Bush budget seeks Ballistic Missile Defense system 2.28.01 MD Kellerhals Jr Wash.File StateDept Intl InfoPgms Bush said that acquiring a ballistic missile defense system is "America's most pressing national security challenge. Outmoded arms control treaties must not compromise America's security." The threats of the Cold War decades have been replaced "by a world in which threats come from rogue states bent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, threats as unconventional as they are unpredictable," Bush said in his budget plan.	"This was the thing that nearly had us mastered; Don't yet rejoice in his defeat, you men! Although the world stood up & stopped the bastard, The bitch that bore him is in heat again." epilogue, Der Aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (The Resistible Rise of A.Ui)   Bertold Brecht
	D.Rumsfeld bio   budget NATO otaku coercion collusion creation new Hartung re StarWars Abu Ghraib Copper Green budget 1.23.02 sweet kiss o' death Russia Iraq diplomacy impressionist Nixon daddy's ghost links R. Armitage J. Bolton B. Chapman D. Cheney L. Craner R. Huber W. Kansteiner J. Maisto J. Negroponte C. Powell O. Reich Shrub pacifism UN peacekeeping dogfight prognosis biojustice environment Ballistic Missile Def. Org FPIF SCREMAR contra space nukes NGO & links
STAR WARS II   Here We Go Again   ¹   ²   ³ 6.19.00   Wm D. Hartung & Michelle Ciarrocca The Nation If you stopped worrying about the bomb when the cold war ended, you were probably surprised to learn that two of the hot-button issues of the eighties, arms control and missile defense, will top the agenda at the Clinton/Putin summit on June 4-5. A central issue in Moscow will be how to reconcile Russian President Vladimir Putin's proposal for deep cuts in US and Russian nuclear arsenals with the Clinton Administration's fixation on developing a National Missile Defense (NMD) system. Clinton has pledged to make a deployment decision this fall, after the Pentagon and the White House analyze the results of the next "hit to kill" test of the missile defense system, slated for late June or early July. The system failed its most recent test, conducted in January, while an allegedly successful test conducted last October was made possible only by the fact that the kill vehicle was guided to the right spot by a large, easy-to-find decoy balloon. The Clinton/Gore proposal is a far cry from Ronald Reagan's Star Wars scheme, which was designed to fend off thousands of Soviet warheads at a cost estimated by former Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire at up to $1 trillion. In contrast, this missile defense plan is meant to deal with a few dozen incoming warheads launched by a "rogue state" like North Korea, at a projected cost of $60 billion. But despite the NMD's seemingly more modest goals, it is every bit as dangerous and misguided as the Reagan scheme, threatening to unravel thirty years of arms-control agreements and heighten the danger of nuclear war. NMD's surprising political revival is rooted in the three Cs of contemporary US politics: conservative ideology, Clintonian cowardice and corporate influence. These short-term pressures are in turn reinforced by an ambitious long-range military objective: the misguided quest for a state of absolute military superiority. The strongest push for missile defense has come from Reaganite true believers in conservative think tanks, especially the small but highly effective Ctr for Security Policy. On Capitol Hill, the NMD lobby is spearheaded by new-look conservatives like Sen. Jon Kyl R-AZ, who led last fall's successful GOP effort to defeat the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Fresh from that victory, the NMD lobby is now seeking to destroy the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty as the next target in its campaign to promote "peace through strength rather than peace through paper," as Kyl put it in a recent speech. The right-wing crusade for missile defense has received aid and comfort from Bill Clinton & Al Gore, who have decided that looking "tough" on defense is more important than protecting the world from weapons of mass destruction. Support has also come from the lumbering behemoths of the military-industrial complex: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing, which are desperately seeking a new infusion of taxpayer funds to help them recover from a string of technical failures and management fiascos that have cut their stock prices and drastically reduced their profit margins. NMD's military boosters see the system primarily as a way to enhance the offensive capabilities of US forces, not as a defensive measure. In its revealing "Vision for 2020" report, the US Space Command, a unified military command that coordinates the space activities and assets of the Army, Navy and Air Force, sings the praises of outer space as the ideal platform for projecting US military dominance "across the full spectrum of conflict." Pentagon hard-liners have a more immediate military goal: using NMD as a shield to protect US forces in interventions against states like North Korea (whose missile development effort, it is worth noting, has been on hold for almost 2 years). A growing number of moderate-to-conservative Democrats are also supportive of a limited NMD system. Whether or not missile defense is an effective response to alleged threats, it seems to offer a sense of security to some members of Congress, who lack the expertise & inclination to question the fevered threat projections of the US military & intelligence establishments. While at least some of the motives of NMD advocates may be understandable, They are also disastrously misguided: Even Clinton and Gore's "limited" system is unnecessary, unworkable and unaffordable. The mere pursuit of an NMD system could pose the most serious threat to intl peace & stability since the height of the cold war. Russian President Putin has emphatically stated that any US move to withdraw from the ABM treaty will lead Moscow to treat all existing US/Russian arms agreements as null & void. And China's chief arms negotiator, Sha Zukang, has warned that if Washington goes ahead with an NMD deployment designed to intercept "tens of warheads" a figure suspiciously close to the eighteen to twenty single-warhead ballistic missiles that represent China's entire nuclear deterrent capability-Beijing will not "sit on its hands." In short, the official Clinton/Gore Administration position on NMD is that we should jeopardize the best chance in a generation to reduce the world's nuclear arsenals in order to preserve the option to deploy a costly, technically dubious scheme designed to defend against a Third World missile threat that does not currently exist and may not ever materialize. To understand how we got into this mess, we need to take a look at the genesis, "death" and resurrection of Reagan's Star Wars dream. A Smile & a Shoeshine When Reagan gave his March 1983 Star Wars speech, in which he pledged to launch a program designed to render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete," he was acting primarily on the advice of Edward Teller, the infamous "father of the H-bomb." In closed-door meetings organized by the conservative businessmen in Reagan's kitchen Cabinet, Teller sold Reagan on a new nuclear doctrine of "assured survival" based on the alleged technical wonders of his latest brainchild, the X-ray laser. As New York Times science writer William Broad pointed out in his 1992 book, Teller's War, the X-ray laser was largely a figment of Teller's imagination, composed of scientific speculation, wishful thinking and outright deception. But Reagan was buying into the concept of missile defense, not the details, so he forged ahead unaware of these inconvenient facts, his enthusiasm reinforced by his desire to counter the nuclear freeze movement. But, as Frances FitzGerald shows in her new book, Way Out There in the Blue (the title derives from Arthur Miller's line in Death of a Salesman in which he describes Willy Loman as "a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile & a shoeshine"), Reagan's Star Wars proposal was more than just a political con game; it was also a potent symbol that served radically different purposes for the different factions within his Administration. For hard-liners like Caspar Weinberger, Richard Perle and Frank Gaffney, Perle protege who founded his own pro-Star Wars think tank Ctr for Security Policy, Reagan's missile defense plan offered a chance to promote their two main goals: sustaining the Reagan military buildup and thwarting progress on U.S./Soviet arms control. For White House political strategists, Star Wars was a way to boost Reagan's flagging popularity ratings, which plummeted with deepest recession since 1930s and growing fear the President's aggressive anti-Soviet stance was moving to brink of nuclear confrontation. The most constructive response to the Star Wars speech within Reagan's inner circle came from Sec.State George Shultz. Rather than trying to convince Reagan of the manifold flaws in his pet project, Shultz treated the Star Wars speech as an opportunity to press Reagan to engage in his first serious discussions with Soviet leaders on nuclear weapons issues. Shultz found an unlikely ally in Paul Nitze, the old cold warrior who was appointed as a special envoy to the US/Russian nuclear talks at Shultz's request. Nitze honed in on the fatal flaw that has plagued all missile defense schemes to date, which is that it is much cheaper to overwhelm a defensive system with additional warheads or decoys than it is to expand the defensive capability to meet these new threats. As a result, Shultz & Nitze were able to prevail over the Weinberger/Perle faction and persuade Reagan to endorse historic agreements to eliminate medium-range nuclear weapons from Europe and implement substantial cuts in long-range weapons under the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). Star Wars was a security blanket that allowed Reagan to engage in serious negotiations with the "evil empire" without being perceived as some sort of weak-kneed liberal arms controller among the conservatives who formed his core constituency. When George Bush took office in January 1989, Reagan's Star Wars fantasy was rapidly overtaken by the reality of sharp reductions in US & Soviet nuclear forces. Both sides ratified the START I arms reduction pact and followed up with a START II deal that called for cutting US & Soviet strategic arsenals to one-third their Reagan-era levels. On a broader front, the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the dissolution of the Soviet Union between 1989 & 1991 made spending billions on a high-tech scheme to defend against Soviet missiles seem irrelevant and absurd. Despite the decline of the Soviet "threat," however, the Bush Administration & Congress continued to cough up $3-$4 billion per year for missile defense. The project's new focus was protection against an accidental nuclear attack. Soon yet another rationale appeared in the form of the "rogue state" strategy, developed by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin Powell and based on the notion that U.S. should be prepared to fight two heavily armed regional powers like Iraq & North Korea simultaneously. In the 1991 Gulf War Saddam Hussein came to personify the rogue-state threat; Iraqi missile attacks on Tel Aviv and a devastating direct hit on a US military barracks in Saudi Arabia prompted calls for more effective defenses against medium-range ballistic missiles. But even that was not enough to sustain enthusiasm for a major new program. A few months after Clinton took office in January 1993, Def.Sec Les Aspin proclaimed the Star Wars program dead (though the Pentagon continued to spend $3-$4 billion per year on missile defense research). Enter Newt Newt Gingrich is gone from the political scene, but the most dangerous plank of his 1994 Contract With America remains: the section that calls for "requiring the Defense Department to deploy antiballistic missile systems capable of defending the U.S. against ballistic missile attacks." That plan was added to the contract by Gingrich and his fellow GOP co-author Dick Armey at the urging of Frank Gaffney of the Ctr for Security Policy. Efforts to turn the contract's rhetoric into viable legislation proved unsuccessful in the short run, but in mid-1996 the Clinton admin decided to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by offering a missile defense compromise known as the "3+3" plan, 3 years of research & testing followed by a 3 year crash program to deploy a system, if the President decided it was necessary, feasible and affordable. The "3+3" gambit allowed Clinton to push off a politically controversial decision on missile defense until a later date that fell well past the 1996 presidential election. Unfortunately for Al Gore, that "later date" is now smack in the middle of his second run for the White House. As John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists put it, "This is a political decision driven by the need to defend Al Gore from the GOP rather than defend America against missiles." While Clinton was yielding ground, Capitol Hill Republicans were regrouping for their next offensive- one result of which was an amendment in the fiscal year 1997 defense authorization bill calling for the establishment of a blue- ribbon panel to "assess the nature & magnitude of existing and emerging ballistic missile threats to the United States." The Republicans wanted their new commission to be viewed as an authoritative and objective body, not just a partisan project. Bearing that in mind, House Speaker Gingrich and Senate majority leader Trent Lott, who were empowered to nominate the majority of the panel's members, chose former Ford Administration DefSec Donald Rumsfeld to head the commission, in the hopes that they could capitalize on his reputation as a moderate Republican with pragmatic views on military matters. Rumsfeld proved worthy of Gingrich's and Lott's confidence when he hammered out a unanimous final report with the appropriate aura of bipartisanship, complete with signatures from Democratic appointees such as former Carter Administration arms-control official Barry Blechman of the Henry L. Stimson Ctr and eminent physicist & longtime missile defense critic Richard Garwin. Just 2 weeks after the report came out, Garwin placed an op-ed in the NY Times denouncing the misuse of the report by missile defense boosters, asserting, "I am alarmed that some have interpreted our findings as providing support for a new national defense system." The Rumsfeld Commission report was unveiled in July 1998 amid hysterical cries from Gingrich that it was the "most important warning about our national security system since the end of the cold war." Hysteria aside, the report's primary finding was that given enough foreign help, a rogue state like North Korea could acquire a missile capable of reaching the United States within five years of making a decision to do so, one-third to one- half the warning time projected in the CIA's official estimates. The Star Wars lobby finally got what it needed: an official, govt-approved statement that could be interpreted as endorsing its own exaggerated view of the Third World missile threat. While the Rumsfeld report drew heavy editorial fire in papers like Chicago Tribune & Milwaukee Sentinel, Wall St Journal applauded it as a long- overdue clarion call for missile defense, and Washington's newspaper of record, the Post, published a measured response that endorsed the panel's findings as "useful and plausible." Inside the Missile Defense Lobby Upon reflection, it is clear that the Rumsfeld report's Republican backers had always intended to use the panel as a tool to advance their pro-missile defense agenda. All the report actually says is that if a country like North Korea gets major foreign assistance, including the extremely unlikely possibility that a country like China would simply give Pyongyang a fully operational ballistic missile, it will achieve the capability to hit the U.S. much more quickly than if it had to build the missile without outside help. As Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for Intl Peace demonstrated in Congressional testimony delivered this past February, the Rumsfeld Commission's conservative backers have used the report as a vehicle for changing the intelligence community's traditional means of assessing the ballistic missile threat, from one that attempts to predict the likely pace of missile proliferation in a given nation in the light of political, economic and military factors, to a "worst-case scenario" approach that asks how quickly a given nation could achieve a threatening missile capability if it had no economic or political impediments. As Cirincione also demonstrated, the "sky is falling" approach has been used to obscure the underlying reality that the ballistic missile threat to the U.S. has decreased in the last decade, not increased. Just as the Rumsfeld Commission turned out to be less objective than it first appeared to be, so did its chairman. Far from being a moderate, Donald Rumsfeld is a card-carrying member of the missile defense lobby. Prior to his appointment to head the commission that bears his name, he was publicly singled out as a special friend in the annual report of the pro-Star Wars think tank, the Ctr for Security Policy. As a further sign of his commitment to the missile defense cause, Rumsfeld has also given money to Frank Gaffney's group. If Gaffney's organization were just an abstract "study group," that would be one thing. But it is a highly partisan advocacy organization that serves as the de facto nerve center of the NMD lobby. Gaffney's center, which now has an annual budget of $1.2 million, was started in 1988 with support from New Right funders like Richard Mellon Scaife and Joseph Coors. Since that time, Gaffney has turned it into a sort of working executive committee for the missile defense lobby. The center's advisory board includes representatives of larger conservative organizations, incl Ed Feulner, president Heritage Fdtn; Wm Bennett, co-director Empower America; and Henry Cooper of High Frontier, the original Star Wars think tank, which was launched during the early years of the Reagan Administration. Other CSP advisory board members include Chas. Kupperman & Bruce Jackson, who serve as vp for Washington operations & director of planning & analysis, respectively, at Lockheed Martin; key members of Congress like Republicans Curt Weldon, Christopher Cox and Jon Kyl; and a who's who of Reagan-era Star Warriors like Edward Teller and former Reagan science adviser Geo. Keyworth. Unlike most think tanks concerned with military issues, the Ctr for Security Policy receives a substantial portion of its funding from weapons manufacturers. 3 out of the top 4 missile defense contractors, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and TRW, are all major corporate contributors to CSP, which has received more than $2 million in corporate donations since its founding, accounting for roughly one-quarter of its total budget. Rumsfeld's link to CSP is not his only affiliation with the Star Wars lobby. He's also on the board of Empower America, which ran deceptive ads against anti-NMD Senator Harry Reid of Nevada in the run-up to the November 1998 elections. In recognition of his service to the missile defense lobby, in October 1998, just 3 months after his "objective" assessment of the missile threat was released, CSP awarded Rumsfeld its "Keeper of the Flame" award for 1998 at a gala dinner attended by several hundred Star Wars boosters. In accepting the award, Rumsfeld joined the company of Reagan, Gingrich and several Congressional NMD boosters. NMD Resurgent: Fast Track to Oblivion? In a reprise of the political two-step that preceded the 1996 presidential elections (Republicans lead, Clintonites follow), the Clinton Administration moved closer to the Republican position on missile defense with a January 1999 announcement that the President would seek a six-year, $112 billion increase in Pentagon spending. The proposal incl $6.6 billion in new funding for procurement of missile defense equipment before 2005, the new target date for NMD deployment established by Def.Sec Wm Cohen. Clinton's decision to accelerate NMD funding was propelled in part by the furor caused by North Korea's August 1998 test of a two-stage ballistic missile, but the trump card in the Republican-led effort to jack up both overall military spending and NMD "deployment readiness" funding was the backlash from the Monica Lewinsky affair. Long before the Lewinsky scandal, Clinton decided that throwing money at the Pentagon was the best way to shore up his credentials as Commander in Chief and divert attention from allegations that he had dodged the draft during the Vietnam War. By the fall of 1998, the combination of a growing federal budget surplus and the President's perceived political weakness resulting from the Lewinsky matter emboldened congressional GOP and Clinton's own Joint Chiefs of Staff to press him for billions of dollars in additional military funds. In mid-September, the Joint Chiefs invited the President to a closed-door briefing where they read Clinton their wish lists on everything from boosting military pay and weapons procurement to applying fresh coats of paint to underutilized military bases. Within a week's time Clinton sent the Chiefs a letter pledging a Pentagon budget increase that would insure that "the men and women of our armed forces will have the resources they need to do their jobs." In October, congressional GOP did the Joint Chiefs one better, loading up Clinton's $1 billion Pentagon supplemental appropriations bill aimed at addressing the military's newfound "readiness crisis" with what analyst John Isaacs of the Council for a Livable World has described as "a $9 billion grab bag of pet projects" that included an additional $1 billion for National Missile Defense. Clinton's apparent embrace of NMD prompted Helle Bering of the conservative Washington Times to complain bitterly that "Clinton has appropriated yet another set of Republican issues." In mid-January Cohen took the Administration's NMD commitment one step further when he made the highly provocative statement that if the U.S. deemed it necessary to withdraw from the ABM treaty in order to field an effective defense against rogue-state missiles, it would do so regardless of Russia's reaction. Meanwhile, back on Capitol Hill, NMD advocates were rallying around Senator Thad Cochran's National Missile Defense Act. In March 1999, aided by the votes of moderate and conservative Democrats who had been persuaded in part by the Rumsfeld Commission's official (albeit misleading) depiction of the North Korean missile threat, House & Senate both passed bills calling for the deployment of a national missile defense system "as soon as it is technologically feasible." Clinton signed the bill into law that July. Although his signing message made it clear that the Administration will consider economic, technical and arms-control factors before deciding whether to deploy an NMD system, Star Wars boosters in Congress have been portraying the legislation as a firm national commitment come hell or high water. The NMD Deception From its inception in the Reagan White House to its resurrection in the Clinton era, the marketing of missile defense has been accompanied at every step by exaggerated technical claims, misleading cost estimates and outright lies. If experience is any guide, the missile defense test scheduled for late June or early July will almost certainly be rigged. (In 1984, in an instance of fraud that only came to light nine years later, a test of Lockheed's Homing Overlay Experiment was rigged by placing a beacon in the target missile so that it could literally signal its location to the interceptor missile.) But even if the next test misfires, the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) has already put forward a rationale that Clinton could use to give the green light for deployment, namely that two more "hit to kill" tests could be squeezed in between now and next spring, when construction will begin on the critical NMD radar site in Shemya, Alaska, if Clinton decides to go full speed ahead on deployment. Even one successful "hit" in any of these next 3 tests, which will occur before BMDO contractors actually break ground on the Alaska radar project but after the Administration has committed funds to long-lead-time materials and services that will be needed to meet the starting date for construction, will be offered as proof of the dubious proposition that the system will work under real-world conditions.	Laertes a Claudius (1.2.51)   My dread lord, Your leave and favour to return to France; From whence though willingly I came to Denmark, To show my duty in your coronation, Yet now, I must confess, that duty done, My thoughts and wishes bend again toward France And bow them to your gracious leave and pardon. a Ophelia (1.3.6)   For Hamlet and the trifling of his favour, Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood, A violet in the youth of primy nature, Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting, The perfume and suppliance of a minute-- No more. … but you must fear, His greatness weigh'd, his will is not his own; For he himself is subject to his birth: He may not, as unvalued persons do, Carve for himself; for on his choice depends The safety and health of this whole state; … Then weigh what loss your honour may sustain, If with too credent ear you list his songs, Or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open To his unmaster'd importunity. Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister Baroness committed her govt to addtl $2billion in development for multi- mission aircraft Joint Strike Fighter pgm . Missile-test item jettisoned from bill 9.20.01   Reuters
	Wash.D.C.   The Senate dropped a provision from a military spending bill yesterday that would have required Congress to approve any missile defense tests that violated a landmark nuclear deterrence pact with Moscow. Hoping to avoid a battle with Republicans after last week's hijack attacks, Sen. Carl Levin D-MI cut the provision from $344billion defense authorization bill & introduced it as separate measure that could be considered by Senate at later date. Levin, Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, said he wanted to avoid confrontation over the bill and speed up approval of the fiscal 2002 funds for the military ahead of the campaign against those behind last week's terrorist attacks. Rumsfeld says Crusader must go 5.16.02   Reuters Wash.DC   Def.Sec Rumsfeld said Thursday he was aiming for sweeping upgrades to the way U.S. fights when he asked Congress to kill an $11 billion artillery gun last week. "The decision to recommend termination of the Army's Crusader artillery program has little to do with the weapon itself," he wrote in a guest column in The Washington Post. Foreshadowing testimony he was due to give to the Senate Armed Services Committee later in the day, Rumsfeld said he sought to invest in alternative firepower that could be deployed more readily for digitally "networked" combat and greater accuracy. "The question we must answer is: Are the interim capabilities Crusader would provide, and not for several years, worth the delay in acquiring truly transformational technology that can sustain our combat advantage well into the future?" he wrote. Crusader is a 155mm self-propelled howitzer. The Army, which spent $2 billion to develop it since 1994, considered it a top procurement priority. The 40-ton gun, tarred as a Cold War relic by critics who consider it too heavy for likely 21st century battlefields, is built by United Defense Industries Inc., which is mounting a big advertising & lobbying drive to save it. United Defense is controlled by the Carlyle Group, investment firm led by former Pres.Reagan Def.Sec Frank Carlucci. Also on Carlyle's payroll are elder President Geo.Bush's Sec.State James Baker, and elder Bush's budget director Richard Darman. Former President Bush himself is a consultant. Lawmakers from Oklahoma, where the Crusader is assembled, urged Rumsfeld Wed. to refrain from issuing any "stop work" order on the big gun while Congress weighs what to do with the $475 million earmarked for it in the fiscal 2003 budget.   Still relying on missile defense to make us feel safer 9.26.01   Lionel Van Deerlin, ex SD Cty, CA Cong. SD UT … exactly 10 days after terrorist assault, U.S. Senate leaders cleared the way to spend another $8.3 billion on SDI … Amid the happily bipartisan atmosphere pervading Washington in the wake of terror, Democratic leaders let the Bush administration have every penny it had requested for SDI in the fiscal year beginning October 1. Obligingly abandoned were plans to trim the allocation by $1.3 billion. The House, under Republican leadership, would of course go along. … If SDI's sponsors ran a casino on the side, you'd want to check their roulette wheels for resin. When he was secretary of defense in the first Bush administration, Richard Cheney dismissed SDI as "an extremely remote proposition that was oversold" by President Reagan. That was 10 years ago, at which point taxpayers already had been nicked $17 billion for this scheme. …   Powell dismisses Putin threat ¹   6.23.01   AP   ¹ Wash.D.C.   Sec.State Powell is brushing aside a warning by Russian President Vladimir Putin that he will upgrade his country's strategic nuclear arsenal if the U.S. deploys a missile defense system. Putin has issued the warning on several occasions, and again on Saturday, but Powell seemed almost dismissive of the Russian leader's stand when asked about it Friday in an interview with AP. "I am not in charge of Russia but I don't think that's what they would do,'' Powell said. He said he was confident that Putin would not try to enhance Russia's strategic force once he takes into account the cost. Powell added that Putin also will come to realize that a U.S. missile defense is not a threat to Russia. Critics of the missile defense system argue that its deployment by the U.S. would touch off an arms race, with Russia and China taking steps to build up their arsenals to overwhelm the U.S. defense shield. On Saturday, Putin again threatened a nuclear buildup if the U.S. abandons the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, "This means that all countries, including Russia, will have the right to install multiple warheads carrying nuclear weapons on their missiles,'' he told reporters in Moscow. He said that for Russia, installing multiple nuclear warheads on existing missiles "is the cheapest response.'' That echoed his comments Monday that while he would try to work cooperatively with the U.S. in developing a new security framework, Russia would enhance its nuclear forces if the U.S. pursued a go-it-alone posture on missile defense. On NATO, Powell said he was not surprised that many allied countries have expressed reservations about the U.S. missile defense plan, given the fact that it represents a major doctrinal change from the current security framework. But he said there is more openness among the allies about the concept than there was before President Bush began consulting them in early May. "I think we have made progress,'' he said. … U.S. security adv. sees progress on missile defense 7.25.01   Reuters Moscow   U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice arrived in Moscow Wed. to put arms control talks with Russia on a fast track, saying the 2 sides had broken the deadlock on missile defense. Rice told govt leaders in Kiev that Russia and the U.S. had moved beyond their dispute over the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, Ukrainian officials said. "Rice expressed her satisfaction that, following meetings in Genoa, ABM talks between Russia & the U.S. have moved beyond deadlock," a spokesman for Ukraine's presidential press service told Reuters. Washington sees the ABM treaty as a Cold War "relic" but Moscow has been unwilling to re-write a pact it says is the cornerstone of strategic stability & 30 other arms accords. Rice has said Washington wants to pursue an "aggressive schedule" of talks on arms issues with Moscow after a weekend G-8 summit. After a bilateral meeting following the summit, President Bush & Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed for the first time to merge talks on missile defense and deep cuts in their vast nuclear arsenals. Putin downplays breakthrough talk Rice's upbeat remarks contrasted with comments by Putin, who denied any breakthrough had been made in Genoa. Russian media have accused him of retreating from his previous opposition to U.S. missile defense plans. Washington says it needs a national missile shield to protect against the threat from "rogue states" like Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Putin concedes the threat exists, but says it is greatly exaggerated. To counter it he has proposed greater diplomatic efforts and, as a last resort, a non-strategic anti-missile system which would preserve ABM and prevent a new arms race. Sunday's accord, however, also marks a shift by Bush, who had hitherto wanted unilateral cuts in U.S. arsenals outside the framework of legally-binding & verifiable accords. Washington argues that would give it more flexibility to counter emerging missile threats. Russia & the U.S. have been jousting over the issue of missile defense for months, and Washington warned earlier this month its research could "bump into" the ABM treaty in a matter of months, not years. Bush wants to forge ahead with a $60 billion program after a third test this summer proved successful where two others had failed. But Moscow remains skeptical the scheme can work and says Washington has still failed to tell it what sort of anti-missile scheme it plans to build. The U.S. has promised to give answers soon, but Bush signaled on Monday that he would press on with the scheme regardless of Russian concerns if the two sides failed to reach an agreement quickly. "Time is of the essence...if we can't reach an agreement, we're going to implement," he told reporters in Rome.   [ Homilies in place of reason. Why is "time of the essence? No rogue nation is threatening to bombard anyone. ] Rice was to meet Vladimir Rushailo, secretary of Russia's Security Council later on Wednesday, ahead of meetings with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov on Thursday. She is due to meet Putin in the Kremlin around midday on Thursday. Sec.State C.Powell & Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov discussed the timetable for security talks in Hanoi this week, on the sidelines of a summit of Asian regional states. Defense ministry officials from both sides are due to meet in Moscow & Washington next month. Missile defense may not bring jobs 5.20.01   Associated Press Los Angeles   While pie-in-the-sky to critics, Pres. GWBush's missile defense plan could deliver billions of dollars to a handful of states as the Pentagon moves to develop the system. However, spending on the multifaceted program would create fewer jobs than other lucrative defense contracts that regularly buoy the economies of states like California & Texas, analysts say. Instead of jobs, the money would fund highly focused research and development efforts and later lead to "boutique'' production of the small number of aircraft, rockets, lasers, radar and satellites that would make up the system designed to intercept and destroy incoming missiles. Although far more advanced technologically, the work would require less labor than more traditional, large-ticket defense projects, like the production of aircraft, ships or tanks. "They're not bending a lot of metal,'' William Hartung, a senior fellow with New York's World Policy Institute said about the missile defense program. "The same amounts of money might not generate as many jobs as previous defense contracts.'' Nor might the money. perhaps as much as $200 billion over the next few decades - flow to as many states, since consolidation in the defense industry has left fewer companies positioned to do the work. "Where you might have had 5 choices to send a contract to, and geography might have ruled, today you might have only two choices,'' said Jon Kutler, chairman & chief executive officer of Quarterdeck Investment Partners, an L.A. investment bank focused on the aerospace & defense industries. Hartung said analysis of past missile defense contracts show two-thirds of the work went to just four firms: The Boeing Co., Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Co. and TRW Inc. Although all four have facilities scattered throughout the U.S., work on developing the missile defense program is likely to stay highly focused in only a few states. That means politics may have little to do with where the contracts eventually go. "I don't think it's going to have a lot to do with Republicans or Democrats. There's going to be a small number of people who can do it, and they'll get the contracts,'' said Martin Anderson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute who advised Bush on missile defense during his campaign. In fiscal 2000, 42 states shared $2.4 billion in unclassified missile defense contracts. However, just 3, Alabama, California and Virginia, captured 83% of that total, according to Eagle Eye Publishers Inc. "That's a highly stratified market,'' said Paul Murphy, president of the Fairfax VA co., which crunches govt contract data. Total spending, classified and unclassified, on the program could hit $5 billion this year. That number could increase in the next several months, when the Bush administration announces how it intends to proceed with the program, said Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Rick Lehner. Even if annual spending on missile defense doubles, as some predict, it will not necessarily translate into a net increase in military spending. "I'd expect there would be some element of a zero-sum game to this: The money you spend on this program will come at the expense of other programs,'' Quarterdeck's Kutler said. If money to fund missile defense should come from the budgets of traditional weapons programs, it could benefit California, since little of that current work is done in the state. "Anything that shifts from traditional platforms to space, to electronics, to rockets is probably advantageous to California,'' said Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution in Wash., D.C. Even limited amounts of spending could lift the lagging defense industry in Southern California, which has shed 200,000 workers in Los Angeles and Orange counties alone over the past 15 years. "You're not going to create as many jobs, but the jobs you do create will be great jobs,'' said Jack Kyser, chief economist for the nonprofit Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.   Rumsfeld charts missile defense course ¹   7.8.01   AP WASHINGTON   The Bush administration wants to greatly expand the number & kinds of testing it believes is needed to build effective missile defenses, and is willing to spend billions more to do it. In a sense, military planners have gone back to the drawing board to fulfill President Bush's goal of creating a reliable defense against ballistic missile attack on U.S., its allies and U.S. forces abroad. The Bush administration sees no less urgency in obtaining a missile defense capability. But after months of reviewing options and studying the Clinton administration's approach, the Pentagon has decided to explore a wider range of technologies before deciding when the system could be ready for use. "The focus of missile defense is no longer on deployment,'' says Lt.Col. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, which manages the Pentagon's missile defense work. The focus is on testing, and lots of it. "It is going to be structured & disciplined,'' Lehner said.   [ Implementation studies are much easier hence more lucrative than production & deployment. ] It is also going to be expensive. Intercept tests conducted during the Clinton administration cost about $100 million apiece. The Bush administration envisions more elaborate and more frequent tests. The proposed 2002 defense budget submitted to Congress on June 27 provides $8.3 billion for missile defense, a nearly 40% increase over the current budget. It would be expected to take tens of billions more before a system is ready for use, although the administration has provided no firm figure. For starters, the Pentagon is piecing together a plan to create a Pacific "test bed'', a collection of test ranges from Ft. Greeley and Kodiak Island in Alaska to Vandenberg AFBase, CA, to Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, to pursue more realistic missile intercept tests. ¹ Up to now, the only flight tests of interceptors designed to shoot down long-range missiles have involved launching an unarmed target missile from Vandenberg and trying to hit it with an interceptor launched from Kwajalein. Just such a test is scheduled for July 14, the first intercept attempt in 12 months. Last July's attempt failed, and several weeks later President Clinton announced that the technology was not sufficiently mature to go ahead with deploying missile defenses. Clinton was operating under a congressional requirement that he deploy a missile defense as soon as it was technologically feasible. His administration chose to focus the bulk of its missile defense effort on a ground-based interceptor designed to collide with a hostile missile outside the earth's atmosphere during the midcourse of its flight. It did so because that technology is more advanced than others, such as interceptors fired from ships or lasers fired from satellites or airplanes. Def.Sec Rumsfeld has decided that the midcourse system alone is insufficient to provide global protection. He wants to build a "layered'' system, a combination of missile defense weapons. Some would be designed to attack a ballistic missile in the boost phase of its flight while it is easiest to detect, others in the descent phase and still others in midcourse. Some of these anti-missile weapons would be based on land, others at sea, others possibly aboard aircraft. "As we proceed in time, and technologies are proven or disproven, we narrow down heading toward a solution,'' the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, Pete Aldridge, told reporters late last month. Lehner said the Pentagon is aiming for deployment sometime between 2004 and 2008, but it has not firm target date. In its new approach, the Pentagon will not only pursue different combinations of missile defense technologies, some well advanced, some largely untried, but also test them in ways not done before. For example, the Kodiak Launch Complex on Kodiak Island, about 250 miles south of Anchorage, Alaska, would be used to launch target missiles over the Pacific. Kodiak also would have interceptors for test flights against target missiles launched from Vandenberg in California toward Kwajalein. The Pentagon also would use Fort Greeley, about 100 miles southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska, as a site from which to launch ground-based interceptors at target missiles fired from an aircraft. The government decided in 1995 to close Ft. Greeley, but the 2001 defense supplemental bill before Congress now contains language permitting the secretary of defense to retain the base for missile defense purposes. This more aggressive testing effort reflects Bush's determination to "set aside'' the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which forbids the testing of missile defense weaponry from other than fixed points on land. Thus the Kwajalein-to-Vandenberg approach is allowed, but not testing from aircraft or ships. Even more fundamentally, the ABM treaty bans any missile defense that is designed to protect an entire nation. Having declared the ABM treaty a Cold War relic ¹, the administration plans to go ahead with testing without regard to treaty limitations, although it has not yet said definitely that it will withdraw from the treaty. It hopes to persuade the Russians to either amend it or to replace it with a new "framework'' in which U.S., its allies and Russia could pursue missile defenses cooperatively. The treaty's limitations are not an immediate problem because testing of the kind that would violate the limits is not likely to be ready for another year or more. "U.S. likely to put arms in space", per USAF chief 8.1.01   Reuters ¹ WASHINGTON   The U.S. will likely put weapons in space one day to protect satellites vital for commerce, communications and military dominance, the Air Force's top general predicted on Wednesday. "I would think that eventually we're going to have to have capabilities to take things out in orbit," Gen. Michael Ryan said of the future ability of the Pentagon to destroy enemy space- and ground-based arms threatening U.S. satellites. "And we had better not be second," he said in an interview with reporters. DefSec D.Rumsfeld recently gave the Air Force oversight over U.S. military space programs. He stressed, however, that the Bush administration had not decided whether the U.S. would become the first nation to station arms such as lasers in space. Ryan, who will retire next month as Air Force chief of staff, said Washington was too dependent on satellites for everything from spying to commerce and weather forecasting to leave them unprotected. "I would suggest that sometime in the future here we are going to have to come to a policy decision on whether we're going to use space for both defensive and offensive capabilities," he told reporters. new space plane? The general noted that the Air Force was developing arms including a laser based on a Boeing 747 aircraft within the atmosphere and examining the possibility of building a futuristic bomber that might fly at the edge of space to quickly reach remote land targets. "We have a huge equity in orbit," Ryan told reporters. "Wherever commerce has gone and our national interests have gone, so have gone our forces. On land, sea and in the air we tended to exploit the realm that we were dependent upon. "It (space satellites) is one of our asymmetrical advantages of this nation (for) intelligence, communications, reconnaissance, weather, navigation. We depend upon the integration of those things in orbit with what we do in the atmosphere and what we do on the ground," he said. "To the extent that should we lose them, it would be a huge blow." The general stressed that such assets had to be protected from electronic interference or outright destruction. "I think that we have in some way be able to protect those assets, at least defensively," Ryan said. "And that leads you to the thought that if you are going to be up there trying to protect them defensively, where do you cross the line on offensive operations?"

