America's
Ultra-Secret Weapon
By MARK THOMPSON
Posted Sunday, January 19, 2003; 10:31 a.m. EST
Every war has its wonder weapon. In Afghanistan, it
was the Predator, the unmanned drone that would loiter, invisibly, over
the battlefield before unleashing a Hellfire missile on an unsuspecting
target. The Gulf War marked the debut of precision-guided munitions, and
in Vietnam helicopters came of age. World War II gave us the horror of
nuclear weapons, and World War I introduced the tank. If there's a second
Gulf War, get ready to meet the high-power microwave.
HPMs are man-made lightning bolts crammed into cruise
missiles. They could be key weapons for targeting Saddam Hussein's stockpiles
of biological and chemical weapons. HPMs fry the sophisticated computers
and electronic gear necessary to produce, protect, store and deliver such
agents. The powerful electromagnetic pulses can travel into deeply buried
bunkers through ventilation shafts, plumbing and antennas. But unlike
conventional explosives, they won't spew deadly agents into the air, where
they could poison Iraqi civilians or advancing U.S. troops.
The HPM is a top-secret program, and the Pentagon wants
to keep it that way. Senior military officials have dropped hints about
a new, classified weapon for Iraq but won't provide details. Still, information
about HPMs, first successfully tested in 1999, has trickled out. "High-power
microwave technology is ready for the transition to active weapons in
the U.S. military," Air Force Colonel Eileen Walling wrote in a rare,
unclassified report on the program three years ago. "There are signs
that microwave weapons will represent a revolutionary concept for warfare,
principally because microwaves are designed to incapacitate equipment
rather than humans."
HPMs can unleash in a flash as much electrical power-2
billion watts or more-as the Hoover Dam generates in 24 hours. Capacitors
aboard the missile discharge an energy pulse-moving at the speed of light
and impervious to bad weather-in front of the missile as it nears its
target. That pulse can destroy any electronics within 1,000 ft. of the
flash by short-circuiting internal electrical connections, thereby wrecking
memory chips, ruining computer motherboards and generally screwing up
electronic components not built to withstand such powerful surges. It's
similar to what can happen to your computer or TV when lightning strikes
nearby and a tidal wave of electricity rides in through the wiring.
Most of this "e-bomb" development is taking
place at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, N.M. The Directed Energy
Directorate at Kirtland has been studying how to deliver varying but predictable
electrical pulses to inflict increasing levels of harm: to deny, degrade,
damage or destroy, to use the Pentagon's parlance. HPM engineers call
it "dial-a-hurt." But that hurt can cause unintended problems:
beyond taking out a tyrant's silicon chips, HPMs could destroy nearby
heart pacemakers and other life-critical electrical systems in hospitals
or aboard aircraft (that's why the U.S. military is putting them only
on long-range cruise missiles). The U.S. used a more primitive form of
these weapons-known as soft bombs-against Yugoslavia and in the first
Gulf War, when cruise missiles showered miles of thin carbon fibers over
electrical facilities, creating massive short circuits that shut down
electrical power.
Although the Pentagon prefers not to use experimental
weapons on the battlefield, "the world intervenes from time to time,"
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says. "And you reach in there and
take something out that is still in a developmental stage, and you might
use it."
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101030127/nmicro.html
Informant: Volker Hartenstein Member of the Bavarian
Parliament
Days Before Going to Bat For
Wireless Companies, Bush Administration
Official Was Feted by Lobbyists
By Pete Yost
Associated Press
http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/012203G.wire.loby.htm
Monday 20 January 2003
WASHINGTON (AP) The Bush administration's point person
for telecommunications policy allowed wireless phone company lobbyists
to help pay for a private reception at her home, and then 10 days later
urged a policy change that benefited their industry, according to documents
and interviews.
Assistant Commerce Secretary Nancy Victory said she
regards the lobbyists as personal friends, and cleared the arrangement
in advance with her department's ethics office. She did not report the
October 2001 party as a gift on her government ethics disclosure form.
''My friends paid for this party out of their personal
money,'' Victory said in an interview last week with The Associated Press.
Victory added she believed it was ''ridiculous'' to
draw a connection between the party and her letter 10 days later to the
Federal Communications Commission urging an immediate end to a decade-old
restriction on wireless spectrum.
