weapons of mass destruction, said Turley, could make it “unmanageable and ambiguous … then you have a criminal provision that would essentially swallow a host of other provisions.”

He believes the statute could be improved, by defining weapons of mass destruction not in terms of items, but rather in terms of the intent of the perpetrator.

“The weapon itself is a poor basis to define the crime.  The crime should be defined as to the intent of the actor, not the relatively arbitrary [weapon] selection of the actor.”

As for Moussaoui, he is charged with five other serious crimes, including conspiracy to commit international terrorism, which also could bring the death penalty.

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Definition II:  Criteria for WMD Open to Change, Analysts Say

By Greg Seigle

Global Security Newswire

Widely held definitions for weapons of mass destruction are subject to change in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks and the recent indictments against a suspected al-Qaeda terrorist, a variety of national security analysts have told Global Security Newswire.

The use of hijacked, fuel-laden commercial airliners to crash into prominent buildings packed with people—a tactic that killed about 3,000 people and prodded U.S. federal prosecutors to charge the lone suspect in custody, Zacarias Moussaoui, with “conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction”—has sparked a debate among U.S. analysts about what constitutes a weapon of mass destruction.

Until now the commonly accepted definition of weapons of mass destruction has included nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, plus missiles that could deliver them.  Today, however, this long-held definition is swelling or shrinking, depending on whom you ask.

While no one disputes that both nuclear and biological armaments are the most lethal weapons on earth, recent interviews by GSN reveal considerable disagreement over whether chemical agents or radiological bombs—or the use of other high profile devices or tactics—should be defined as true weapons of mass destruction.

“We ought to be broadening the category so to include not only weapons of mass destruction but also weapons of mass disruption,” said Dan Goure, a senior fellow at the Lexington Institute.

“While insidious and horrific as they are, chemical or radiological weapons do not meet the definition,” countered retired British Col. Terry Taylor, president of the U.S. branch of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

“The classic definition has always been troublesome,” added Taylor, who from 1992 to 1997 served as the chief weapons inspector for the U.N. Special Commission scouring Iraq for nuclear, biological or chemical evidence.  “Including [other criteria] is all right as long as people remember that nuclear and biological are much worse.

“Many analysts feel chemical weapons do not meet this definition because they will not cause as many casualties,” Taylor continued. “In my view, weapons of mass destruction involves tens of thousands of deaths and a very wide scale of destruction of cities.”

Should Chemical Weapons Count?

Chemical agents, several analysts argued, are not genuine weapons of mass destruction because they are difficult to disperse over large areas, thereby making them less likely to cause mass casualties. As terrifying as chemical attacks may be, they do not fall under a true definition of weapons of mass destruction, they said.

Analysts cite the 1995 Sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway by the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, which was intended wipe out thousands of people but instead killed 12 and wounded about 500, as an example of how difficult it is to use chemicals as weapons of mass destruction.

“You’d have to work pretty hard to use chemical weapons to create a lot of casualties,” said Gordon Oehler, former CIA deputy director for nonproliferation who is now a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute and an executive with Science Application International Corporation.

“It seems to me that it will be a fear factor and an economic factor,” he added. “Fear in that it will create widespread panic and economic in the fact it disrupts business and no one wants to return” to the site of the attack.

“If you’re looking at it from a body count perspective, chemical weapons do not qualify,” said Patrick Garrett, a defense analyst with GlobalSecurity.org. “Chemical weapons are very easy to defend against [with gas masks and chemical protection suits]. But it’s much more difficult to defend against biological or nuclear weapons.”

“Bioweapons and nukes are in a class unto themselves, chemical weapons don’t even come close,” said Tara O’Toole, director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies. “You cannot deploy enough chemical weapons, even a powerful nerve gas to kill tens of thousands of people. It is just very impractical. They are not weapons of mass lethality or mass destruction—bioweapons are.”

Other analysts, however, say that the threats posed by chemical weapons should not be dismissed. They note that the Sarin gas used in the Tokyo subway attack was not very pure, therefore not as lethal as it could have been. Now, in the wake of extremely pure, weapon-grade anthrax being mailed in the United States, the use of purified chemical such as Sarin or VX nerve gas should not be ruled out, they said.

