Tag Archives: Congress

Celestial Navigation: Pentagon’s Extraordinary ’64-Star’ Letter Shows Why The U.S. Cannot Agree to Ban All Landmines

July 14, 1997Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): In an
unprecedented display of the Pentagon’s
verbal firepower, the United
States’ entire senior military
leadership went on record last week
in opposition to draft legislation which
would “permanently restrict the use
of funds for new deployment of
anti-personnel landmines (APL)
commencing 1 January 2000.” Signed
by every member of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff and all of the regional
Commanders-in-Chief (CINCs), this letter
makes clear that the bill co-sponsored by
Sens. Patrick Leahy
(D-VT) and Chuck Hagel
(R-NE) would “unnecessarily endanger
U.S. military forces and significantly
restrict the ability to conduct combat
operations successfully.”

The sixteen four-star generals and
admirals who signed this letter ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_97at”>see attached)
make clear that “landmines are a
‘combat multiplier’ for U.S. land forces,
especially since the dramatic reduction
of the force structure.” As has been
noted previously by Secretary of
Defense William Cohen, JCS
Chairman General John Shalikashvili,
Senate Foreign Relations
Committee Chairman Jesse Helms
and the Center for Security Policy,⁽¹⁾
this important contribution to American
combat power is accomplished without
contributing to the humanitarian problem
caused by the “indiscriminate and
irresponsible use
of…non-self-destructing APL.”

In the words of the Nation’s top
military officers, the United States,
instead, uses self-destructing
anti-personnel landmines “to shape
the battlefield, protect unit flanks and
maximize the effects of other weapons
systems” — steps that are
“particularly important to the
protection of early entry and light
forces, which must be prepared to fight
outnumbered during the initial stages of
a deployment.” They add: “We
must, at this time, retain the use of
self-destructing APL in order to minimize
the risk to U.S. soldiers and marines in
combat.”

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy
thoroughly agrees with the bottom line
conveyed by the extraordinary “64
Stars” letter:

“Until the United States has
a capable replacement for
self-destructing APL, maximum
flexibility and war-fighting
capability for American combat
commanders must be preserved. The
lives of our sons and daughters
should be given the highest
priority when deciding whether or
not to ban unilaterally the use
of self-destructing APL.”

– 30 –

1.
Fore more on the views of these
critics of the Leahy-Hagel bill, see the
Center’s Decision Brief
papers entitled The Battle Is
Joined: Defense Department, Congressional
Opposition Mounts To Fatuous Landmine Ban
( No. 97-D 94,
9 July 1997) and Hold that
Line: JCS Objections Appear Crucial To
Retaining American Right To Use Landmines
To Save U.S. Troops’ Lives
(No. 97-D 81,
18 June 1997).

“Hard Questions About Land Mines”

July 9, 1997Center for Security Policy

By Patrick M. Cronin and Ted Sahlin
The Washington Post, 09 July 1997

There can be no disagreement on the
tragic consequences of land mines when
they kill or maim innocents. The
grotesque images of crippled or seriously
wounded victims of war always will be
emotionally gripping. Unfortunately, the
alternatives to the painstaking
U.N.-sponsored Conference on Disarmament
— either the so-called Ottawa process or
the proposed legislation co-sponsored by
Sens. Patrick Leahy and Chuck Hagel to
forbid U.S. military forces from using
anti-personnel land mines — are more
nostrums than solutions.

Before the president is urged to
unilaterally relinquish the U.S. right to
use land mines, he should be given
straight answers to three hard questions:

What is the source of the problem?
Like terrorist bombs, land mines have
been and will remain an inexpensive means
of inflicting casualties. Sadly, cheap
and easy technology (land mines generally
cost less than $ 10 each and can be
constructed by almost anyone) lends to
their proliferation. The largest makers
and exporters of anti-personnel land
mines are China, Iraq, Iran and North
Korea.

U.S.-controlled land mines are not
killing or maiming innocent people
overseas. We halted the export of
anti-personnel land mines in 1992, but
even before that Congress regulated their
export. The United States now stocks
“smart” mines that
self-destruct within two weeks. President
Clinton has ordered the armed forces to
use smart mines until a global ban is
reached and to destroy stocks of older
“dumb” mines. The
“smart” mines used in the
Persian Gulf War cut off the Iraqi
Republican Guard and saved countless
lives among coalition soldiers. The
proposed Leahy-Hagel legislation and the
Ottawa process would eliminate even these
smart mines while not getting at the
source of the dumb mines, which are the
most direct threat to innocent victims.

Will our abandonment of land mines
solve the problem? Obviously, it is
difficult for a self-imposed U.S. ban to
solve the problem if our mines are not
its source. In addition, the argument
that U.S. moral leadership will reduce
the source of the problem can be
entertained only with incredulity. The
countries that are the largest source of
the problem are the least susceptible to
moral suasion from the international
community. Non-state actors or military
movements are even less sensitive.
Less-developed countries and armed
factions around the world will continue
to resort to mines as a means of leveling
the battlefield. If the United States
unilaterally relinquishes all
anti-personnel land mines, it will be
exerting moral leadership for no
substantive result while denying itself a
valuable war-fighting capability.

How will a ban affect our ability to
fight wars and protect the lives of
Americans? The president has been a
staunch advocate of continued global
engagement, and Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright has cogently
articulated why the United States is
unique in its ability to prevent and
limit conflict. A blanket proscription on
land mines would irreducibly weaken the
U.S. military’s ability to conduct its
mission.

The Korean peninsula and the Persian
Gulf are perhaps the two hottest flash
points on the planet. It is not difficult
to imagine how increasing internal decay
in the North could trigger an explosion.
At this critical juncture, it would be
foolhardy to diminish any part of the
U.S. deterrent and thereby potentially
send the wrong message to Kim Jong-Il and
the military leadership in Pyongyang.

Likewise, the leaders of Iran and Iraq
would view the U.S. elimination of
self-destructing anti-personnel land
mines from our Persian Gulf defense plans
only as an opportunity to improve their
fighting capability. In both cases, the
United States — unilaterally — would be
assisting potential adversaries.

Finally, what message does it send to
our soldiers and Marines if their
civilian leaders prohibit the use of land
mines to stake out the moral high ground
when they know that they will face
enemies not bound by a similar constraint
nor by our value system?

What can be done to ameliorate the
problem without hastily jeopardizing our
own fighting force? In addition to
persevering with the step-by-step
Conference on Disarmament process, we can
give U.S. forces the advantage in mine
warfare by increasing counter-mine
technology and equipment, increase
training in de-mining operations and
increase aid to U.S. military
medical-assistance teams in providing
prosthetic devices and training to
victims. These modest steps address both
the humanitarian problem posed by land
mines and the U.S. national interest.

Patrick M. Cronin is deputy
director of the Institute for
National Strategic Studies,
National Defense University, and
director of its Strategy and
Policy Analysis program, where
Ted Sahlin, an Army colonel, is
senior military fellow. This
essay represents their personal
views and not those of the U.S.
government.

The Buck Stops With Al Gore: Veep-Approved Rip-Off By Russia Of U.S. Taxpayer, Technology Now Threatens An American’s Life

June 27, 1997Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): The 10^th
— and possibly final — major crisis to
occur on Russia’s Mir space station in
the past five years has brought into
needed focus a scandal of major
proportions. Unfortunately, it has taken
the drama of a disaster that is
jeopardizing the life of an American
astronaut and his two Russian colleagues
to precipitate widespread questions about
the wisdom of a dubious U.S.-Russian
space cooperation program that has been
personally and insistently championed by
Vice President Al Gore.

This program was addressed by the
Center for Security Policy in a February
1996 paper enumerating myriad ways in
which the Clinton Administration was
sluicing funds to Russia in support of
President Yeltsin’s then-faltering
re-election bid. href=”97-D89.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾
The Center observed that Vice President
Gore has, in partnership with Russian
Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, made
a number of “problematic decisions
with respect to American assistance to
Moscow’s space sector at the expense of
the United States’ interests and
Treasury.”⁽²⁾

The Decision to Put Another
American on a Dangerous Mir

Perhaps the most appalling decision of
all those taken by the Clinton-Gore team
in the interest of collaborating with
Russia in space was made last month.
Despite widespread misgivings, yet
another American — Michael Foale — was
placed on Mir when astronaut Jerry
Linenger’s 4 month-long tour came to an
end last month.

There were ample reasons for opposing
such a deployment on a space vehicle with
Mir’s recent record:

On 23 February 1997, a serious
fire broke out, triggered by a
chemical oxygen generator.
Although as the Washington
Times observed on 26 June
1997, at the time this incident
was “described as a minor
blaze, extinguished in 90
seconds, it actually burned for
fourteen minutes according to
astronaut Jerry Linenger who was
aboard the space station. He
compared it to the Apollo 11
blaze that killed three
astronauts on the launch pad in
1967.”
According to Linenger, there
have been previous problems with
the docking operations on Mir.
Last March, station commander
Vasily Tsiblyev had trouble with
a faulty TV monitor at one point,
losing control of a cargo
resupply craft. (Tsiblyev also
had a close call in 1994 when a
Soyuz vehicle carrying a crew
back to earth “grazed”
one of Mir’s modules.)
The primary oxygen generator
failed in March, according to the
Washington Post, forcing
the use of a back-up device
“of the same type that had
triggered the February
fire.”
The Post reported
that a malfunction in Mir’s
attitude-control system also
occurred in March, causing it to
list until an alternate back-up
system was activated.
In April, a failed cooling
device in turn caused a
break-down in a mechanism that
cleans the air in Mir’s cabin of
carbon dioxide. The crew’s
activities had to be restricted
to reduce the accumulation of
condensation. Further cooling
system leaks then caused
temperatures to rise sharply and,
in the Post‘s words,
“leaking antifreeze caused
the crew to suffer breathing
problems, allergic reactions and
swollen eyes.”