Unfortunately, fraudulent testing of missile defense components is far from ancient history. Nira Schwartz, a computer software expert who worked on tests of the NMD interceptor for TRW, filed a civil suit against the company in April 1996 charging that it forced her to misreport her findings on the critical question of whether the interceptor missile can tell the difference between a real warhead and a decoy. The documents in the case were unsealed earlier this year and featured in a March 7 front-page NYTimes story. The company has denied Schwartz's allegations, but another engineer who worked on the tests has backed her up. Since Schwartz's claims became public earlier this year, MIT missile defense expert Theodore Postol has conducted an independent analysis of the data generated by the test in question, and he has concluded that the results raise fundamental questions about the ability of any currently available technology to discriminate between warheads & decoys. Since this capability is essential for even a modest NMD system to have any chance of intercepting a handful of incoming warheads, TRW and the Pentagon have gone to great lengths to cover up this embarrassing fact. When Postol sent a letter to the White House outlining his findings, the Pentagon responded by ruling that the contents of Postol's letter should be classified on the grounds that they contained top-secret material. On May 25 the BMDO released a cursory letter charging that Postol's findings were "incomplete" and his conclusions "wrong" because "Dr. Postol is not considering all the capabilities of our system of systems." Postol fired back the same day at a DC press conference organized by the Global Research/Action Center on the Environment, presenting his technical critique of the NMD system in detail and slamming the Administration for "foot-dragging and playing politics with an important decision that directly affects the security of the nation" rather than appointing an impartial panel to investigate seriously his charges of fraud in the test program.
In addition to the evidence of outright fraud, the NMD program has recently been subjected to a flurry of questions from critics within the Pentagon and the US intelligence community. On May 19, a few days after Postol sent his letter to the White House, the Los Angeles Times published an interview with a high-level US intelligence official who flatly contradicted the Clinton Administration's contention that China has nothing to fear from a limited US NMD system. The official also noted that the North Korean and Iranian missile threats have not been moving along as rapidly as expected, and he asserted that the concept of the "rogue state" was in itself an impediment to objective analysis of the missile threat.

