$30 billion of U.S. War Money Given to Crooks and Wasters

August 31, 2011

RT
August 31, 2011

The US wasted at least one dollar out of six on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which amounts to about US $30 billion, a bipartisan commission found. The sum may double in future, as foreign governments abandon unsustainable projects funded by the US.

The Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan is to report its sobering findings on Wednesday, but co-chairs Christopher Shays and Michael Thibault made parts of it public on Monday in an op-ed article in the Washington Post.

“Tens of billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted through poor planning, vague and shifting requirements, inadequate competition, substandard contract management and oversight, lax accountability, weak inter-agency co-ordination, and sub-par performance or outright misconduct by some contractors and federal employees. Both government and contractors need to do better,” they say.

The Pentagon has been increasingly reliant on contractors to wage war over the decades. In Afghanistan and Iraq, on average, there was one private contractor for each troop serving, with the total number of contractors at times exceeding 260,000. Now America “cannot conduct large or prolonged military operations without contractor support.”

The sheer scale of private firms’ operation aggravated by lack of accountability caused a fresh set of problems and has harmed US interests in a number of ways, the authors say.

“Our final report shows that the costs of contracting waste and fraud extend beyond the disservice to taxpayers. The costs include diminishing US military, diplomatic and development efforts; fostering corruption in host countries; and undermining US standing and influence overseas,” they say.

“Poor planning, federal understaffing and over-reliance led to billions of dollars of contracts awarded without effective competition, legions of foreign subcontractors not subject to US laws, private security guards performing tasks that can easily escalate into combat, unprosecuted instances of apparent fraud, and projects that are unlikely to be sustained by the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan,” the authors add.

The potential waste from unfinished or unsustainable projects is a problem, which may equal in scale that of actual waste from poor handling of direct expenditures. Some of the examples of this are $40 million invested in a prison in Iraq which Baghdad did not want and that was never finished, and $300 million poured into a Kabul power plant which the Afghan government has neither the money nor the technical skills to use. The money came from US taxpayers and is likely to simply vanish down the drain.

The commission has prepared a set of recommendations for Congress and the US administration to approve, which they hope will improve the situation.

The Pentagon say they are aware of the problem, but refused to comment on the commission’s findings until the report is published.

“We are well aware of some of the deficiencies over the years in how we have worked contracts,” said Marine Corps Colonel David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman. “We have worked hard over those years to try to correct those deficiencies when we come across them.”

“There have been many instances because of wartime needs where a long lengthy competitive bid contract process does not serve the needs of the war-fighters,” he said. “In many instances it’s a matter of saving lives, doing things more quickly because of the nature of conflict.”

The Department of Defense has been under increasing scrutiny recently, as the US government seeks ways to reduce the budget deficit. Lately, the Pentagon was targeted for overspending on risky weapon R&D projects, buying aircraft spare parts at inflated prices and paying money to shady Afghan transport companies possibly linked to the Taliban, among other things. The sums allegedly mishandled in all such cases range from tens of millions to billions of dollars.

According to John Glaser, an assistant editor at Antiwar.com, the latest report by the bipartisan commission is just the tip of the iceberg.

“This is just one report in a field of many describing such profligate waste in the American empire,” he said. “There have been previous reports about US aid going directly to fund the insurgency – that is, the Taliban. There is a report out done by the Center for Public Integrity that investigates the Pentagon’s practice of no-bid contracts for defense industry corporations, which has ballooned to a $140 billion problem in 2011. So this kind of waste is just widespread throughout the wars.”

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Libyan War is a training ground for Global War Template

June 19, 2011 1 Comment

by Rick Rozoff
June 19, 2011

As the West’s war against Libya has entered its fourth month and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has flown more than 11,000 missions, including 4,300 strike sorties, over the small nation, the world’s only military bloc is already integrating lessons learned from the conflict into its international model of military intervention based on earlier wars in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq.

What NATO refers to as Operation Unified Protector has provided the Alliance the framework in which to continue recruiting Partnership for Peace adjuncts like Sweden and Malta, Istanbul Cooperation Initiative affiliates Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates and Mediterranean Dialogue partnership members Jordan and Morocco into the bloc’s worldwide warfighting network. Sweden, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates also have military personnel assigned to NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in the nearly ten-year-long war in Afghanistan. In the first case, troops from the Scandinavian nation has been engaged in their first combat role, killing and being killed, in two centuries in Afghanistan and has provided eight warplanes for the attack on Libya, with marine forces to soon follow.

