Abstract
DARPA's robocar race
If the Defense Ad-vanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has its way, the next ground war the United States fights may closely resemble an episode of BattleBots–the TV show that pits robotic vehicles with names like Berzerker 2000 and The Piecemaker (built by amateur inventors and weekend mechanics) against each other in a last-machine-standing brawl.
In a competition open to all, DARPA is offering $1 million to the design team that develops an unmanned, totally autonomous ground vehicle that navigates an as-yet-to-be-determined course from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in the fastest time. The agency is specifically looking outside the defense industry to inject a greater level of creativity into its unmanned, ground combat vehicle program.
“By bringing together leaders in business, defense, technology, and academia with nontraditional partners in fields such as robotics, entertainment, and off-road racing, we will develop synergies that foster new ways of thinking,” said DARPA Director Anthony Tether in a February 27 story on RaceFan.com.
The $1 million challenge: to devise a vehicle smart enough to travel from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, all on its own.
Whether those new ways of thinking will foster an actual U.S. military weapon remains to be seen. The winner must not only finish first but must complete the course in 10 hours. If no vehicle crosses the “arrival line” in time, the $1 million will roll over into the following year (Congress authorized the prize through 2007).
And the technological challenges presented by even the most basic tasks are great, says Dave van Gogh, a professor of mechanical engineering who is heading up a team of undergraduates from the California Institute of Technology: How do you distinguish between a bush (which you can run over) and a rock (which you can't)? How do you distinguish between a puddle of water (which you can safely cross) and a deep lake (in which you'll sink)?
Van Gogh believes that “to win this race, the average speed needs to be 25 mph, which means at certain points, the vehicle will need to be travelling at over 30 mph, perhaps as high as 60 mph. This is an extreme challenge to current technologies as they stand.”
DARPA has specified neither the exact course nor the exact distance, except to say that the race will originate in the Los Angeles area, conclude near Las Vegas, and include less than 300 miles of “off-road” travel. Vehicles will be expected to navigate ditches, open water, rocks, and construction, and pass any number of “waypoints” (specific latitude and longitude readings) along the route on their own, without remote control. Entries that do not reach waypoints in the required time will be immediately removed from the course, so there is no margin for error.
The contest, announced earlier this year, drew an enthusiastic and larger than expected crowd February 22 to the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles to review the objectives, rules, and technical requirements. The 400-strong gathering included a platoon of robot hobbyists, university researchers, and representatives from Intel, Boeing, Rockwell Scientific, and dozens of other tech companies. While some considered the task daunting, attendees generally commended the contest structure of the program.
The Grand Challenge, as it has been christened, allows people to focus on the problems of off-road unmanned driving for moderate periods of time, obstacle detection and avoidance, and other autonomous vehicle challenges “without having to please a sponsor or funding agent,” says David Parish, president and chief executive officer at Om-nitech Robotics International LLC, an Engle-wood, Colorado-based developer of control systems for unmanned ground vehicles. “Results are all that count. The approach is common in racing but unheard of in government contracting.”
Omnitech plans on having at least one serious entry in the race and may support multiple teams. Other entries are being considered by groups that range from the University of Iowa to Thompson Motor Sports to suggestively named private concerns like Team Rig To Kill.
Applications for the race can be obtained at the DARPA Web site (www.darpa.mil) and are due by noon on October 14, along with a technical paper describing the Grand Challenge vehicle. Qualification inspections and demonstrations will take place March 12, 2004, with the race scheduled for the following day.
One rule will surely disappoint BattleBots fans, though: No vehicle may intentionally come into physical contact with other vehicles.
Paul Rogers is a Chicago-based freelance writer.
Bionic kitty, pigeon alarms, and the dolphins of war
War is for the dogs, the old saying goes–but in the war on terror, it's also for the pigeons, monkeys, sea lions, dolphins, and chickens. This wartime menagerie isn't as odd as it might sound; the animal kingdom has been recruited into military service for thousands of years, from Hannibal's elephants to glow worms in World War I, when soldiers smashed them into goo for nighttime signals.