“I would classify them as weapons of mass destruction because they can still kill a lot of people,” said Cheryl Loeb, a research analyst with the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

Loeb said chemicals have been considered mass-casualty weapons since 1899, the first meeting of international experts that ultimately lead to the 1925 Geneva Convention—and to the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention—that outlaws their use.

“Anything that causes indiscriminate loss of life is a weapon of mass destruction,” said David Phillips, who as a relief worker twice visited Halabja, the Kurdish village in northern Iraq that was gassed by Iraqi troops in 1988.

“The immediate impact caused several thousand deaths,” said Phillips, now the deputy director for the Council on Foreign Relations’ Center for Preventive Action. “The ongoing toll can be measured in terms of cancer, impotence and other medical side effects that are ongoing today.

“Those are just the physical effects, that doesn’t include the psychological impact—the fear, the loss of a sense of security,” he added.

Simply put, some analysts believe chemicals could still wipe out thousands of people if an agent is purified and released in the confines of large groups of people, such as a crowded sports stadium or a skyscraper. 

“The potential is certainly there,” said Joseph Cirincione, director of nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “We have to look at the consequences—not just the physical characteristics of the physical device, but the damage it is capable of doing.”

Radiological Weapons

Fewer analysts believe radiological weapons—a conventional explosive that releases deadly doses of radiation—should count as weapons of mass destruction (see GSN, Dec. 11).

“I don’t buy it,” Oehler, the former CIA official, said of radiological weapons being included in the definition.

“They don’t pose a lot of danger, but cause a lot of terror,” said health physicist John Poston, a professor of nuclear engineering at Texas A&M University. “The health hazard is almost zero … The risk of someone getting cancer [without being exposed to a radiological weapon] is one in three. About one person out of every seven or eight I think is going to die from cancer.”

The radiation would be contained “within the [limited] range of the explosive device,” added Taylor, the former UNSCOM inspector. “The area of effect would still be quite limited, unlike chemicals, which could [at least] spread with the wind.”

Others, however, said that radiological weapons possess the potential to create tremendous death tolls.

There is a rare grade of a radiological weapon that some governments planned to make and experimented with that are “extremely dangerous,” according to David Albright, president for the Institute for Science and International Security. “They used a certain type of radioactive material that doesn’t last a long time. You spread it out over an area and you can contaminate many square kilometers. And if people wander in there, they’re probably going to get enough radiation to get very sick or die. Those are very dangerous in the hands of terrorists but are very hard to make.”

One senior nuclear engineer from Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico raised his eyebrows when it was suggested that radiological bombs might not count as true weapons of mass destruction.

“There is one isotope, one I can’t name, that could make radiological bombs very lethal, almost as deadly as nuclear bombs,” said the nuclear engineer, who asked to remain anonymous.

“Even a crude radiological bomb could take out the whole Capitol complex—I’d call that a weapon of mass destruction,” said U.S. Representative Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), a leading lawmaker on national security issues privy to classified information.

Variety of WMD Scenarios

The indictments against Moussaoui and 23 other co-conspirators—including Osama bin Laden and the 19 hijackers who died Sept. 11—employ a vaguely worded U.S. law (see related GSN story, today) intended to cover any attacks that kill large amounts of people by using unconventional means, according to U.S. officials.

Under the wording of the law, it is possible that a whole variety of devices could be considered mass casualty weapons—and lead U.S. federal prosecutors to charge an individual, terrorist group or nation with using weapons of mass destruction, analysts said.

Possible scenarios envisioned by analysts include conventional munitions used to topple bridges or buildings full of people; hand grenades or other explosives used to crack open nuclear reactors; or the opening or rupturing of loaded hazardous material trucks in densely populated areas.

The Sept. 11 attacks themselves—in which terrorists essentially used the hijacked airliners as guided cruise missiles—has stirred some controversy over whether fuel-laden aircraft that slam into buildings brimming with people should be categorized as weapons of mass destruction, as the U.S. Justice Department alleges in its recent indictments.

“It certainly is intellectually appropriate to describe [the aircraft attacks] as weapons of mass destruction,” said Baker Spring, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “When terrorists are going after innocent civilians and slaughtering them, it does put things in a different category… It falls outside the category of a common crime.