Meanwhile, a blue-ribbon panel chaired by former Reagan Administration Secretary of the Air Force Gen. Larry Welch has issued two scathing critiques of NMD program management, the first of which pointed out that the NMD system was on a far tighter testing schedule than any recent weapons development program of comparable scale. It went on to charge that the program was on a headlong "rush to failure." The second Welch report, released this past November, strongly encouraged the Administration to push back its NMD deployment decision to avoid "regressing to a very high risk schedule." In February a report by Philip Coyle, the Pentagon's director of operational test and evaluation, charged that the Pentagon was facing heavy pressure to "meet an artificial decision point in the development process."
There is one final element distorting the NMD testing program: corporate greed. The major corporate players in the NMD testing program, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, all have serious & direct conflicts of interest, since the results of the tests they are helping to carry out will determine whether they start reaping multibillion-dollar missile defense contracts over the next few years. Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon has tried to wave off charges of fraud involving TRW's NMD "hit to kill" vehicle by arguing that TRW's version has not been chosen for inclusion in the final NMD system. However, Bacon fails to mention that Boeing, which is now in charge of overall systems integration for the entire NMD project, designed the interceptor vehicle that has been the subject of the fraud allegations. Whether Boeing colluded with TRW's manipulation of test results or merely overlooked them, it doesn't bode well for its role as the principal monitoring agent for subcontractors. The fox is guarding the chicken coop: If Boeing is able to orchestrate a series of seemingly credible tests, it stands to make billions of dollars in production contracts for decades to come. This inherent conflict of interest at the heart of the NMD testing program is one of the factors that have led missile defense experts at MIT and the Union of Concerned Scientists to call for the appointment of an independent panel to assess the feasibility of missile defense before the President makes a deployment decision.