Even the cause of the present crisis
should have been anticipated from past
difficulties with the automated docking
system. James Oberg, an expert on the
Russian space program cited by
both USA Today and the Washington
Post told the Post: “The
automated docking system used in the past
was manufactured in Ukraine, which was
demanding payment in dollars from the
Russians. ‘So now [the Russians] are
testing a new all-Russian guidance
system….They’re shaving the margins. The
dice are getting more and more loaded
against us with every throw.’“
(Emphasis added.)

The choice of putting an American
astronaut in such a dangerous position
smacks of a politicized decision. It
threatens to add greatly to the already
enormous price the Clinton-Gore
Administration has been paying to prop up
the Russian space program.

Making the Lincoln Bedroom
Shakedowns Look Cheap By Comparison

According to the Washington Times,
NASA is paying Russia $400 million
through next summer for cooperative
Russian space station efforts, including
U.S. personnel use. (At roughly one
million dollars a night, this makes the
price charged for sleep-overs in the
Lincoln bedroom appear reasonable by
comparison — especially given the
increasing discomforts associated with
visits to Mir.)

The true costs, however, of the
various programmatic shifts,
reschedulings, work-arounds and
“borrowing” of funds from other
accounts (including the shuttle program)
to make whole Russia’s obligations on
joint space activities will be hard to
estimate. Sorting it out may take a team
of accountants months of sifting through
the various scams and sleights of hand
perpetrated by Mr. Gore and his
subordinates.

It is very much to be hoped that such
an inquiry will become an urgent priority
for conscientious legislators like Rep.
James Sensenbrenner, Jr. (R-WI)
— who chairs the House Science Committee
and who called, in the wake of the latest
Mir debacle, on NASA Administrator Dan
Goldin to conduct an immediate
“top-to-bottom” evaluation of
the safety of the Russian space station.

In the course of his remarks on 25
June 1997, Rep. Sensenbrenner scathingly
described the overarching financial
dimensions of the U.S.-Russian
cooperation:

“The Russians don’t want to
admit to a failure and have to
close down the Mir and lose a
huge source of hard currency. The
reasons the Mir has been kept
going five years beyond its
design capability is because it
is a huge foreign currency earner
for Russia. And a lot of that
foreign currency is dollars right
out of the U.S. taxpayers’
pockets.”

The Bottom Line

To be sure, the American people and their
elected representatives will face a
serious problem in getting to the bottom
of this story. The wired, secretive
nature of the Gore-Chernomyrdin meetings
is increasingly paralleled by what
appears to be a suborning of NASA,
leading to a systemic dissembling about
even the realities of technical
problems with the Russian space program
— to say nothing of their true
implications for programs like the
International Space Station. For example,
contrast the
“they-are-in-no-danger” line
being deployed by NASA to allay concerns
about the Mir crisis with Jerry
Linenger’s statement that “This
is a major emergency, about as serious as
you can have in space.”

The following are among the steps that
are clearly in order:

Account for what
Messrs. Gore and Goldin have cost
the American taxpayer to date
with their politically motivated
and ill-advised bail-outs for
Russia’s space programs and
performance shortfalls.
Establish what it will
actually cost the U.S. taxpayer
to clean up the mess Mir now
represents. According to
USA Today, the Russian
space station “will probably
fall to earth in 4-5 years and
its orbit cuts across the world’s
most populated areas.” If
the space shuttle is required to
fly one or more missions to
dismantle and dispose of the Mir,
who will pay the $400-500 million
dollars required per shuttle
flight? Will funds that would
otherwise be earmarked for the
international space station be
diverted for this task?
Come to grips with the
reality that the Russians are
clearly not equipped to handle
their role in preparing the
International Space Station —
a role that is currently part of
the “critical path” to
completion of this important
initiative. Immediate steps must
be taken to redesign the station
so as to ensure that it is no
longer susceptible to Russian
non-performance or extortion. For
the time being, Russia should be
scaled-back to the position of a
subcontractor.
Act to equip the
Nation with ready, reliable and
inexpensive means of getting to
and back from space.
The present crisis underscores
the unacceptability of America’s
present limited, costly and
extremely time-consuming means of
accessing outer space. Toward
this end, an urgent effort should
be made to perfect and field a
vertical launch/vertical landing
reusable launcher that can
transform both military and
commercial uses of space.

At the end of the day, there will be
no hiding. The hundreds of millions — if
not more than a billion — of dollars and
the damage done in the process to NASA
and the U.S. space program arising from
the Gore space scam will be seen as yet
another instance of compromising the
integrity and effectiveness of an
American (and/or Western) institution in
the pursuit of a short-term and
short-sighted effort to pander to Moscow.
Other recent examples of such behavior
include the mutation of NATO with
Russia’s inclusion as a de facto
member and the explicit inclusion of
Russia in virtually all activities of the
G-7 and its formal membership into the
Paris Club and OECD. href=”97-D89.html#N_3_”>⁽³⁾
What puts Mr. Gore’s folly with respect
to space cooperation in a class by
itself, however, is the fact that it has
very clearly put American lives in
jeopardy.

– 30 –

1. See the Center’s
Decision Brief entitled Clinton’s
Political Fundraising for Yeltsin Will
Entail High Costs for U.S. Taxpayers and
Interests ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-D_12″>No . 96-D 12,
9 February 1996).

2. These have
included:

granting the Kremlin
greatly increased numbers of
launches of U.S. payloads — up
to 20 launches per year versus
the 8 it has previously been
allowed. This
arrangement has enabled Moscow to
make further inroads into the
Western commercial space launch
market by the heavily subsidized
(and, therefore, cut-rate)
services of what still amount in
this sector to command economies.

While American satellite
manufacturers expect to obtain a
short-term benefit from such
inexpensive launch opportunities,
the longer-term effect will be to
erode further the viability of
the U.S. commercial launch
industry. Even more worrisome
than the as-yet-undefined hard
currency windfall this deal
represents for a Russian industry
thoroughly embedded in the old
Soviet military-industrial
complex is the fact that the
Clinton Administration is so
blithely sacrificing capabilities
that may be essential to
America’s strategically vital
access to space.

Vice President Gore
offered — apparently without
congressional consultation, to
say nothing of approval — to
assume responsibility for
shuttle-launching at least three
payloads that Russia was supposed
to put into orbit as part of its
contribution to building the
international space station.
In so doing, the United States
bought into a total of nine joint
missions through 1998.

3. See the
Center’s recent papers on these subjects
entitled ‘Founding Act’ Or
‘Final Act’ For NATO? ( href=”97-D69.html”>No. 97-D 69, 19
May 1997) and First, Clinton
Mutates NATO; Now, the G-7: Why Denver
Should Be The First — And Last —
‘Summit of the Eight’ ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-C_83″>No. 97-C 83, 19
June 1997).

Breaking the Code on the Encryption Debate: National Security Interests Are Being Jeopardized

June 25, 1997Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): With relatively
little fanfare, a truly momentous public
policy debate is taking place in
Washington. Unfortunately, all other
things being equal, it seems likely that
the outcome of this debate concerning the
domestic use, foreign export and
international regulation of encryption
techniques will do grievous harm to the
national security interests of the United
States.

‘You Can’t Tell the
Players…’

Such an extraordinary, and ominous,
result is in prospect due to several
factors:

By its very nature, encryption —
a generic name for numerous means
of encoding computer, voice or
other transmissions of data so as
to conceal the contents from
unauthorized access — is one of
the most complex and obscure of
sciences. Given its direct
relevance for the protection of
classified U.S. government
information and for the
penetration of foreign
governments and other entities’
secure communications, the U.S.
National Security Agency (NSA)
has jealously tried to shield
from public view as much as
possible about the technology and
techniques involved in encryption
and code-breaking.

The necessary secretiveness
associated with what NSA does and
how the spread of encryption
systems might affect the American
ability to perform signals
intelligence (SIGINT) by
intercepting and monitoring
foreign communications enormously
complicates this debate.

Robust encryption at home
contributes to national security
as well as protecting American
industry, critical information
networks and citizens’ privacy. But
a national information
infrastructure also needs
selective transparency on call to
support users’ needs to get at
their encrypted data.

U.S. law enforcement
agencies in carrying out criminal
investigations also need to be
able to access voice
communications, data records and
data transmissions consistent
with constitutional protections. The
loss of this investigative
technique, which is subject to
strict judicial scrutiny — would
be disastrous for law
enforcement.

Widespread use of unbreakable
encryption is exactly what
terrorists, drug lords,
pedophiles and their ilk want to
see. But law enforcement needs a
controlled window into this
encryption as part of its
responsibility to detect, prevent
or prosecute criminal behavior. Experience
with court-ordered wiretaps
suggests that, by requiring
judicial approval of such
electronic monitoring, this
function critical to the rule of
law and a civil society can be
performed without risk of serious
abuse.

Due to advances in information
techniques, the know-how
and means for providing
sophisticated encryption
capabilities has proliferated
dramatically in recent years.
With the burgeoning use of the
Internet and other electronic
devices for conducting business,
the demand for means to keep
voice communications, data
records and data transfers
private has also grown
tremendously.