Whether an animal is four-legged, flippered, or feathered, the fighting forces can find a use for it. At least nine navy-trained bottlenose dolphins were flown to the Persian Gulf during the conflict in Iraq to help mark mines and clear waterways for shipments of humanitarian aid. Other flippers on the frontlines include California sea lions, at least one of which was deployed to support missions for Operation Enduring Freedom. Valued for their ability to see in very low light and for their agility, the sea lions (or “Shallow Water Intruder Detection Systems”) locate suspicious underwater objects.
A navy sea lion.
The navy trains the dolphins and sea lions to “detect, locate, and mark mines so human divers can deal with them appropriately before they damage or sink military or civilian ships,” according to the navy, “and they can also detect and mark enemy swimmers who pose a threat to people, vessels, and harbor facilities.” (In the past, the navy has tested the potential abilities of killer whales and sharks, among others.)
On the ground, marines in Kuwait used chickens as a kind of canary in the mineshaft, a low-tech early warning system to detect possible chemical weapons attacks. Operation Kuwaiti Field Chicken (or KFC, get it?) got off to a rough start when many of the locally bought “Poultry Chemical Confirmation Devices” quickly died. To make up for the loss, one staff sergeant bought replacement pigeons (National Post, March 26).
And according to a Moroccan weekly, the Moroccan government wasn't monkeying around when it offered 2,000 primates to the coalition forces for the purpose of detonating Iraqi mines.
A navy dolphin wears a homing device on its right flipper
Needless to say, not everyone is thrilled with the non-human participation. Animal rights proponents characterize the creatures as a coalition of the unwilling. “They aren't volunteers,” the Humane Society said in the March 27 Boston Herald. “They were drafted.”
The CIA has tried to use animals for covert operations, too, according to its own recently released documents. One, the heavily edited “[Redacted] Views on Trained Cats [redacted] for [redacted] Use” from 1967, describes a project in which the CIA, undeterred by conventional wisdom that holds cats are uncoachable, attempted to train a cat for surveillance missions. Implanted with batteries and other devices that would transform it into a kitty-based listening post (its tail was the antenna), the bionic feline was a flop. On a test run, the cat was hit by a passing taxi (Atlantic Monthly; National Security Archive).
Is this any way to run a coup?
On April 20, looters were running riot in Baghdad, and despite the presence of U.S. troops, confusion reigned about who was in charge (Financial Times, April 20). A former director general of the Iraqi Oil Ministry, who preferred to remain anonymous, found the U.S. takeover in Iraq to be, well, amateurish:
“We have a lot of experience with coups d'etat,” he said, “and this one is the worst. Any colonel in the Iraqi army will tell you when he does a coup he goes to the broadcasting station with five announcements.
“The first one is long live this, down with that. The second one is your new government is this and that. The third is the list of the people to go on retirement. The fourth one, every other official is to report back to work tomorrow morning. The fifth is the curfew.”
Linda Rothstein
Nuclear propulsion rises from the ashes
In February, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) christened its nuclear propulsion and power generation program Project Prometheus. But if NASA is determined to use names from Greek mythology, Project Phoenix might be more apropos.
Project Prometheus (launched as the Nuclear Science Initiative in 2002), is the latest in a long line of U.S. efforts to link nuclear technology and space travel. NASA believes–this time for sure–that nuclear technology will enable a host of missions that are impossible with conventional technology, from shuttles to Mars to exploration of Pluto, and it has the enthusiastic backing of the Bush administration.
President George W. Bush allocated $279 million to Prometheus in 2004 and earmarked a total of nearly $3 billion through 2008. Of the 2004 spending, $186 million will be used to develop onboard nuclear-powered technologies such as radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs, which use heat from decaying plutonium 238 to generate electricity), while $93 million will be used on nuclear fission-based propulsion systems.
Neither nuclear propulsion nor atomic-powered equipment on spacecraft is a new idea. RTGs have been used in space since 1961, and the Soviet Union launched 31 ships with fission reactors between 1967 and 1988, according to the World Nuclear Association. The concept of nuclear propulsion goes back even further, to Project Orion and the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications (NERVA) program that began in the mid-1950s. NERVA designs centered on propelling a ship by using a graphite-core nuclear reactor to heat hydrogen to extreme temperatures and eject it through a nozzle at high velocity. Twenty NERVA engines were tested at Jackass Flats, Nevada, before the program was shut down in 1973.