Boeing is not the only company with an interest in helping the Pentagon put the best face on the NMD program. Lockheed Martin, whose "legacy" company, Lockheed Aircraft, was in charge of the 1984 Homing Overlay Experiment, which was later exposed as fraudulent, brags in a recent edition of its company newsletter, Lockheed Martin Today, that it produces the rockets used to propel both the mock warhead and the "kill vehicle" involved in NMD "hit to kill" tests. This is certainly a convenient setup if the company and the BMDO are thinking of stacking the deck on the next intercept test to insure a successful result.
Of the four largest NMD contractors (the others are Boeing, Raytheon and TRW), Lockheed Martin has the most to gain. If US/Russian arms-reduction talks are stymied by US stubbornness on NMD, Lockheed Martin will be able to sustain its key nuclear weapons programs. And if NMD deployment moves forward, Lockheed Martin will receive billions in additional funding for production of numerous components and subcomponents of the national missile defense system. Given what's at stake, the companies have decided to leave nothing to chance. Since Republicans took control of both houses of Congress in January 1995, weapons industry PACs have given twice as much to Republican Congressional candidates as they have to Democrats, a far higher margin than prevailed when the Democrats ruled Capitol Hill, when they received about 55 percent of defense industry PAC funds, compared with 45 percent for Republicans. Hard-line Star Warriors have gotten the bulk of this industry largesse. A World Policy Institute analysis of two recent pro-Star Wars letters to President Clinton-one from 25 senators organized by Jesse Helms stating that they would kill any arms-control deal with the Russians that attempted to put any limits on the scope of future NMD deployments, the other from thirty-one Republican senators pushing the Ctr for Security Policy's pet project, a sea-based missile defense system-reveals that the signatories of these pro-Star Wars missives have received a total of nearly $2 million in PAC contributions from missile defense contractors in this election cycle.

Lockheed Martin has not neglected the presidential candidates. On the Republican side, Lockheed Martin vice president Bruce Jackson, who served as chairman of the US Committee to Expand NATO, was overheard by one of the authors at an industry gathering last year bragging about how the industry's troubles will be over if GWBush is elected, since Jackson would be personally writing the defense plank of the Republican platform. And Loral CEO Bernard Schwartz, who has longstanding ties to Lockheed Martin dating from when Lockheed absorbed Loral's defense unit in 1996, was the top individual donor of soft money to the Democratic Party in the 1996 presidential cycle; Loral employees gave $601,000 to Democratic Party committees. Schwartz has nearly doubled that amount in the run-up to the November 2000 elections, with $1.1 million in soft-money contributions to Democratic committees to date. He was briefly in the spotlight last year when he was accused of lobbying the Clinton admin to ease the standards for the export of satellite technology to China.

NMD and Beyond

William D. Hartung & Michelle Ciarrocca are the president's fellow and senior research associate, respectively, at the World Policy Institute at the New School. They are co-authors of Tangled Web: The Marketing of Missile Defense 1994-2000 (World Policy Institute). Research assistance provided by the Nation Institute's Investigative Fund.
Background & related Information
World Policy Institute "Star Wars Revisited," by William Hartung and Michelle Ciarrocca, April 2000. http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms

Union of Concerned Scientists "Countermeasures: A Technical Evaluation of the Operational Effectiveness of the Planned US National Missile Defense System," by UCS and the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, April 2000. http://www.ucsusa.org/arms/index.html

Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers and Council for a Livable World "Pushing the Limits: The Decision on National Missile Defense," by Stephen W. Young, April 2000. http://www.clw.org/coalition

Federation of American Scientists John Pike of FAS provides up-to-date news coverage, as well as useful links on missile defense. http://www.fas.org/starwars/index.html

Center for Defense Information   "Star Wars: New Hope or Phantom Menace?" video released 3.30.00 http://www.cdi.org

Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Reporting on global security, military affairs and nuclear issues. globenet.free-online.co.uk/

Don't Blow It "Tell President Clinton 'Don't Blow It!' Send him a free postcard and help make nuclear weapons a thing of the past." http://www.DontBlowIt.org

Center for Security Policy A not-for-profit, nonpartisan educational corporation established in 1988 by Frank Gaffney. http://www.security-policy.org

Heritage Foundation The conservative nonprofit think tank offers "a website devoted to disseminating information and policy analyses regarding U.S. national security issues." http://www.security-policy.org

Empower America DC policy organization founded in 1993 by Wm J. Bennett, Jack Kemp, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Vin Weber. http://www.empower.org

Congressional Budget Office "Budgetary and Technical Implications of the Administration's Plan for National Missile Defense," April 2000. http://www.cbo.gov

"Dir., Operational Test & Evaluation FY99 annual rpt - National Missile Defense," referred to as the Coyle Report. Submitted to Congress Feb. 2000 http://www.dote.osd.mil/reports/FY99

Within Defense Dept, Ballistic Missile Defense Organization is responsible for managing, directing and executing Ballistic Missile Defense Pgm. http://www.acq.osd.mil/bmdo

Common Dreams: The Rumsfeld Commission, Rev. Moon, on North Korea's supposed missile threat to US as motivation for Star Wars, by Robt Parry http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0103-07.htm

1998   Council for a Livable World on Rumsfeld Commission, in 1998 http://www.commondreams.org/pressreleases/July 98/072998d.htm

The Guardian, on Rumsfeld's opposition to intl war crimes tribunal http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0103-02.htm

In 1969, resigned his House seat to join Cabinet as an Asst to President & Dir. Office of Economic Opportunity.
In Dec. 1970, named Counsellor to the President; Oct. 1971 appt Dir. of Cost of Living Council.

Named U.S. Amb. to NATO Feb. 1973. Served as U.S. Permanent Rep. to N.Atlantic Council & Defense Planning Committee, and Nuclear Planning Group. In this responsibility, represented the U.S. on a wide range of military and diplomatic matters
Addtl awards incl Opportunities Industrial Center's Executive Govt Award & Distinguished Eagle Scout Award.

Cold Warrior collegiality U.S. Def•Sec Pentagon briefing 3.8.01  Transcript State Dept Intl Info Pgms Q: Mr. Secretary, in the wake of meetings yesterday with the S.Korean president, and with your meetings with Lord Robertson, intelligence experts still say that N.Korea , albeit it's very hard to get intelligence out of there, could possibly have ICBMs capable of hitting the U.S. in the next 4 or 5 years. And they also say that even going 4 more, it would be impossible to put even a limited defense system in place by then. What will you do if in fact N.Korea abridges the agreement and starts testing or starts building missiles capable of hitting the U.S.? Would you advise the president perhaps to conduct a first strike, or what would you do? Rumsfeld: (Laughs.) You've got to be kidding. (Laughter.) I mean … (laughter continues) [ He is so confident of his authority that he can deride & laugh at queries that parrot his own lies about rogue nations necessitating missile defenses. ] Robertson: "NATO … still based on these shared values of freedom, democracy, of free markets and of the rule of law. Rumsfeld sees NATO as a key tool of the U.S. and, indeed, of the western system as an agent of change, an agent of relevance, as an agent of peace & understanding and of stability in the world today. And U.S. leadership and active participation in NATO is still a key to the dynamism of the organization." [ Only the Arabs are better versed at hypocrisy than the English. Cheney & Rumsfeld fought tooth & claw to prolong the Cold War's milsec profiteering status quo. ] " … phased & conditioned release of the ground safety zone between Kosovo & Serbia, which the North Atlantic Council this morning decided upon; … the European Security and Defense Identity, … the Petersburg Tasks that will be umbilically connected to NATO & to NATO structures, … missile defense, an important & current issue, but where the alliance has no intention of being divided or split in any way and where we are keen to get right down to the promised consultations on missile defense: on the how and the when, rather than on the whether, which has been decided by the will of the American people." [ I must have been asleep during that plebescite. ] "… reassured by the commitment made at the North Atlantic Council foreign ministers meeting last week by Sec. Powell when he made it clear that we went into this common mission together, we will come out of it together. Rumsfeld panel propose sats' safeguard council ¹ ² ³ 1.8.01   WashPost Commission chaired by Donald H. Rumsfeld, President-elect Bush's nominee for secretary of defense, will recommend the creation of top-level posts to cope with foreign threats against U.S. satellites in orbit, people close to the commission said yesterday. The panel's approximately 100-page report, which is to be made public this week, stops short of calling for a new branch of the armed forces devoted to the military uses of space. That may disappoint some members of Congress who favor a so-called Space Force. But the Rumsfeld Commission will recommend steps to highlight the military importance of space, including re-establishment of a National Space Council in the White House and creation of a Defense Space Council at the Pentagon. There was a National Space Council, chaired by former vice president Dan Quayle, during the previous Bush administration, but it was dissolved by President Clinton. In addition to resurrecting the White House space panel, the Rumsfeld Commission wants to add a presidential special assistant for space on the National Security Council staff. The commission also will propose the naming of a new Air Force undersecretary of space who would oversee the National Reconnaissance Office, which builds and runs defense satellites. Competing demands for the use of America's spy satellites have been a continual source of rancor among intelligence agencies, the military and civilian policymakers. Missing from the commission's proposals is any discussion of developing offensive or defensive weapons in space, which some arms control experts fear could spark an arms race. Both Russia and the U.S. have been researching weapons to attack satellites, and China has warned that it might build such weapons if U.S. proceeds with a national missile defense system. Sen. Robert C. Smith R-NH, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee who pushed for establishment of the Rumsfeld Commission, told reporters that "we really have a lack of leadership and advocacy both in Congress and the executive branch [on space issues], and I'm hopeful that as an immediate result of this report, we can pull assets together in terms of responsibility and decision-making." Smith, a strong proponent of a separate Space Force, conceded that a new branch of the armed services cannot be created right away. "But we can evolve there, and to do that we have to put certain things in motion, and that we will be in a better position to do now," he said. Congress was not left out of the commission's deliberations, either. The report calls for creation of a Space Caucus on Capitol Hill and perhaps an Aerospace Power subcommittee attached to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. prospective dangers of D. Rumsfeld as Def.Sec   His belligerent tendencies guarantee a war in Colombia already likely:   http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0105-01.htm   Hysterical recommendations of 1998 Rumsfeld Commission, which endorsed NMD (National Missile Defense, new name for Reagan's "Star Wars" scheme, aka Strategic Defense Initiative, regularly discredited in every test-current technology still can't distinguish a nuclear warhead from a decoy balloon), are based on warnings about hostile "rogue states" and their threat against American people & American soil.

NATO Sec•Gen. Geo.Robertson: "… delighted to be here and to have my first meeting in the Pentagon with the new American secretary of Defense. This is the era of the defense minister: • a former defense minister, secretary general of NATO, • a former defense secretary, U.S. defense secretary • a former defense secretary filling the positions of U.S. vice president, and • a former defense secretary the UN special representative in Kosovo. But it's good to greet somebody who's got such a long track record with NATO." ¹ Rumsfeld:   "didn't mention to you, Lord Robertson, that I am the one who dedicated the NATO corridor here in this building a long time ago, and Joseph Luns was here for that."   … The Partnership for Peace group … 46 countries   Rumsfeld Proposes Defense Cuts ¹ ²   6.27.01   AP WASHINGTON   Bush admin Wed. submitted to Congress $329 billion defense budget for 2002 that proposes cutting Air Force fleet of B-1B bombers, retiring all 50 Peacekeeper long-range nuclear missiles and planning an unspecified number of base closings in 2003. Def.Sec Rumsfeld said the administration's amended 2002 defense budget is $18.4 billion more than President Bush had proposed in February and $33 billion more than the current defense budget. "If we are to extend this period of peace & prosperity, we need to prepare now for the new & different threats we will face in the decades ahead and not wait until they finally emerge,'' Rumsfeld said. Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news conference that the $18.4 billion increase is the biggest for any year since the mid- 1980s. Nonetheless Rumsfeld acknowledged that the increase does not meet all of the military service's needs for 2002 and leaves some important areas of military operations on a trend line that is "still negative.'' He blamed the Clinton administration for allowing spending in critical areas to slip year by year. "The coasting went on too long,'' he said. Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon's chief financial officer, told reporters that although the administration has no plans to close military bases in the coming year it hopes to persuade Congress that bases should be closed in 2003. He mentioned no specific bases and said the Pentagon was in the midst of developing a plan for how to proceed on this politically sensitive subject. "We are all across the map on this,'' he said, indicating that there was no consensus within the Pentagon on whether there should be a single round of base closings, multiple rounds or other approaches. Zakheim said experts have told the Pentagon that the military has about 25 percent too many bases. The decision to cut B-1Bs from the bomber force was the biggest surprise in the budget. Critics in Congress quickly accused the administration of playing politics, noting that the only two B-1B bases left would be in President Bush's home state of Texas and S.Dakota, home state of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Air Force says the B- 1Bs cost more than $200 million apiece. There originally were 104; 93 remain. The last one was built in 1988. Rumsfeld is asking Congress for authority to retire 33 of the 93 B-1Bs and consolidate the fleet at just 2 bases, Dyess Air Force Base in Texas and Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota. Zakheim said this would save $165 million in 2002, and that the savings would be used by the Air Force to modernize the remaining B-1B fleet. The change would end the B-1B mission for the 116th Bomb Wing at Robins Air Force Base near Macon, Ga., and the Kansas Air National Guard's 184th Bomb Wing at McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita. The consolidation would also affect a smaller number of bombers aigned to Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho. The amended budget request got a rocky reception from a pivotal Rep. Jim Nussle R-IA, House Budget Committee chairman. He threatened to block the proposed $18.4 billion increase until the Pentagon explains how it fits into its long-term budget plans. "This is getting very close to an irresponsible way to do it,'' Nussle said at a committee hearing. The B-1B decision would appear to indicate that Rumsfeld intends to keep the Air Force's fleet of B- 52 bombers. The irony of that is that the B-1B originally was proposed as a replacement for the B-52, which has been flying since the Vietnam War and is expected to last another 30 years. Members of Congress from affected states were not happy. "This is wrong. It stinks,'' said Sen. Zell Miller, D- GA. He said it could mean the elimination of 800 to 900 jobs in Georgia. The Air Force has not yet completed a $90 million complex at Robins to house the B-1s, which moved there 5 years ago. Sen. Pat Roberts, R-KS, member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, accused the Air Force of playing politics in the decision. "South Dakota is the home of the majority leader of the Senate. Texas is the home of the president. I have a little feeling about this,'' Roberts said. Sen. Max Cleland, D-GA, said he learned about the proposal Tuesday in a telephone call from Air Force Secretary John Roche, who was vacationing in France. "I couldn't believe it on policy grounds, couldn't believe the way it was handled, so secretly,'' he said. "There was no consultation with the Congress, no prior briefing, no transition plan, no economic plans for the communities. It looked like the Air Force was pressured into this decision by higher-ups.'' The B-1B, nicknamed the "Lancer,'' originally was built as a long-range nuclear bomber but was converted during the 1990s to a strictly non-nuclear role. The first version of the B-1, called the B-1A, was canceled in 1977 after 4 prototype bombers were built. Flight tests of B-1As continued through 1981, when President Reagan took office and ordered production of an improved variant, the B-1B, which is the version flying today.