U.S. manufacturers of computer
software and hardware — many
of whom have been key supporters
of and enjoy great influence with
President Clinton and his
Administration — are demanding
an opportunity to meet this
demand with encryption products
that will be exceedingly robust,
if not impenetrable. They
typically point not only to the
trade benefits such sales would
represent but to the prospect
that foreign manufacturers of
encryption technologies will
gladly supply products not
available from American sources.
Similar arguments have proven
effective in obtaining
Administration support for the
wholesale elimination of export
controls on powerful computers —
even supercomputers.

President Clinton has already
issued an Executive Order
substantially liberalizing the
export of powerful encryption
capabilities. Under its terms,
encryption programs involving up
to 40-bit keys (in layman’s
terms, the number of variables
used in combination to conceal a
given piece of encrypted message
traffic, one of several factors
determining the robustness of an
encryption program) can be
exported without a license. The
Executive Order also permits
programs of any strength
to be exported provided they have
a “key recovery”
capability (i.e., a code-breaking
spare key has been created) —
even if that key resides with the
purchaser of such encryption.

Civil libertarians —
including some conservatives with
well-deserved reputations for
concern about U.S. national
security — have taken the
position that techniques which
impede or preclude government
monitoring of electronic
transmissions are highly
desirable. Their
enthusiasm for the most
widespread proliferation of
encryption techniques, both
domestically and internationally,
provides tremendous political
cover for others with more
suspect motivations.

Counter-culture opponents
of U.S. government power,
including some holding high
office in the Clinton
Administration, appear untroubled
by the diminution of American
capabilities to perform signals
intelligence — historically an
area of decisive and
strategically vital advantage for
the United States. href=”97-D88.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾
Evidently, they are no more
concerned by the other side of
this coin: Thanks to the
Clinton-approved transfer of
American supercomputers and other
powerful data processing systems,
foreign governments are likely to
have much enhanced capabilities
to perform their own
code-breaking operations, further
reducing U.S. dominance in the
field.

The Legislative Context

Against this backdrop, several bills
have been introduced reflecting two basic
approaches. The first sponsored by
Senators Conrad Burns (R-MT) and Patrick
Leahy (D-VT) in the Senate and by Rep.
Robert Goodlatte (R-VA) in the House
would essentially eliminate controls on
the export of encryption. This
legislation is favored by the computer
software and hardware industries and a
number of civil libertarians. Senate
Majority Leader Trent Lott has thrown his
support behind the Burns-Leahy bill.

A bill recently introduced by Senator
John McCain, chairman of the Senate
Commerce Committee, presents an
alternative approach. It attempts to
“split the difference,”
addressing domestic law enforcement
concerns by way of creating incentives
for U.S. manufacturers to participate in
a key management infrastructure (i.e.,
establishing means whereby federal
agencies, with appropriate court orders,
can obtain the ability to read encrypted
communications). While the incentives to
do so are significant, the companies
would be under no requirement to take
part in this arrangement.

As a sop to the encryption industry,
however, the McCain legislation
would make several concessions that could
be injurious to the national security.
First, it would raise the threshold for
unlicenced exports from 40 bits to 56
bits. This represents a dramatic increase
in the power of encryption programs that
will find their way into the hands of
hostile powers, international terrorists
and other foreign criminal elements —
and will add dramatically to the time and
computing power required by U.S.
intelligence to monitor their activities.

Second, the McCain legislation calls
for the creation of an
industry-government advisory board tasked
to consider and jointly develop
recommendations concerning future
standards for encryption exports. Such an
arrangement would put those responsive to
multinational stockholders on an
essentially equal footing with
government agencies responsible for the
national security. In addition, the bill
would mandate foreign-availability
assessments — a pretext frequently used
by industry to argue for even the most
irresponsible transfers of U.S.
technology.⁽²⁾

Parsing Out the Issues

There are, in fact, three
separate issues involved in
the present encryption debate — issues
that have, to some extent, been
commingled by the Clinton Administration,
it appears in an effort to obscure what
is at stake for a vital national security
capability.

1. Domestic Policy

Encryption products are the future for
the privacy and security of
communications and information. Americans
have a right to be secure in the
knowledge that their private
communications and information remain
private, and that they can conduct
electronic commercial transactions
reasonably safe from fraud or compromise.
Security embedded in consumer goods (as
well as in information systems) needs to
become a common part of how business
works in this country. There is
today no restriction on the use of
encryption within the United States.
Americans may import any encryption
devices and software into the U.S. There
are, however, restrictions on the export
of U.S. encryption items.

Unfortunately,
encryption in the hands of domestic
criminals can be a menace to American
business and society, enabling them to
hide illicit records and transactions. For
law enforcement today, encrypted
communications mean no electronic
surveillance. Court-ordered
wiretaps may be unenforceable. Because of
the importance of court-ordered
electronic surveillance to law
enforcement, law enforcement agencies
across the country believe the impact of
widely proliferating encryption will be
disastrous for them, unless they have a
means of lawfully and promptly decrypting
communications and information of
criminal suspects.

Accordingly, the United States
requires common standards for accessing
encrypted data and communications (known
as “key recovery”).
Importantly, such standards
are required not only by law enforcement
but in order to support commercial needs
(for example, companies need to be able
to get at their electronic records if the
person who encrypted them dies or turns
into a vindictive disgruntled employee).
Consumers also have a vested interest in
ensuring that standards exist whereby
they can be assured that encryption will
be reliable and easily interoperable
(e.g., to manage interfaces between
various network systems). A
domestic public key recovery
infrastructure is the answer to these
requirements,

A public key recovery infrastructure
is, however, particularly essential for
law enforcement. Increasingly, criminals
are utilizing techniques to encode their
phone calls, concealing their computer
transmissions and keeping their records
locked up in encrypted computer disks or
drives, rather than in file cabinets.
Subject to the limits of U.S.
constitutional guarantees, law
enforcement needs to be able to continue
to do its job in the information age.
Law enforcement does not need more
intrusive authorities or abilities than
it has now; it needs merely to be
able to continue to be able to make use
of the same investigative techniques
presently available with respect to
wiretaps.

Alternatively, if the government does
nothing but passively watch as encryption
proliferates with no standards to guide
it, law enforcement will lose
critical investigative capabilities.
In all likelihood, it will be forced to
turn to more intrusive techniques
(microphones in the room or car rather
than taps on telephones), measures that
are more invasive of privacy and which
put more police officers’ lives at risk.
Criminals (drug dealers, kidnappers,
thieves) will enjoy safe havens they do
not presently have, and more good
citizens will find themselves victims of
unsolved crimes.

Regrettably, the Clinton
Administration has been unwilling to
stand up and say, here is what needs to
be done — perhaps out of a fear of
alienating a key constituency, the
computer industry. The
Administration clearly appreciates the
need to support law enforcement (law and
order is, after all, good politics). But
when asked, its spokesmen say they are
afraid their endorsement of a domestic
policy would prejudice its chances of
enactment, citing their experience with
the public relations disaster of an
earlier encryption management initiative
known as the “Clipper Chip.”
The truth is that there is no one better
positioned than President Clinton to
provide leadership, given his well known
ties to the hardware and software
industries.

2. Export Controls

In some respects, the Clinton
Administration’s policy has been worse
than doing nothing: It has tied the
domestic encryption issue to liberalizing
export controls on encryption techniques,
ostensibly in the hopes of buying the
support of the producers of encryption
products for greater cooperation with
regard to domestic key management
arrangements. This
is most regrettable since export
controls are the single most important
tool the United States has for protecting
sensitive national security interests in
this arena.

The unavoidable
reality is that U.S. national security is
heavily dependent on being able to
collect intelligence by listening in on
what its adversaries — actual and
potential — are up to. This intelligence
saves lives, wins wars, and preserves the
peace. And in an era of
information warfare, having superior
information systems may be determinative
of military power.

This reality was reflected until last
year by treating encryption technologies
as part of the State Department’s
Munitions Control List. President
Clinton’s Executive Order, however, moved
export controls on such technology over
to the much less rigorous Commerce
Department. It also further adulterated
the export controls regime by directing
that: 40-bit encryption programs may be
exported without a license; 56-bit
encryption programs may be exported
without a license provided the exporter
is working on a public key recovery
technology base; and any product that is
part of a public key recovery system may
be exported without a license.

American products should enjoy the
lion’s share of the market (U.S. software
has 75% of the global market today), but U.S.
exporters of highly capable
“crypto” — 40-bit and above —
should be required to get a license to
minimize the likelihood that their
products will fall into the wrong hands.
Any further weakening of export controls
would have a deeply debilitating impact
on national security. With all
of the focus on domestic encryption
regime, and with no advocacy from the
Executive Branch, national security
interests are not being represented —
and are losing out.

3. International Dimension

To make matters worse, the Clinton
Administration — under the
“leadership” of a controversial
former Carter Administration official, David
Aaron, who has been designated
as its “Ambassador for
Encryption” — has come up with a
curious and dangerous gimmick:
It proposes to
“multilateralize” yet another
area of sovereign U.S. policy concern href=”97-D88.html#N_3_”>⁽³⁾
by getting OECD nations to take the lead
in an area it is reluctant to champion
domestically, namely in implementing
national key recovery regimes.

As in other issues — ranging from
environmental regulation to family
planning — the Administration appears to
hope that the creation of common
international practice and standards will
provide a basis for imposing arrangements
domestically that would otherwise be
highly controversial, and perhaps
politically costly. Not surprisingly, the
Administration has come under some
criticism from allies for the hypocrisy
of trying to make them go first with
respect to developing key recovery
infrastructures even as it declines to
step up to the issue at home.