The military conflicts waged and other interventions conducted by the United States and its NATO allies over the past twelve years – in and against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Macedonia, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan and Libya – have contributed to the American military budget more than doubling in the past decade and U.S. arms exports almost quintupling in the same period.

The Pentagon and NATO are currently concluding the Sea Breeze 2011 naval exercise in the Black Sea off the coast of Ukraine, near the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet based in Sebastopol. Participants include the U.S., Britain, Azerbaijan, Algeria, Belgium, Denmark, Georgia, Germany, Macedonia, Moldova, Sweden, Turkey and host nation Ukraine. All but Algeria and Moldova are Troop Contributing Nations for NATO’s Afghan war. The once-annual maneuvers resumed again last year after the Ukrainian parliament banned them in 2009. This year’s exercise was arranged on the initiative of chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen. Last year’s Sea Breeze drills, the largest in the Black Sea, included 20 naval vessels, 13 aircraft and more than 1,600 military personnel from the U.S., Azerbaijan, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Moldova, Sweden, Turkey and Ukraine.

This year the guided missile cruiser USS Monterey joined the exercise. The warship is the first deployed to the Mediterranean, and now the Black, Sea for the Pentagon’s Phased Adaptive Approach interceptor missile program, one which in upcoming years will include at least 40 Standard Missile-3 interceptors in Poland and Romania and on Aegis class destroyers and cruisers in the Mediterranean, Black and Baltic Seas. Upgraded versions of the missile, the Block IB, Block IIA and Block IIB, are seen by Russian political analysts and military commanders as threats to Russia’s long-range missiles and as such to the nation’s strategic potential.

As former Indian diplomat M K Bhadrakumar wrote in a recent column:

“Without doubt, the US is stepping up pressure on Russia’s Black Sea fleet. The US’s provocation is taking place against the backdrop of the turmoil in Syria. Russia is stubbornly blocking US attempts to drum up a case for Libya-style intervention in Syria. Moscow understands that a major reason for the US to push for regime change in Syria is to get the Russian naval base in that country wound up.

“The Syrian base is the only toehold Russia has in the Mediterranean region. The Black Sea Fleet counts on the Syrian base for sustaining any effective Mediterranean presence by the Russian navy. With the establishment of US military bases in Romania and the appearance of the US warship in the Black Sea region, the arc of encirclement is tightening.”

USS Monterey, whose presence in the Black Sea has been criticized as a violation of the 1936 Montreux Convention, will return to the Mediterranean where the U.S.’s newest nuclear supercarrier, USS George H.W. Bush, and its carrier strike group with 9,000 service members and an air wing of 70 aircraft is also present, having recently visited U.S. Naval Forces Europe/Africa and Sixth Fleet headquarters in Naples, Italy, due north of Libya.

Last week the amphibious assault ship USS Bataan engaged in a certification exercise with its French counterpart FS Tonnerre in the Mediterranean. The U.S. Navy website stated that the certification “will provide Tonnerre with additional flexibility during their support to NATO-led Operation Unified Protector,” the codename for the Alliance’s war against Libya. The USS Bataan Amphibious Ready Group includes an estimated 2,000 Marines from the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit and dozens of warplanes and attack and other helicopters, and is poised for action in Libya and, if the pattern holds, Syria.

The U.S. and NATO allies and partners – Albania, Algeria, Croatia, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Malta, Mauritania, Morocco, Spain, Tunisia and Turkey – conducted the Phoenix Express 2011 maritime exercise in the Eastern and Central Mediterranean from June 1-15, which included maneuvers in support of the U.S.’s global Proliferation Security Initiative.

Also earlier this month NATO held this year’s Northern Viking air and naval exercise, the latest in a series of biennial drills under that name, in Iceland with 450 NATO military members from the U.S., Denmark, Iceland, Italy and Norway. The United States European Command website cited the Norwegian detachment commander saying, “exercises like [Northern Viking 2011] allowed the pilots to prepare for real-world scenarios, like Operation Odyssey Dawn,” the name for the Western military campaign in Libya from March 19-30.

