Iraq I:  Iraq Survey Group Set to Release Report Next Month

British officials have said that the Iraq Survey Group, which is currently conducting the WMD hunt in Iraq, has found enough evidence to release a report of its findings next month, the London Times reported today (see GSN, Aug. 4).

The group’s report is expected to include evidence of a long-term biological weapons program, the Times reported.  Coalition forces have also received a large amount of evidence from Iraqi scientists as to how former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein sought to hide his WMD efforts from U.N. inspectors, British officials said (Michael Evans, London Times, Aug. 8).

The group’s findings are also expected to be included in a report on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction the British government is planning to publish in September, according to the London Independent.  The British intelligence service MI6 believes the group’s findings will help to support a now-disputed report the British government released in last September on Iraq’s WMD programs (Sengupta/Waugh, London Independent, Aug. 8).

White House Officials Repeated Africa-Uranium Claim

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported today that senior Bush administration officials reiterated the now-disputed claim that Iraq sought to obtain uranium from Africa shortly before, and then after, U.S. President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address (see GSN, Aug. 5).

Bush aides have said that the claim was included into Bush’s address because of miscommunications between the CIA and White House staff, according to the Post.  In the month that the State of the Union was delivered, however, the claim was also included in two White House documents and in speeches and articles prepared by four senior White House officials.

In January, U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz all made the claim at various times, according to the Post.  In addition, the African uranium claim was also included in a report sent to Congress as part of the Bush administration’s request for authorization to use military force against Iraq and in a publicly released report on Iraq’s weapons concealment activities, the Post reported.

The inclusion of the Africa uranium claim in the State of the Union address “made people below feel comfortable using it as well,” White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett said yesterday.  There was some “strategic coordination” as to what claims should have been included in statements against Iraq, Bartlett said, adding, “I don’t know of any specific talking points to say that this is supposed to be used” (Walter Pincus, Washington Post, Aug. 8).

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Iraq II:  Al-Qaeda Links With Baghdad Were Exaggerated

By Peter H. Stone

National Journal

As criticism over the Bush administration’s use of prewar intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction continues, a new wave of accusations seems ready to break — this time, over complaints that in its efforts to sell the war, the White House also hyped claims about the links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Three former Bush administration officials who worked on intelligence and national security issues have told National Journal that the prewar evidence tying al-Qaeda to Iraq was tenuous, exaggerated, and often at odds with the conclusions of key intelligence agencies.  The Bush alumni, as well as other intelligence veterans and some members of Congress, say they see parallels between how the administration painted the Qaeda connection to Iraq and the way that the White House often portrayed intelligence about weapons of mass destruction.

“Our conclusion was that Saddam would certainly not provide weapons of mass destruction or WMD knowledge to al-Qaeda because they were mortal enemies,” said Greg Thielmann, who worked at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research on weapons intelligence until last fall.  “Saddam would have seen al-Qaeda as a threat, and al-Qaeda would have opposed Saddam as the kind of secular government they hated.”

Other Bush veterans concur that the evidence linking al-Qaeda to Iraq was overblown.

“Anyone who followed al-Qaeda for a living would not have considered Iraq to be in the top tier of countries to be worried about,” said Roger Cressey, who left the administration last fall after working on counterterrorism issues at the National Security Council and as a top aide to cyberterrorism czar Richard Clarke.  “I’d argue that Iraq would be in the third tier.”  By contrast, Cressey said, Iran would rate in “the top tier.”

And Flynt Leverett, who worked on Middle East issues at the National Security Council until earlier this year and is now with the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy, said that some administration officials pushed the intelligence envelope on the al-Qaeda connection.

Generally, these and other former intelligence officials who talked to National Journal believed that the United States needed to confront Saddam Hussein.  But the analysts questioned the war’s timing and wondered whether the attack should have come before the battle against al-Qaeda was sufficiently far along.

In the reviews that the Senate and the House Intelligence panels are conducting into the accuracy of prewar intelligence, the claims on Iraq and al-Qaeda are also a topic of inquiry.  Republican leaders of those committees have generally defended the administration’s prewar assessment of al-Qaeda-Iraq links.  Democrats, however, have been skeptical.

“I have never believed that the prewar links between al-Qaeda and Iraq were very strong,” said Representative Jane Harman (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, who voted in favor of the war last fall.  “The evidence on the al-Qaeda links was sketchy.”