But this is worse than simple
hypocrisy. It is flatly
inconsistent with American values for
U.S. officials to argue that foreign
governments — many of which do not
recognize the basic individual rights of
their citizens — should have unfettered
access to their private communications.
Few of these governments actually observe
the strict limitations on electronic
surveillance which pertain in the United
States. It is one thing for the U.S. to
have a domestic key recovery regime which
is subject to the rigorous and proper
constraints of its Constitution and
system of justice. It is quite another to
say that, as a foreign policy objective
of this country, Washington wants to guarantee
the ability of foreign governments to spy
on their own citizens, or (worse) on
Americans who may communicate with those
foreign citizens or travel within those
countries.

The Bottom Line

The Clinton Administration
appears once again to have gotten the
answers exactly wrong. Their
efforts have confused the debate and
helped to divide the ranks of those who
generally are concerned with national
security — even as they are jeopardizing
vital national security interests,
evidently out of a desire to avoid
antagonizing major political donors.

Domestic policy, export controls, and
international accords concerning
encryption are different concerns, each
in need of understanding and debate on
the merits. And the vital American
national security requirement for
electronic intelligence abroad must be
supported. On an even more fundamental
level, those who traditionally are
sensitive to national security concerns
must not allow differing perceptions of
domestic law enforcement to translate
into legislation that may not only
endanger the defense of the United States
but undermine its rule of law
domestically. A lawless society is no
defender of American liberties.

The undeniable fact is that U.S.
national security is dependent upon our
ability to collect intelligence in
peacetime on foreign threats,
from terrorist groups to the
proliferation of “weapons of mass
destruction” to the status of
thousands of nuclear-tipped missiles in
potentially unfriendly hands. Likewise,
success in foreign matters (from trade to
diplomacy to support for friends and
allies) requires intelligence to identify
opportunities for the U.S. officials to
act in defense of our values and
interests around the world.

The U.S. ability to gather SIGINT
therefore is not something about which
responsible Americans can afford to be
ambivalent. This is a vital national
security priority. And it is, to be sure,
one that must take precedence over the
commercial advantages of selling U.S.
software abroad.

– 30 –

1. During both
World War II and the half century of the
Cold War, SIGINT was far and away the
most important type of intelligence the
U.S. gathered. Without the ability to
collect and read enemy codes and ciphers,
the U.S. might well have lost the Second
World War. Without SIGINT, the Cold War
might have ended far differently and
might well have turned into a hot war at
critical junctures; certainly, the U.S.
would have been almost blind to many of
the Soviet Union’s malevolent activities.

2. It is unclear
on what basis other industries
selling sensitive products — for
example, the supercomputer, chemical and
biotechnology, machine tool, chip
manufacturers, etc. — would be denied
similar vehicles for demanding the
elimination of any remaining export
controls on the transfer of their
respective products. What is more, it not
self-evident that the national security
will be well served by advertising which
foreign encryption products are of
concern to the U.S. government, let alone
encouraging American manufacturers to
supply superior — i.e., less breakable
encoding techniques — in place of such
products.

3. See in this
connection, the Center’s Decision
Brief entitled Truth
or Consequences #9: C.W.C. Proponents
Dissemble About Treaty Arrangements
Likely to Disserve U.S. Interests
(No. 97-D 46,
27 March 1997).

First, Clinton Mutates NATO; Now, The G-7: Why Denver Should Be The First — And Last — ‘Summit Of The Eight‘

June 19, 1997Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): President
Clinton’s decision to transform the Group
of Seven (G-7) meeting in Denver on 20-22
June into a “Summit of the
Eight” comes on the heels of, and
parallels, his evisceration of another,
vital Western inter-governmental
institution: The North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO).

Unfortunately, just as Clinton’s
“Founding Act” which grants
Russia both a “voice”
and a de facto “veto”
over the West’s premier security
arrangement, ⁽¹⁾
his decision to make Russia what amounts
to a full-fledged member of the G-7 will
likely mutate this important economic and
geostrategic coordinating mechanism. Such
a step promises, at best, to condemn the
Group of Seven to irrelevance.
More likely, it will turn this conclave
into yet another vehicle for abetting Moscow’s
agenda — at the expense of the U.S. and
its allies.

Dumbing Down the Discussion

Such a prognosis is borne out by what
is — even by G-7 standards ⁽²⁾
— an extraordinarily anodyne set of
discussion items for the Summit of the
Eight. According to Deputy Secretary of
the Treasury Lawrence Summers, ⁽³⁾
the topics will be:

“…ways to address the
profound economic and social
effects caused by the aging
of our societies.”

“…provid[ing] the degree
of flexibility necessary for
companies to adapt [to structural
changes in the
economy]…produced by technological
change and economic integration.“

“…how to cope with the
risks to global financial
stability that have accompanied
the benefits of financial
integration.”

“endorsement of a concerted
international strategy to assist emerging
economies in
strengthening their financial
systems, including a new,
universally applicable set of
core principles for banking
supervision.”

“…a broad international
effort to strengthen growth and
development in Africa.”

“…[urge] nations by the
year’s end to participate in an
international convention to criminalize
bribery.“

In addition, Secretary Summers
declared that the G-7 want to aid Russia
in its bid to penetrate every other major
international economic organization by
“…see[ing] Russia join the Paris
Club in 1997, the World
Trade Organization in 1998
and the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development at an appropriate
time in the future.”

A Real Agenda

Unfortunately, there are far more
pressing economic and geostrategic
developments that should be on the
Western industrialized democracies’
agenda — but cannot be, lest Moscow’s
direct and problematic involvement in
each of them prove inconvenient, if not a
show-stopper. These include:

Assuring the West’s
Access to the Vast Hydrocarbon
Resources of the Caspian Basin:
The huge oil and natural gas
deposits of the Caspian Sea
region — by some estimates
second only to those of the
Persian Gulf in terms of
exportable surpluses for the 21^st
Century — would enable Western
nations, including the United
States, to reduce their reliance
on Mideast sources. ⁽⁴⁾
Russia, however, appears
determined to: monopolize
transportation routes; challenge
the current demarcation of
sovereign control over the
central deposits of the Caspian
Sea; and destabilize the
government of Azerbaijan — the
one Western-oriented, secular
Muslim state of the region that
is anxious to do business and
enhance security cooperation with
the United States and its allies. ⁽⁵⁾

The G-7 should make clear
in the Denver Summit’s political
declaration that any effort to
destabilize Azerbaijan or
otherwise restrict the free flow
of Caspian oil to world markets
will be met with a unified
Western response aimed at
countering such strategically
threatening actions.

Reconstituting an
Effective, Multilateral Export
Control Regime:
President Clinton has repeatedly
issued Executive Orders declaring
the proliferation of weapons to
be an “extraordinary threat
to the national security” of
the United States. He has also
proclaimed himself
“personally committed to
developing a more intelligent
export control policy, one that
prevents dangerous technologies
from falling into the wrong
hands….” What he has
determinedly refused to
acknowledge, however, is that the
“wrong hands”
includes Russia — a
preeminent diverter of militarily
relevant technology and
proliferator of dangerous weapon
systems. ⁽⁶⁾

What is more, as Dr. Peter
Leitner — a Senior Strategic
Trade Analyst in the Clinton
Defense Department — told the
Joint Economic Committee on 17
June 1997, thanks to a deliberate
Clinton Administration policy
aimed at eviscerating the
“national security export
controls that we came to know and
rely upon” during the Cold
War, all there is to show for
this Mr. Clinton’s “more
intelligent export control
policy” is:

“…a handful of
weak, ineffectual regimes
which are little more
than cardboard cut-outs
designed to maintain the facade
of an international
technology security
system, but [that] offer
virtually no protection
from nations seeking to
develop advanced
conventional weapons or
weapons of mass
destruction.” ⁽⁷⁾

The G-7 must recognize the
urgent need to reconstitute an
effective multilateral export
control regime on the model of
the Coordinating Committee on
Export Controls — an arrangement
that maintains, and enforces,
controls on strategic technology
exports to Russia and China so
long as these nations engage in
the diversion of such technology
to their respective militaries or
to the West’s other potential or
avowed adversaries.

Addressing the Abuse of
the U.S. and International
Securities Markets: Both
Russia and China are increasingly
issuing dollar-denominated and
other bonds as a means of
attracting large sums of
inexpensive, undisciplined and
largely non-transparent cash. In
addition, Moscow and Beijing
appreciate that this greatly
expanded borrowing base has the
further virtue of penetrating key
constituencies in Western
economies and their societies
that have, heretofore been
largely beyond the reach of
communist recruiters, national
military establishments and
intelligence services (i.e.,
securities firms, pension funds,
insurance companies, corporations
and individuals). Over time,
arguably hundreds of firms and
many thousands — if not millions
— of people in the West will
have a vested financial interest
in opposing the imposition of
meaningful economic sanctions,
containment strategies and other
penalties that might be
appropriate responses to Russian
and/or Chinese misdeeds. ⁽⁸⁾

As Roger W. Robinson, Jr., the
first occupant of the Casey
Institute’s William J. Casey
Chair, has documented, ⁽⁹⁾
in recent years China has issued
over $6 billion in
dollar-denominated bonds —
financial instruments that have
been offered by enterprises which
are, in at least a number of
cases, “… closely
connected to the People’s
Liberation Army (PLA) and the
Chinese military industrial
complex.” These bonds are
facilitating the PLA’s efforts to
raise funds to underwrite its
offensive military build-up,
conduct espionage, technology
theft and influence operations in
the United States, suppress human
rights and pursue other
activities inimical to Western
interests.