This week NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen visited Britain and Spain, meeting with Prime Minister David Cameron and Foreign Secretary William Hague in the first country and Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero, Foreign Minister Trinidad Jimenez and Defence Minister Carme Chacon in the second.

While in London Rasmussen focused on the wars in Libyan and Afghanistan, both under NATO command, and promoted the implementation of the European wing of the U.S. international interceptor missile system.

Perhaps in part responding to the dressing down NATO member states had recently received by the person Rasmussen truly, if unofficially, has to account to – U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates – he boasted:

“NATO is more needed and wanted than ever, from Afghanistan to Kosovo, from the coast of Somalia to Libya. We are busier than ever before.”

In Spain he addressed the nation’s upper house of parliament in a speech titled “NATO and the Mediterranean: the changes ahead” and, according to the bloc’s website, emphasized “NATO’s changing role in the Mediterranean, particularly focusing on Operation Unified Protector and NATO’s future role in the region.” He also pledged that “we can help the Arab Spring well and truly blossom.” Libya and Syria, tomorrow Algeria and Lebanon, come to mind as the objects of NATO’s false solicitude, and Egypt and Tunisia too, as Rasmussen has already mentioned, in regard to NATO training their militaries and rebuilding their command structures in accordance with Alliance standards, as is being done in Iraq.

The war against Libya, NATO’s first armed conflict in the Mediterranean and on the African continent, is solidifying control of the Mediterranean already established by the ongoing Operation Active Endeavor surveillance and interdiction mission launched in 2001 under NATO’s Article 5 collective military assistance provision.

While Rasmussen was in Britain, Russian ambassador to NATO Dmitri Rogozin said that the Atlantic Alliance “is being drawn into a ground operation,” and asserted “The war in Libya means…the beginning of its expansion south.”

Two days before, the U.S. and NATO completed Baltic Operations (BALTOPS) 2011, which included 20 ships from eleven European nations and the flagship of the Mediterranean-based U.S. Sixth Fleet, USS Mount Whitney, other American warships and Commander, Carrier Strike Group 8.

Concurrently in the Baltic Sea, the 11-day Amber Hope 2011 exercise was launched in Lithuania on June 13 with the participation of 2,000 military personnel from NATO members the U.S., Canada, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway and Poland and Partnership for Peace members Georgia and Finland. Former Soviet republics and Partnership for Peace affiliates Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Ukraine are attending as observers.

The second phase of the exercise will begin on June 19 and, according to the Lithuanian Defense Ministry, “troops will follow an established scenario based on lessons learnt by Lithuanian and foreign states in Afghanistan, Iraq and off the Somali coast,” in the last case an allusion to NATO’s ongoing Operation Ocean Shield. The bloc has also airlifted thousands of Ugandan and Burundian troops into Somalia for fighting in the capital of Mogadishu.

Earlier this week NATO also held a conference with the defense chiefs of 60 member and partner states in Belgrade, Serbia, which was bombed repeatedly by NATO warplanes 12 years ago, also focusing on the bloc’s current three-month-long war in Libya.

The Strategic Military Partner Conference was addressed by, inter alia, French General Stephane Abrial, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander for Transformation based in Norfolk, Virginia, who said, “I’m convinced that the operation in Libya will be successful,” though conceding that the hostilities may be prolonged well into the future in his opening statement.

The Black Sea Rotational Force, a Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force, followed military training exercises in Romania with a two-week exercise in Bulgaria on June 13 with troops from the host nation and, for the first time, Serbia on one of the four air and infantry bases in the country the Pentagon has moved into since 2006. The earlier training in Romania was at one of another four bases acquired in that nation.

The local press reported that most of the U.S. Marines involved arrived at the Novo Selo Range “straight from Afghanistan” on Hercules-C-130 transport aircraft.

Lieutenant Colonel Nelson Cardella of the U.S. Marine Corps said of the drills, “Our troops will be trained to improve the interoperability of our staffs” for the Afghan and future wars.

Bulgaria’s Standart News announced that “next year the Black Sea Rotational Force exercise will take place in Serbia.”

The mission of the Black Sea Rotational Force, formed last year, is to integrate the armed forces of twelve nations in the Balkans, Black Sea region and Caucasus – Albania, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Georgia, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine – through NATO for deployment to Afghanistan and other war zones and post-conflict situations.