Project Orion, which ran until the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, took an altogether different approach to nuclear propulsion: The idea was to detonate a nuclear bomb beneath the craft, with the force of the blast propelling it upward at tremendous speeds. The bottom of the ship–the “push-plate”–resembled a Frisbee with a hole in the center. Nuclear bombs were to be ejected through the hole and detonated at a safe distance. The design team, led by physicists Theodore Taylor and Freeman Dyson, devised a shielding system to protect the astronauts from radiation and claimed that the push-plate could withstand the hundreds of nuclear explosions that would be needed for a deep-space journey. The model was tested in Point Loma, California, using conventional explosives, but an actual nuclear test never took place.
In Brief
Now that's anti-nuclear
In 1984, India's Atomic Minerals Division found huge uranium deposits in the West Khasi Hills, not far from the border with Bangladesh (BBC, May 5, 2003). But since 1992, when the government decided it wanted to exploit the ore, there's been one tiny problem: Whenever employees of the state-owned mining company try to approach the area, the local tribespeople, the Khasi (who own the land as communal property) chase them off with bows and arrows.
Why do I not feel more secure?
Last summer the Bush administration said the new Homeland Security Department would have 169,154 employees (Washington Post, April 10). In November Tom Ridge, now the department's head, said there would be 190,000 employees. On February 18, the day before the department was officially inaugurated, Ridge said the department had 180,000. But on March 17, the department's chief of personnel said the department had 210,000 workers.
Suddenly there came a tapping …
Big Brother continues to plot methods to ID the public using a variety of so-called biometric techniques. We've become accustomed to fingerprinting and voice recognition technology, as well as the more definitive DNA evidence. Face recognition is a newer idea, as is iris scanning technology. And then, of course, there's Georgia Tech's “gait recognition” research aimed at identifying individuals by the supposedly unique way they walk. Latest to enter the identification contest, however, are researchers at Britain's Cambridge University, who say they can positively identify individuals by the way they tap a number into an ATM machine or dial a telephone (BBC, February 27, 2003).
It depends on your meaning of “fun”
When the Minneapolis Star Tribune's “Fun Facts” feature on February 22 reported that “more than 330,000 people were killed by the two atomic bombs that the United States dropped on Japan,” angry letters from readers included such comments as: “No wonder everyone hates us,” and “Maybe someday we'll be able to read about the attacks on the World Trade Center in a future ‘Fun Facts.’” The Star Tribune has now changed the name of the feature to “Did You Know….”
Thanks, Mom
Soldiers deployed in the just-ended Gulf War have been warned by the Pentagon not to use the flea and tick collars that many of their families include in care packages from home. For one thing, the pesticides on the collars are relatively toxic. They tend to burn human skin–so some soldiers wear the collars on top rather than under their clothing. But they are also reported to be of little use. Army Maj. Dwight Rickard of the Armed Forces Pest Management Board told the American Forces Press Service (April 16, 2003) that “if you put them on humans, the fleas and ticks won't go near the collar, but they will go everywhere else.”
The sheep report
Those of you who have been waiting for the all clear–for all the sheep raised on the British Isles to be declared free of radioactive contamination caused by the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident in 1986–keep holding your breath. According to the BBC (March 3), 400 farms still need to be monitored.
Navy establishes free speech–free zone
Ground Zero, a peace organization that protests against the Bangor, Washington, submarine base–and the Trident nuclear missile–has leafleted at the base at least once a month for 25 years. According to Ground Zero's newsletter, activists always “stood 30 feet outside of the guard-houses in the medians and between lanes of traffic leading to the base, [wearing] bright orange vests, hands extended, offering leaflets.” On March 3, however, the navy suddenly decided that leafleting would no longer be allowed, and on March 6, two Ground Zero leafleteers were arrested trying to pass out copies of the Bill of Rights. According to Ground Zero members, there is no other safe place to stand in the approach to the base, so they have effectively been silenced.