The G-7 nations should
create forthwith a multilateral,
security-minded screening
mechanism that would interact
with their respective
intelligence services, the NATO
economic secretariat and the
OECD, to review prospective
foreign borrowers (particularly
Chinese and Russian state-owned
enterprises and banks). The
purpose of such reviews would be
to ensure that these entities are
not engaged in — or in some way
advancing — activities harmful
to Western security interests,
principles and values.

Preserving — and
Broadening — Economic Sanctions
as a Western Policy Tool:
Western allies, and their
respective business communities,
have increasingly sought to
undermine and delegitimate the
use of economic sanctions — the
only middle ground between empty
rhetoric (read, diplomatic
protests) and military action.
The West cannot afford to ignore
the fact that trade, as well as
financial, sanctions may be the
most effective and certainly
the most proportionate
response to the predations of
ever more sophisticated
proliferators, terrorists, drug
cartels, money launderers,
criminal syndicates, technology
thieves — and the hostile
military establishments that
often are behind or collaborating
with these subversive elements.

The G-7 must bear in mind
Benjamin Franklin’s admonition
that “We will hang together
or hang separately.” The
West must cooperate in the
promulgation and enforcement of
economic sanctions — even in
instances where some perceived
short-term losses will accrue to
their national or business
interests (e.g., in terms of
export opportunities, job
creation, etc.). In addition,
greater use must be made of
financial sanctions, particularly
in relation to Western bond
markets, as such sanctions more
often than not involve no
underlying trade transactions,
projects, jobs or
people-to-people contacts. Hence,
they entail less economic damage
to Western economies and risk
less political blow-back than
other types of economic
sanctions.

The Bottom Line

Unless and until such items are
considered on the G-7 agenda, this
organization will fail to serve the sort
of catalytic and coordinating function
for common Western interests to which it
has, on occasion at least, contributed in
the past (notably, the Williamsburg
economic summit of May 1983 where a joint
strategy was implemented on a
security-minded East-West trade, energy
and financial regime and the decision to
deploy Pershing II and Ground-Launched
Cruise Missiles in Europe was affirmed).

Since the inclusion of Russia in these
talks will virtually ensure that no such
deliberations can occur in Denver, it can
only be hoped that the next economic
summit will again be a Group of Seven
meeting, one in which the West’s critical
economic and geostrategic interests can
be candidly addressed.

– 30 –

1. See the Center
for Security Policy’s Decision
Brief entitled Founding
Act or Final Act for NATO? ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_69″>No. 97-D 69, 19
May 1997).

2. For example, see
the Casey Institute’s Perspective
entitled Stealth Summit: The
Incredible Shrinking G-7 ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-C_66″>No. 96-C 66,
1 July 1996).

3. Remarks by
Secretary Summers before a World Trade
Conference in Denver, 10 June 1997.

4. See in this
connection the Center’s Caspian
Watch Series: Caspian
Watch #6: Weinberger Issues Timely Alert
Against Interest Group’s Hijacking of
U.S. Caspian Policy ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_66″>No. 97-D 66, 12
May 1997); Caspian Watch #5:
Senator Byrd Takes the Lead in Securing
US Access to 200 Billions of Barrels of
Oil in the Caspian Sea ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_32″>No. 97-D 32, 25
February 1997); Caspian Watch
#4: House-Senate Conference Must Strike
Proper Balance for American Interests
(No. 96-D
85, 17 September 1996); Caspian
Watch #3: Center, Washington Post Agree
— Congress Must Do The Right Thing By
U.S. Interests in the Caspian Basin
(No. 96-D
76, 1 August 1996);
Caspian Watch #2: The Great Game Is On —
Will the Republicans in Congress Play?
(No. 95-D
87, 1 November 1997); and Caspian
Watch #1: Russian Power-Plays on ‘Early
Oil’ Hallmark of Kremlin Expansionist
Past — And Future? ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=95-D_71″>No. 95-D 71,
2 October 1995).

5. It is worth
noting that, toward this end, Russia has
been increasing its military presence in
the region, arming neighboring rival and
territory-seeking Armenia, and conspiring
with radical Islamic Iran.

6. Russia has,
according to former Secretary of Defense
Caspar Weinberger and Peter Schweizer,
provided the Iranians with
“nuclear-related technologies,
missile components and other advanced
equipment” with the stated purpose,
per a June 1996 joint statement,
“…of preventing the presence of
[Western] power in the Caspian Sea.”
What is more, Russia has expressed an
intent to transfer supersonic SS-N-22
missiles (a missile designed to attack
U.S. AEGIS ships and aircraft carriers)
to China. If past practice is any guide,
China will be willing, in due course, to
transfer the SS-N-22 to Iran — enabling
that nation further to threaten the free
flow of oil through the Straits of
Hormuz.

7. See the Center’s
Press Release entitled Profile
in Courage: Peter Leitner Blows the
Whistle on Clinton’s Dangerous Export
Decontrol Policies ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-P_82″>No. 97-P 82, 19
June 1997).

8. For more
information on the implications of
Russian bonds on Western markets, see the
following Casey Institute Perspectives
entitled: If You Like the
Rigging of the Lebed Dismissal, You’ll
Love the Rigging of the Global Credit and
Securities Market ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-C_100″>No. 96-C 100,
17 December 1996), The Debate
Over Russia’s Financial
“Break-out”; Where Will It End
for U.S. Taxpayers, Interests?
(No. 96-C
110, 4 November 1996) and Russian
‘Bondage’: Moscow’s Financial Breakout
Gets Underway with Wildly Oversubscribed
Eurobond Sale ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-C_119″>No. 96-C 119,
26 November 1996).

9. For more
information concerning Chinese
penetration of Western bond markets see
the following Casey Institute products: Dangerous
Upshot of Clinton-Gore’s China ‘Bonding’:
Strategic Penetration of U.S. Investment
Portfolios ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-C_47″>No. 97-C 47, 1
April 1997), USA Today
Illuminates Case for Urgent Action To
Halt Chinese ‘Bondage’ ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-R_68″>No. 97-R 68, 16
May 1997) and Non-Renewal of
MFN for China: A Proportionate Response
to Beijing’s Emerging, Trade-Subsidized
Strategic Threat ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-C_76″>No. 97-C 76, 9
June 1997).

Hold That Line: JCS Objections Appear Crucial To Retaining American Right To Use Landmines To Save U.S. Troops’ Lives

June 18, 1997Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): As predicted, href=”97-D81.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾
the U.S. Senate’s decision to ratify a
multilateral treaty with the admirable —
but totally unachievable — objective of
effecting a worldwide ban on poison gas
has only served to encourage proponents
of other, utopian arms control
delusions. Preeminent among
these is the proposal now being massively
promoted by a former British
queen-in-waiting, the Red Cross, an
assortment of generally left-of-center
organizations (including the Vietnam
Veterans of America) and a number of U.S.
legislators led by Senator Patrick Leahy
(D-VT): A ban on the production,
stockpiling or use of anti-personnel
landmines (APLs).

At risk of being altogether lost in
the frenzy of hype, do-goodism and
political correctness associated with the
effort to prohibit these weapons —
devices universally portrayed as inhumane
and relentlessly exacting a toll on
innocent civilians — are a few
inconvenient facts:

The U.S. Military Needs
Anti-Personnel Landmines

The United States military uses
anti-personnel landmines in a responsible
manner in order to save American
lives. It employs mines designed to
self-destruct after a short period (4
hours to 15 days), laying them down in
marked areas to protect U.S. forces. Such
use of anti-personnel mines is especially
important when American personnel are
outnumbered — a fact of life in many
combat situations, especially at the
entry of forces into a theater of
operations, and one that is likely to
become still more common as the size of
the Nation’s military shrinks. href=”97-D81.html#N_2_”>⁽²⁾

In fact, recent studies by the
Army indicate that American casualties
will increase by some thirty percent
if U.S. land forces are obliged to fight
without the use of landmines.
As a result, the images of maimed
children endlessly conjured up by
proponents of the APL ban are not the
only ones to be borne in mind; the
practical effect of such a ban will
probably be to create a great many more
American flag-draped coffins and
body-bags in future conflicts.

What’s an APL?

U.S. anti-personnel mines are
particularly important as a means of
preventing, tampering with or breaching
of anti-tank mines — a weapon system
that would, ostensibly, not be
covered by the proposed ban. Indeed,
fifteen retired general officers —
including General Norman Schwarzkopf —
who wrote an open letter to President
Clinton on 3 April 1997 urging him to
embrace a ban on anti-personnel
landmines, noted that “the
proposed ban…does not affect anti-tank
mines, nor does it ban such normally
command-detonated weapons as Claymore
‘mines,’ leaving unimpaired the use of
those undeniably militarily useful
weapons.” (Emphasis added.)

In fact, the International Committee
of the Red Cross (ICRC) — a prime-mover
behind the anti-personnel landmine ban
which is spending millions of dollars
promoting this agenda (at least some of
it likely coming from U.S. government
contributions)⁽³⁾
— has expressed strenuous opposition to
a definition that would limit the ban to
those mines “primarily
designed” to injure people. In a 6
January 1997 item on its Website, the
ICRC expressed concern about “the
increased use and rapid development of
high-tech, dual-purpose mines which can
destroy, for example, either a vehicle or
a person.”

In other words, it is
predictable that the present proposal
will come to apply to a great many other
weapon systems, perhaps
including artillery projectiles, mortar
and tank rounds, grenades, bombs or
submunitions that may fail to detonate,
leaving in place unexploded ordnance. At
the very least, the ICRC formula seems
likely to create obligations on the U.S.
military for cleaning up foreign
battlefields where it has been obliged to
fight. The costs associated with such an
obligation are potentially astronomical
and, of course, unbudgeted.

