The Center for Public Integrity

WASHINGTON, December 17, 2002 — It happened late on a Friday night, at my third airport of the day. As American Airlines Flight 3028 from St. Louis finished taxiing to a gate at Washington Dulles airport, the plane's Pavlovian bell sounded and we all stood up and began preparing to disembark. Directly in the row ahead of me, a man arose and I couldn't help but notice what he was wearing. Across the shoulders of his blue shirt were the following words: "Total Information Awareness."

The Total Information Awareness System, the controversial Pentagon research program that aims to gather and analyze a vast array of information on Americans, has hired at least eight private companies to work on the effort. Since 1997, those companies have won contracts from the Defense Department agency that oversees the program worth $88 million, the Center for Public Integrity has learned.

LONDON / WASHINGTON, June 12, 2002 — Even within the secretive world of private military companies, AirScan is noted for being unforthcoming about its operations. The Florida-based company has repeatedly refused to disclose what work it is doing in Europe, choosing instead to discuss the company's plans to track polar bears hibernating in the Arctic.

LONDON, June 12, 2002 — The flaw in the U.S. communications system is a Pentagon network called the Global Broadcasting Service (GBS), a new military satellite system begun in 1996. The system was designed to "provide efficient, direct broadcast of digital multimedia information" and give "deployed warfighters...high-bandwidth data imagery and video of critical information." It uses commercial broadcast satellite technology. But it was not originally intended to use ordinary commercial TV satellites.

LONDON, June 12, 2002 — If you heard anything, you would think it was a mosquito hovering, hunting for fresh prey. But in the dark night skies over the Balkan mountains, that distant, faint buzzing may mark a hunter of a different sort. Shrouded from view, loitering up to 16,000 feet in the air is a small army of robot spy planes used by Allied forces to watch for trouble. Every day, the spy planes are aloft to monitor the high mountain passes and deep valleys for illicit traffic, across routes in use for centuries to smuggle arms, drugs, even women destined for the sex business. In Afghanistan, some of the spy-in-the-sky observers can even be armed to fire missiles by remote control.

LONDON — The war on terrorism in Europe is being undermined by a military communications system that makes it easier for terrorists to tune in to live video of U.S. intelligence operations than to watch Disney cartoons or new-release movies.

Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma personally authorized the clandestine sale of $100-million worth of high-technology anti-aircraft radar systems to Iraq on July 10, 2000, in violation of United Nations sanctions.

Alleged Russian arms trafficker Victor Bout denied that he had any links to the al Qaeda terrorist network of Osama bin Laden and no role in shipping weapons to Afghanistan.

"In wartime," Winston Churchill once said, "truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." Two weeks after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld evoked Churchill’s words when asked for assurances that neither he nor his lieutenants would lie to the media as the United States pursued the war on terrorism and the bombing of Afghanistan. Though Rumsfeld quickly added that he could not envision a situation in which lying would be necessary, this is indeed a "different kind of war," and the always-present risk of disinformation is heightened precisely because of that.

Victor Bout, the Russian arms trafficker whose clandestine sales of weapons of war to some of the bloodiest regimes and rebels in Africa were exposed by the United Nations, had another secret client: he sold millions of dollars of arms to the Taliban in Afghanistan.