But these rogue states are always places like N.Korea & MidEastern Muslim nations, which, if the Rumsfeld Commission's paranoid fantasies of aggression are correct, don't have the technology to undertake missile assaults on the US. Russia says it will respond to any U.S. antimissile system by equipping their missiles with more warheads. Rumsfeld, obviously hired by Bush because he supports NMD and has close ties with defense industry lobbyists, would promote policies weakening American security, which has the circular effect of justifying greater military spending (cf. Scott McLarty)

How Depleted Uranium Eroded U.S.-European Defense Cooperation
01.11.01   Tomas Valasek, sr analyst CDI: Weekly Defense Monitor vol.5 #2

As an emerging actor on the international scene, the EU naturally demands a say in defense and security policies. Hence the recent effort to establish a 60,000-strong EU Rapid Reaction Force and the necessary political and military bodies to guide it. What is not clear yet, however, is the relation between the emerging European superstate and the U.S.. In the defense realm, this translates into uncertainty about the European defense identity's relation to NATO. Some in Europe, most notably France, have sought to keep the EU completely separate from NATO. Although Europe and the U.S. see eye-to-eye on most defense issues, creation of a separate EU force carries the seeds of a conflict. The EU and NATO may find themselves unable to conduct joint operations as they used to for the past five decades. Moreover, should Brussels and Washington disagree on a security issue, there will be less incentive to seek common ground as Europe will have the ability to act independently. All decisions in NATO have to be made unanimously, thus forcing the allies to hear each other out and compromise.
Making a virtue out of necessity, the U.S. has publicly endorsed the European defense efforts. At the same time, Washington has sought to steer the EU's defense institution closer to NATO. The alliance's involvement in EU defense decisions would guarantee that Washington is at least consulted on, if not actually asked to approve, EU's military plans. To this end, U.S. officials have successfully worked with their close allies in Europe, Great Britain and Germany, to make sure that EU any defense agreements provided for close NATO involvement.

But proving once again that it is the little details that usually derail grand plans, the depleted uranium (DU) controversy is destroying much of the will in Europe to trust and work with the Americans. U.S. planes fired all of the controversial DU-coated rounds, which Italy, Spain, Portugal and other states now suspect of causing cancer in members of their peacekeeping forces. The European press has been merciless. "What kind of military alliance do we have where [we] must beg for information from the superpower?," wrote the Frankfurter Rundschau. "Confidence in the alliance has been shaken," wrote the respected French daily, Le Figaro. "It looks likely that a clash between the Americans and the Europeans cannot be avoided," wrote Italian daily La Repubblica. Never mind that Washington maintains that it informed its allies of the DU hazard back in 1999, that a link between DU and cancer has not been convincingly proven, and that the number of cases of cancer among peacekeepers may be well within the statistical average for the population at large. "The controversy about an alleged Balkan syndrome carries the traits of a panic," wrote the Suddeutsche Zeitung. Next time the European leaders discuss how closely to anchor the EU defense institution to NATO, the public will no doubt ask whether they want to be linked to an alliance which many Europeans are now convinced is killing its own soldiers.
But something positive may come out of the controversy. Washington has indeed at times treated its European allies with a cavalier attitude. Until recently, nobody has bothered to ask the allies what they think of the proposed U.S. national missile defense system, even though the program will not work without installations on the territory of European countries. U.S. pundits and officials routinely accuse Europe of not pulling its weight in the Balkans even though the EU pays 80% of non-military aid to Bosnia and Kosovo, and contributes two thirds of the peacekeeping troops (the U.S. share is 15%). One way to ensure continued European defense cooperation with the United States is to make NATO a more palatable choice for the Europeans. This need not be complicated. Washington needs to be more forthright with its allies, more willing to hear their views on issues of common interest, and more careful to check the facts before accusing Europe of not pulling its weight.

"Brokaw Slams Rather in Unguarded Moment Caught on Satellite Feed."
10/16/96   AP

Hartung index   Arms Trade Resource Ctr


Star Wars, Continued
The boondoggle that won't stop, and the corporate money that keeps it going
Wm. S. Hartung and Michelle Ciarrocca Multinational Monitor, October 2000

Rumsfeld: Star Wars Booster

Holes in the coverage excerpted
What's left out of reporting on missile defense
Nov.2000   Michelle Ciarrocca Extra

Special interests drive program

Data from the Center for Responsive Politics reveals that the "Big 4" missile defense contractors-Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and TRW-have given out almost $7 million in PAC and soft-money contributions since 1997. And in 1997 and 1998, the most recent years for which figures are available, the four spent a whopping $34 million on lobbying. The top missile defense contractors have also been generous supporters of the often-quoted Frank Gaffney Jr., a leading proponent of NMD who heads the Ctr for Security Policy in Washington. In a New York Times article (9.6.00), Gaffney is quoted calling ads from the disarmament group Peace Action "misleading." But it seems far more misleading that the article failed to mention that Gaffney's Ctr for Security Policy receives more than 15 percent of its annual revenue from corporate sponsors, incl Boeing & Lockheed Martin.

The Rumsfeld commission, which found that the missile threat facing the U.S. is "evolving more rapidly" than had been reported, was described as a "bipartisan commission that has been determining the threat posed to the U.S. by ballistic missiles" (Washington Post, 7.29.98). But the makeup of the commission, chaired by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, calls into question the group's impartiality. Ctr for Security Policy board members William Graham and William Schneider served on the panel, and CSP has publicly bragged that a number of its former staffers and interns went on to serve as staff members of the Rumsfeld commission. Donald Rumsfeld is a financial supporter of the Ctr for Security Policy, as well as a board member of Empower America, group that ran a series of pro-"Star Wars" radio ads during the 1998 elections. While 7.16.98 Long Island Newsday rightly noted that the commission was "created by the GOP congressional leadership," none of these personnel details were revealed in media coverage of the Rumsfeld report.

KARL GROSSMAN, Author of "Weapons In Space" & professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, Grossman said today: "Star Wars has received a huge push with the assumption of power by the Bush-Cheney administration, intimately linked to corporate interests committed to expanding space military activities. The goal, as U.S. military documents state [e.g., http://www.spacecom.af.mil/usspace], is to have the U.S. 'control space' and from space 'dominate' the Earth below.

That's why, in Nov. 2000, some 160 nations voted in the UN, the U.S. abstained, to reaffirm the Outer Space Treaty, the basic international law on space, enacted in 1967 to keep war out of space. Now the U.S. would push full-speed-ahead to make space a new arena of war. Spearheading the drive will be Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney, a former member of the TRW board. His wife, Lynne Cheney, remains on the Lockheed Martin board but is on a 'leave of absence.' Lockheed Martin, the world's biggest weapons manufacturer, and TRW are major Star Wars contractors and have spent many millions of dollars lobbying for the program
.

A main player, too, will be National Security Council deputy director-designee Stephen J. Hadley, Star Wars advocate whose Washington law firm represents Lockheed Martin. They will be working from a foreign policy platform put together at the GOP National Convention by a committee chaired by Bruce Jackson, vice president for corporate strategy and development at Lockheed Martin."
Institute for Public Accuracy

BUSH LEAGUE 1/3/01   The Progressive Review

Ctr for Public Inquiry more Shrub

accidental wit

THE REAL BIPARTISANSHIP ABOUT this election is this: the defense industry won. As we have pointed out, there has been a covert bipartisan agreement to dramatically increase the defense budget. That's a big reason Cheney and Lieberman were put on their respective tickets. Bush is not letting the industry down. Not only is Cheney a former member of the TRW board, his wife is on a "leave of absence" from Lockheed Martin, another major Star Wars contractor. Also, the new national security deputy, Stephen Hadley, works for a law firm that represents Lockheed Martin. Now this: Norman Mineta, the new transportation secretary, has been senior vice president and managing director of Lockheed Martin IMS.
The Washington Times is right in noting that Bush "has now assembled a Cabinet that looks more like America in its diversity than any of President Clinton's cabinets. In appointing two black men, one Asian-American man, four women (including a hispanic), hispanic man and a Lebanese-American man, Mr. Bush has assembled a Cabinet that will have just five non-Hispanic white men, assuming all his nominees are approved by the Senate."
What the Times doesn't say, however, is that when you include Star Warrior Donald Rumsfeld, Lockheed Martin and its industry kin will be better represented in the cabinet room than blacks, Asians or latinos. Now that's affirmative action.
[ Even the Clintons, venal & licentious as the best of them with reputation compromised to the hilt, had some sense of feigned shame and decorum. GWBush, steeped in privilege to the point of having no experience outside ironclad isolation from his own responsibility, daily admits conflict of interest in most news from his administration. It is a waste of time to hold him accountable when he can't grasp the concept. He must be replaced. ]

Bush jokes with journalists about cloning Cheney
3.25.01   Reuters

Bush style gives White House corporate feel
3.11.01   Richard L. Berke NYTimes

The recent release of Bush's budget blueprint underscores a telling difference between Bush and Clinton. By Card's estimation, Bush devoted "in the neighborhood of five hours" to meetings to discuss his budget proposal. By contrast, Gene Sperling, who for years was a top economic adviser to Clinton, said the former president spent at least 25 hours in official meetings assembling the budget in his first weeks in office, and 50 hours more in more casual settings. Bush left it to Cheney to preside over a small group of aides to actually draft the proposal. "There has been a sea change," said Kenneth Duberstein, who was a chief of staff for Reagan. "This is the first time in American history we've had a president and a prime minister."

[ Where Wm Casey was the corpse's hand of WWII on R.Reagan, Cheney is Vietnam haunting GWBush. ]

Another stark difference is how this administration handles politics. Though polling has been commissioned by the White House, Bush's pollsters joke that he has banned them from the Oval Office; they have yet to meet with him. Stanley Greenberg, Clinton's first pollster, said that in the early days of the Clinton administration he met with the president weekly in the Oval Office to review the latest surveys, and often spent several days a week in the White House in the early months. Pollsters and a dedicated orientation toward the hourly news cycle may be gone, but many people inside and outside the Bush White House say it is just as political as it was under Clinton, although in different ways. A close friend and adviser of Bush's said that Karl Rove, Bush's senior adviser, had spoken to him in specific terms about how the White House was reacting to the energy crisis in California, and how that might affect the president's re-election prospects there.
"It's just as political, but it's not in-your-face political," the adviser said. "It's more of a big- picture perspective. It's not, 'How can we score points for the moment?' " Bush's friends say he learned from his father that he cannot tune out the political implications of his job, and he learned from Clinton to seize opportunities to sell his programs. A prime example is how Bush traveled to swing states this week to sell his budget. "Clinton was so intimately involved in every detail," said Sen. John B. Breaux, D-La. "With Bush, it comes from the bottom and works its way up the channels. But it's not any less political. The trips around the country are a classic political operation. That's playing tough, hard politics."

An important reason for what has been widely regarded as a smooth takeover of the govt is that Bush has surrounded himself with veterans such as Cheney and Card. Staff members are also, by and large, older than those of past administrations, which is another reason for the more subdued White House. Several longtime govt observers said they expected members of the Cabinet to have far more latitude than those under Clinton. That is because of Bush's penchant to delegate and because he picked seasoned, independent people. "It's going back to a Cabinet govt," said former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y. "What's interesting to me is how many of the people here are people who have been here before and have a sense of this place. They are steady and not new to their work, and they're not wondering how it will all come out."
Still, it also appears the White House is in firm control of the Cabinet. When Christie Whitman, the EPA administrator, announced recently that she was letting stand a flurry of regulations imposed by Clinton, Card said she first had cleared it with his staff. "It is normal for major rules or major policy pronouncements to be coordinated with the White House," Card said. "The president is the leader of the executive branch of govt." Many officials in the Bush White House said they were struck by how there seemed to be far less back stabbing than there had been even in Bush's father's White House.
Even Democrats on the outside have noticed that. "I am impressed by how much this White House seems to be geared toward the president and his interests rather than self- promotion," said Douglas Sosnik, who was a top aide to Clinton for six years. "If there's a mistake, staffers take the blame and insulate Bush from it. I'm not sure I could always say that about the Clinton White House."

Bush to visit Camp David often
3.3.01   Sonya Ross AP

… Aides say Bush finds freedom at Camp David, as also the privacy he cherishes but gets now only in small doses. The place is heavily guarded by Marines, gates and surveillance cameras. The security allows Bush to do normal-guy stuff like watching movies and taking a morning jog in the clean mountain air. "Here at the White House, he runs on a treadmill," said spokesman Ari Fleischer. "When he travels on the road, he'll often run on a treadmill at his hotel room. So it's an opportunity for him to run outdoors, which he appreciates."
Yesterday's trip was Bush's fourth to Camp David since he took office Jan. 20. He met there last week with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. At one point, Bush took the wheel of a golf cart to take Blair and both their wives for a short drive. After the Blairs left, the Bushes lingered an extra day and attended church at the chapel. Much of the weekend was spent working on the address Bush delivered Tuesday to a joint session of Congress.