Guess What: There Will
Still be Landmines After a Ban

While banning the use of
anti-personnel landmines by the United
States and other Western states that
employ them responsibly will have a
deleterious effect on those nations’
military operations, such a ban
will do nothing to address the
problem with which its proponents claim
to be concerned. First, one
cannot prohibit the 110 million landmines
currently said to be in the ground in a
half-dozen or so developing nations
scarred by past or ongoing conflicts
(e.g., Cambodia, Afghanistan and Bosnia). href=”97-D81.html#N_4_”>⁽⁴⁾

In fact, as Paul Jefferson
— a former British mine disposal officer
and freelance mine-clearer who was
severely wounded by an anti-personnel
mine in Kuwait — wrote in an article
entitled “Why Diana is
Wrong” published by the
London Daily Telegraph on 8
February 1997:

“I am typical of most
mine-clearers — as opposed to
anti-landmine lobbyists, charity
PR spokesmen and journalists —
in that I do not believe
that a ban on landmines will do
anything to help solve the
problem of landmine devastation.
That may sound paradoxical, but
it is true. People do not want to
hear this, but the call
for a mines ban is unworkable,
undesirable and, worse, counter-productive.

“The campaign
diverts attention and funds from
the real issue. It
enables governments to claim that
they are spending money on
dealing with the problem of
landmines, whereas in fact they
are spending money on discussing
the problem, on hosting
conferences, on carrying out
‘assessment missions’, on
promoting ‘mines awareness’
campaigns — on almost
everything, in fact, other than
the messy business of actually
getting the mines out of the
ground. (Emphasis added
throughout.)

Second, there
is no reason to believe that
other nations — notably, China,
Russia and Vietnam — whose use or
widespread sale of
anti-personnel landmines has done
much to create the present
humanitarian problem — will join
or comply with a treaty banning
APLs. As Jefferson
notes:

“The proposed ban is
unworkable because producer
nations, especially the Russians
and Chinese, have refused to
consider it. Landmine use is
integral to their military
doctrine; they have long land
borders to defend. It is also
unworkable because AP mines are
so cheap to produce that even a
country such as Vietnam, with its
minimal industrial capability,
can churn them out for
export.”

Under these circumstances, as one Army
officer who wished to remain anonymous
put it: “The decision to
take landmines away from U.S. forces is
like taking firearms away from policemen
because a criminal has used one for an
illegal purpose.” This sort
of moral equivalence is all too evident
among those who might be called
“prohibitionists” — people who
argue, in the words of one, that “If
we cannot prevent war, we will make it
impossible to fight.” Of course,
banning landmines, lasers, poison gas or
even bullets from the arsenals of the
United States and other law-abiding
nations will not make it impossible to
fight wars, just difficult if not
impossible for such nations to win
them at the lowest possible cost.
Put differently, so-called
“international norms” may make
some feel better, but surely not those
who will bear with their lives the price
of such wishful thinking.

Making
U.S. Military Personnel into War
Criminals?

One other consideration is the
likelihood that U.S. combat personnel in
dangerous situations will find ways to
jury-rig hand-grenades or other ordinance
to serve as anti-personnel mines in
order to protect themselves against
surprise attack. A ban on
APLs could transform such actions into
international war crimes — and those who
take these legitimate self-defensive
steps into war criminals. This
absurd prospect can only reinforce
plummeting morale within the armed forces
and further aggravate the problem of
attracting and retaining good men into
the ground combat arms.

The Bottom Line

At this writing, only the
determination of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff appears to be preventing
capitulation on the part of the Clinton
Administration and the Congress to the
campaign immediately to ban all U.S. use
of anti-personnel landmines.
According to yesterday’s New York
Times, both President Clinton and
Vice President Gore have indicated
privately that “they cannot afford
to cross the leaders of the military
branches….” Unfortunately, such
comments seem calculated to increase
pressure on the JCS to abandon their
opposition to an immediate and permanent
ban on APL use rather than a signal of
real solidarity with the uniformed
military on a politically difficult but
principled position. Certainly,
there has been no visible effort made by
either the President, the Vice President,
the National Security Advisor or any
other senior official to support the
Chiefs’ stance.

The Chiefs have recognized that APLs
are absolutely indispensable to the
defense of South Korea and, more
generally, vital to protecting American
troops in exposed positions around the
world. They are to be commended
for displaying to date real courage under
fire — courage surely inspired,
in part, by the knowledge that to do
otherwise would be to place political
expediency above the welfare and safety
of the troops they command. Those troops
and their leadership deserve support, not
second-guessing and mau-mauing, from
civilians in the legislative and
executive branches of the U.S.
government, in the media and among
well-meaning, but seriously misguided,
anti-landmine activists.

– 30 –

1. See the
Center’s Decision Briefs
entitled Truth or
Consequences #3: Clinton ‘Makes a Mistake
About It’ In Arguing The CWC Will Protect
U.S. Troops ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_21″>No. 97-D 21, 6
February 1997), Clinton’s
C.T.B. And Other Placebos Won’t Stop,
Will Compound The Danger Of Proliferating
Weapons Of Mass Destruction
(No. 96-D
90, 24 September 1996), Will
The Senate Let Clinton Rewrite The C.F.E.
Treaty Without Its Advice And Consent?
(No. 96-P
86, 18 September 1996) and Hope
Over Experience: Despite Military
Fig-Leaf, Clinton’s Landmine Ban Is Still
A ‘Utopian Delusion’ ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-D_34″>No. 96-D 34,
3 April 1996).

2. In his powerful
essay in the 8 February 1997 Daily
Telegraph, former professional
mine-clearer Paul Jefferson notes that
operations other than war also may
require the use of mines for the safety
of U.S. and allied personnel: “Our
soldiers take part in peacekeeping
operations in which they could
easily find themselves outnumbered by
hostile forces, needing to buy themselves
time and protection before evacuation or
regrouping. They can achieve this with AP
mines.”

3. The ICRC spent
roughly $5 million in its recent campaign
to achieve another totally unverifiable
and ill-advised arms control initiative
— a ban on the use of military lasers
capable of blinding enemy personnel. By
some estimates, its current campaign
against APLs may involve outlays several
times that amount.

4. Jefferson’s
article also calls into question the
accuracy of oft-cited estimates about the
numbers of APLs currently in the ground
around the world. He documents how in at
least some key cases these estimates have
been politically manipulated:

“Lobbyists would have you
believe that lifting mines from
the ground will not work, that
the problem is too intractable
for mine-clearance operations to
cope with. They say that
mines are being laid on such a
scale that only an outright ban
on the weapon will forestall
terrible devastation. They
are wrong. The figures
being bandied about have been
arrived at by methods of which
the general public knows little.
These figures are then written up
in briefing sheets and passed on
to journalists who accept them
without question.” (Emphasis
added.)

So Far, So Good: Feingold’s Defeat In Committee Points Way For Senate To Support Independent International Broadcasting

June 16, 1997Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): The U.S. Senate is
currently expected to complete work over
the next two days on legislation intended
to reorganize and streamline the Nation’s
foreign policy-making machinery. Most of
the attention concerning this bill has
revolved around the determination of
Foreign Relations Committee chairman
Jesse Helms to consolidate the functions
of several bureaucracies inside the State
Department.

As the Center noted last week, href=”97-D80.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾
the most valuable part of the legislation
Sen. Helms is co-sponsoring with his
ranking minority member, Senator Joseph
Biden, may ironically prove to be a
section that explicitly protects — and
expands — the independence from Foggy
Bottom of one of the United States’ most
formidable, but least appreciated,
foreign policy tools:
government-supported international
broadcasting.

What is At Stake

The danger inherent in subordinating
such broadcasting to the State
Department’s managerial and budgetary
control — and inevitably, therefore, to
its policy dictates — should be obvious.
First, for the government’s
own international services
currently run by the U.S. Information
Agency (the Voice of America, Worldnet
and Radio and Television Marti), the
demands of diplomacy would likely take
precedence over the dissemination of
information in support of freedom
overseas. This problem was bad
enough when USIA was a separate agency;
if its broadcast operations were
integrated into State, there would be
even less tolerance for reporting and
editorials critical, for example, of
totalitarians with whom the
Administration is interested in doing
business.

Second, for currently
independent, but government-supported,
broadcasting services like Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and
the recently established Radio Free Asia
(RFA), however, such an
arrangement would be worse than
compromising. It would likely be the kiss
of death. After all, the
audiences of these “Freedom
Radios” — which generally include
their respective countries’ political
elites and opinion-leaders, priority
targets for American public diplomacy —
place a premium on the objectivity and
reliability of RFE/RL and RFA’s
broadcasts. These are attributes the
Radios’ listeners associate inextricably
with information sources free of U.S.
government editorial control.

‘Freedom Radios’ — A
Proven Asset

During the Cold War years, the Freedom
Radios served as “surrogate”
national radios for populations denied
access to accurate news and other
information by their own,
communist-controlled media.
Unfortunately, there are some in the
United States Senate who naively believe
that the need for such instruments ceased
with the collapse of the Soviet empire.
Others disagreed with the earlier effort
to resist communist tyranny and resented
the pivotal role played by the Freedom
Radios in what Churchill called the
“Twilight Struggle.”

In fact, but for the leadership of
Senator Biden, the Freedom Radios might
well have ceased operations by now. In
1993, then-freshman Democratic Senator
Russell Feingold of Wisconsin made a
personal cause célèbre of
terminating all U.S. government
underwriting of RFE/RL. To support this
draconian action, he claimed that the
Radios were bloated and expensive relics
of the Cold War, operating — thanks to
an independent Board for International
Broadcasting — altogether too
independently of government oversight and
control.