Each of the wars the U.S. and its NATO allies have waged since 1999 has gained the Pentagon and the Alliance new military bases and expeditionary contingents in subjugated and adjoining nations in Southeastern Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean and Persian Gulf, and South and Central Asia.

Just as the Yugoslav, Afghan and Iraqi wars contributed to developing a U.S.-led NATO international military intervention capability for use against Libya today, so the Libyan experience is being employed for future conflicts.

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China: The New Bin Laden

May 11, 2011

Paul Craig Roberts
May 12, 2011

George Orwell, the pen name by which Eric Blair is known, had the gift of prophecy, or else blind luck. In 1949 in his novel, 1984, he described the Amerika of today and, I fear, also his native Great Britain, which is no longer great and follows Washington, licking the jackboot and submitting to Washington’s hegemony over England and Europe and exhausting itself financially and morally in order to support Amerikan hegemony over the rest of the world.

In Orwell’s prophecy, Big Brother’s government rules over unquestioning people, incapable of independent thought, who are constantly spied upon. In 1949 there was no Internet, Facebook, twitter, GPS, etc. Big Brother’s spying was done through cameras and microphones in public areas, as in England today, and through television equipped with surveillance devices in homes. As everyone thought what the government intended for them to think, it was easy to identify the few who had suspicions.

Fear and war were used to keep everyone in line, but not even Orwell anticipated Homeland Security feeling up the genitals of air travelers and shopping center customers. Every day in people’s lives, there came over the TV the Two Minutes of Hate. An image of Emmanuel Goldstein, a propaganda creation of the Ministry of Truth, who is designated as Oceania’s Number One Enemy, appeared on the screen. Goldstein was the non-existent “enemy of the state” whose non-existent organization, “The Brotherhood,” was Oceania’s terrorist enemy. The Goldstein Threat justified the “Homeland Security” that violated all known Rights of Englishmen and kept Oceania’s subjects “safe.”

Since 9/11, with some diversions into Sheik Mohammed and Mohamed Atta, the two rivals to bin Laden as the “Mastermind of 9/11,” Osama bin Laden has played the 21st century roll of Emmanuel Goldstein. Now that the Obama Regime has announced the murder of the modern-day Goldstein, a new demon must be constructed before Oceania’s wars run out of justifications.

Hillary Clinton, the low-grade moron who is US Secretary of State, is busy at work making China the new enemy of Oceania. China is Amerika’s largest creditor, but this did not inhibit the idiot Hilary from, this week in front of high Chinese officials, denouncing China for “human rights violations” and for the absence of democracy.

While Hilary was enjoying her rant and displaying unspeakable Amerkan hypocrisy, Homeland Security thugs had organized local police and sheriffs in a small town that is the home of Western Illinois University and set upon peaceful students who were enjoying their annual street party. There was no rioting, no property damage, but the riot police or Homeland Security SWAT teams showed up with sound cannons, gassed the students and beat them. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufKv-5t0t4E

Indeed, if anyone pays any attention to what is happening in Amerika today, a militarized police and Homeland Security are destroying constitutional rights of peaceful assembly, protest, and free speech.

For practical purposes, the U.S. Constitution no longer exists. The police can beat, taser, abuse, and falsely arrest American citizens and experience no adverse consequences.

The executive branch of the federal government, to whom we used to look to protect us from abuses at the state and local level, acquired the right under the Bush regime to ignore both US and international law, along with the US Constitution and the constitutional powers of Congress and the judiciary. As long as there is a “state of war,” such as the open-ended “war on terror,” the executive branch is higher than the law and is unaccountable to law. Amerika is not a democracy, but a country ruled by an executive branch Caesar.

Hillary, of course, like the rest of the U.S. Government, is scared by the recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) report that China will be the most powerful economy in five years.

Just as the military/security complex pressured President John F. Kennedy to start a war with the Soviet Union over the Cuban missile crisis while the US still had the nuclear advantage, Hillary is now moving China into the role of Emmanuel Goldstein. Hate has to be mobilized, before Washington can move the ignorant patriotic masses to war.

How can Oceania continue if the declared enemy, Osama bin Laden, is dead. Big Brother must immediately invent another “enemy of the people.”