You can ask but we won't tell, part 1
Last year, in the wake of September 11, federal regulators imposed new safeguards and security requirements on nuclear waste storage sites. Officials of the state of Utah, which will be hosting a storage site if the Goshute Indians go through with their proposed facility at Skull Valley, believes it is in the state's interest to know what the security plans are (Casper Star-Tribune, March 25). But the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board–an arm of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission–has ruled that it's none of the state's business.
You can ask but we won't tell, part 2
According to an April 6 Washington Post report by Karen DeYoung and Dan Morgan, in a neat bit of finagling, the Bush administration was trying to get the $2.5 billion Iraq reconstruction fund appropriated to the budget of the White House itself, where executive privilege could be used to prevent the Congress and the public from ever learning how the funds were being spent.
The Pentagon brought nuclear propulsion back to life again in 1988 with the secret Timberwind program aimed at developing a nuclear-fueled rocket to launch the heavy equipment necessary for President Ronald Reagan's “Star Wars” program. After being rechristened the Space Nuclear Thermal Power program and repurposed as a Mars rocket project at the start of the Clinton administration, Timberwind died in 1993.
What form Project Prometheus's nuclear propulsion system will take remains to be seen, but NASA has already slated its first mission: the exploration of Jupiter's three largest moons, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, with a target launch date within the next 10 years.
Artist's rendering for Project Prometheus.
Activist groups have decried the project, pointing out the potential of a failed launch or reentry to spread radiation throughout the atmosphere and suggesting that the project's primary purpose is to lay the groundwork for space-based lasers and warfare.
But space travel proponents say nuclear power is just the thing needed to vault exploration of the galaxy light years ahead. Nuclear power could triple a ship's speed, they say, allowing a roundtrip to Mars in about a month. And it would facilitate much larger payloads than the space shuttle's 29-ton maximum–possibly thousands of tons. And although current RTG systems max out at about 290 watts of power, optimists say Prometheus's funding windfall will make possible a technology that will produce huge stores of electrical energy, opening the door to all sorts of sensor, laser, and communication capabilities.
“With the new technology, where we go next will only be limited by our imagination,” NASA chief Sean O'Keefe told the Los Angeles Times earlier this year.
NASA scientists say that RTGs, at least, have been proven safe. RTGs have already been used on 25 different NASA spacecraft, including Galileo, Viking, and Voyager, according to New Scientist.com. The Cassini space probe scheduled to reach Saturn in 2004 carries 72 pounds of plutonium dioxide in RTGs and 0.7 pounds in heater units, while two Delta II launch vehicles carrying plutonium-heated rovers were slated to begin a mission to Mars mid-year. Even in a launch accident, the chances that RTGs will release radioactivity are very slim, NASA says. And the reactor of any yet-to-be-developed nuclear-propelled spaceship would be shut down until it reached a safe distance from Earth.
Opponents remain unconvinced, and even the name of the project itself suggests some level of apprehension. Although Prometheus delivered the gift of fire to humans, his own fate was far from pleasant. The Greek Titan spent 30,000 years chained to a rock as an eagle swooped down every day and pecked away part of his liver–a relatively light sentence, considering the half-life of plutonium is 24,000 years.
Save your receipts
A General Accounting Office (GAO) and Energy Department investigation of Los Alamos National Laboratory's financial controls revealed an eyebrow-raising $14.6 million in questionable charges. Extravagant meals, zippy sports cars, cash advances at casinos, and inadequate internal audits are among the potentially illegal activities noted in the audit. The investigation also criticized the University of California, which runs the lab, for being “less careful with federal funds at times than with its own” (Los Angeles Times, April 22, 2003).
According to a February GAO report, the university's management of the lab has been closely watched since November 2002, when two former investigators were fired after they went public with allegations of employee fraud. Since then, the university has rehired both men, and laboratory Director John Browne resigned, along with five top managers. Energy has announced that the university can manage the lab until its contract expires in 2005. After that, others will be allowed to compete to run the lab.
George P. Nanos, interim director of Los Alamos, defends the alleged illegal expenditures, claiming “strong exception to the conclusions of this particular report.” As reported in the Los Angeles Times article, a University of California spokesperson said the “university rejected the report's contention that U. C. gave less scrutiny to the expenditure of federal funds for working meals than it did when university money was spent.”