“As unusual an approach as [the attacks were], militarily we categorize it as a fuel-air weapon,” Spring continued. “A powerful fuel-air weapon is at the very high end of conventional armament capabilities, and somebody could argue that it is at the very low end of a weapons of mass destruction.”

“I think there’s a difference here between the instrument and intention,” said Phillips, the Council on Foreign Relations analyst. “There’s a realignment of terminology that allows us to emphasize the intent behind the act with the instrument that causes harm.”

“The intent is mass but the weapon is conventional, and we ought to be counting that in,” remarked Goure of the Lexington Institute. “Rather than rooting things out we need to read more things in.”

Redefinition Should Be Deferred

While many analysts believe the criteria for weapons of mass destruction should be expanded or decreased, most agree that the early stages of the war on terrorism is not an ideal time to be tinkering with the classification.

“In the present climate, I don’t think it will help to rule out chemicals,” said Taylor. “I think it’s all right to let it remain for now.”

“I don’t see anything wrong with the definition,” said Oehler. “[But] what about that bomb at the World Trade Center in ’93? Had that been placed in a more strategic position it might have brought the building down and been much worse. Does that make it a weapon of mass destruction?”

In short, analysts believe the most grave threats to humankind comes from nuclear and biological weapons, both of which can kill tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or perhaps even millions of people. The other weapons—particularly chemical and radiological weapons—are left open to debate.

“Anything that could kill thousands of people within several square kilometers—that’s anybody’s definition of [weapons of mass destruction],” said Cirincione, echoing the comments of most analysts.

What’s the Point?

A small, but vocal, minority of analysts does not understand all the fuss over the definition of weapons of mass destruction.

“It’s a pointless debate,” said Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow for strategic assessment for the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“The fact is that any system that kills thousands of people [in a singular attack] is a weapon of mass destruction,” he continued. “I think we need to avoid getting into almost medieval, scholarly debates on theories which in practice make no difference at all.”

Cordesman went on to borrow a well-known quote from Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, who in a 1970s ruling on pornography cited a definition Cordesman likened to that of weapons of mass destruction: “I don’t know what it is, but I know it when I see it.”

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Iraq I:  Defector Documents WMD Facilities; Sanctions Negotiated

An Iraqi defector who calls himself Abu Mohammad said he had documents and other information about the exact location of secret chemical and biological weapons plants in Iraq, according to a report today by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.  Mohammad, who said he was a chemical engineer who worked for almost a decade in Iraqi military plants, applied for residency in Australia.

Mohammad’s profile, as described by ABC and Agence France-Presse, is very similar to the description of a defector called Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri in yesterday’s New York Times, but the exact relationship between the two is unclear (see GSN, Dec. 20).

Mohammad told ABC he can pinpoint hidden weapons sites.  “New factories are built in place of old factories that [were] bombed” and in another places, he said (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Dec. 21).

Mohammad produced diagrams of 150 secret military projects that showed the locations of sites Iraq used to produce weapons and missiles, according to Agence France-Presse.  Richard Butler, former head of the U.N. weapons inspections team in Iraq, said he had seen the documents and thought the Mohammad’s account was credible.

The information supports claims that Iraq is continuing to produce weapons of mass destruction, Butler said.  “Reports like that of this guy and other defectors suggests to us quite strongly that they’re back in business … In the three years without inspection I’ve seen reports that [Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has] recalled his nuclear weapons design team, and Lord knows what he’s been able to acquire on the black market,” Butler said.

Mohammad said his work as a contractor to the Iraqi military included sealing secret facilities to prevent chemical and biological agents from leaking, Agence France-Presse reported.  He was arrested early this year and tortured for six months before bribing guards and escaping Iraq, he said (Agence France-Presse, Dec. 21).

Russia and U.S. Discuss Sanctions

Meanwhile, Russian diplomats said yesterday they were working to preserve Russian interests during the final day of U.S.-Russia discussions to design a new sanction regime for Iraq, according to Agence France-Presse.

“It is important that we reach an agreement under which Russian exports to Iraq do not suffer … The most important thing is that we and [the] United States agree to expand the list of goods that can be delivered to Iraq through a fast-track system that does not require U.N. approval,” said a Russian official.

Russia and the United States were working on a 500-page list of goods to include in a fast-track program, the official said.