In the absence of appreciable support
from Republicans, the best Sen. Biden
could do was to provide a stay of
execution for the Freedom Radios: a new
institutional arrangement that more
closely tied them to USIA and that set
arbitrary timelines for eliminating
government subsidies to RFE/RL and the
national foreign language services they
provide. Significant belt-tightening and
streamlining followed, making the Freedom
Radios today a model of efficient use of
government resources.

A Needed Tool for the
Future

In the interval, moreover, it has
become clear that the post-Cold
War world is — if anything — one in
which U.S. interests require an increased
capability to provide factual information
to the peoples of Eastern and Central
Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Equally clear is the requirement that
such information be disseminated in a
form that is not discounted by the
audience as mere propaganda put out by
mouthpieces of the American government.

One painful case in point has been the
Balkans, where control of most
information sources by totalitarians bent
on aggression contributed greatly to the
popular support for ethnic cleansing. It
is nothing less than tragic that U.S.
government policy toward the former
Yugoslavia prevented Radio Free Europe
from broadcasting to that region in
Serbo-Croatian at a time when the truth
may have undercut the sense of grievance
on which the likes of Slobodan Milosevic
relied to justify and sustain genocidal
campaigns.

A similar opportunity beckons today:
The recent, overwhelming defeat in Iran
of the candidate favored by that nation’s
fanatic theocracts is proof that the
Iranian people are yearning for an end to
“Islamic” tyranny. What they
largely lack, however, is information
which makes clear that such change is not
only necessary but possible;
that freedom-loving peoples elsewhere
support this goal and are willing to do
their part to help — at a minimum, by
providing news and analysis which both
encourages and equips the growing
opposition to the Iranian government.

Helms-Biden vs. Feingold

The good news is that Senators
Helms and Biden have recognized these
realities and taken steps in their
legislation to maximize the effectiveness
of U.S. government-supported
international broadcasting. They
propose not only to assure the continued
independence and viability of the
existing Freedom Radios, but have
authorized the creation of a new service
within Radio Free Europe to be known as
Radio Free Iran. The Helms-Biden bill
also promises to increase the impact and
reduce the costs of the Voice of America
and other government-run broadcasting
services by placing them along with the
Freedom Radios under an independent, but
accountable, Broadcasting Board of
Governors.

Interestingly, Senator
Feingold was massively rebuffed when, in
the Foreign Relations Committee last
Thursday, he tried to strike this
language. By a vote of 14-3, every
Republican and a majority of the
Committee’s Democrats supported their
leaders in affirming — and expanding —
the independence of the Nation’s
international broadcasting operations.

The Bottom Line

It is to be profoundly hoped that this
sort of bipartisanship will prevail in
the full Senate as well should Sen.
Feingold (or others) try yet again to
imperil some of the United States’ most
powerful, effective and inexpensive
instruments for promoting freedom around
the world.

– 30 –

1. See the Center’s
Decision Brief entitled
Freeing and Strengthening Freedom
Radios May Be Helms-Biden Reorganization
Initiative’s Most Important Achievement
(No. 97-D
79, 12 June 1997).

European Security Act — Two Steps Forward on NATO Enlargement, One Ill-Advised Step Back on Missile Defense

June 11, 1997Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): The Senate Foreign
Relations Committee is scheduled this
afternoon to complete work on legislation
intended to reorganize and streamline the
institutions responsible for formulating,
conducting and explaining the Nation’s
foreign policies. Long a priority of the
Committee’s chairman, Senator Jesse Helms
(R-NC), this initiative received critical
momentum when — as part of the Clinton
Administration’s bid to secure Senate
approval of the controversial Chemical
Weapons Convention — Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright agreed to eliminate
several bureaucracies and consolidate
their responsibilities in the State
Department.

Among the entities expected, until
recently, to be subordinated to State’s
managerial and budgetary control — and
inevitably, therefore, to its policy
dictates — is the Broadcasting
Board of Governors. This organization was
created in 1994 to oversee the range of
U.S. government and government-supported
international broadcasting operations.
The former (i.e., the Voice of America,
Worldnet and Radio and Television Marti)
are currently run by the U.S. Information
Agency.

Importantly, the 1994 legislation
recognized the necessity of
preserving the bureaucratic and
editorial independence of the latter
(i.e., Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty
and Radio Free Asia) — a
feature deemed critical to the ability of
such “Freedom Radios surrogate
broadcasting Radios” to attract and
retain their respective audiences. During
the Cold War years, this feature of
“surrogate” broadcasting
(affording access to accurate news and
other information to populations denied
it by their own, communist-controlled
media) was assured by an independent
Board for International Broadcasting.

But for the leadership of
Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE), now the
Foreign Relations Committee’s ranking
minority member, the Freedom Radios would
have been a victim of the naive notion
that — with the collapse of the Soviet
empire — such surrogate broadcasting no
longer was needed and could not be
justified as a government expenditure.
At the time, faced with intense pressure
from Senator Russell Feingold (D-WI), who
made terminating the Freedom Radios a
personal cause célèbre, and in
the absence of appreciable support from
Republicans, the best Sen. Biden could do
was to provide a stay of execution for
the Freedom Radios: a new institutional
arrangement that more closely tied them
to USIA and that set arbitrary timelines
for eliminating government subsidies to
RFE/RL and the national foreign language
services they provide.

Changed Circumstances

It has become increasingly apparent in
recent years that, if anything,
the post-Cold War world is one in which
U.S. interests require increased
capability to provide factual information
to the peoples of Eastern and Central
Europe, Eurasia and the Middle East in a
form that is not discounted by the
audience as propaganda put out by the
mouthpieces of the American government.
One painful case in point has been the
Balkans, where control of most
information sources by totalitarians bent
on aggression and genocide contributed
greatly to the popular support for ethnic
cleansing. It is nothing less than tragic
that U.S. government policy toward the
former Yugoslavia prevented Radio Free
Europe from broadcasting to that region
in Serbo-Croatian at a time when the
truth may have undercut the sense of
grievance on which the likes of Slobodan
Milosevic relied to justify and sustain
his war machine.

A similar opportunity beckons today:
The recent, overwhelming defeat in
Iran of the candidate of the
fanatic clerics is proof that the people
of that long-suffering country are
yearning for an end to
“Islamic” tyranny. What
they largely lack, however, is
information that makes clear that such
change is not only necessary but possible;
that freedom-loving peoples elsewhere
support this goal and are willing to do
their part to help — at a minimum,
through the dissemination of news and
analysis which both encourages and equips
the growing opposition to the Iranian
government. This could be easily
and cost-effectively accomplished via the
creation of a Radio Free Iran service
providing broadcasting, ideally, in
Farsi, Arabic, Kurdish and Balouchi via
the organizational structure and
equipment of Radio Free Europe.

(In fact, such an effort should be just
one part of a larger U.S. government
effort to facilitate the emergence of
unified democratic opposition to the
extremist Iranian theocracy. In this
connection, Congress would be
well-advised to provide
government support comparable to
that going to private institutions
engaged in such democracy-building
efforts elsewhere to the
Foundation for Democracy in Iran
— an organization that has demonstrated
an extraordinary ability to forge a
common front among various Iranian
religious, political and ethnic
constituencies to work for change in
their homeland.)

The Clinton Administration’s signaling
that it sees in the election of a
relatively “moderate” Iranian
cleric as “hopeful” evidence
that change is afoot in Tehran, however,
underscores the importance of keeping
surrogate broadcasting as far away as
possible from the State Department. That
is the only reliable means of mitigating
the danger that the U.S. government’s
policy du jour (for example, one
that indulges yet again in the absurd
delusion that Iranian
“moderates” who operate in a
government under the thumb of radical
clerics is one with whom the United
States can safely do business) will
constrain the flow of factual news and
pro-change/pro-democracy editorials and
analyses from reaching the people of
Iran.

The Bottom Line

The State Department reorganization
legislation affords an important
opportunity to enhance one of the most
powerful and least expensive
instruments for promoting freedom around
the world: surrogate broadcasting.
Senators Helms and Biden are to be
commended for their bipartisan efforts to
put the Freedom Radios and other
instruments for international
broadcasting on a footing that continues
— and builds upon — the enormous
progress made to date by Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty in reducing its
costs while significantly increasing
their reach and influence. To do
so will require both
institutional independence from the
policy-making apparatuses of the U.S.
government and a continuing commitment of
public funding for the operations of the
Freedom Radio.

– 30 –

Courage Under Fire: Gen. Fogleman Shows The ‘Right Stuff’ About Military Order And Discipline; Sen. Lott Does Not

May 22, 1997Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): The media feeding
frenzy over the case of First Lieutenant
Kelly Flinn and the predictable response
from several congressional quarters —
notably, female Members of Congress and
liberal Democratic Senator Tom Harkin
(D-IA) who have assailed the Air Force
for its insensitive handling of an
“affair of the heart” — have
put into sharp relief one of the most
serious threats currently facing the U.S.
military: social experimentation
that threatens to destroy the good order
and discipline essential to an effective
fighting force.

The good news is that the Air Force’s
senior military officer, General Ronald
Fogleman, yesterday stood up for the
armed forces in the face of a
stupifyingly ill-informed attack by Sen.
Harkin. When the Senator charged his
service for “looking
ridiculous” as it brought charges
against Lt. Flinn over her acknowledged
adultery, Gen. Fogleman pointed out that
her adultery was only the precipitating
cause of the first female B-52 pilot’s
disciplinary problems: “This
is an issue about an officer entrusted to
fly nuclear weapons who disobeyed an
order [and] who lied. That’s what this is
about.”