Sports cars were among the alleged purchases made by employees of the Los Alamos lab.
In the meantime, external reviews by both Price Waterhouse Cooper and Ernst & Young have recommended that the university and laboratory practice stricter control over property management and payroll.
Chuck Hansen
This magazine lost a valued friend and contributor when Chuck Hansen, a relentless researcher who wielded Freedom of Information Act requests like an artist wields a brush, died on March 26. He was 55.
Folks like novelist Tom Clancy and Pulitzer Prizewinner Richard Rhodes (Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb), knew Hansen as a generous and invaluable source whom they were grateful to draw upon. Long-time readers of the Bulletin also knew him as a periodic contributor who could be counted on to reveal the nuclear weapons establishment's assortment of embarrassing secrets. Some of his pieces for this magazine dealt with nuclear accidents; his last piece, “Beware the Old Story” in the March/April 2001 issue, predicted correctly that it would not be long before the old Cold Warriors in the new administration began calling for the design and manufacture of new nuclear weapons.
Hansen was the author of Swords of Armageddon, a comprehensive history of U.S. nuclear weapons, and of the now out-of-print 1988 book, U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History, copies of which, as Dan Stober noted in an April 1 obituary in the San Jose Mercury News, were then selling on eBay for $975 each.
Hansen was unique, as another anecdote from Stober's piece captured so well: “At a conference of government officials in 1994, a speaker listed several categories of people seeking declassification of nuclear documents. The last category was simply ‘Chuck Hansen.’”
A calendar of errors
This one's for the history books, folks. While it's always possible that some Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or WMD–which posed such an immediate threat to the United States that the Bush administration was compelled to invade that country–may some day be found, so far the weapons have proved elusive. Just for the record, (and in case in a few years no one can believe what happened, or the story becomes confused with the plot of a Marx Brothers movie), here's a representative sample of reports from the U.S. and British news media since the search for Iraq's WMD began:
April 7: The Washington Post relays the Pentagon announcement that it has found the “smoking gun”–the 101st Airborne has located a large cache of chemical weapon-laden missiles southwest of Baghdad; buried “bio-weapons labs” are also reported found.
April 10: U.S. military commanders announce they have secured the Tuwaitha nuclear facility.
April 11: U.S. military commanders reveal that before April 10, Tuwaitha, a site known to contain various radioactive materials, was left unguarded for days. During that time Iraqi civilians looted the facility, almost certainly carrying away contaminated materials.
April 12: The Guardian reports that the U.S. and British governments have rejected the idea that experienced U.N. weapon inspectors should return to Iraq. Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that Saddam Hussein's science adviser, Lt. Gen. Amer al-Saadi has surrendered, but insists Iraq had no WMD.
April 13: The Washington Post reports that the “smoking gun” chemical weapon found on April 7 is some sort of pesticide, probably used to combat mosquitos; as for the April 7 report that chemical weapons missiles had been found, the Pentagon “denies any knowledge of this alleged discovery.”
April 15: CNN reports that buried bioweapons labs turn out to be crates of new, unused laboratory equipment (test tubes and the like).
April 20: The Washington Post says the Pentagon intends to form a 1,000-man “Iraq Survey Group” to hunt for weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, Britain's Independent sums up what has been discovered about Iraqi WMD so far: The U.S. intelligence report that the nuclear facilities at Tuwaitha had been rebuilt was a “sham”; a claim that Iraq had bought uranium in Niger was based on falsified documents; and the aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq were not for gas centrifuges to produce weapon-grade uranium. The United States claimed that Iraq was expanding its chemical facilities, but in reality the chemical site at Al Qaqaa was bombed during the first Gulf War, and its chemical weapons were then removed and destroyed by the United Nations. As for the pre-war claim that Iraq was building a dangerous unmanned aerial vehicle for the purpose of spraying bioweapons into the atmosphere, a single dismantled drone found by U.N. inspectors was not reported because it was not a prohibited item. Secretary of State Colin Powell's claim at the United Nations in February, that Iraq had weaponized ricin, was misleading, to say the least. The truth, surely known to U.S. intelligence, was that Iraq conducted a single test in November 1990, which failed, after which the ricin project was abandoned. Similarly, no evidence to date supports Powell's other claims–that Iraq engaged in research on smallpox, or that it had any VX, mustard gas, botulin, or anthrax.