Her counterpart on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence also sounded dubious about the administration’s effort to link al-Qaeda and Iraq.  “I think the ties were always tenuous at best,” said Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who also voted for the war.  “The evidence about the ties was not compelling.”  Rockefeller said that his panel has a staff group focusing on the question and that the panel may hold a hearing just on this issue in the fall.

In two periods during the run-up to the war against Iraq — in late September and early October of 2002, just before the vote in Congress, and then this year in the weeks before the war — administration heavyweights highlighted what they portrayed as significant ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda.  President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice all weighed in on this point, sometimes in a broad-brush way, sometimes with hints of tantalizing specifics.

Powell, in his major speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, cited the presence of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist who was in Baghdad in May 2002 receiving medical treatment for wounds he received in Afghanistan.  Powell referred to al-Zarqawi as “an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda lieutenants.”

But several intelligence experts say Powell overstated these ties.  Al-Zarqawi “is at best seen as having linkages to al-Qaeda, instead of being a card-carrying member,” Cressey said.  “There’s no question that Zarqawi is a terrorist, but there are real questions about whether he’s a member of al-Qaeda,” said Vince Cannistraro, a former head of counterterrorism operations at the CIA.

In his State of the Union address in January, Bush made the al-Qaeda-Iraq connection.  “Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody,” the president said, “reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda.”  Bush darkly added, “Secretly and without fingerprints, [Hussein] could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists or help them develop their own.”

In perhaps the boldest assertion before the war, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld on Sept. 27 stated that the administration had several “bullet-proof” sentences in intelligence reports about ties between Iraq under Saddam and al-Qaeda.  “We have what we consider to be very reliable reporting of senior-level contacts going back a decade,” Rumsfeld said.

Bush echoed Rumsfeld’s remarks in his major address in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, asserting as well that al-Qaeda and Iraq had “high-level contacts that go back a decade.”  He also stated that “we’ve learned” that Iraqis trained Qaeda members in “bomb making and poisons and deadly gases.”  And Bush posited that Iraq “could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists.”

But even as the president made these comments, the key classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq making the rounds in the Bush administration presented a more nuanced and less alarmist view.  For instance, according to a recent Washington Post account, Bush didn’t mention a key conclusion of the intelligence report: that although high-level contacts between al-Qaeda and Iraq had taken place in the early 1990s when bin Laden was based in Sudan, these contacts had not been followed by any significant ties between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government.  Similarly, intelligence sources have said that the claim that Bush made about Iraq training Qaeda members in bomb making or poison gas use had not been fully verified.

“There wasn’t the kind of link between Iraq and al-Qaeda that people wanted,” said one Bush administration alum.  The CIA, he added, had “some measure of intellectual responsibility and didn’t come up with a case.”

Moreover, the president failed to mention the report’s conclusion that the prevailing view in the intelligence community was much more guarded about the prospect of Hussein’s transferring weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.  In fact, CIA Director George Tenet wrote to Senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who was then the chairman of the Senate Intelligence panel, that only if a U.S. attack against Iraq seemed imminent or inevitable might Hussein “decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD attack against the U.S. would be his last chance to exact vengeance.”

Ken Pollack, a former CIA analyst and Iraq expert who is now director of research at the Saban Center at Brookings, said he also believed before the war that it was “extremely unlikely” that Hussein would have turned over weapons of mass destruction to al-Qaeda.  Furthermore, Pollack has since concluded that there’s a “much stronger” argument to be made that “the administration exaggerated its case for war in terms of the al-Qaeda issue than on the WMD issue.”

Bush particularly irked intelligence analysts when he landed on an aircraft carrier right after Baghdad fell and proclaimed that the U.S. had just “removed an ally of al-Qaeda.”  Thielmann, the former State Department analyst, calls the statement “an outrageous distortion” and a “shameless falsehood.”

Bush, when specifically asked at his news conference on July 30 whether the links between Iraq and al-Qaeda were exaggerated and whether he now had more definitive evidence pointing to them, gave a long answer justifying the war on other grounds.  But on the links between al-Qaeda and Iraq, he said only that David Kay, the former U.N. weapons inspector now in Iraq looking for evidence of weapons of mass destruction, was also going through piles of documents to look for such links.  “It’s going to take time for us to gather the evidence and analyze the mounds of evidence, literally the miles of documents that we have uncovered,” Bush said.

Some critics argue that by linking al-Qaeda and Iraq, the administration has not only misled the public about Iraq but about the real and continuing danger from al-Qaeda.