The discussions followed an agreement last month in the U.N. Security Council to extend sanctions against Iraq for six months and then revise the sanctions (see GSN, Nov. 30).  Russia originally opposed the plan but then reached an agreement with the United States.  Russia has said it was concerned that barriers on exports to Iraq could hurt Russian economic interests (Agence France-Presse/Jordan Times, Dec. 21).

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Iraq II:  U.S. House Says Absence of Inspectors Poses “Mounting Threat”

The U.S. House of Representatives yesterday criticized Iraq for refusing to allow U.N. weapons inspectors into the country and urged the United Nations to press for unrestricted inspections.

Representatives in the House passed a resolution, 392-12 with seven voting present and 23 not voting, saying that Iraq has violated its international obligations and that the absence of inspections poses a “mounting threat” to the United States and its allies (U.S. State Department release, Dec. 20).  The resolution also called on the United Nations to reject any agreement that does not provide inspectors with “immediate, unconditional and unrestricted access to any and all areas, facilities, equipment, records and means of transportation.”

“Since 1998, [Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s] ability to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program, his biological weapons program, his chemical weapons program and his long-range missile program has not been constrained by international inspectors.  There is every reason to believe that Saddam has taken advantage of the absence of inspectors to revive these weapons programs,” said House International Relations Committee Chairman Henry Hyde (R-Ill.).  During inspections from 1991 to 1998, Hussein used all possible means to prevent weapons inspectors from learning “the truth about the history of weapons programs,” Hyde said.

U.N. Security Council resolutions require Iraq to allow inspectors complete access to sites suspected of housing weapons of mass destruction materials (U.S. House International Relations Committee release, Dec. 19).

The House vote followed a report in yesterday’s New York Times concerning new evidence from an Iraqi defector indicating Hussein has continued to develop weapons of mass destruction (see GSN, Dec. 20).

Kofi Annan Warns Against Attacking Iraq

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan Wednesday called on Iraq to comply with U.N. resolutions, noting the country had made no moves to allow U.N. inspectors to return.  “Iraq has to understand that it has to begin responding to Security Council resolutions,” Annan said, adding, “I don’t see any signal that inspectors are about to go back to Iraq, but we also live in a world where unpredictable things happen.”

Annan also said that expanding the war on terrorism to Iraq would only increase tensions in the Middle East.  “I have not seen any evidence linking Iraq to what happened on the 11^th of September, … but of course any attempt to do that can exacerbate the situation and raise tensions in a region that is already under strain because of the Israeli and Palestinian conflict,” he said (Reuters/New York Times, Dec. 20).

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Iraq:  Defector Helped Build WMD Facilities

An Iraqi defector said he helped renovate facilities for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as recently as a year ago, the New York Times reported today.

Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a civil engineer, worked at several secret sites in Iraq that were used to store and perhaps develop biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, he said in an interview last week in Bangkok.  Weapons facilities were located in private villas, in the rear of government companies, underneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad and beneath fake water wells, he said.

The Iraqi National Congress, which seeks to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, arranged Saeed’s interview, and U.S. intelligence officials were trying to verify his claims, the Times reported.

If accurate, the information indicates Iraq has continued repairing weapons of mass destruction facilities after U.N. weapons inspectors left the country in 1998, the Times reported.  It could strengthen the Bush administration’s efforts to force Iraq to admit weapons inspectors (see GSN, Dec. 19).

Crack Proofing

Iraq has built extra chemical, biological and nuclear facilities in case some weapons or materials were discovered or attacked, Saeed said.  Some extra facilities remained unused for years.  Saeed said he had visited at least 20 sites that were related to chemical or biological weapons.

Saeed’s work usually involved preparing empty rooms for research.  The Iraqi government hired his company to fill cement cracks in floors and walls, inject cement walls and floors with chemicals to prevent corrosion and line rooms with pastes to prevent leaks and improve decontamination efforts, the Times reported.

After an accident in a biological facility in Baghdad in 1997, Saeed repaired a chipped floor, he said.  Although the room was empty when he arrived, he had to wear a rubberized suit, a gas mask and booties.  There were pipes that moved fresh air into the room, he said.  The facility had been bombed in 1993, but was rebuilt.