But Hillary, being a total idiot, has chosen a country that has other than military weapons. While the Amerikans support “dissidents” in China, who are sufficiently stupid to believe that democracy exists in Amerika, the insulted Chinese government sits on $2 trillion in US dollar-denominated assets that can be dumped, thus destroying the US dollar’s exchange value and the dollar as reserve currency, the main source of US power.

Hillary, in an unprecedented act of hypocrisy, denounced China for “human rights violations.” This from a country that has violated the human rights of millions of victims in our own time in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, secret CIA prisons dotted all over the planet, in US courts of law, and in the arrests and seizure of documents of American war protestors. There is no worst violator of human rights on the planet than the US government, and the world knows it.

The hubris and arrogance of US policymakers, and the lies that they inculcate in the American public, have exposed Washington to war with the most populous country on earth, a country that has a military alliance with Russia, which has sufficient nuclear weapons to wipe out all life on earth. The scared idiots in Washington are desperate to set up China as the new Osama bin Laden, the figure of two minutes of hate every news hour, so that the World’s Only Superpower can take out the Chinese before they surpass the US as the Number One Power.

No country on earth has a less responsible government and a less accountable government than the Americans. However, Americans will defend their own oppression, and that of the world, to the bitter end.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is the father of Reaganomics and the former head of policy at the Department of Treasury. He is a columnist and was previously an editor for the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, “How the Economy Was Lost: The War of the Worlds,” details why America is disintegrating.

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A Silent Killer in Times of War and in Times of Peace

April 13, 2011

April 12, 2011

It was used in both Gulf War I and II; in Kuwait, Afghanistan, Bosnia, and now in Libya. Even though it is widely known how dangerous this toxic substance is, the United States and Britain have refused to sign a ban that prevents aggressors from using it when involved in military conflict. With an average lifespan of 4.5 million years, depleted uranium will continue to murder almost indefinitely, generation after generation with no consequences for those who utilize it indiscriminately against innocent and unsuspecting populations.

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America’s Planned Nuclear Attack on Libya

April 1, 2011 1 Comment

By Michel Chossudovsky
March 30, 2011

A war on Libya has been on the drawing board of the Pentagon for more than 20 years. Using nukes against Libya was first envisaged in 1997.

On April 14th 1986, Ronald Reagan ordered a series of bombings directed against Libya under “Operation El Dorado Canyon”, in reprisal for an alleged Libya sponsored terrorist bombing of a Berlin discotheque. The pretext was fabricated. During these air raids, which were condemned by both France and Italy, Qadhafi’s residence was bombed killing his younger daughter.

Barely acknowledged by the Western media, a planned attack on Libya using nuclear weapons, had been contemplated by the Clinton Administration in 1997, at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

The Department of Defense had developed a new generation of bunker buster tactical nuclear weapons for use in the Middle East and Central Asia:

“Military officials and leaders of America’s nuclear weapon laboratories [had] urged the US to develop a new generation of precision low-yield nuclear weapons… which could be used in conventional conflicts with third-world nations.” (Federation of American Scientists, 2001, emphasis added).

The B61-11 earth-penetrating weapon with a nuclear warhead had not been tested. It was part of the B61 series, coupled with a so-called “low yield” nuclear warhead. According to US military sources: “If used in North Korea, the radioactive fallout [of the B61-11] could drift over nearby countries such as Japan.” (B61-11 Earth-Penetrating Weapon, Globalsecurity.org). The B61-11 earth-penetrating version of the B61 was configured initially to have a “low” 10 kiloton yield, 66.6 percent of a Hiroshima bomb, for post-Cold War battlefield operations in the Middle East and Central Asia.