Donald Rumsfeld, hollow man 12/29/00   Libertarian Socialist News   p.o. box12244 Silver Spring, MD 20908 WashDC   George Bush has named Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary. Here are some background points: 1)   Rumsfeld is known to friend for always being politically "safe". When asked policy questions, he always equivocates and never gives a policy answer. Some question whether or not he actually has any opinions. Despite that, he has a history of membership in war-mongering organizations, and is tied to several major nefarious corporations. 2)   Rumsfeld is known to friends as "Rummy". 3)   Rumsfeld is closely tied to Monsanto, and has been an outspoken advocate of genetically modified food. 4)   Rumsfeld publically criticized the Democrats in 1995 for inviting Jewish-Russia mafia boss Grigory Loutchansky to a fundraiser. 5)   Loutchansky is a board member of an anti-Soviet group known as the Jamestown Foundation, which assisted Russian dissidents in coming to America in the 1980s, and is now working on assisting "Russia's transition to a free-market economy." 6)   Rumsfeld sits on the board of the Balkan Action Committee. Fellow board members incl Elie Wiesel, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. The board recommended US ground invasion of Serbia during Kosovo bombardment. All board members except Geraldine Ferraro were involved in Committee on the Present Danger, Jeane Kirkpatrick chair, which promoted U.S. "interventions" in Central America, Afghanistan, and Angola. 7)   Rumsfeld headed a Congressional Committee that investigated the Bay of Pigs Invasion and found no CIA wrongdoing, and is seen by some as a major advocate in Congress for expanded CIA powers during the 1960s. 10)   Rumsfeld, as a member of the "Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf" has urged US support, funds, arms and intervention on behalf of the anti-Hussein opposition in Iraq. Other members of the Committee incl Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, Martin Peretz (publisher of the New Republic), Casper Weinberger and Paul Wolfowitz.

The Saddam in Rumsfeld's closet 8.4.02   Jeremy Scahill ZNet "Man and the turtle are very much alike. Neither makes any progress without sticking his neck out." Donald Rumsfeld 5 years before Saddam Hussein's now infamous 1988 gassing of the Kurds, a key meeting took place in Baghdad that would play a significant role in forging close ties between Saddam Hussein & Washington. It happened at a time when Saddam was first alleged to have used chemical weapons. The late Dec. 1983 meeting paved the way for an official restoration of relations between Iraq & the US, which had been severed since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. With the Iran-Iraq war escalating, President Reagan dispatched his MidEast envoy, a former secretary of defense, to Baghdad with a hand-written letter to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and a message that Washington was willing at any moment to resume diplomatic relations. That envoy was Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld's Dec. 19-20, 1983 visit to Baghdad made him the highest-ranking US official to visit Iraq in 6 years. He met Saddam and the 2 discussed "topics of mutual interest," according to the Iraqi Foreign Ministry. "[Saddam] made it clear that Iraq was not interested in making mischief in the world," Rumsfeld later told NYTimes. "It struck us as useful to have a relationship, given that we were interested in solving the Mideast problems." Just 12 days after the meeting, on 1.1.84, Wash.Post reported that the U.S. "in a shift in policy, informed friendly Persian Gulf nations that the defeat of Iraq in the 3-year-old war with Iran would be 'contrary to U.S. interests' and has made several moves to prevent that result." In March of 1984, with the Iran-Iraq war growing more brutal by the day, Rumsfeld was back in Baghdad for meetings with then-Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz. On the day of his visit, March 24th, UPI reported from the U.N.: "Mustard gas laced with a nerve agent has been used on Iranian soldiers in the 43-month Persian Gulf War between Iran & Iraq, a team of U.N. experts has concluded... Meanwhile, in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, U.S. presidential envoy Donald Rumsfeld held talks with Foreign Minister Tarek Aziz (sic) on the Gulf war before leaving for an unspecified destination." The day before, the Iranian news agency alleged that Iraq launched another chemical weapons assault on the southern battlefront, injuring 600 Iranian soldiers. "Chemical weapons in the form of aerial bombs have been used in the areas inspected in Iran by the specialists," the U.N. report said. "The types of chemical agents used were bis-(2-chlorethyl)-sulfide, also known as mustard gas, and ethyl N, N-dimethylphosphoroamidocyanidate, a nerve agent known as Tabun." Prior to the release of the UN report, the US State Dept on March 5th issued statement saying "available evidence indicates that Iraq has used lethal chemical weapons." Commenting on the UN report, US Amb. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick was quoted by The New York Times as saying, "We think that the use of chemical weapons is a very serious matter. We've made that clear in general & particular." Compared with the rhetoric emanating from the current administration, based on speculations about what Saddam might have, Kirkpatrick's reaction was hardly a call to action. Most glaring is that Donald Rumsfeld was in Iraq as the 1984 UN report was issued and said nothing about the allegations of chemical weapons use, despite State Dept "evidence." On the contrary, NYTimes reported from Baghdad 3.29.84, "American diplomats pronounce themselves satisfied with relations between Iraq & U.S. and suggest that normal diplomatic ties have been restored in all but name." A month & a half later, in May 1984, Rumsfeld resigned. In Nov. that year, full diplomatic relations between Iraq & the US were fully restored. 2 years later, in an article about Rumsfeld's aspirations to run for the 1988 GOP presidential nomination, Chicago Tribune Magazine listed among Rumsfeld's achievements helping to "reopen U.S. relations with Iraq." The Tribune failed to mention that this help came at a time when, according to the US State Dept, Iraq was actively using chemical weapons. Throughout the period that Rumsfeld was Reagan's MidEast envoy, Iraq was frantically purchasing hardware from American firms, empowered by the White House to sell. The buying frenzy began immediately after Iraq was removed from the list of alleged sponsors of terrorism in 1982. According to 2.13.91 LA Times article: "First on Hussein's shopping list was helicopters; he bought 60 Hughes helicopters & trainers with little notice. However, a second order of 10 twin-engine Bell "Huey" helicopters, like those used to carry combat troops in Vietnam, prompted congressional opposition Aug. 1983... Nonetheless, the sale was approved." In 1984, according to LA Times, the State Dept, in the name of "increased American penetration of the extremely competitive civilian aircraft market", pushed through the sale of 45 Bell 214ST helicopters to Iraq. The helicopters, worth some $200 million, were originally designed for military purposes. NYTimes later reported Saddam "transferred many, if not all [of these helicopters] to his military." In 1988, Saddam's forces attacked Kurdish civilians with poisonous gas from Iraqi helicopters & planes. U.S. intelligence sources told The LA Times in 1991, they "believe that the American-built helicopters were among those dropping the deadly bombs." In response to the gassing, sweeping sanctions were unanimously passed by U.S. Senate that would have denied Iraq access to most US technology. The measure was killed by the White House. Sr officials later told reporters they did not press for punishment of Iraq at the time because they wanted to shore up Iraq's ability to pursue the war with Iran. Extensive research uncovered no public statements by Donald Rumsfeld publicly expressing even remote concern about Iraq's use or possession of chemical weapons until the week Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, when he appeared on an ABC news special. 8 years later, Donald Rumsfeld signed on to an "open letter" to President Clinton, calling on him to eliminate "the threat posed by Saddam." It urged Clinton to "provide the leadership necessary to save ourselves & the world from the scourge of Saddam & the weapons of mass destruction that he refuses to relinquish … the GWBush administration has failed to provide even a shred of concrete proof that Iraq has links to Al Qaeda or has resumed production of chemical or biological agents, Rumsfeld insists that "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

Interview With James Turner J. Baum & M.Baran Mission Possible Radio 1390 WZHF U.S. govt in collaboration with a major drug manufacturer Searle Pharmaceuticals, later bought by Monsanto, unleashed a very dangerous addictive drug on the world's population which causes symptoms as mild as migraine headaches to symptoms as serious as seizures, cancer, blindness and death. The drug is question is aspartame and marketed as NutraSweet, Equal and Spoonful. It is in every so-called diet soft drink on the shelf. Searle falsified test results about the safety of aspartame, bought off prosecutors who were supposed to prosecute them, they put in place a puppet as Commissioner of the FDA who approved this aspartame drug above the objections of the Scientific Boards of Inquiry. This is just one legacy of the Reagan administration. Several months later in Feb. 1981, President Reagan appointed a fellow named Arthur Hull Hayes the Commissioner of the FDA. This came through the transition team on which Donald Rumsfeld, the President of the Searle drug company served and within approximately 3 months or so, three or four months, Dr. Hayes overruled not only the Public Board of Inquiry but also a panel of scientists inside FDA who concured with the Board thatNutraSweet should not be allowed on the market because it might cause brain tumors. He overruled both of those groups and allowed for NutraSweet to reach the marketplace. That was for dry foods. He then repeated that act two years later for soft drinks. And interestingly enough, he was a physician working on contract doing studies for the Defense Dept at the time when Donald Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense. It is our supposition that that's where their paths crossed and that's how he was able to make his way through the transition team and be appointed FDA Comissioner. But in any case the Searle drug company managed to run a masterful public relations campaign on behalf of NutraSweet. One example, let me give you one example, Donald Rumsfeld had been the Director of the staff at the White House under President Ford and he had been a congressman prior to that and he had become of friend of the President of Pepsi Cola and when he became president of the Searle drug company which was in serious financial straignts, and really having great difficulty, he was hired to pull it out of its doldrums, when NutraSweet was about to be very severely criticized in a report from the Centers for Disease Control they ran a review of 635 complaints on NutraSweet and they said that there needed to be further studies and they identified the fact that approximately 25% of the people who reintroduced NutraSweet into their diet either by intention or by accident, suffered the same side effects that they had originally complained about and they pointed out several severe instances of NutraSweet difficulties. That study was to come out on a particular day as released by the CDC and the FDA and on that day, that very day, as if by coordination the Pepsi Cola company held a world wide press conference announcing that they were going to put NutraSweet in Diet Pepsi. After Dole selected Rumsfeld as policy coordinator, Rumsfeld profile orig. appeared as The New Boss 7/15/96   Michael Crowley New Republic Your presidential campaign has a dead battery. Your stump speeches don't energize crowds or move the polls. Voters see you as an inside player, a legislative sausage-maker without compelling rationale for your candidacy or coherent vision for your presidency. What to do? If you're Bob Dole, you turn to a 1970s-era bureaucratic operator who's also spent years in Washington in service of no particular ideology. That man is Donald Rumsfeld, who has held four Cabinet posts and who has just become policy coordinator for the Dole campaign. His job will be to choose and oversee teams of policy rainstormers. According to Bob Woodward's new book, The Choice, Rumsfeld's also near the top of Dole's running-mate wish-list. Why is Dole so enamored of him? The connection is personal. The two served in Congress together and have been close ever since. When Rumsfeld aborted his 1988 run for the presidency, he quickly backed Dole instead of the favorite, George Bush. It's easy to see why the two get along. Both are establishment, process Republicans. Dole is well-known to be happiest when surrounded by familiar faces from his generation. It's also true that the famously undisciplined Dole, who at times in past weeks has seemed to be running as much against his staff as against Bill Clinton, could benefit from Rumsfeld's managerial discipline. But the Dole campaign is bereft of ideas, and on that score its new policy coordinator seems likely only to make matters worse.

After turning down Nixon's offer of GOP chairmanship (Dole wandered into that bear-trap instead), Rumsfeld accepted the NATO ambassadorship in 1970. Then Gerald Ford, another sometime congressional ally, picked Rummy as his chief of staff, and he later served as Secretary of Defense. It's telling that Rumsfeld's most notable political legacy is probably " Rumsfeld's Rules," a blend of political aphorisms and do's & don'ts of running the White House collected from his days under Ford. Together the snippets form a short manual that preaches corporate-like management structure and efficient use of subordinates. "The President's key assets are his words and time," reads a typical entry. "Help him allocate each with care." It sounds banal, but a few recent administrations could have benefited from such banality.

The managerial skills touted in his "Rules" served Rumsfeld well during a long private-sector hiatus. During the late '70s & '80s, he oversaw profitable downsizing-propelled turnarounds at 2 major corporations: the pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle, whose stock soared more than 500%under his reign, and the technology giant General Instrument Corp.
Rumsfeld earned himself several million along the way, and a place among Fortune's "10 toughest bosses in America." While Rumsfeld's style may have translated into profits in the corporate world, in Washington it sometimes burned bridges. His tactics left him many enemies in the House. "Typical Rumsfeld," noted Bob Haldeman in his diary after Rummy faked out Nixon's staff in pursuit of an administration job in 1972. "Rather slimy maneuver," Haldeman called it, which is quite a comment considering the source. But few found much ideological passion behind Rumsfeld's climb. Pat Buchanan called him a "party pragmatist of vast ambition and no settled political philosophy." In 1988, Rumsfeld flirted with his own presidential run. Columnist George Will even drooled over the "hardness in his gaze & temperament," and pitched him as a potential "GOP heartthrob" to succeed Ronald Reagan.
But, a little like Dole today, Rumsfeld found that the qualities that served him well inside official Washington, his pragmatism and ability to get things done, did not serve him well on the big stage, where voters demanded a vision. His exit announcement reflected the lack of flair that had so quickly sunk his presidential bid: "For a dark horse, the probable imbalance of revenues and expenses early in the campaign raises the specter of a deficit of several millions of dollars," he droned. " … I am unwilling to proceed on a deficit basis." There is, however, one important exception to Rumsfeld's blurry political philosophy, and it could have important implications as he helps shape Dole's platform. Rumsfeld approaches hawk purity and is likely to encourage the Dole campaign's growing focus on defense.