Saeed also worked on underground facilities disguised by empty water wells on farms in the Baghdad area.  Part of his job was to seal ventilation pipes in the ground next to the wells.  Lead-lined containers were stored in the 20 such facilities that he visited, he said.  He did not know what was in the containers, but he assumed the contents were radioactive.  “Why else use the lead?” he said.

Hussein’s presidential palaces also stored weapons of mass destruction, Saeed said.  He fixed a small crack in the ceramic wall of a tunnel in a secret underground structure between two presidential sites in Radwaniya, he said.

Saeed also had information about sites he had not personally visited.  He said workers showed him biological materials from a laboratory underneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad and told him the conditions under which it was stored to ask if the material could still be used, since its expiration date had passed.  He did not know whether the laboratory was a storage facility or whether scientists conducted research there.

Laundering Equipment, Contaminating Prisoners

Saeed’s knowledge of Iraqi weapons activities appears to extend beyond observations of the facilities he visited.  He said Iraq used certain companies to purchase equipment with approval from the United Nations and then secretly divert it to weapons of mass destruction programs, Saeed said.  A construction business based in Cologne, Germany, called Leycochem, was one such company, he said.  Leycochem denied the claim and said its sales to Iraq had received U.N. approval.

Saeed has also told representatives from the Iraqi National Congress that Iraq had tested chemical and biological agents on Shiite and Kurdish prisoners in 1989 and 1992.  The congress helped Saeed flee Iraq.

Credibility, Concerns

Saeed’s information seems “plausible,” said Richard Butler, former head of the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq (see GSN, Nov. 30).  UNSCOM had already suspected several of the sites Saeed mentioned, Butler said, adding, “It rings true what this man says about underground wells and tunnels.”

Saeed’s claims match up with other reports about Iraq’s programs, said Charles Duelfer, former UNSCOM deputy chairman.  “The evidence shows that Iraq has not given up its desire for weapons of mass destruction,” Duelfer said.

An Iraqi National Congress representative said he had been in the army with Saeed and trusted him.

U.S. intelligence officials, however, have been skeptical of defectors in the past, due to concern they might embellish information to make themselves appear more valuable and receive protection in the United States or other countries, Butler said.

U.S. intelligence officials have interviewed Saeed twice, U.S. experts said yesterday.  His information appeared to be reliable and important, the experts said.  The CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency refused to comment on Saeed.

Saeed’s Escape

Iraqi authorities arrested Saeed last January on what he called false fraud charges and imprisoned him in Hakamiya, where political prisoners are held, the Times reported.  He bribed his way out of jail in the summer and fled Iraq with the help of the Iraqi National Congress (Judith Miller, New York Times, Dec. 20).

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Iraq:  U.S. Decides Not to Expand War

The Bush administration has decided against opening a new phase of the war on terrorism by attacking Iraq and attempting to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, senior U.S. officials and Western diplomats said, according to today’s Philadelphia Inquirer.

International opposition to a war on Iraq influenced U.S. President George W. Bush’s top advisers against it, according to the Inquirer (see GSN, Nov. 27).  Officials also decided that prospects for military success were not certain.

“Although there’s a lot of discussion going on within the administration, there’s no serious military planning being done for some kind of campaign against Iraq,” said a European diplomat.  Overthrowing Hussein remains a U.S. goal despite the decision to avoid attacking Iraq at this time, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday.

Officials led by Powell are designing a strategy focused on forcing Iraq to allow U.N. weapons inspectors to return after a three-year absence (see GSN, Nov. 14) and persuading the U.N. Security Council to restructure economic sanctions against Iraq (see GSN, Nov. 30).  The United States would then consider “other options” if Iraq refused, including military action, a U.S. official said, but officials did not expect a confrontation on the issue until spring, the Inquirer reported. 

The United States is still considering using air strikes to destroy sites where U.S. officials suspect Iraq is developing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and missiles.  “It may be that’s a more limited objective that does not cause as much resentment in the [international] coalition,” said a senior administration official.

After completing operations in Afghanistan, the United States also plans to target suspected al-Qaeda leadership hideouts in places such as Somalia, Yemen and Sudan, U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said yesterday (see GSN, Nov. 28).

Meanwhile, the United States has been working to increase the capabilities of opposition groups in northern Iraq and working to expand U.S. influence beyond the Iraqi National Congress, which appears to hold little support inside Iraq, the Inquirer reported.