The Pentagon’s Plan to Nuke Libya

The B61-11 tactical nuclear weapon was slated by the Pentagon to be used in 1997 against the “Qadhafi regime”:

“Senior Pentagon officials ignited controversy last April [1997] by suggesting that the earth-penetrating [nuclear] weapon would soon be available for possible use against a suspected underground chemical factory being built by Libya at Tarhunah. This thinly-veiled threat came just eleven days after the United States signed the African Nuclear Weapons Free Zone Treaty, designed to prohibit signatories from using or threatening to use nuclear weapons against any other signatory, including Libya.” (David Muller, Penetrator N-Bombs, International Action Center, 1997)

Tarbunah has a population of more than 200,000 people, men, women and children. It is about 60 km East of Tripoli. Had this “humanitarian bomb” (with a ”yield” or explosive capacity of two-thirds of a Hiroshima bomb) been launched on this “suspected” WMD facility, it would have resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, not to mention the nuclear fallout…

Harold Palmer Smith Junior

The man behind this diabolical project to nuke Libya was Assistant Secretary of Defense Harold Palmer Smith Junior. “Even before the B61 came on line, Libya was identified as a potential target”. (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – September/ October 1997, p. 27, emphasis added)

Harold Palmer Smith had been appointed by President Bill Clinton to oversee nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs with a focus on “the reduction and maintenance of the US arsenal of nuclear weapons”. From the outset, his actual mandate, was not “reduce” but to “increase” the nuclear arsenal by promoting the development of a new generation of “harmless” mini-nukes for use in the Middle East war theater.

“Testing” the B611-11 Nuclear Bomb on an Actual Country

The Department of Defense’s objective under Harold Smith’s advice was to fast track the “testing” of  the B61-11 nuclear bomb on an actual country:

Five months after [Assistant Defense Secretary] Harold Smith called for an acceleration of the B61-11 production schedule, he went public with an assertion that the Air Force would use the B61-11 [nuclear weapon] against Libya’s alleged underground chemical weapons plant at Tarhunah if the President decided that the plant had to be destroyed. “We could not take [Tarhunah] out of commission using strictly conventional weapons,” Smith told the Associated Press. The B61-11 “would be the nuclear weapon of choice,” he told Jane’s Defence Weekly.

Smith gave the statement during a breakfast interview with reporters after Defense Secretary William Perry had earlier told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on chemical or biological weapons that the U.S. retained the option of using nuclear weapons against countries armed with chemical and biological weapons. (http://www.nukestrat.com/us/afn/B61-11.htm, emphasis added).

While the Pentagon later denied its intention to bomb Libya’s Tarhunah plant, it nonetheless confirmed that “Washington would not rule out using nuclear weapons [against Libya]“. (Ibid., emphasis added.)

Nukes and Mini-Nukes: Iraq and Afghanistan

The US military contends that “mini-nukes” are “humanitarian bombs” which minimize “collateral damage”. According to scientific opinion on contract to the Pentagon, they are  “harmless to the surrounding civilian population because the explosion is underground”,

The B61-11 is a bon fide thermonuclear bomb, a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) in the real sense of the word.

Military documents distinguish between the  Nuclear Earth Penetrator (NEP) and the “mini-nuke”, which are nuclear weapons with a yield of less than 10 kilotons (two-thirds of a Hiroshima bomb). The NEP can have a yield of up to a 1000 kilotons, or seventy times a Hiroshima bomb.

This distinction between mini-nukes and  the NEP is in many regards misleading. In practice there is no dividing line. We are broadly dealing with the same type of weaponry: the B61-11 has several “available yields”, ranging from “low yields” of less than one kiloton, to mid-range, and up to the 1000 kiloton bomb.

In all cases, the radioactive fallout is devastating. Moreover, the B61 series of thermonuclear weapons includes several models with distinct specifications: the B61-11, the B61-3, B61- 4, B61-7 and B61-10. Each of these bombs has several “available yields”.

What is contemplated for theater use is the “low yield” 10 kt bomb, two-thirds of a Hiroshima bomb.

The Libya 1997 “Nuclear Option” had set the Stage…

Neither the Bush nor the Obama administrations have excluded using thermonuclear bunker buster bombs in the Middle East war theater. These weapons were specifically developed for use in post Cold War “conventional conflicts with third world nations”.  They were approved for use in the conventional war theater by the US Senate in 2002, following the adoption of the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review.

In October 2001, in the immediate wake of 9/11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld envisaged the use of the B61-11 in Afghanistan. The stated targets were Al Qaeda cave bunkers in the Tora Bora mountains.

Rumsfeld stated at the time that while the “conventional” bunker buster bombs “‘are going to be able to do the job’… he did not rule out the eventual use of nuclear weapons.” (Quoted in the Houston Chronicle, 20 October 2001, emphasis added.)