April 21: Questions are raised about how seriously the U.S. government believed its own claims about WMD, considering that, as the New York Times reports, weapons search teams do not have adequate transport and are having to rely on borrowed helicopters. On the same day, in the same paper, reporter Judith Miller declares that an unnamed Iraqi scientist has identified an unnamed site where, he says, Iraq destroyed unnamed chemical and biological weapons before the war. Miller calls this the “most important discovery to date in the hunt for illegal weapons.”
April 24: The Washington Post reports that the reason U.S. forces waited three weeks after reaching Tuwaitha before inspecting it was due to an internal U.S. government dispute about who would be in charge. The BBC quotes the editor of Jane's Intelligence Digest, Alex Standish, who says reports of Iraq's WMD were “politically driven.”
April 25: President George W. Bush says WMD may not ever be found in Iraq.
April 27: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman says it doesn't matter if no WMD are found. On the other hand, Raymond Whitaker, writing in the Independent, says the road to war was paved with lies and that intelligence agencies were at the mercy of political appointees who distorted intelligence reports to fan the flames. The story about the purchase of uranium from Niger, based on “crude forgeries,” had been known to be false for more than a year. As for Scud missiles, not only were none fired, none were found. The Blair government plagiarized outdated graduate student papers and called them a dossier on Iraqi weapons. Other questionable information came from an exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, which was paid to “come up with” claims. It's odd, Whitaker concludes, that if U.S. and British authorities were so concerned about finding WMD that within a few days they diverted some of the search teams to other tasks. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reports that David Kay, a prewar supporter of the administration's position, says of the U.S. WMD search: “My impression is this has been a very low priority so far, and they've put very little effort into it.”
April 28: Associated Press reports that some 55-gallon drums previously found in northern Iraq and described by U.S. military personnel as containing “blister agent” contain rocket fuel.
April 29: Surrendered scientist Nassir Hindawi tells CNN he was the only person in Iraq smart enough to make powdered anthrax (about which, he adds, he kept quiet). Hindawi describes Rihab Taha, Iraq's famous “Dr. Germ,” as a former student of his who lacked practical abilities. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw is described by Independent correspondent Ben Russell as “hinting” that WMD may never be found, although Straw continues to insist that Iraq “had them recently.”
May 1: President Bush lands on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln and declares an end to major combat operations in Iraq. On the same day, but reported in the May 17 Washington Post, U.S. special weapons hunters break down the doors of “Special Security Organization Al Hayat.” The padlocked innermost storage room is found to be filled with vacuum cleaners.
May 7: The Associated Press reports that Lt. Gen. William Wallace of the army's Fifth Corps says there is “plenty of documentary evidence” of WMD coming from “lower-tier Iraqis.” Wallace offers no examples.
May 9: The Associated Press reports that Col. Richard McPhee says his teams have found no chemical or biological weapons so far, and that they might never be found, but he thinks they will find an “infrastructure.” Or, as Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence says, a program for WMD will be found, just no WMD. “How it was configured and how they intended to use it” is the problem, according to Cambone.
May 11: The Los Angeles Times reports that before the war U.N. teams tracked down what U.S. intelligence had told them were “decontamination trucks” only to find they were fire trucks. Other information provided to U.N. inspectors was also less than helpful: “Sometimes it was amazingly specific. You know, ‘Go into the basement, there's a door marked 4, go in there, then there's a long corridor, then you'll find a room filled with equipment.’ Except there never was.”
May 11: The Washington Post reports that the group directing the search for WMD, the 75th Exploitation Task Force, is planning to leave Iraq.
May 13: The Washington Post's Harold Meyer-son calls pre-war information “faith-based intelligence.” But Kenneth Timmerman, writing in Insight magazine, says that only liberals care whether Iraq actually had WMD.