The Bush administration “created a powerful impression for the American public that al-Qaeda and Iraq were joined,” said Dan Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror.  Benjamin added, “People don’t understand that al-Qaeda is a global insurgency distinct from states, and is eager to topple some states.”

Other former intelligence officials are also dismayed by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz’s recent statement that the fight against Iraq is the “central battle” in the Bush administration’s war on terrorism.  “The idea that the battle in Iraq is the central battle in the war on terrorism flies in the face of reality and all that we know about al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and other globally active terrorists,” Leverett said.

Looking ahead, some critics worry that the Iraq war could ultimately help al-Qaeda more than hurt it.  “A lot of people who could have been very helpful working on al-Qaeda were working on Iraq,” Graham, a presidential candidate, said.  “We shifted intelligence assets as well as military and intelligence people

Other Democrats concur.  “The war enormously deepened the pool of eager recruits for al-Qaeda,” Rockefeller said.  “I think that al-Qaeda was, is, and always will be a greater threat than Iraq.”

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Iraq I:  U.S. Sanctions Jordanian for Allegedly Aiding Iraqi WMD Programs

By Mike Nartker
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The United States has imposed sanctions against a Jordanian national for allegedly making a “knowing and material” contribution to Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons programs, a U.S. State Department official told Global Security Newswire today (see GSN, March 12).

According to a notice published in the Federal Register today, the United States has imposed sanctions against Mohammed al-Khatib for biological and chemical proliferation activities in violation of the Arms Export Control Act and the 1979 Export Administration Act.  The sanctions, which took effect today, prohibit the United States from entering into any contracts with al-Khatib and prevent him from exporting goods to the United States for at least one year.

Today’s sanctions against al-Khatib were imposed for the same activities that resulted in sanctions being imposed against him earlier this year for violating the 1992 Iran-Iraq Arms Control Act, the State official said.  The official also said that Khatib was part of a network that included the Indian company NEC Engineers Private Ltd.  Earlier this year, the United States imposed sanctions against NEC Engineers and a second Indian company, Protech Consultants Private Ltd., for allegedly aiding Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons programs (see GSN, Feb. 20).  The United States could possibly soon announce new sanctions against NEC Engineers, the State Department official said.

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Iraq II:  Army Examining Possible Role of Vaccines in Pneumonia Outbreak

The U.S. Army is planning to examine the possible role of vaccinations against diseases such as anthrax as officials study recent pneumonia cases among U.S. soldiers in Iraq and southwestern Asia, an official said yesterday (see GSN, Aug. 6).

“Among all of the possible causes or contributing factors, we are looking at the immunizations that the soldiers received as well,” said Col. Robert DeFraites of the Army Surgeon General’s Office.  “It is premature to say that there is any relationship at all,” he said.

John Sever of the George Washington University’s medical school, a co-author of a study that examined the possible side effects of the anthrax vaccine, has also said the Army should examine if the vaccine has played any role in the pneumonia cases.  That study found that the vaccine might have been the cause of two earlier pneumonia cases, according to the Washington Times (Mark Benjamin, Washington Times, Aug. 7).

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Iraq III:  Hundreds of Radioactive Sources Still Missing From Tuwaitha

A spokeswoman for the International Atomic Energy Agency has said that hundreds of radioactive sources are still unaccounted for from the Tuwaitha complex in Iraq, the main center in former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program, the Glasgow Sunday Herald reported Sunday (see GSN, July 16).

As many as 400 sources are still missing from Tuwaitha, which was found in April to have been looted, according to IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming.  A source for the Sunday Herald said he was approached to help sell uranium oxide in the southern Iraqi city of Basra for $250,000.  The source said he believed the material came from the Tuwaitha complex (Pratt/Arbuthnot, Glasgow Sunday Herald, Aug. 3).

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Iraq:  Biological, Chemical Weapons Largely Ruled Out in U.S. Pneumonia Cases

By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army has dispatched two epidemiological teams to Iraq and the surrounding region to investigate a recent rash of pneumonia cases among U.S. troops in the region, U.S. Defense Department officials said yesterday.  Of the 100 cases diagnosed since March, two soldiers have died and more than a dozen have been hospitalized.

“We’re sparing no effort to fully analyze and diagnose this condition,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Clinical and Program Policy David Tornberg said at a Pentagon briefing.

Streptococcus has been identified as the cause of pneumonia in at least two of the cases, Col. Robert DeFraites of the Office of the Army Surgeon General said at the briefing, but no such cause has been established for the two deaths.