European states, including the United Kingdom and Russia, have said they oppose any potential U.S. attack on Iraq.  Several Arab countries (see GSN, Nov. 29) have also expressed concern about the consequences of such action (Warren Strobel, Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec. 19).

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U.S. Export Controls:  Bush May Ease Restrictions on High-Performance Computers

By David Ruppe

Global Security Newswire

U.S. President George W. Bush is considering an executive order to greatly relax restrictions on exports of U.S.-made, high-performance computers (HPCs) to countries that could use them to develop nuclear weapons and other military advances.

Proponents of the move contend the spread of advanced computer technology is uncontrollable, and so U.S. companies should not be held back.  Critics disagree, saying the proposed relaxation could greatly harm U.S. national security.

The most powerful computers are, in principle, already available to all but a handful of designated rogue states—but for many countries only if approved after a U.S. review for national security implications.

The new regulations would eliminate that review on the latest generation of commercially available computers for more than 40 “Tier 3” countries of proliferation concern, including Pakistan, India, Russia, Israel and China, which are known or are believed to have nuclear weapon programs.

The Commerce Department, with input from the Pentagon and other agencies, is responsible for restricting licenses of HPC exports that might be used to build weapons of mass destruction or otherwise be detrimental to U.S. national security interests.

Under the new regulations, exports of computers capable of performing 190,000 million theoretical operations per second (MTOPS) would no longer require an export license or U.S. scrutiny for those countries.  The previous threshold was 85,000 MTOPS, set by former President Bill Clinton just before he left office last January.

The average desktop computer operates at around 1,000-2,000 MTOPS.  A joint Defense-Commerce Department study several years ago found that nuclear blasts could be simulated with computers performing at between 10,457 and 21,125 MTOPS.

The decision regarding HPC exports will be made “by presidential action,” said Catherine Willis, a spokeswoman for the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Export Administration, which throughout the Clinton administration was an aggressive proponent of relaxing HPC export controls.

International Reaction

The control relaxation plan was discussed with other friendly and allied governments at a recent arms control cooperation meeting in Vienna, where, according to one Pentagon source, it was coldly welcomed.

“Some of the allies asked, what’s the strategic rationale?  They were very cynical in their treatment of the U.S. proposal,” said Peter Leitner, a strategic trade adviser in the Pentagon, speaking as an independent expert and longtime critic of executive branch export control relaxation polices.

“There has been zero strategic analysis. It’s all based on economic objectives,” he said.

Some Security Implications

Computer experts say the more powerful a computer is in terms of the number of operations per second it can perform, the more precisely and rapidly it can perform a simulation.

“When you have a large computer, you assume you have a lot of memory. You essentially will be able to solve more challenging problems,” said Jack Dongarra, a computer science professor at the University of Tennessee.

In practical terms, it could help countries more quickly and accurately develop nuclear weapons, according to Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control in Washington. “My impression is there are not too many limits on what you can do.”

Higher-powered computers can improve modeling and simulation of nuclear weapons and the dispersal of chemical and biological agents in the atmosphere, said Leitner.

The proposal is “so massively bizarre … it’s during a war with the threat of [weapons of mass destruction] ... And what is the best way to have a clandestine WMD program?  Modeling and simulation,” he said.

Foreign governments also could use high-performance computers to break secret U.S. military encryption more rapidly and easily, said Stephen Bryen, founder and former director of the Pentagon’s technology control office, the Defense Technology Security Administration.

“What you’re getting into is machines that can crack almost any code, and that affects our eyes and ears,” he said. “It makes, for example, our fleet operations in the Pacific more vulnerable.”

Futile to Control a Widely Available Technology

Proponents of easing controls maintain that advanced HPC technology is becoming so widely available around the world it would be futile to try to prevent countries from acquiring it by limiting U.S. exports.

“Dramatic technological advances, globalization, and increases in foreign competition have made it unrealistic for the United States to think it can control access to computing power,” said the Computer Coalition for Responsible Exports, which represents leading U.S. computer companies, in a statement earlier this year.

CCRE Communications Director Jennifer Greeson suggested critics of the proposed control loosening are out of step with the national security community consensus in Washington.