The use of the B61-11 was also contemplated during the 2003 bombing and invasion of Iraq. In this regard, the B61-11 was described as “a precise, earth-penetrating low-yield nuclear weapon against high-value underground targets”, which included Saddam Hussein’s underground bunkers:

“If Saddam was arguably the highest value target in Iraq, then a good case could be made for using a nuclear weapon like the B61-11 to assure killing him and decapitating the regime.” (Defense News, December 8, 2003, emphasis added)

“All options are on the table”… Sheer madness. Nukes to implement “regime change”… What Rumsfeld had proposed, as part of a “humanitarian mandate”, was the use of a nuclear bomb to “take out” the president of a foreign country.

(author’s note: There is no documentary evidence that the B61-11 was used against Iraq).

Is a Nuclear Attack on Libya Still on the Pentagon’s Drawing Board?

“The Coalition of the Willing” under US-NATO mandate is currently involved in “a humanitarian war” on Libya to “protect the lives of innocent civilians”.

Is the use of a nuclear bomb excluded under the Alliance’s R2P Responsibility to Protect Doctrine?

The Bush administration’s 2001 nuclear doctrine contained specific “guidelines” regarding “preemptive” nuclear strikes against several countries in the broader Middle East Central Asian region, which explicitly included Libya.

 As revealed by William Arkin in early 2002, “The Bush administration, in a secret policy review… [had] ordered the Pentagon to draft contingency plans for the use of nuclear weapons [The 2001 Nuclear Posture Review approved by the Senate in late 2002] against at least seven countries, naming not only Russia and the “axis of evil”–Iraq, Iran, and North Korea–but also China, Libya and Syria. (See William Arkin, “Thinking the Unthinkable”, Los Angeles Times, 9 March 2002)

In addition, the U.S. Defense Department has been told to prepare for the possibility that nuclear weapons may be required in some future Arab-Israeli crisis. And, it is to develop plans for using nuclear weapons to retaliate against chemical or biological attacks, as well as “surprising military developments” of an unspecified nature. These and a host of other directives, including calls for developing bunker-busting mini-nukes and nuclear weapons that reduce collateral damage, are contained in a still-classified document called the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which was delivered to Congress on Jan. 8. (ibid)

The preemptive nuclear doctrine (DJNO) –endorsed by the Obama Administration– allows for the preemptive use of “mini nukes” in conventional war theaters directed against “rogue states”. While the “guidelines” do not exclude other (more deadly) categories of nukes in the US /NATO nuclear arsenal, Pentagon “scenarios” in the Middle East and North Africa are currently limited to the use of tactical nuclear weapons including the B61-11 bunker buster bomb.

The fact that Libya had been singled out by the Pentagon for a possible 1997 mini-nuke “trial run” was a significant element in the formulation of the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR).

It is worth noting that tactical B61 nuclear weapons have also been deployed by America’s NATO partners: five European “non-nuclear states”, including Belgium, The Netherlands and Italy, which are directly participating in the Libya bombing campaign, have B61 mini-nukes stockpiled and deployed under national command in their respective military bases. (Michel Chossudovsky, Europe’s Five “Undeclared Nuclear Weapons States“, February 10, 2010)

These European-based mini-nukes are earmarked for targets in the Middle East. While Libya is not mentioned, according to “NATO strike plans”, the European-based thermonuclear B61 bunker buster bombs could be launched “against targets in Russia or countries in the Middle East such as Syria and Iran” (quoted in National Resources Defense Council, Nuclear Weapons in Europe, February 2005).

In the context of the ongoing war against Libya, “all options are on the table”, including the preemptive nuclear option, as part of a “humanitarian mandate” to protect the lives of innocent civilians.

In 2007, a Secret 2003 STRATCOM Plan was revealed, which confirmed Washington’s resolve to wage preemptive nuclear attacks against Iran, Syria and Libya. While the concepts and assumptions of this document were derived from the 2001 NPR, the Plan formulated by Strategic Command headquarters (USSTRATCOM) focused concretely on issues of implementation.

The use of  nuclear weapons including the B61-11 against Libya in the course of the current military campaign, as initially envisaged by the Department of Defense in 1997 and subsequently embodied as the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) cannot, therefore, be ruled out.

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