Under Nixon, Rumsfeld was suspicious of detente with Russia, opposed the SALT II treaty and won bigger Pentagon budgets. Today, he champions the proposed missile defense system that Dole is touting to help win defense-industry-rich California. Yet this will probably prove small change given Dole's general lack of focus. The rap against Dole is that he doesn't know why he wants to be president. How is Rumsfeld, a man who didn't even know why he wanted to be president, supposed to find the answer?

Pentagon warlord   Donald Rumsfeld's secret plan to defeat Saddam relies on special forces, a new high-tech weapon and a defense secretary involved in every detail   1.19.03   M.Thompson & M.Duffy Time

Over the past few weeks, he has been holding up deployment papers at the last minute, demanding answers & explanations about which units are going where, why. He has been running similar drills for months on the generals & admirals, reworking the plans to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein. Army 4 star Gen. Franks, who would run the war as head of U.S. Central Command, actually prepared the plan. But as a Pentagon officer points out, "That misses the point. Franks may be the draftsman, but Rumsfeld's the architect."

As America prepares for a war that would require 25 times the number of troops deployed to fight the Taliban, Rumsfeld, 70, is on the line as never before in a long & storied career. Afghanistan was a highly unconventional war that relied in part on CIA agents carrying bags of cash to buy the loyalty of anti-Taliban fighters. But taking out Saddam would mean an old-fashioned kind of conflict, with thousands of Marines & G.I.s carrying rifles & grenades.
A war, if it comes, would be Rumsfeld's legacy. Win or lose, this would be Rumsfeld's war. Ever since Rumsfeld became something of a matinee idol with his daily war briefings, his relationship with the military he leads has become more complicated. Between his easy smile & his shiny little eyeglasses, he is vaguely reminiscent of F.D.R. and is brimming with the same sort of spooky confidence. His clipped, no-nonsense manner, leavened with plenty of "good gollies" & "dadburnits" and time-honored doubletalk, cut the press down to size during the Afghan war, scored high in the polls and turned the man who has the distinction of being both the youngest & the oldest person ever to hold the title of Secretary of Defense into a celebrity who is featured in the pages of Vanity Fair and skits on Saturday Night Live.

In the foxholes, Rumsfeld's take-no-prisoners bravura plays well with the soldiers who would be doing the fighting in Iraq. "We do what we're told to do," says a Marine commander, "but confidence is important to us." As you move up the ranks to the men who are supposed to be scripting this fight, however, not everyone is convinced that Rumsfeld should be managing it down to the last dog tag.
Retired Army Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, who led the first Gulf War, says he is "nervous" about the control Rumsfeld is exercising over the buildup. "It looks like Rumsfeld is totally, 100%, in charge," says Schwarzkopf. "He seems to be deeply immersed in the operational planning to the chagrin of most of the armed forces."

It is worth noting that before the shooting starts, another battle, fought behind the scenes, has already been lost & won. This one was waged via endless meetings & telephone calls during the past 8 months between Rumsfeld & Franks over exactly how to run this war. As with any battle plan, the military has raised some doubts; one officer estimates that as many as 1 in 3 senior officers questions the wisdom of a pre-emptive war with Iraq. The reasons aren't surprising: the U.S. military is already stretched across the globe, the war against Osama bin Laden is unfinished, and even if the march to Baghdad goes quickly, a long postwar occupation looks inevitable.
Military's assessment of success' chances are less optimistic than those of Administration theologians. Sessions produced an inevitable compromise between soldier & politician. If it's hard to tell who won, that's partly because, as Franks told Time, "It's not a matter of winning & losing; winning & losing occurs on a battlefield."

When Franks' rough draft first arrived at the Pentagon nearly a year ago, the plan was to invade Iraq from Kuwait in the south, from Turkey in the north and from Jordan in the west. Rumsfeld couldn't shake the notion that it seemed too familiar. He felt that the U.S. would face a far weaker Iraqi army than the one it crushed 12 years ago and has bombed incessantly for the past 5 years.
"Despite being told not to do it, [Franks] basically sent up a revised Gulf War I plan. Rumsfeld couldn't believe it," says a senior Pentagon official. Says a Central Command officer: "As soon as they started talking numbers, real disagreements broke out." While Franks said he needed at least 250,000 troops, Rumsfeld wanted no more than 100,000, fearing that larger numbers gathered on Saddam's doorstep would present a tempting target.

Rumsfeld was also enamored of the dubious idea, backed by a few gung-ho Pentagon civilians, that a small force could hook up with tribesmen in the north & south and get the job done quickly. That might have worked against ragtag warlords in Afghanistan, but it would be dangerous in Iraq, where Saddam has a 400,000-man army.
As the plan bounced between Washington & Franks' Tampa FL HQ, Franks' troop count fell and then rose again as war planners became convinced that they might have to engage in door-to-door fighting in Baghdad. The final number split the difference: war with Iraq could begin with as few as 150,000 U.S. troops in the region, ready to strike by mid-February, with 100,000 or more standing by in Europe & elsewhere.

"Rumsfeld is all about challenging your assumptions," says a senior Navy officer who works with him. "He wants proof of everything. His basic message is, Show me the data, and I'll show you the troops or the money." While Rumsfeld eventually accepted more forces than he had planned, he has retained a big say over how they would be deployed.
He demanded many more special-forces soldiers, never popular with the regular Army, be added to the mix. The commandos' primary mission: disable Saddam's biological, chemical and nuclear-weapons capabilities. "He wants them to go after weapons of mass destruction," says a Central Command officer. "They were ancillary in Franks' plan, but they've become critical in Rumsfeld's plan." Rumsfeld also assigned some special forces to hunt for Scud missiles.

Rummy, as he's known, also prevailed on the timetable. Franks wanted Air Force bombers to pound Iraqi positions for 10 to 14 days before starting a ground war, far shorter than the 39-day air campaign in 1991 but long enough, Franks said, to pulverize any Iraqi defenses before the infantry begins to move. Rumsfeld balked at that request, cutting the air-war plan to 7 days or less, since he believes a combined campaign will shorten the battle & save lives.
Rumsfeld pushed his foot to the floor on a ground war too, insisting that once the real shooting starts, U.S. tanks & other armored vehicles should race ahead of their supply lines toward Baghdad in days, if not hours, instead of maintaining a moderate pace to allow slower fuel trucks to keep up.

The ambitious plan is classic Rumsfeld. Brookings Institution military analyst Michael O'Hanlon praises the approach, which relies heavily on special forces & unmanned drones. "Rumsfeld wanted to do something more innovative than have a quarter-million armor-centric troops marching up the Tigris-Euphrates valley," says O'Hanlon.
Rumsfeld clearly decided that his civilian advisers who were pushing for the Afghan model, sending in 75,000 U.S. troops to back the Shi'ites & Kurds as they fight to overthrow Saddam, were wrong. "Franks was basically right on how many troops we need," O'Hanlon says, "and Rumsfeld listened to him."
Some former Pentagon officials are worried about the Secretary's unusually heavy hand in the planning game. "Rumsfeld is running this on a very short string," says retired general Merrill McPeak, Air Force Chief of Staff during the Gulf War. "I'm sure that's a source of frustration for Tommy Franks, but this is a Rumsfeld show. He's really running this buildup, hands on the throttle & steering wheel. If I were there, I'd be contemplating resignation daily."

Franks dismisses McPeak's concerns. "Everyone who ever wore the uniform and no longer wears the uniform is automatically out of date," he says. "[Rumsfeld] challenges, he probes, he manages, he asks questions, and there never, ever has been a point, at least on my side of the equation, where I have felt like I needed to argue with him about an issue. There has never been an occasion where the Secretary has thrown me or one of my plans or ideas out of the room. That is not his style."
Adds Franks: "I have no desire to suck up to the Secretary, but I'll tell you he is a terrific manager. And I have been a combat soldier for a long time. The nexus of the two is very powerful for this country." Another Pentagon official puts it this way: "There are hundreds of one-star generals & action officers who complain that Rumsfeld's not listening to the military. But the truth is that he is. He just isn't listening to them."

Rumsfeld continues to shift troops around as nations fall in & out of the coalition against Saddam. U.S. diplomats worked overtime last week trying to win basing rights for 15,000 troops in Turkey, and they remain optimistic that Saudi Arabia will join Kuwait in allowing U.S. troops to stage from its soil.
Rumsfeld also is making an ever growing list of things that could go wrong in a war with Iraq and peppering his officers to anticipate them. "He has an unsettling tendency to do that," an associate says. As Rumsfeld put it recently, "I'm never satisfied. It's genetic with me."

Rumsfeld was 9, living in a Chicago suburb, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. His father put his real- estate career on hold to join the Navy and fight in the Pacific. "In WWII there were suicide pilots flying their aircraft into our ships," the Secretary told guests at an awards dinner last year. "Today a new enemy is seeking global power and has flown our own airliners into our buildings on suicide missions."
During WWII, Rumsfeld attended school in 5 cities in 4 different regions of the U.S. By age 14, he had held 16 part- time jobs, delivering newspapers & selling magazines in Illinois; raising chickens, watermelons and cantaloupes in N.Carolina; chopping wood, delivering ice and digging razor clams in the Pacific Northwest; gardening and doing odd jobs in California.

After high school he wrestled at Princeton for political science degree. After a 3 year stint as a Navy pilot, he became an investment banker in Chicago. He was a young man in a hurry. Rumsfeld ran for Congress in 1962 and arrived in Washington at the age of 30, during President Kennedy's last year in office.
One of several Young Turks in the House incl Bob Dole, Gerald Ford and George Herbert Walker Bush, Rumsfeld organized his pals into an informal club and served 4 terms before leaping to the Nixon White House. There he rose through various mid-level posts and became, within 4 years, NATO ambassador.

He maintained close friendship with Allard Lowenstein, famed liberal organizer. Rumsfeld took Lowenstein to GOP conventions; Lowenstein returned the favor. From the beginning, Rumsfeld's peers noticed that he was, as one puts it, "tough, competitive and transparently political." He was also better organized than anyone else. That's one reason that, after Nixon resigned in 1974, Ford brought Rumsfeld back from NATO to be his top White House aide and bring order to a West Wing in chaos.
Rumsfeld proved himself handy with the knives: he maneuvered constantly against rivals while keeping his agenda a secret. "You'll never know what he is really thinking," says a colleague from the Ford years. Rumsfeld was not afraid of anyone, not even the greatest infighter of them all, then Sec.State Kissinger. "Your wife was measuring my office the other day, Don," Kissinger once said to Rumsfeld, just to get a rise.

Many in Ford's inner circle believed that by 1975, Rumsfeld had designs on the presidency. Other top GOP were poised to plunge in after Nixon exited, but few moved as fearlessly as Rumsfeld. He began seeking ways to gain quick foreign policy experience. At his urging, Ford installed a fast-rising Rumsfeld protege named Dick Cheney in the chief of staff's job. Rumsfeld sent his rival for VP Geo.Bush to a politically toxic job at the CIA. At age 43, Rumsfeld became the youngest Pentagon chief in history.
When Ford teamed with Dole to lose to Jimmy Carter in 1976, Rumsfeld did something most Washington comers would rather die than try: he disappeared. For much of the next 25 years, he stayed out of the limelight, serving as CEO of GD Searle, maker of NutraSweet, then as chief of General Instrument Corp., maker of cable-TV boxes that is now owned by Motorola.

A huge success at business, he missed politics; he once said he never should have left. But his attempts to stage a comeback always ran aground. He tried for No. 2 spot on the 1980 Reagan ticket, losing to old rival George H.W. Bush, and launched a brief run at the G.O.P. nomination in 1988, losing out once again to Bush. By then the Rumsfeld-Bush rivalry was openly acidic: when Rumsfeld withdrew from the '88 race, he sent Bush a check for $100 or so, noting in an accompanying letter that he had sent the same amount to all Bush's rivals, thus hedging his bets.

Self-employed for most of the 1990s, Rumsfeld made a cameo appearance in the 1996 race when his old friend Dole took him on as a campaign chairman and even briefly considered him for the vice presidency. But Rumsfeld's political stars failed to align. Newt Gingrich asked him to run a commission on the missile threat in the final years of the Clinton era, a pulpit Rumsfeld used to warn GOP hopefuls of looming threats from Iraq, North Korea and China.
Over the years, he became rich, bought a gigantic spread in Taos, NM, and was living quietly with Joyce, his high school sweetheart & wife of 48 years, when old charge Cheney asked him to come back and work for Bush's son.

Ask a general officer to name the No. 1 theme of Rumsfeld's latest Pentagon tour, and the answer probably won't be war. At the heart of Rumsfeld's activism is a desire to re-establish civilian control over a military that ran circles around the Clinton Administration. Not long after arriving in 2001, Rumsfeld announced plans to "transform" the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines into lighter, faster, stealthier fighting units.
To the guys in uniform, "transform" meant not only cuts but also civilian oversight, so the military did what it does best: it prepared for a long siege. Rumsfeld ran into a wall of generals, Congressmen, lobbyists and weapons makers, who worked quietly together behind Rumsfeld's back to foil his plans. Rumsfeld was among the first to grasp what others would take months to understand: that threats to America overseas were no longer deterred by tanks, bombers and aircraft carriers.

However clean his logic, getting the generals to give up their gadgets was turning out to be much dirtier work. "This is a very large organization," says General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, "and as with any ship, there's a lot of inertia that won't allow you to turn it 10 degrees. You need energetic people to make that happen." But one man was no match for the nation's 4 military services. Rumsfeld found he could not make a move without its being leaked to the newspapers, and pretty soon he knew he was beaten.
Right after Labor Day 2001, Rumsfeld declared "the Pentagon bureaucracy" a mortal enemy of the U.S. The next day, the Pentagon was attacked by terrorists. Rumsfeld & the services put aside their feud for a real war, and over time the need to transform things seemed to disappear, partly because the terrorist attacks opened the cash spigot and hard choices didn't seem necessary.