“More and more members of the national security community have come to the conclusion that controlling commodity-type systems like the ones we’re talking about, that are essentially used for business processes and payroll calculations, do not pose a threat to national security interests,” she said, citing two think tank studies and a Pentagon report.

A Center for Strategic and International Studies report released in June recommended ending performance-based hardware controls on computers and microprocessors.  It suggested strengthening controls focused on the users and purposes of the equipment and finding new ways for the U.S. military to use information technology.  Click here to read CSIS report.

Because smaller-scale HPCs can be linked together to make more powerful ones, it is a waste of government resources to hold back the more powerful models, Greeson said.

They “are essentially commodity items that someone in another country could surpass the restrictions by clustering lower-powered computers together and downloading computing power literally off the Internet, and by remote access, simply sending the problem off to a supercomputer center to have it calculated.”

MTOPS Matter

Milhollin disagreed, saying increased access to more-powerful U.S.-made HPCs would help the Tier 3 countries develop computing power much more quickly.

“It makes a big difference what you start scaling with.  If you started assembling groups of computers operating at 190,000 [MTOPS] it would be much faster than if you started assembling groups of computers starting at 85,000,” he said.

The University of Kentucky’s Dongarra said it is advantageous to build a system using higher-powered computers, as opposed to scaling together many lower powered computers.

“It’s always easier with fewer.  When it becomes more, it complicates things,” he said.

CCRE’s Greeson said national security interests are protected, since U.S. controls over sensitive software remain in place, such as “controls over more advanced, specialized systems, military applications, submarine detection [and] special algorithms.”

Where are HPCs Today?

Bush’s decision comes as high-performance computer power is rapidly advancing, especially in the non-Tier 3 world:  the West, Japan and South Korea.

“We have this incredible situation where the performance of the computers we use is doubling every year and a half,” said Dongarra, who compiles twice yearly a list of the top 500 supercomputers around the world.  Click here to read the list.

Ranked first on the most recent list, released Nov. 10, is Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s ASCI White, at roughly seven trillion operations per second.  Number 500 is the Environmental Protection Agency’s Cray computer, which can perform 94,000 operations per second (see GSN, Dec. 3).

Complicating export control efforts, very advanced HPCs can and are being used today by nonmilitary concerns such as banks, telecommunications firms, insurance companies and universities for weather research centers, the list shows.  Ranked 25^th is the investment company Charles Schwab, 46^th is State Farm (insurance) and 118^th is Bayer AG (pharmaceuticals), all with computers rated above 250,000 operations per second.

But that is mostly in the West. Only two computers in China, a traditional country of concern for national security reasons, made the list.  Both are of U.S.-origin:  Number 434 on the list is a Hewlett-Packard owned by the Finnish engineering company Kone Cranes with a speed of 99,900 million operations per second, and number 471 is a Hewlett-Packard owned by an undescribed entity, Jiangxi Beijing, rated at 99,200 million operations per second.

The list also says that U.S. companies Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Cray, Intel, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Compaq, are by far the dominant suppliers of the most advanced computer systems worldwide, with a few Japanese companies having a relatively tiny share of the market.

That indicates that the United States could successfully control the access Tier 3 countries have to more powerful computers, said Leitner.

“We have an infinite ability to control access in exports. There is no foreign availability,” he said.  “The Japanese on this issue are much more conservative than we are.”

Clinton Administration Legacy

A White House decision favoring loosened controls would add to a string of HPC export control relaxations by President Clinton during his two terms.  Those decisions were encouraged by the computer industry and were also criticized by some in Congress on national security grounds.

In his most significant action, on Jan. 19, one day before he left office, Clinton relaxed the Tier 3 license threshold from 28,000 to 85,000 MTOPS.

When Clinton took office in 1993, the United States controlled computer exports up to a capacity of 12.5 MTOPS and China was believed to have no high-performance machines.  It has since imported hundred from the United States.

Clinton also last year eliminated the distinction between Tier 3 military and civilian importers of U.S. high-performance computers.

“It means that overtly military sites in [the countries] can get computers up to this limit with no government scrutiny,” said Milhollin.

Eliminating the licensing requirement for higher-level computers also means the higher-level computers can be retransferred anywhere in the world without U.S. knowledge or control over the end-user, said Leitner.

