Pentagon

WASHINGTON -- She held an unusually responsible job for a 27-year-old, analyzing intelligence for the Navy - work that included investigating the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. Still, Angela Houtz managed to find the time to take food to the homeless in Washington, to mentor a girl who lived near the Navy compound in Suitland, to organize a Thanksgiving drive for the local poor. So when her family reached a settlement over the Rockville woman's death at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, it wasn't difficult to figure out what to do with the proceeds.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush, members of Congress and virtually all counterterrorism experts have acknowledged that defeating terrorists cannot be accomplished solely by dropping bombs on them. Ultimately, they say, ending terrorism will come only by addressing its underlying causes. "Our long-term strategy to keep the peace is to help change the conditions that give rise to extremism and terror by spreading the universal principle of human liberty," Bush said in March 2005. But a close look at the United States' counterterrorism priorities shows a strategy going in the opposite direction.

WASHINGTON -- President Clinton declared yesterday that he was "anxious to end the bombing" in Yugoslavia, and the Pentagon said the 10-week-old air war could end as early as tomorrow if Serbia begins a troop withdrawal from Kosovo.As Washington became more optimistic that peace in the Balkans was in fact at hand, Clinton also sought to assure the American public that the nation had pursued a "goal that has been worth fighting for" -- stability in Europe and the return of more than 800,000 ethnic Albanians to their homes in Kosovo.

WASHINGTON -- A scientific survey underwritten by the Pentagon has concluded that an experimental drug given to American troops during the Persian Gulf war to protect against a nerve gas may have been responsible for the chronic illnesses afflicting tens of thousands of veterans.The report, to be released at a news conference today, is the first commissioned by the Pentagon to identify a possible cause for the illnesses, which have collectively come to be known as gulf war syndrome. It sharply contradicts two earlier government studies -- by a presidential commission and by the Institute of Medicine -- that ruled out the drug as a cause.

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon scrambled yesterday to investigate a NATO attack on a convoy of military vehicles in Kosovo, trying to prove that dozens of ethnic Albanian civilians who were killed nearby were the victims of a Serbian atrocity and not the NATO planes.Describing the incident, U.S. and NATO officials said last night that their aircraft attacked Serbian military vehicles yesterday in a village between Dakovica and Prizren, but then abruptly halted the strikes after spotting civilian vehicles near the military ones.

WASHINGTON -- Linda R. Tripp, the woman whose secret taping of Monica Lewinsky provoked the scandal that led to the impeachment of President Clinton, is finally heading back to work for the Pentagon -- although in a different office miles from the five-sided building.Tripp is expected to begin today as a public affairs specialist for the Defense Manpower Data Center, the Pentagon's research arm in nearby Rosslyn, Va., said a defense official who requested anonymity.The 49-year-old Columbia resident remains a political appointee and will earn $94,098, the same salary she's been receiving as a public affairs specialist for the Pentagon's Joint Civilian Orientation Conference.

WASHINGTON -- The ground rules were simple: Use laptop computers purchased at local stores and software downloaded from the Internet; target only unclassified government computer systems, and see how far you can get.The "Red Team" hackers hit the jackpot. In less than three months, a team of about 30 computer specialists from the National Security Agency secretly penetrated computers that control electrical grids in Los Angeles, Washington and other major cities. They broke into networks that direct 911 emergency response systems.

WASHINGTON -- Under pressure from the Pentagon and Republicans in Congress to reduce military commitments overseas, the Clinton administration plans to withdraw the last U.S. troops stationed in Haiti, even though peace there remains tenuous at best, Defense Department and administration officials said yesterday.The U.S. troops -- 480 people, including engineers, doctors and nurses and a security force from the Army's 82nd Airborne Division -- are the remnants of the force of 20,000 that occupied Haiti beginning in September 1994 to restore the elected government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Here is an excerpt of an editorial from the San Diego Union-Tribune, which was published Tuesday.THE Pentagon's decision to inoculate U.S. military personnel against highly lethal anthrax contamination is firmly supported by potential battlefield threats and sound medical science. Defense Secretary William Cohen should not abandon this necessary program because of the tiny minority of soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines who have refused to take the vaccine based on unsubstantiated claims about its safety.

WASHINGTON -- Amid reports of new Serb atrocities, upward of 100,000 new refugees might be headed into Albania and Macedonia from Kosovo in coming days, further straining already overburdened allied efforts to house and feed the ethnic Albanians, officials said yesterday.It is the largest movement of refugees in more than a week, said officials with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), who noted that more villages are reported burning and young men still are being separated from the refugee streams by Serbian army troops and police units.