No evidence so far indicates any biological warfare agent has played a role in any of the cases, DeFraites said.

“We’ve found no evidence of anthrax, smallpox or any other biological agent [to which] we can attribute the pneumonia,” DeFraites said.

“Based on all the information we have to date, there’s been no positive findings of any anthrax or smallpox or any other biological weapons.  So [I have come] pretty close to ruling it out,” he said.

DeFraites added after the briefing that chemical weapons have also been ruled out as a cause of the pneumonia cases.

Pneumonia is generally caused by infections, usually bacterial, or by noninfectious factors such as inhalation of dust, metals or smoke.  The American Lung Association lists inhaled food, liquid, gases and dust as noninfectious causes of pneumonia.  The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons Web site indicates a kind of “chemical pneumonia” can result from exposure to mustard gas.

Deaths Led to Dispatch of Special Teams

Fifteen of the U.S. troops with pneumonia have been placed on respirators, 10 of them in Iraq, DeFraites said, adding that the last confirmed case emerged last Wednesday.  No link has been established so far among the troops that developed pneumonia, and none of them appears to have transmitted any infection to any of the others, he said.

DeFraites said the total number of cases, at about 100, is within the range one would expect under normal conditions, given that up to 500 pneumonia cases are registered worldwide each year in the U.S. Army.

Nevertheless, the two deaths, which both occurred over the last two months, spurred the Army to send in the investigative teams, DeFraites said.  Seventeen Army troops died of pneumonia during the five-year period ending last year, he said.

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International Response:  U.S. Delays Call for South Korea to Join Proliferation Security Initiative

A rough draft of a speech given yesterday by Gen. Leon LaPorte, the top U.S commander in South Korea, included a call for Seoul to join an international effort to intercept shipments of WMD-related cargo, but the general left out that section when he delivered the speech, according to the Korea Times (see GSN, Aug. 4).

“The navy of the future must join in the effort to interdict WMD (weapons of mass destruction) delivery,” said the draft of LaPorte’s speech, which was prepared for the eighth International Sea Powers Symposium, hosted by the South Korean Navy.

LaPorte did not mention that South Korea should join the Proliferation Security Initiative, however, when he actually gave the speech, according to the Korea Times.  Lee Ferguson, a spokeswoman for U.S. Forces Korea, said the rough draft of the speech had been provided to reporters by mistake.

A South Korean official said no decision has been made yet on South Korea joining the initiative.

“Nothing has been decided on South Korea’s participation in the PSI so far, as the meeting itself has not yet progressed to a stage where it can court new members,” the official said.

The official also said that South Korea may be asked to join the initiative during the next meeting of PSI members, scheduled to be held next month in Paris (Seo Soo-min, Korea Times, Aug. 6).

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British Response:  Hundreds Have Received WMD Response Training This Year

More than 700 British health care workers have received training this year in responding to incidents involving weapons of mass destruction, the British Health Protection Agency said yesterday (see GSN, May 29).  The agency is also “scanning the horizon” for new biological and chemical threats, agency Chief Executive Pat Troop said (Xinhua News Agency, Aug. 6).

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Libya:  Qadhafi Suggests Willingness to Allow Inspectors to Visit Industrial Sites

By Mike Nartker
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — Libyan leader Col. Muammar Qadhafi indicated Sunday that he is willing to allow international biological and chemical inspectors to visit Libyan sites (see GSN, June 23).

During an interview with ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulus, Qadhafi suggested that he would allow international experts to visit Libyan industrial sites.  Such experts could come from international organizations, similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency, that address biological and chemical weapons. 

“This is my proposal.  Yes,” Qadhafi said.  “And I think this is the correct approach,” he added.

The United States believes that ever since U.N. sanctions against Libya were suspended in 1999, Qadhafi has resumed trying to acquire chemical weapons equipment and expertise, primarily from Western Europe, according to a CIA report released in April (see GSN, April 11).  Libya wants to develop both an offensive chemical weapons capability and an indigenous production capability, the report charges.  The report also says that Libya is still working to develop a biological weapons program.

Despite these charges, arms control experts told Global Security Newswire yesterday that Qadhafi’s proposal was promising in light of Libya’s recent efforts to re-establish ties with the West.  In the past few years, Libya has undertaken several measures, such as providing terrorism-related intelligence to the United States following the Sept, 11, 2001, attacks, to help rehabilitate its image.

