[Nettime-bold] Re: Will missles return to sting?

["Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net>]

This sounds like a reasonable threat. Early in 1990's when Croatia 
became a country, there was a celebration on a Croatian merchant 
ship in the Red Hook harbour in Brooklyn. This was behind the US 
border, effectively. My friend and me got in driving his 14ft moving 
truck. We were waved in and out of area and nobody ever checked 
the truck - this would perhaps be impossible to imagine after 9-11. 
The truck was empty in both directions - but in theory the ship 
could have brought some Stinger missiles from Bosnia unused by 
mujahedeen, and we could have brought them back into the US, 
with no knowledge of the US authorities. And whenever I hit the surf 
at the Jones Beach remote West End I see a number of wide 
fuselage airliners coming from Europe flying low preparing for 
landing on JFK, easy targets - I always wondered whether the TWA 
flight 800 was shot down like that by a Stinger missile by some Al 
Qaeda or other terror group.

ivo



Date sent:      	Thu, 15 Nov 2001 03:28:32 -0500
Send reply to:  	International Justice Watch Discussion List
             	<JUSTWATCH-L@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>
From:           	Daniel Tomasevich <danilo@MARTNET.COM>
Subject:        	Will missles return to sting?
To:             	JUSTWATCH-L@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU

        Will Stinger missles be used by anyone in Afghanistan?
There are still many of them out there that the CIA wasn't able
to purchase back.


More than a decade after the Soviets left Afghanistan, some 300 to 600
Stinger missiles remain unaccounted for. Some CIA boosters attempt to
downplay the threat by claiming that the batteries in the missiles have only
a short shelf life. However, while researching at the National Security
Archives, I uncovered a 1987 document from the U.S. Army Central Command
stating clearly that "the BCU, the power source required to activate the
Stinger, has a shelf life of at least 10 years, with a reliability rate of
98%-99%."


Daniel
(article not for cross posting)
-------------------------------------------------------------

USA Today
Wednesday, November 14, 2001
Editorial/Opinion

        "Will missiles return to sting?"

By Alan J. Kuperman

Federal investigators are treating the crash of American Airlines Flight 587
as an accident, and it may well turn out to be just that. But the
possibility of a terrorist act crossed every mind when the news broke Monday
that an airliner had dived into a New York neighborhood. There was instant
speculation that the airliner might have been the victim of a bomb - or,
even more ominously, a surface-to-air missile.

Not likely this time, we are being assured. But the risk remains: No amount
of heightened security within an airport will stop the launch of a
man-portable surface-to-air missile from an off-site location. During
takeoff and landings, lumbering civilian airliners are defenseless against
such missiles, which have fallen into troublemakers' hands around the globe.

Ironically, the roots of this missile proliferation lie in U.S. policy
toward Afghanistan in the mid-1980s. At that time, the occupying Soviet army
was using helicopters to batter the Afghan mujahedin rebels, our allies.
After 2 years of heated debate, the United States in late 1986 provided the
rebels one of our highest-technology weapons: the man-portable Stinger
anti-aircraft missile.

At first, the Stinger had a decisive impact, shooting down dozens of Soviet
and Afghan military aircraft in a few months. In short order, however, the
Red Army adopted a series of technical and tactical countermeasures that
effectively nullified the Stinger. The Soviets retrofitted aircraft with
flares, infrared beacons and exhaust baffles to disorient the missiles, and
their pilots operated at night or employed terrain-hugging tactics to
prevent the rebels from getting a clear shot.

Within about a year, the Stinger became so ineffective that the rebels
essentially stopped firing them. That's when the Central Intelligence Agency
made a crucial error. Basking in the Stinger's early success, and apparently
unaware that the rebels had stopped firing the missiles, the CIA provided
the rebels hundreds more. With no immediate need for the missiles, the
rebels either sold them at international arms markets or squirreled them
away for future use.

Thanks to this CIA mistake, the missiles spread to rebel and terrorist
groups around the world. In 1987, it was reported that an Iranian boat had
fired a Stinger that hit a U.S. helicopter in the Persian Gulf but failed to
explode. In 1991, Tunisian fundamentalists reportedly used a Stinger in a
failed assassination attempt. In the early 1990s, Stingers shot down
aircraft in civil wars in Bosnia (twice) and Tajikistan, according to
reliable accounts. In addition, an anti-aircraft missile was used in 1994 to
shoot down the plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi,
triggering the Rwandan genocide.

Media reports also indicate that Stingers have been acquired by Kashmiri
militants, Indian Sikhs, the Iranian drug mafia, Iraq, Qatar, Zambia, North
Korea, Libya and militant Palestinian groups. In addition, authorities have
broken up plots to acquire the missiles by the Irish Republican Army, the
Medellin cartel, Croatian rebels, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Chechen secessionists
and Cuban exiles.

The first President Bush tried to stop this hemorrhaging after it became
clear that our former Afghan allies were linked to radical Islamic
terrorists. He gave the CIA $10 million to buy back the Stingers, and when
that proved inadequate, the agency got another $55 million in 1993. The CIA
eventually retrieved a few dozen Stingers, but the main effect of the
buyback program was to bid up the black-market price of the missile from its
original value of $30,000 to as high as $200,000. Inadvertently, this
enabled rebels and terrorists to sell Stingers back to the CIA at inflated
prices and then to use the proceeds to buy even larger numbers of cheaper
missiles at arms bazaars. To put this in context, the $65 million
appropriated to the CIA to buy back a fraction of the leftover Stingers is
about twice the Pentagon's original purchase price for all of the missiles
provided to the rebels.

More than a decade after the Soviets left Afghanistan, some 300 to 600
Stinger missiles remain unaccounted for. Some CIA boosters attempt to
downplay the threat by claiming that the batteries in the missiles have only
a short shelf life. However, while researching at the National Security
Archives, I uncovered a 1987 document from the U.S. Army Central Command
stating clearly that "the BCU, the power source required to activate the
Stinger, has a shelf life of at least 10 years, with a reliability rate of
98%-99%."

The scariest part is that civilian airliners are considerably more
vulnerable than military aircraft to Stingers and other such missiles. They
are bigger, slower and have no defense mechanisms, and areas adjacent to
commercial airports are unguarded. Simply put, during takeoff and landing,
airliners are sitting ducks for anyone able to get close to the airport with
a functioning surface-to-air missile.

To defend against the missile threat would be a major challenge. Only two
methods are possible. First, civilian aircraft could be equipped with the
same missile detectors, flares, infrared jammers and other countermeasures
as military aircraft. This likely would cost billions of dollars, unbearable
for an airline industry already reeling from the aftereffects of the recent
terror attacks - unless the federal government footed the bill.

Second, we could establish large exclusion zones around airports to prevent
anyone on the ground from getting a shot while the plane remained within
range below about 15,000 feet. However, this would be unfeasible at airports
located in densely populated areas, such as those in New York, Los Angeles
and Washington.

To those cognizant of the missile threat during the past 15 years, it has
been a pleasant surprise that few civilian airliners have been shot down by
terrorists. Experts traditionally have explained our good fortune by saying
that terrorists do not seek to kill large numbers of civilians, which would
serve no political purpose. In the wake of Sept. 11, however, that
reassuring assumption must be reassessed.



Alan J. Kuperman, a visiting scholar at the University of Southern
California's Center for International Studies, is the author of a 1999
Political Science Quarterly analysis of the Stinger missile and U.S.
intervention in Afghanistan.

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