While Washington prepares to inject Maryland with billions in new stimulus projects on one hand, it's contemplating turning off a Maryland job machine with another. The clock strikes midnight on March 1 for Lockheed Martin's F-22 Raptor, a "stealth" jet fighter that has been in development for more than a decade and in production since 2003. President Barack Obama has to decide by then whether to extend Raptor purchases beyond the 183 already built or under contract. A "no" would mean work would start to wind down next year and the last F-22 would roll out of Lockheed's Marietta, Ga., plant in 2011.

WASHINGTON - The Obama administration is preparing to rush fresh troops to Afghanistan but lacks a clear strategy for using them, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates acknowledged before a congressional panel yesterday. The Pentagon is ready to send two combat brigades of about 7,000 troops to Afghanistan this spring, and another brigade could be deployed by midsummer, Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "Our greatest military challenge right now is Afghanistan," he said, adding that Islamist extremists have "largely" turned their attention from Iraq to Afghanistan.

The Democratic chairman of a House investigative committee presented documents to the Pentagon yesterday charging that a top Republican fundraiser, Harry Sargeant III, has made $210 million in profits over the past four years because his company vastly overcharged for delivering fuel to U.S. air bases in Iraq. In a written statement yesterday, a lawyer for Sargeant, who is finance chairman of the Florida Republican Party and a major fundraiser for John McCain's campaign, called the allegations "deeply disappointing" and said they were not supported by facts.

Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler is pushing the Pentagon to do the right thing - obey the law and comply with an Environmental Protection Agency order that it quickly complete a cleanup of serious pollution at Fort Meade. He's threatening to sue if the Army fails to act. The Pentagon's assurance that public health and safety are not imperiled as it cleans up the Superfund site at its own pace and with its own priorities is not credible. The EPA issued the Fort Meade cleanup order last year because it was worried about drinking water and soil contamination from past dumping at the Anne Arundel County base.

WASHINGTON - With a $20 million, 24-nation aid effort under way for victims of the fighting in Georgia, the USNS Comfort, Baltimore's familiar white-hulled hospital ship, remains idle at its Canton pier, though on standby for possible deployment to the region. The Pentagon sent a military team into war-ravaged Georgia yesterday to determine what supplies are needed and the most effective ways to deliver them. Two Air Force C-17 cargo planes have already carried basic loads of shelter, food and clothing.

A Pentagon audit of $8.2 billion in American taxpayer money spent by the U.S. Army on contractors in Iraq has found that almost none of the payments followed federal rules and that in some cases, contracts worth millions of dollars were paid for despite little or no record of what, if anything, was received. The audit also found a sometimes stunning lack of accountability in the way the U.S. military spent some $1.8 billion in seized or frozen Iraqi assets, which in the early phases of the conflict were often doled out in stacks or pallets of cash.

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon has rejected or deferred millions of dollars in military aid requests from Pakistan amid criticism that Islamabad has squandered U.S. funding and allowed al-Qaida to re-create a haven in its western tribal regions. In February, the Defense Department turned down or delayed more than $81 million requested by Pakistan, according to a report issued yesterday by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. The rejection represents a small portion of nearly $1 billion a year that Pakistan has received through a post-Sept.

Anyone who has ever built a home addition can see the danger. You strike a deal with a contractor, then ask for changes that end up costing a small fortune. It's been much the same way with the purchase of Pentagon weapons systems, except for this: Department of Defense officials have been indifferent to the problem, and the cost to taxpayers has been astronomical - large enough to impugn the professionalism of project managers and suggest that radical reforms in procurement are needed.

WASHINGTON -- Lockheed Martin Corp.'s Joint Strike Fighter, already the most expensive weapons program ever, is projected to increase in price by as much as $38 billion, congressional auditors said yesterday. That would bring the cost to develop and build 2,458 U.S. aircraft to $337 billion, 45 percent above the estimate when the program started in October 2001. "Midway through development, the program is over cost and behind schedule," Michael J. Sullivan, who tracks the program for the Government Accountability Office, told two panels of the House Armed Services Committee that oversee military spending.

WORLD Israeli raid targeted a reactor Israel's air attack on Syria last month was directed against a site that Israeli and U.S. intelligence judged was a partly constructed nuclear reactor, apparently modeled on one North Korea has used. pg 19a Vatican suspends monsignor The Vatican said yesterday that it has suspended a monsignor from a senior post at the Holy See after an Italian TV program using a hidden camera recorded him making advances to a young man and asserting that gay sex was not sinful.