‘There You Go Again’

The bad news is that Senate Majority
Leader Trent Lott has decided for the
second time in a month to place endearing
himself to the Nation’s media elite and
political establishment ahead of U.S.
national security interests. First, Sen.
Lott decided to support ratification of
the controversial Chemical Weapons
Convention — despite the fact that
defects he identified as unacceptable
remained uncorrected. Now, he has
signaled an indifference to the
most fundamental requirement of a
military organization: that rules and
orders be faithfully executed and that
disobedience, and especially mendacity,
be severely punished.

Even more troubling is Sen. Lott’s
apparent “political
correctness” about efforts to remake
the U.S. military in the image of the
worst of American civilian society.
Amplifying on his astonishing statement
of the day before — to the effect that
the Air Force was “badly
abusing” Lt. Flinn — the Majority
Leader told a press conference yesterday
that, “We have just got to account
for the fact that men and women are going
to have relationships that lead to
marriage and perfectly wholesome
relationships and we should not wind up
punishing them by dragging them through
courts-martial in every instance.”

Not only does this statement appear,
on its face, to be singularly ignorant of
the facts of the Flinn case; it also
displays an appalling insouciance about
the toll sexual libertarianism takes on a
military organization. As it happens, a
letter made public yesterday from the Air
Force enlisted woman who was married to
Lt. Flinn’s lover, puts into sharp relief
both the fact that adultery tends
to break up marriages more often
than it leads to “wholesome
relationships” and the
deleterious impact such triangles
involving service personnel can have on
the good order and discipline required by
the armed forces.

The Bottom Line

As syndicated columnist Patrick
Buchanan wrote in the Washington
Times on 21 May: “Whatever the
modernists say, adultery is a breach of
trust, a breach of faith, an act of
deceit and a primary cause of family and
social breakdown and human unhappiness
from divorces to violent death.”
Surely, Lt. Flinn is not the first person
in uniform to commit adultery, nor will
she be the last. If she is not subjected
to the prescribed judicial proceedings
and punishment, however — not only for
having engaged in such activity but for
disobeying a direct order to cease doing
so and then lying about that disobedience
— the Flinn case will set a precedent
whose detrimental impact on the U.S.
military may be incalculable.

While Sen. Lott’s betrayal of his
purported conservative attachment to
“family values” and the best
interests of national security has earned
him once again the lavish editorial
praise of the New York Times, it
stands in stark contrast to Gen.
Fogleman’s courage under fire and further
diminishes Sen. Lott’s stature as a
present, to say nothing of future,
Republican leader.

– 30 –

Hatch’s ‘Submarine’ Patent Deform Bill Threatens To Sink The Engine Of U.S. Competitiveness, National Security

May 21, 1997Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): Tomorrow, the
Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to
act hastily on legislation eagerly sought
by its chairman, Senator Orrin Hatch
(R-UT). The sponsor’s strategy for moving
S. 507 — which has the benign-sounding
title of “The Patent Improvement
Act” — has seemingly drawn on the
classic stealth tactics of a submarine
captain: Run silent, run deep.

The effect of having this
legislation surface for committee mark-up
with negligible advance notice and with
minimal opportunity for deliberation and
debate is to maximize the chances of
Senate approval of a legislative
initiative that probably would not
otherwise pass muster. That
would be a serious mistake — for
American economic competitiveness and for
U.S. national security.

What is at Stake

Indeed, this benign-sounding bill
could have very adverse implications for
innovative Americans whose
constitutionally-mandated patent rights
may be seriously infringed by such an
effort to “streamline” the
patent process. Particularly distressing
is the fact that S. 507 would require the
publication of patent applications 18
months after filing — irrespective
of whether a patent has been issued or
not.

This would have the effect of denying
U.S. inventors protection against large
multinationals or foreign-owned
enterprises with a demonstrated interest
in stealing America’s technological
seed-corn. In War by Other Means,
a recently published study of economic
espionage and other unfair techniques
foreign governments and companies are
using to undermine U.S. competitiveness,
President Clinton’s chief economist,
Laura D’Andrea Tyson, is quoted as
estimating that the U.S. lost
$105 billion in potential sales from
1985-1989 due to patent theft by the
Japanese.

Threat to National Security

Of particular concern is the prospect
that such expedited publication of patent
applications — entailing the disclosure
of sufficiently detailed information to
produce working models — will not only
make wholesale patent infringement
likely. It would also increase
the chances that technology with
considerable potential in the national
security field may be released before
that potential is properly evaluated and
protected by patent secrecy orders.

For these reasons, the Casey Institute
of the Center for Security Policy joined
a number of leading figures in the
national security field in opposing the
House counterpart of the Hatch patent
“reform” bill, H.R. 400 when it
was considered two weeks ago. This group
included: House National Security
Committee Chairman Floyd Spence
(R-SC) and the chairman of that
Committee’s Military Procurement
Subcommittee, Rep. Duncan Hunter
(R-CA), as well as Rep. Dana
Rohrabacher (R-CA) who serves on
the House Science and International
Relations Committees, Phyllis
Schlafly, president of Eagle
Forum and Steven Shore,
president of the Alliance for American
Innovation. Their efforts succeeded in
stripping several of H.R. 407’s most
controversial provisions when it was
considered on the House floor.

Specifically, an amendment offered by Rep.
Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) exempted
individual investors, small businesses
and universities from the requirement to
publish patent applications within
18-months of filing. It also deleted a
provision that would have greatly
expanded the opportunities for
“reexamination” of existing
patents — an invitation to foreign and
multinational corporations endlessly to
challenge patents that have already been
awarded. The latter feature, which
remains in S. 507, would mean that small
businesses and individual investors, who
produce an enormous number of the
Nation’s technological breakthroughs,
could be blackmailed by the threat of
such assaults on their patents, and the
associated legal costs, unless the
patents are shared.

S. 507 Cannot Be Fixed

Unfortunately, if Sen. Hatch’s
strategy succeeds, S. 507 will retain
both the troubling provisions struck by
the Kaptur amendment and those that
remain in H.R. 400. A
particularly insidious example of the
latter is language granting “prior
user rights.” This would have the
effect of breaching the
“first-to-invent” philosophy
that has been the cornerstone of U.S.
patent law since George Washington signed
the first Patent Act in 1790. Instead, it
would push the United States toward a
“first-to-file” arrangement —
which amounts to a
“first-to-steal” formula —
that has characterized other nation’s
patent systems and contributed to the
relative paucity of important
technological breakthroughs produced
elsewhere. This change could force a
compulsory license on the patentee — and
likely violate the “exclusive”
ownership rights guaranteed in the
Constitution and essential to U.S.
innovation.

The big corporations, foreign
governments and enterprises that are
providing the muscle behind the effort to
eviscerate America’s brilliantly
successful patent system claim that
reform is necessary to stop an abuse
known as “submarine
patents.” These are patents
filed but left inactive until they are
surfaced to challenge subsequent
inventions whose applications touch in
any way on the original application.
While such patents — a term believed to
have been coined by the Japanese Patent
office — have been exploited from time
to time since 1965 when they were first
identified in the Patent Examiners’
Handbook, there are available remedies
well short of legislation that would
effectively undermine the entire U.S.
patent system. Indeed, submarine
patents can be prevented today, if only
the Commissioner of Patents utilizes his existing
authority and allows his examiners fully
to exercise U.S. law.

Another objectionable feature of the
House-passed bill and S. 507 is one of Al
Gore’s “reinventing government”
initiatives: corporatizing the
Patent Office. Ironically, the
current Patent Office may approximate the
ideal for government
bureaucracies — its costs are completely
covered by patent application and other
fees charged to inventors. In fact, this
organization actually netted a surplus
recently, returning $93 million to the
Treasury. Patent Commissioner Bruce
Lehman has big plans for his new,
“reformed” and
“corporatized” Patent Office:
He envisions spending up to $2 billion
(which would either come from
substantially increased fees, in effect a
burdensome new tax on invention) to
purchase new office space, furniture and
computers.

This legislation would also phase out
much of the civil service protection
currently afforded to patent examiners,
exposing them to politicization. The bill
would also allow contracting out of the
examination function which means that
foreign entities could be in a position
to determine U.S. property rights.
Incredibly, it would create an
appointed Board of Advisors, some of whom
could be employed by companies — foreign
or domestic — with a vested interest in
Patent Office business. S. 507 even
allows the Patent Office to receive
monetary or real property contributions.

Coming on the heels of a
Clinton Administration effort in the
spring of 1996 — the same period John
Huang, Charlie Trie and others were
brokering large and illegal Chinese
contributions to the Clinton reelection
campaign — to give the Chinese
government the entire U.S. patent data
base (including the technical support
necessary to exploit this wealth of
information) such changes clearly seem
ill-advised, if not recklessly so.⁽¹⁾
The opportunities for political
interference, corruption and malfeasance
at the expense of the national interest
seem endless.

The Bottom Line

The United States can ill-afford to
tube a patent system that has produced
technology which is the envy of the
world, particularly since it is clear
that such envy will prompt competitors to
use any deforming of the
protections currently in place to rip-off
the seed-corn of America’s economic and
military strength. Sen. Hatch’s
submarine legislation should be sunk
before it sinks the United States’ vital
technological edge.

– 30 –

1. See “U.S.
Patent Chief Negotiating to Give Chinese
U.S. Patent Data Base,” FDA Week,
Vol. 2, No. 14, 5 April 1996.