May 13: The New York Times reports that “suspicious trailers,” which could be mobile bio-weapons labs have been found–but they contain no biological materials.
May 17: The Washington Post reports that White House communication director Dan Bartlett believes there is proof that Iraq had a WMD program because “the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution that confirmed it.”
May 22: Peter Jennings, introducing a story on ABC-TV's nightly news, summed up the record. “U.S. intelligence officials say they have concluded that the two tractor-trailers, which they found in northern Iraq during the war, are laboratories for making biological weapons. But they have found absolutely no trace of biological agents in them. Nine weeks after the war began, there is no tangible evidence of any biological or chemical weapons in Iraq at all.”
Terrorist kangaroos and gunpowder tea
Feel the paranoia. If you're living in the United States these days, that's pretty easy. Crazy security measures–like confiscating water bottles at public concerts and locking subway bathrooms–are everywhere. Tired of the madness, Privacy International (a consortium of more than 100 privacy experts and human rights organizations from 40 countries) ran a “Stupid Security” competition to root out the world's most “pointless, intrusive, and self-serving security measures.” Surprisingly, top honors in their contest did not go to the U.S. government.
Privacy International awarded the government of Australia first prize in the “Most Egregiously Stupid” category for what the April 10 Sydney Morning Herald called the “$15 million refrigerator magnet campaign” designed to educate Australians about evildoers Down Under. Along with the refrigerator magnets, the government distributed pamphlets, ran television and radio spots, and placed print advertisements telling people how to protect themselves from chemical or biological attack.
Not knowing why Australia expected to be the target of an international terrorist attack, the only rational explanation contest organizers could find for the campaign is the Aussie love of all things American. Why should being paranoid be any different, they asked?
February 25: Three-year-old Joana Saudland is screened by a puppetcovered wand at Denver International Airport.
Runner-up in the same category went to Moscow's Mayor Yuri Luzhkov for his policy of requiring propiska (registration) papers for anyone living in or visiting Moscow. According to watchdog group Nelegal (the word means “one who lives without special permission” in Russian), propiska was invented by Stalin in 1932. Even though Russian authorities promised years ago to abolish the requirement, Luzhkov now claims that propiska is Moscow's main defense against terrorism and that similar restrictions exist in all progressive Western countries.
Propiska is also favored by members of Moscow's militia, who supplement their meager incomes by “shaking down” visitors and residents to check paperwork. It usually only takes a small bribe, $1–$10, to avoid arrest, but the number of officers needing to boost their incomes to a livable wage compounds the problem. Nelegal points out that there are more than three times as many officers in Moscow as in New York.
It would be different if registration papers were easy to obtain, but applications require several official signatures and endorsements, and they need to be filed within 10 days of arriving in Moscow. This is nearly impossible given that the office that processes applications is open only two or three hours each week.
Although the top two awards went to foreign governments, Uncle Sam garnered most of the others. The “Most Inexplicably Stupid” award went to federal security screen-ers at Philadelphia International Airport for issuing a “code-red hazardous materials alert” when a Saudi student (attempting to demonstrate that his cologne was only cologne) spritzed some of the odorous liquid on himself and inadvertently on two guards. By the time his ordeal was over, the local emergency room, a doughnut shop, and a 24hour pharmacy had all been quarantined (Reuters, February 20).
But when it comes to bonehead airport screening, not much can top the actions of Delta Airlines screeners working at JFK International Airport. While boarding a plane from New York to Florida, a woman was forced to taste each of the three bottles of her own breast milk that she was carrying in a diaper bag. (Although the awards reported that she had to drink all three bottles in their entirety, she only had to sample them, according to the August 8, 2002, Associated Press.) The mother offered to feed some to her infant, whom the guards had also confiscated during the interrogation, but they refused, noting that the bottles could contain explosives that could be thrown at a stewardess.
Not to be outdone were officials at London's Heathrow Airport–runners-up in the “Most Inexplicably Stupid” category–who confiscated a man's box of gunpowder tea (a hand-rolled green tea that resembles packets of gunpowder) before allowing him to board his plane. It appears they were frightened by the name, not the tea, which they put in a plastic bag and returned to him. The box was removed for destruction.