“There [would be] no restrictions on re-exporting these things. If they don’t require a license, they don’t require restrictions on re-exporting.”

Greeson said the MTOPS measurement of computing power is not a good way of determining the national security implications of a computer export, and said a better measurement needs to be developed. Higher-performance computer exports, however, should not be held up until that happens, she said.

“By that point in time, we could have missed [the opportunity to export] two or three generations of technological advances.”

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Al-Qaeda:  More WMD Documents Discovered

U.S. investigators discovered “significant” documents at Tarnak Farms near Kandahar, Afghanistan, while searching former al-Qaeda sites for evidence that the organization was building weapons of mass destruction, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday (Agence France-Presse I, Dec. 16).

U.S. officials will test items from the Tarnak Farms camp for traces of chemical, biological and radioactive material, Rumsfeld said.  Investigators had visited about 30 sites to test for such materials (see GSN, Dec. 14), U.S. General Tommy Franks said yesterday. He said that the list of sites to be inspected has grown to 50 sites partly based on information gleaned from Taliban and suspected al-Qaeda detainees.

“It is frightening,” Franks said, “Some of the information that we have gained would allude to perhaps—I don’t want to call them science projects—but would make reference to things like poisons, the building of explosives, some of these cookbooks that we have talked about before that talk about terrorist approaches to problems and how buildings can be destroyed, and so forth.”

Some pieces of evidence “suggest that [al-Qaeda was] trying, at least, to acquire these weapons of mass destruction, and that’s no surprise,” said U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (Kenneth Bazinet, New York Daily News, Dec. 17).

There is no confirmation yet that al-Qaeda had the means to create weapons of mass destruction, Franks said, adding he could not confirm reports that al-Qaeda had planned to detonate a bomb in London (Agence France-Presse II, Dec. 16).

In a former al-Qaeda house near Kandahar, a Portuguese journalist discovered a hand-written plan to detonate a car bomb weighing more than 1,000 pounds in the Moorgate area of London, the London Independent reported yesterday.  It was unclear whether al-Qaeda planned to execute the attack or whether the notes were only for training purposes, and there was no evidence of when the organization would have implemented the plan, the Independent said (Justin Huggler, London Independent, Dec. 16).

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Pakistan:  Two Nuclear Scientists Released

Two Pakistani former nuclear scientists under investigation for their ties to al-Qaeda were released Saturday in time for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, although reports conflicted on the details of their release.

Muhammad Asim Mehmood, son of Sultan Bashiru-din Mehmood, one of the detained scientists, said yesterday that Mehmood and Chaudry Abdul Majid, another scientist, had been released and declared innocent, the New York Times reported today.  According to previous reports, Pakistani authorities had already released the scientists once after their original detention and then detained them again for further questioning last month (see GSN, Nov. 26).

Pakistani authorities were unavailable for comment, according to the Times, and Muhammad Asim Mehmood said he did not know if U.S. authorities had been involved in the release and could not comment on any U.S. involvement in the scientists’ interrogation.  The scientists must report any of their movements outside Islamabad and are not allowed to speak to the media, the son said.

Mehmood said his father had met with Osama bin Laden in August (see GSN, Dec. 12) but only to ask bin Laden for funding for a university in Kabul.

“It’s true that he met with Osama,” he said, “but my father wanted to discuss setting up a polytechnic university.  He thought Osama might be the financier for it.”  U.S. authorities have said no evidence existed (see GSN, Dec. 10) to indicate the scientists provided useful nuclear weapons information to bin Laden (Douglas Frantz, New York Times, Dec. 17).

The Washington Post reported the release slightly differently.  Pakistani officials said the two scientists were released to spend Eid al-Fitr with their families, according to the Post.  “They have promised to return back to us soon after the Eid holidays,” said a Pakistani official.  They were not allowed to leave Islamabad, the Post reported.

The scientists said last month they had answered bin Laden’s technical questions about constructing weapons of mass destruction, Pakistani officials said, adding that the scientists’ information did not help advance any al-Qaeda weapons programs.  “The probe against these scientists is by no means over, but we are satisfied that their contact with bin Laden didn’t result in any improvement in al-Qaeda’s firepower,” said a Pakistani intelligence official (Kamran Khan, Washington Post, Dec. 16).

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