“Libya [is] making a major effort” to end its status as a proliferator and as a sponsor of terrorism, said Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.  Such an effort has been consistent enough to indicate that Qadhafi is “serious” with his proposal, Cordesman said (see GSN, May 1).

If Libya follows through with its proposal, the results could be more promising than the last time international inspections were conducted in a country of concern, namely Iraq, according to Jeffrey Bale, a senior research associate at the Monterey Institute for International Studies’ Center for Nonproliferation Studies.  Bale said yesterday that he doubted Qadhafi would work to frustrate inspectors, unlike former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, because there has been a relative lack of international pressure on Libya to allow inspectors to visit sites there. 

If Qadhafi had planned not to comply with inspectors in Libya, he probably would not have suggested he was open to inspections at all, Bale said.

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Iraq:  Former CIA Envoy Repeats White House Intimidation Charge

Former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who visited Niger last year on behalf of the CIA to investigate reports that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium there, accused the White House again yesterday of using intimidation to prevent criticism of its handling of prewar intelligence, according to Reuters (see GSN, July 25).

After returning from Niger, Wilson reported that Iraq had probably not attempted to purchase uranium there, helping to discredit the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq had sought to obtain uranium from Africa.  During a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, Wilson said there had been several attempts at discrediting him, most notably a leak to the media identifying his wife’s as a CIA employee.  Wilson also said the recent apparent suicide of British WMD expert David Kelly, whom the BBC cited as a source in a story claiming London had exaggerated the case for war,  would also have a chilling effect on other intelligence experts coming forward (Tabassum Zakaria, Reuters/Yahoo!News, Aug. 5).

Iraqis Attacks Conducted by Hussein Loyalists

Meanwhile, U.S. military officers in Iraq and Iraqis themselves have said that militia groups loyal to former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein are behind the continuing attacks on U.S. forces there, not al-Qaeda fighters as some senior U.S. officials have said, according to the Associated Press.

Over the past week, several senior U.S. officials, including Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq; and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, have suggested that foreign terrorists were conducting the attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq.  Several U.S. military commanders, however, have said the attacks appear to be conducted by loyalists to the Hussein regime.

“We think Saddam Fedayeen are operating in this area,” Army spokesman Capt. Mike Calver said in the Anbar Province west of Baghdad, referring to a loyalist militia.  “We suspect there are ex-regime loyalists — people who are much disenfranchised with the loss of the regime,” he said.

A number of Iraqis have also denied that foreign fighters were taking part in the attacks on U.S. troops, saying that most of the 4,000 to 6,000 Arab fighters that came into Iraq before the war had been killed or left the country.  Those Iraqis interviewed by AP said U.S. officials were blaming the attacks on foreign fighters in an attempt to show that Iraqis supported the occupation.

“They are claiming there are al-Qaeda fighters in order to justify to their people their invasion and occupation of Iraq,” said Sheik Diyab Younis Zo’ebi (Scheherezade Faramarzi, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, Aug. 5).

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Iraq:  Hussein Destroyed Weapons in Mid-1990s, Aide Says

An aide to former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has said Iraq destroyed its WMD stockpiles years prior to the recent war with the United States, but maintained an ambiguous stance over their existence in an effort to appear strong, the Associated Press reported Friday (see GSN, Aug. 1).

By the mid-1990s, “it was common knowledge among the leadership” that Iraq had destroyed its stockpiles of chemical weapons and had discontinued its biological and nuclear weapons programs, according to the aide.  Hussein believed, however, that a deliberate ambiguity over the fate of the weapons of mass destruction would deter a U.S. attack, the aide said.

“He repeatedly told me:  ‘These foreigners, they only respect strength, they must be made to believe we are strong,’” the aide said.

Some experts believe that Iraq released false information about its WMD programs to help create the impression that it still possessed such weapons, U.S. Defense Department intelligence experts said.

“That explanation has plausibility,” said Robert Einhorn, a former assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation.  “But the disposition of those missing weapons and materials still has to be explained somehow,” he added (Slobodan Lekic, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, Aug. 1).

Niger Repeats Denial of Uranium Sale to Iraq

Meanwhile, Nigerien President Mamadou Tandja yesterday reiterated that his country did not attempt to sell uranium to Iraq, as has previously been alleged by the United States and the United Kingdom (see GSN, July 29).

Prior to the war, both the United States and the United Kingdom cited Iraq’s alleged attempts to obtain uranium from Africa as evidence that Hussein was seeking to relaunch his nuclear weapons program.  However, a major piece of evidence used to back that claim — documents purporting to show an attempted Iraqi purchase of uranium from Niger — was later determined to be false (see GSN, July 30).