Instead of having to choose either weapons of the future or those of the past, the Pentagon last year bought both. Rumsfeld has canceled only a single major weapons program in two years, the $11 billion Army Crusader artillery gun, while allowing such dubious programs as the Air Force's $200 million F-22 Raptor fighter and the Navy's $2 billion Virginia-class submarines to move forward.
Everyone knows there isn't enough money to pay for all these weapons (and others on the drafting board) unless defense budgets continue to rise dramatically and almost no one thinks that will happen. "We have not totally left behind the cold war legacy," Myers told Time. "We need to do a lot of work to make ourselves agile & flexible to address the new security environment."

Rumsfeld arrives at his office each day at 6:30 a.m. and typically stays at his post for 12 hours before heading home and working several more hours. He often speaks first to Franks and then joins a conference call with Condoleezza Rice & Colin Powell. Focused as he has been on Iraq, the Secretary isn't preoccupied: his influence is felt across the board, on arms control, China policy, the North Korean crisis and the still fruitless hunt for bin Laden.
He has backed Homeland Security Dept creation and jump-started a military command to support its work. But he drew the line when Congress pressed the President to place all U.S. intelligence assets, incl military intelligence, under CIA control.

Among those in the Bush inner circle, Rumsfeld is closest to Cheney philosophically & personally. Friends for 35 years, the two men talk about everything, incl the state of the economy. Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, describes his boss as "a constant, active source of energy." Where Rumsfeld goes, Wolfowitz says, "he kind of generates a mini-storm." GOP senators complained to White House chief of staff Andrew Card that Rumsfeld was keeping them in the dark about war plans & other military issues. So last week Rumsfeld reported to Capitol Hill for a 21/2-hour kiss-&-make-up session with Senators. Asked later if he had been ignoring his minders, Rumsfeld said, "I don't think there is a problem."

Truculent attitude most irritates many military men. Some who have worked with Rumsfeld say his interpersonal skills are shabby, however charming he is on camera. "Rumsfeld's a bully; he's arrogant, and he has a huge ego," says a sr Army officer with more than 30 years' experience in uniform. The loudest cries come from the Army, where Rumsfeld & his troops have kneecapped the 2 men in charge.
Rumsfeld let it be known last April that the Army's top general Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, was a lame duck 15 months before his term was slated to end. "It was condescending & a little bit cruel," says retired 4 star Army general Barry McCaffrey. A month later, Rumsfeld loyalists made it clear that Army Sec Thomas White, former Enron executive who vainly tried to thwart Rumsfeld's decision to kill the Crusader, was one more mistake away from losing his job.
"It's pretty clear that the Army is going to be the big loser," says a top Reagan-era Pentagon aide Lawrence Korb. "If it were not for the war in Afghanistan and the looming war in Iraq, I'm sure they would already be cutting 2 Army divisions." Perhaps Rumsfeld is counting on the first war of the 21st century to shake the brass out of its cold war mentality. But it may be that he has already accomplished most of what he came to do: reassert civilian control of a military that had grown used to getting its way.
As photocopiers cranked out the deployment orders last week for Rumsfeld to consider at his own unpredictable pace, top military officers admitted they are scrambling to think ahead, no longer waiting for him to O.K. their every move. Any delay, they said, would be risky with a man like Rumsfeld prowling the halls. "We're sending troops forward without deployment orders," a top Navy officer conceded last week. "We don't want to get caught flat- footed when Rumsfeld asks, 'How come you guys haven't left yet?'"

In "Rumsfeld's Rules," Defense Secretary-designate Donald H. Rumsfeld shows far more than a passing interest in the art of intelligence analysis, quoting Confucius, Machiavelli, Colin L. Powell and others on a discipline made up of "knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns." Although Rumsfeld began compiling the collection of personal reflections & quotations 40 years ago as he first arrived in Washington, his ruminations on intelligence stem from his role 2 years ago as chairman of a congressional committee on ballistic missile threats to U.S. national security. From Machiavelli, Rumsfeld draws insight on how best to view an adversary's propensity to act: "Never assume the other guy will never do something you would never do."
From Confucius, he cites the sage's definition of intellectual honesty: "When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it: This is knowledge." And from Powell, President-elect Bush's pick for secretary of state, he defines how analysts should inform the policymakers for whom they toil: "Tell them what you know. Tell them what you don't know. And, only then, tell them what you think." Rumsfeld also quotes Richard Haver, a former official in Navy intelligence now serving as Bush's transition director for the intelligence community: "Nothing ages so quickly as yesterday's vision of the future."

Rummy rant wins dubious honor 12.2.03   AP London   DefSec Rumsfeld won this year's "Foot in Mouth" award for the most baffling statement by a public figure. Britain's Plain English Campaign, scourge of jargon, clichés and legalese, announced the honors Tuesday, giving runner-up to California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The top prize went to Rumsfeld for this logic-twister he gave at a press briefing on Iraq: "Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns, there are things we know we know," Rumsfeld said. "We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know." "We think we know what he means," said Plain English Campaign spokesman John Lister. "But we don't know if we really know."

As usual, Rumsfeld stares down the storm 7.1.05   Mark Mazzetti L.A. Times Wash.D.C.   At the darkest moment of his Pentagon tenure, when the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal was gathering steam and many in Washington were betting on his swift exit, DefSec Rumsfeld boarded a C-17 cargo plane last year and made an emergency trip to Baghdad. There, Rumsfeld told a throng of U.S. troops that he had no intention of going down without a fight. "It's a fact," Rumsfeld said. "I'm a survivor." Back home, Rumsfeld's trip became fodder for late-night television. "Yeah, a survivor about to be voted off the island," Jay Leno cracked on "The Tonight Show." Yet in Washington's own brand of reality TV, where Machiavellian intrigue is not a ratings game, Rumsfeld has done far more than survive. 5 months into President Bush's second term, Rumsfeld's influence within the administration shows no sign of waning. Even as the war in Iraq casts a long shadow over the reform agenda that Rumsfeld is pushing at the Pentagon, the Defense chief who remains a magnet for controversy is staying on the offensive. With public support for the Iraq war declining and the number of critics on Capitol Hill growing, Rumsfeld in the last week emerged again as the Bush Cabinet's most prominent spokesman for the war effort.

3 days before appearing on talk shows last Sunday, the 72-year-old Defense secretary withstood eight hours of congressional questioning, peppered with lawmakers' harsh criticism about the war's progress. Afterward, aides said Rumsfeld spent little time worrying about critics such as Sen. Edward M. Kennedy D-MA, who characterized Iraq as a "quagmire" and called for the Defense secretary's resignation.

"He doesn't dwell and is always looking ahead to the next thing. This is not a guy who looks back and agonizes," said Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita, who is also one of Rumsfeld's closest advisors.
Beyond Iraq, the White House has given Rumsfeld an unusually long leash that allows him to hold forth on issues far outside his portfolio as Defense secretary. During the first stop of a two-continent tour last month, Rumsfeld caused a sensation when he delivered a speech in Singapore to Asian defense ministers warning of the threat that China's military poses to the balance of power in the Pacific. The speech was the buzz of the two-day conference, and not just because Rumsfeld chose to fire a warning shot at China right in the emerging giant's backyard. Straying from purely military issues, the Defense secretary urged the Chinese to speed the pace of political reforms and pressed China to lean on North Korea to return to diplomatic talks about its nuclear program.

Even Bush administration critics who attended the conference were amazed at the breadth of topics the White House allows Rumsfeld to weigh in on, and at a time when the Bush administration is wrestling with the question of how hard a stance to take toward China.
"He's not just speaking as the defense minister. It's like a super minister, speaking on trade, diplomatic and other economic issues," said Kurt Campbell, the head of Asia policy at the Pentagon during the Clinton administration who attended the speech in Singapore. "It's really quite remarkable, and it's something we really haven't seen before in the past."

In his sixth decade of govt service, Rumsfeld still earns his reputation as one of Washington's most adept bureaucratic warriors. For example, the creation of national intelligence director to oversee the nation's $40-billion intelligence apparatus led to predictions that the power of the Defense secretary, who historically has controlled most of the intelligence budget, would greatly diminish.
Bush has indeed given John D. Negroponte, the spy chief, unprecedented power. Yet Rumsfeld is vastly expanding the Pentagon's role in clandestine espionage operations, sending special operations troops and civilian Defense Dept personnel on intelligence missions that traditionally have been the work of CIA spies.

This effort has rankled some State Dept officials, who say U.S. embassies abroad have not been kept informed about the Pentagon missions. Yet the Defense Dept has not surrendered its prerogatives. The White House recently signed off on procedures allowing Pentagon spies on clandestine missions to report directly to regional military commanders, not U.S. embassies.
Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, Negroponte's deputy, said Wednesday that the Pentagon and CIA are in the process of forging a "memorandum of understanding" regarding intelligence operations. According to one senior intelligence official, the two departments are negotiating how soldiers and spies can both run intelligence missions against adversaries without encroaching on each others' turf.

At home and abroad, Rumsfeld's role in the military and political battles of the past 4 years has assured him a spot as one of America's most important Defense secretaries. What remains unclear, however, is how history will judge his tenure at the Pentagon.
Despite all of Rumsfeld's initiatives to transform the Pentagon, many agree that his ultimate legacy will hinge on two outcomes: whether Iraq can emerge from its crucible of violence before the American public pushes in earnest for a troop withdrawal, and whether a drawdown in Iraq can occur before the all-volunteer military buckles under the weight of its global demands.

"If things turn out well in Iraq, he will be the man known for reforming the military and this building," said a senior military officer at the Pentagon. "If Iraq goes south, fair or not, he will go down as the man who bullied the military into an unpopular war."
John F. Lehman, secretary of the Navy during the Reagan presidency and a member of the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, said the "jury is still out" on how Rumsfeld will be regarded by history, yet Rumsfeld has found the perfect formula for longevity in an often-brutal job.
"He knows that you can't accomplish anything in the bureaucracy unless you have the confidence of the president. He clearly does," Lehman said. "And you have to stay there a long time, because the bureaucracy can always just wait you out." Lehman added: "I think he's settled in for the duration."

Rumsfeld's much-publicized battles with the generals over the pace of Pentagon reform have largely died down, in part because Rumsfeld's long tenure has allowed him to promote officers who accept his vision of a lighter, leaner military. Unlike many of his predecessors, Rumsfeld devotes much of his time to scrutinizing the candidacies of one- and two-star generals and admirals for lower posts, an influence over the Pentagon's "farm system" that ensures a legacy at the Pentagon years after he is gone.
The height of the Abu Ghraib scandal, a period during which Rumsfeld twice submitted his resignation to President Bush, was hardly the only moment when many in Washington predicted that Rumsfeld's days at the Pentagon were numbered.
During the summer before 9.11.01, when top military leaders were protecting prized weapons and blocking Rumsfeld's push to transform the military, conventional wisdom was that Rumsfeld had been outmaneuvered by an entrenched military bureaucracy and that he had lost the White House's confidence.

More recently, during a trip to Kuwait Dec. 2004, one soldier sharply questioned Rumsfeld about why reservists heading into Iraq lacked proper equipt and were resorting to "hillbilly armor" to protect their combat vehicles. Rumsfeld's reply, "You go to war with the army you have", was widely perceived as callous and out of touch. It led Sen. John McCain R-AZ to declare he had no confidence in Rumsfeld's leadership.
Rumsfeld weathered all these storms, emerging each time with his clout inside the White House intact. Even with the ascension of Condoleezza Rice as a secretary of State who, unlike predecessor Colin L. Powell, has Bush's ear, Rumsfeld is undiminished. Some administration officials point out that the difference is that while Rumsfeld used to dominate the meetings of Bush's war cabinet, Rice now shares the spotlight.

Rumsfeld often says the judgment of history means more than the daily musings of pundits and editorial writers. As violence in Iraq shows no sign of abating, he evinces little doubt that, in the end, he will be proved right. During the surprise May 2004 trip to Baghdad after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Rumsfeld told the assembled troops that he had stopped reading newspapers and that on the plane to Iraq he instead passed the time reading a book about the Civil War to put the current struggles in context.
During last week's contentious hearings on Capitol Hill, amid flagging public support for the U.S. mission in Iraq, Rumsfeld drew parallels between the Iraq war and the dark days of America's Revolutionary War. He also quoted Abraham Lincoln telling Union soldiers, "I beg of you, as citizens of this great Republic, not to let your minds be carried off from the great work we have before us."
"That was good advice," Rumsfeld said.

Rumsfeld's prickly, often-abrasive style has at times rankled longtime U.S. allies. He has taken a more diplomatic tack in recent months, even remarking during a European trip this year that it was "Old Rumsfeld" who made the infamous comments about "Old Europe" concerning French and German criticism of U.S. preparations for the 2003 war in Iraq.
He has little hesitation about barreling down paths where diplomats often fear to tread. One recent target of Rumsfeld's verbal barbs has been Russia. The Defense secretary has criticized Russian govt for its close financial ties with Syria and for selling 100,000 AK-47 rifles to President Hugo Chavez's govt in Venezuela.   ¹
The issues were expected to come up when Rumsfeld met with Russian Defense Minister Sergei B. Ivanov last month in Brussels. As the two men shook hands amid popping flashbulbs, video cameras and boom microphones, the smiling Ivanov fired the first shot.
"Mr. Rumsfeld, where is your Kalashnikov?" Ivanov asked.
Rumsfeld pretended to look inside the jacket of his dark flannel suit, looked back up at Ivanov, and shot back. "I must have given it to Venezuela," he said, grinning. The two men turned, walked into a conference room and shut the door.

daddy's ghost   click pic for parapet scene
  "It's their reality. We just live & die in it."   per Bushworld

Bush backs brother Jeb for White House
5.10.06   Nedra Pickler AP