''Many of the attendees had nothing to do with that
issue,'' she said, declining to further identify the guests.
Ethics experts said the arrangement at the very least
heightens public concerns about the appearance of a conflict of interest,
and may have run afoul of federal ethics standards.
''Going ahead with this party seems insensitive to
public concern about whether this Bush administration is in the pocket
of corporations and lobbyists. It doesn't look good for her or the administration,''
said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis
who teaches legal and government ethics.
Stephen Gillers, a professor at New York University's
law school, said Victory had a legal obligation to disclose the lobbyists'
largesse on her financial disclosure form.
''Victory's industry friends could pay for the party
out of their own pocket, but she had a duty to reveal their contribution
to the public,'' Gillers said. Under federal ethics rules, Victory can
correct the matter by revising her financial disclosure form.
Victory serves as administrator of the National Telecommunications
and Information Administration and is the administration's policy representative
before the independent Federal Communications Commission.
The party Oct. 14, 2001 was paid for by six hosts,
including lobbyists for three companies with a stake in wireless communications
and an attorney from Victory's old law firm where her husband is a partner
specializing in communications law.
Corporate representatives from the telecommunications
industry were among the dozens of party guests, according to Victory.
A copy of the party's invitation, obtained by AP, clearly
names at the top lobbyists Brian Fontes of Cingular Wireless, Priscilla
Hill-Ardoin of SBC Telecommunications and Rich Barth of wireless phone
manufacturer Motorola.
It said the hosts ''invite you and your guest to a
reception in honor of Nancy Victory,'' and urged attendees to RSVP to
a number or e-mail address at Victory's old law firm.
Ten days after the catered reception at Victory's million-dollar
home in Great Falls, Va., she asked the FCC to immediately repeal restrictions
that Cingular, SBC and other major cellular companies had long complained
about.
The FCC voted two weeks later to phase out by Jan.
1, 2003, the limits on how much of the spectrum individual carriers could
own in a geographic area. The agency had put the limits in place in the
early 1990s to promote competition.
In today's market, ''rules such as these that draw
arbitrary lines in the name of ensuring competition are simply not needed,''
Victory wrote the FCC on Oct. 24, 2001.
The carriers argued that more airwaves would give them
the space to provide advanced mobile services, but critics said the change
would squeeze out smaller competitors and drive up rates.
Casting the single vote against the change, FCC Commissioner
Michael Copps said that the agency had not done enough to study the shortage
of airwaves.
''This is, for some, more about corporate mergers than
it is about anything else,'' Copps said at the time.
Cingular and SBC both had formally urged the FCC to
end the restrictions. Motorola did not weigh in on the issue, but it's
largest commercial cellular customers, including Cingular, advocated repeal.
Victory declined to name any of the invited guests,
but said a government ethics officer told her in advance that ''these
parties are very, very common'' and that there was no ethical problem
as long as those at the reception were personal friends.
Victory said she did not provide the ethics officer
with a list of those from industry, ''nor should that be necessary. They're
my friends.'' The ethics officer, she said, also told her she didn't have
to report the party as a gift.
At least one company whose lobbyist helped pick up
the tab, SBC, is checking to see if the approximately $480 its lobbyist
spent came from corporate funds. Fontes and Barth said they don't remember
how much they paid or whether the money came from corporate funds.
''A group of folks who either worked with Nancy or
have known her for many years just got together to toast her,'' Fontes
said. Victory had been confirmed by the Senate for her new government
post two months earlier.
Kirsten Lovett, a spokeswoman at Victory's former law
firm, Wiley Rein & 0Fielding, said in a statement that ''I do not
know anything about the party to which you refer as it was not a firm
function'' even though the invitation's RSVP listed a number and e-mail
address at the firm and one of its partners was a co-host.
Wiley Rein & Fielding, is one of the largest communications
law firms in town. The founder, Richard Wiley, was an FCC commissioner
and chairman during the Nixon and Ford administrations.
Informant: Don Maisch
SAY NO TO WAR IN IRAQ
http://www.idealist.org/en/ip/idealist?COMPONENT=OrgViewer&ORG_ID=91768#CAMPAIGN_2
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