Tandja yesterday again denied that his country had any involvement in a uranium sale to Iraq.

“Against our wishes our country has been front-page news over an affair of the sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq: this affair is nothing else than an accusation without foundation,” Tandja said (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, Aug. 3).

Tandja also called on the International Atomic Energy Agency to publicly clear Niger of any involvement.

The IAEA should “publicly wash Niger of all suspicions before the U.N. Security Council,” Tandja said.  “Without that, our country can only remain harmed and hampered by a situation in which it isn’t implicated in any way,” he said.

The IAEA refused yesterday to comment on Tandja’s request, saying it still needed to be formally made.

“It’s an unusual request,” IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said.  “We’d have to get it formally in writing and then see what we would do with it,” she said (Associated Press/Globe and Mail, Aug. 3).

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International Response:  Legal Authority Is Uncertain for U.S.-Led Cargo Interdiction Effort

U.S. officials have said there is debate over how much legal authority exists under which to conduct the Proliferation Security Initiative — a U.S.-led effort to interdict suspect shipments of WMD-related cargo, the Washington Post reported today (see GSN, July 23).

Some U.S. officials have said that current laws allow for most of the effort, and all that is needed is better coordination and enforcement.  Legal experts, however, differ over what existing laws allow, the Post reported.

Under current international law, countries may board ships with the permission of the country whose flag the ship is flying, or if the ship is unmarked, according to the Post.  Ships carrying illicit cargo — such as illegal drugs — or those transiting between countries with established agreements, can also be stopped and captured.

“The plan is to use existing authorities in the first instance, because if you do that in a proactive way by sharing information with others and being prepared to move, you’ll have an 80 to 85 percent solution,” a White House official said.

However, there currently is no international ban on shipments of WMD-related materials, according to the Post.  To address this, some legal experts have recommended that the United States work within the United Nations to expand the current legal authority.

“More important than adding one country after another to the president’s initiative, you need to get something through the U.N. Security Council,” said Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center.  “The reason is, if you’re going to get international common usage, that is the most efficient way to make that happen,” he said.

U.S. officials said the Bush administration has no plans to seek U.N. approval for seizures of WMD-related cargo because of concerns that such a move would trigger debate over what would qualify for interdiction.  They also said that the initiative would not result in the creation of a large-scale international system, such as a task force or an enforcement mechanism.

“It’s not like there’s going to be some big unveiling, where the marker will come down and all of a sudden we’re going to be out there looking for bad guys shipping around bad things,” a U.S. Defense Department official said.  “We’re doing that now,” the official said.

There are also concerns over the U.S. motive for the initiative, according to the Post.  While Bush administration officials have said the initiative is meant to be a global effort, some countries are concerned that it is a covert attempt to establish a blockade around North Korea, the Post reported.  In a speech last week, U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton explicitly linked the effort to both North Korea and Iran. 

Initiative members are planning to enlist more members by targeting costal Asian and Middle East countries, as well as those countries whose flags are most often used by traffickers, officials said (Bradley Graham, Washington Post, August 3).

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U.S. Response:  Scientists Studying Use of Fish to Detect Biological, Chemical Agents

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Center for Water Security are examining whether a species of fish could be used to help detect toxins placed in the U.S. drinking water supply by terrorists, the Associated Press reported today (see GSN, May 29).

Center scientists are studying whether zebrafish could be used to detect the presence of toxins in water, according Michael Carvan, head of the project.  The fish are genetically modified to glow when they encounter different types and levels of chemicals, AP reported. 

For example, scientists expose the fish to high levels of E. coli.  Only those fish with the gene to react to high levels of the bacterium should glow, while others should remain a dull gray, AP reported.

More work still needs to be done, however, before the fish could be used to test water supplies, Carvan said.

“We can get them to light up,” Carvan said.  “But they don’t pass that trait onto the next generation,” he said (Tim Cigelske, Associated Press, Aug. 4).

Researchers at the Office of Naval Research and Duke University are also working on ways to modify organisms to react to the presence of certain materials, such as toxins and pathogens, according to New Technology Week. 

The scientists are working to develop a method to produce proteins that could link to molecules of a substance to be identified.  Those proteins, which could also include a fluorescent molecule to glow in the presence of the substance, could then be inserted into organisms for use as chemical and biological detectors (Dave Ahearn, New Technology Week, Aug. 4).

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